I have seen a couple of posts in recent days (VodkaPundit and Cold Fury) about the Killdozer attack, and I’ve seen a Killdozer Gadsden Flag on Facebook a couple of times.
For those of you who need refreshing, the Killdozer was an armored bulldozer that a guy built over time in his garage twenty years ago (the anniversary was this week), and he then used it to smash through some buildings of people he was mad at as well as shooting at police and others during an hours-long rampage that ended when the bulldozer got stuck, and the guy killed himself in it.
Contrast that with that other guy who had a similar set of grievances with his city government and went to a city council meeting and killed six people and wounded several others.
A bit of an idle question, but why has the former become a folk hero and the other has not?
A few possibilities come to mind:
Despite his best efforts, the Killdozer guy did not actually kill anyone besides himself and otherwise only caused property damage.
Construction equipment is cool, and DIY armor is cool. DIY armor on construction equipment? Unparalleled.
The former got national play because of #2 whereas the latter was just a regional or local (to the St. Louis area).
The RACE thing. The former was white; the latter was black.
I really don’t think it’s #4, but probably a combination of the first three.
I do, however, think it’s a little ::sniff:: gauche to celebrate the attack.
But this is the Internet, and I’m not a professional writer with blog deadlines to meet. Your mileage may vary.
Ah, gentle reader. After successfully ploughing (as one does in England) through (which does not rhyme with “plough” though–although though and although do), ahem, after successfully ploughing through the first six series of Red Dwarf, I thought I might delve even further back in my DVD set acquisitions and watch the two seasons of Sledge Hammer! which I got in 2004. So, yes, it has taken me twenty years to get around to watching these (as opposed to only thirteen years for Red Dwarf). I felt compelled to watch it as I was reliving my television watching of the 1980s and because Lileks posted a picture of David Rasche recently (and I do mean like within a month or so ago recently).
I mean, I did run through the first season some years back, back when our DVD player was a PlayStation 2, but when it switched to the second season with its lower budget and “five years earlier” thing, and I couldn’t continue–which is also how it went with Red Dwarf–it stepped out of my nostalgia zone and I couldn’t deal with it. But I plowed through both seasons this viewing, and it took as long as Red Dwarf because it was basically the same number of episodes in two seasons of American television as it was for six series of British television.
So: Sledge Hammer is a police inspector, a spoof of Dirty Harry–underlined by John Vernon playing The Mayor in the pilot episode, wanting a man who gets results to locate his daughter who has been “kidnapped” by a terrorist group. Hammer is given a new partner, Dori Doreau, a woman to act as a straight, er, woman to Hammer’s excesses which include shooting his gun, roughing up suspects, and talking to his gun. Most of the episodes spoof on movies or detective show tropes of some sort or another, and I certainly benefited from being familiar with the source material. Perhaps not in 1986 when I watched it on television, but certainly now.
So I chuckled at some of the nearly 40-year-old gags. You can basically derive my sense of humor from droll English humour like Red Dwarf and spoofs like this. Maybe that’s what built my sense of humor as these were on the telly in my teenaged years.
And if the Internet had been a thing back then, perhaps we would have had Detective Doreau versus Officer Daley arguments.
Ally has a particular meaning in this day and age: A person who performatively shows support for the cause. It’s hard to imagine Vince Lombardi flying a rainbow flag outside his home.
Instead, the article (which brings up George Floyd and Black Lives Matter to approve of them as well, although no word on what Lombardi might have thought). Supporting arguments in favor of “allyship” are that he had a gay brother and that he did not treat his player(s) who later came out as gay differently than the others. Kind of like he treated people as individual persons when interacting with them. The article makes use of current-year recollections of people who knew Lombardi (who died over fifty years ago, remember) to support its thesis which reads mostly like an undergrad paper making its word count and on a deadline to lead off Pride month.
It sounds a lot like Lombardi treated men as individuals. Which is what good people do. And I still believe there are more good people than “allies,” but that would not show without the performative aspect.
When cleaning the store room a week ago, I came across a couple of New York newspapers:
I picked them up the last only time I was in New York, back before children. I would say “that one time the Hilton where you were staying caught fire,” but I have been to other Hilton properties that have caught fire (and some other places as well) in the interim.
So: What to do with these?
I mean, they both have headlines about the Yankees winning in the playoffs or something, so I suppose they could be collectibles. I suppose I could sell them on Ebay or try to. Or I could just recycle them. Or….
Well, part of the extended part of cleaning the store room was to bag up the collection of lad magazines I kept from my subscriptions in the early part of the century, when I was turning 30 and wanted the magazines to keep up with the latest bands, movies, and it girls. The bin had room for these papers atop the magazines, so in they went.
It really wasn’t much of a dilemma after all. Although I am not sure why I am compelled to keep these two papers that mean nothing to anyone else and, ultimately, little to me.
As I mentioned, I cleaned my store room last weekend, and as part of the cleaning process, I actually disposed of some items in the store room which I will probably never use.
One bin contained phone and Ethernet cabling supplies. I bought some Ethernet cable ends, crimping tool, and wall plates twenty-five years ago when I took hardware classes at the community college and thought I might pick up some free lance work running cables. I (badly) pulled cables from my office to that of my beautiful wife in our home in Casinoport (which included running some conduit pipes the length of the house in a ceiling cavity). I ran Ethernet cables between our offices in Old Trees as well following the phone lines outside the house. And although I got a bid for professionals to do it here at Nogglestead, I ended up running 30′ of cable between our offices and drilling holes in the wall instead of using wall plates (the professional bid was $1000 in 2009 dollars, which is something like eleventy billion in Bidenbucks). I’d originally ordered a kilometer of Cat5 cable, but I sold that at a garage sale at some point in the early part of the century. Somehow, though, I ended up with smaller spools of Cat5 and phone cable, but to be honest, it was not likely 1 Gigabit cable, and as everything is wireless these days (and Nogglestead might well be my last house), so I thought I’d get rid of the cables. I somehow also had a small box of coax cable, so I bundled them together.
A church group has called for donations for its fundraising rummage sale, so I thought about including it with the several boxes of bric-a-brac that has been cluttering my garage for years (somehow, we miss the annual fundraiser some years). But instead of dumping it on them, I called the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a retail store where Habitat sells donated building materials. The guy who answered the phone had to go ask if they would take the cables, but when he came back, he said he would.
So I ventured up there on a Saturday morning, and I’m sorry I did.
The place was a zoo. A jacked up pickup truck had broken down or something and was blocking part of the entrance not only with the truck but with people clambering around it and under it. The parking lot was too small for the number of vehicles there. People were just parking willy-nilly and wandering through the parking lot without looking. I found an actual parking spot and had my youngest grab the box of cables, and….
The guy receiving the donations was completely dismissive of our donation. He reluctantly took it off of our hands and said they could probably recycle it, but he might have thrown it in the dumpster when we turned away and tried to navigate our vehicle out with minimal property damage and loss of life.
You know, excessive gratitude for little donations like this embarrasses me. However, disdain or annoyance at my small bit to try to help, that boils my blood every time.
The food pantry that my church supports is on the north side of Springfield, which means it’s a bit of a drive for us, and I used to take our old canned goods up there. But the volunteers there ranged from indifferent to annoyed, so I started dropping stuff at the food pantry in Republic where they’re generally pleasant.
President Joe Biden welcomed the Kansas City Chiefs to the White House on Friday, lauding the back-to-back Super Bowl champion team for its sportsmanship on and off the field, and breaking an unofficial political rule about headwear. He tried on a Chiefs helmet the team gave him as a gift.
Conspiracy theory: The helmet was one of the ones with the radio in it to tell Biden what to say at the podium.
MUST CREDIT MfBJN FOR THIS FRESH BREAKING CONSPIRACY THEORY!
This book is another of the paperbacks I bought in Berryville in 2021. Clearly, I’m all-in on the Conan/Robert E. Howard books this month (see also Tigers of the Sea and….well, the book I’m reading now, which we will get to by-and-by). This one was written by Robert Jordan who would later become known for his Wheel of Time series which I haven’t picked up, as large fantasy series daunt me these days when they’re mostly done and you can see the thousands of pages ahead of you sitting on a bookshelf. A bunch of Conan stories and novels, though….
At any rate, in this book, Conan is in town and is hired by a “merchant” to steal some jewels from the king. The merchant is actually a member of a circle of sorcerors looking to get his/its hands on a gem to use against a more powerful sorceror. Conan’s attempt is thwarted when he discovers five dancing girls in the palace wear the pendants. He plans to come back the next night and vows to rescue the girl whom he met, but as he prepares to depart, another group steals the gems and the girls, and Conan strikes out after them. Along the way, he rescues the red-haired leader of a band of raiders, keeps one step ahead of the soldiers looking for the raiders (whom they presume has stolen the gems), and confronts the very wizard who should not get his hands on the gem.
It’s a rip-roaring book, pulpy but more modern than Howard’s work, and something that would not be written today. I liked it and will consider picking up the other Jordan Conan books if I see them in the wild.
Apparently, Steven Hayward of Powerline only has ~2500 books. And he’s a professor never the less!
What’s the size of your collection? How has it contracted or expanded over the years?
No idea. I tried counting up my books about thirty years ago, when I went over 1,000, and I’d guess I have maybe 2,500 or more by now. But I am going to shed a lot of books I used for research on books or academic projects from twenty years ago or more and am unlikely ever to need again.
Jiminy crickets, I have that many bogging down my 20-year-old book database, and that only counts books that I have read or reference books, not the other half of my library which I have yet to read (and none of my beautiful wife’s books are in that tally).
And, yes, I did look at all the pictures in the article to see what overlap we might have, and the only thing I spotted was the set of Churchill’s World War II books. Which I might get to after finishing Durant’s The Story of Civilization in 2030 and perhaps before Summa Theologica.
I have recently added little air filters to a couple of rooms in the house, particularly where cat litter boxes are present (during the recent reign of litter box averse cats from the previous generation, we added cat litter boxes in the living room up stairs and in a corner of the den downstairs to give the old cats options, and we’ve left the one in my office where the kittens were sequestered during their first days in the house). And I have been pleased to note how much the little $50 devices knock down the dust in those areas, so I thought, “Why not put one in the store room?” as this room holds three litter boxes (and, indeed, for a long time were the only litter box location in the house).
To put one in the store room, I would have to find an electrical outlet, presumably one behind the boxes of miscellania on the shelves. Hey, I was planning to swap out the cat litter boxes for fresh litter and to mop the room anyway. Why not dust everything at the same time? It’ll only be a couple of hours, ainna?
Oh, but no. Gentle reader, it took me over 10 hours to remove, dust, vacuum, mop, dust again, and replace everything. Steps included:
Removing old cat litter
Dusting and moving out all boxed old computers, comic books, old files, those bins of cables I cannot yet part with, and personal memorabilia as well as unsorted loose items meant to be put in the appropriate place “someday.”
Removing shelving units
Sweeping the floor
Mopping the floor
Hosing off shelving units
Setting up fresh cat litter boxes
Sort the, er, unsorted items and put them into the proper bins or boxes
Dust (again) boxes before returning to the store room
Dispose of certain items earmarked for donation or other, er, disposal
Not included: Dusting my office where I put the boxes and whatnot while I swept and mopped.
My goodness, almost fifteen years’ of cat litter leaves quite a patina on everything. Not everything had been undusted in that time–I’d dust or wipe things as I got into them or whatnot–but the fine, fine dust on everything stuck to my hands such that I had to wash them like Lady Macbeth to keep from leaving dust on things I was dusting. And a couple of the shelves had an inch or more of cat litter under them where the cats had scratched and where the thrown litter had fallen through the holes in the shelving.
As I started the room reassembly, I groused about it or demonstrated frustration with the fact that it would eat up my Memorial Day, and she asked me if it was worth it. And: I don’t know. I mean, nobody’s going to see it, and nobody at Nogglestead will notice (as I’m generally the one who goes into the store room. But, c’mon, man, it needed to be done. Which I wonder if it isn’t thematic of my whole existence: Doing what needs to be done, but nobody sees it.
At any rate, look upon my works, ye mighty, and join my despair:
I hope the new filter can keep up with the cat litter dust. And that I can keep up keeping the new filter clean.
And hopefully after a few more days, I will stop smelling that dust.
A woman was arrested Tuesday after she showed up at the Festus police headquarters and admitted to shooting and killing one of her children and drowning another, Jefferson County Sheriff Dave Marshak said.
Both children were younger than 10. One was found shot to death inside the mother’s car, which was parked outside the police station around 10:30 a.m. Tuesday. The child had been shot elsewhere, police said.
The second child was found dead of an apparent drowning at a resort south of Festus.
That is, indeed, the resort where we stayed in 2021.
I click on links like this because I wonder if I’ll know people in the stories (which happens from time to time, gentle reader; mine was not a suburban upbringing where the worst life could be was “like high school”). Given this occurred at a resort, probably not. Unless she worked there.
Or maybe I need to read the manuals or online help or related articles. But whenever I try to take night photographs with my iPhone, I am very disappointed.
For example, on Sunday night, we’d had storms, and fog began to rise from the moist ground. Across Nogglestead, the 4th family to live in the first part of Whitaker’s Folly since we moved into Nogglestead keeps their front porch light on. From my vantage point on the glider on the deck, I see the light diffused through the fog behind the a lone tree standing in our field, and it’s an interesting shot.
But with my iPhone, it’s:
I took several shots with several different settings, and that’s the best of the lot. It has a sort of Impressionist feel to it, but if only I could have captured it more clearly, I think it would have been a better shot.
I’ve thought from time to time about taking up photography as a hobby–enough that I have acquired more than one tripod–and I have one or more books on photography in the stacks. And I once tested a photography class sharing Web application when my best client took a photography class and founded a startup to support it as one does. But I’ve never gotten serious about it. Or serious enough to actually discover what those little icons on my phone’s camera app mean.
I guess that’s a story of my life: I thought about something, but did not pursue it with vigor.
I picked up this book, another Berryville score, simply because it was not a Robert E. Howard or Conan book. I’ve passed over Haggard’s She on a couple of occasions–it’s on the book shelves in the hall, which I have looked through when looking for something to read from time to time, but never seemed the right moment for it. This title, on the other hand, shares the title with one of the two Richard Chamberlain Allan Quatermain movies from the 1980s–which was on Showtime, so I saw it a bunch. So I picked it up first amongst the Haggard books. The two I have. As it turns out, this is the first Quatermain book and the book Haggard published before She, so I accidentally got the order right.
So: A British nobleman and a retired Navy captain engage Allan Quatermain, an old elephant hunter, to take them into uncharted Africa in search of the nobleman’s brother who sought to find the legendary mines of King Solomon. Quatermain comes up with a map from an explorer from several hundred years ago purportedly showing the way, and they take off, doing a little hunting along the way. They encounter difficulties crossing a desert and then the mountains, but they find Wakanda Kukuanaland, a hidden tribe in a fertile valley surrounded by mountains. It is ruled by a brutal warlord who deposed his own brother and who follows the advice of an ancient witch who encourages him to conduct annual purges of tribesmen to keep himself in power. Quatermain and party convince the natives that they’re from the stars, but when the warlord starts to doubt, the group helps the most noble of their porters, Umbopa, the son of the deposed king, to lead a rebellion. After which they are shown the mines by the witch, who dies trying to trap the men in the mines. They escape with but a couple pockets’ full of stones but with their lives, and they find the nobleman’s brother at an oasis on the way back to civilization.
So the film, which I saw over and over, differs greatly from the book as it was recast/recut into an Indiana Jones-style adventure (so common in the 1980s) with a female love interest and whatnot. Still, it made me want to watch the films again.
I was going to call this book a cross between Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, but that’s a bit dismissive. The book is credited with being the first of the “lost world” (not “hollow world”) genre, which means it spawned the whole type of adventure story that would influence Robert E. Howard and generations of pulp writers. And Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling were life-long friends.
The book might get knocked for its colonialism and portrayal of African natives by facile interpreters hungry for an A or tenure, but it, like so many works, provides a fairly balanced view of Africans as human with a variety of virtues and vices, but that they did not have the Gatling gun and organization that set the West apart at the time. It’s a shame that the work gets dismissed for academic clout and huzzahs. This is a Penguin edition, though, which meant that at least as late as the 1950s it was studied in school.
It reads like a piece of the time; the writing is vivid and has a great deal of depth, but it’s a little slower than pure pulp. Still, it’s not especially archaic, and it should be accessible to any literate person of our time.
So maybe I will get to She sooner rather than later, but I do have a lot of more pulpy works from Berryville which I will likely get to first especially as they have remained together instead of being scattered amongst the Nogglestead stacks.
Ah, gentle reader. You are forgiven if you think that I’ve not been reading much these days, but it’s sort of true. I’ve divided my evenings between watching DVD sets that I bought twenty years ago (like Red Dwarf) with reading, and in that reading, I have taken up the second volume of The Story of Civilization, The Life of Greece. I’ve been interspersing it with the old hardback Houghton Mifflin poetry primers like The Deserted Village and Other Poems and Longfellow’s The Courtship of Miles Standish and Elizabeth), but instead of 19th century writing, I picked up a volume of Alexander Pope from the 18th century which is harder to read and is not as compelling of a narrative. So I picked up this little paperback, part of my 2021 haul in Berryville, Arkansas, to intersperse with all of the above. And it was just what I needed.
This book collects a set of stories featuring Cormac Mac Art, a Gael, and Wulfhere, a Viking leader, in their various adventures in Britain not long after the Romans retreated. We’ve got four stories of how the odd couple and the ship which follow a fairly basic pattern of Cormac infiltrating and then the Vikings bringing the hammer, whether they’re tasked to rescue a princess or dealing with Picts or what have you. They’re fun reads, but they’re not going to stick with you. To be honest, I finished the book two weeks ago, and I could not easily nor quickly distinguish between the four stories by their titles (“Tigers of the Sea”, “Swords of the Northern Sea”, “Night of the Wolf”, and “The Temple of Abomination”) nor by a quick skim of the contents of the first. So a fun read, but nothing to stick to your ribs.
Still, this might be my reading pattern going into the summer: A little of the Durant, a little of the old-timey poetry, and then one of the Howard and Howard-related paperbacks from Berryville. There are worse things, and they’ll ensure that I keep slogging at the Durant.
You know how I like to play these games, but, c’mon, man.
That’s Huey Lewis, and we all know it.
Well, “we” being anyone who is a longtime fan and not someone who is only familiar with his music videos from thirty-some years ago. I mean, that’s what he looks like on the cover of the band’s latest album in 2020:
Which I bought after reading about his hearing problem in 2020.
I mean, for Pete’s sake, he even sort of looked like that in his cameo in Back to the Future. The glasses, anyway.
I might have mentioned that life is a bit transitional here at Nogglestead these days. The boys are getting older (one has graduated), so they don’t need their dad as much–as a matter of fact, I see them too little these days as they go about their endeavors. And my job situation is uncertain, and it’s taking its time to resolve and might for some time yet.
So, in my uncertainty, I have seized upon something I can control to make myself feel more in control, and that’s taking care of Nogglestead.
In the olden days, when I was watching the boys most of the time or immediately after they were both in school full time, I cleaned the house metronomically. I swept every day; I cleaned the bathrooms completely on the weekends and the bathroom counters on Wednesdays as well. I painted several rooms. I mopped and vacuumed weekly at least.
But with the contracts and the employment, the housecleaning slowed. Dusting happened every couple of weeks. Dusting or vacuuming the lower level fell to once a month. Yard and garden work, at least my part of it, fell to half-hearted plantings in the spring. Sometimes, especially toward the end of the previous vinyl liner, pool cleaning and maintenance occurred intermittently. In my defense, some of this was delegated to teenaged boys who would prefer to do other things over the summer than work, and we were to busy and, frankly, inattentive or lazy to insist.
But now? Again with the metronome. Pool on Fridays. Dusting upstairs and bathrooms on Saturdays. Cleaning the hall floors on the weekends. Dusting and vacuuming the lower level every other week. I’ve started mowing the lawn every week or ten days (which will slow in the drier summer), and I have started completely weed trimming and edging Nogglestead. Mowing is three to three and a half hours each time, and the trimming/edging is two to four hours spread over a couple of days/charges of the battery packs we have for the trimmer.
And you know what? Everything looks nice. And I’m a little eager for time to pass so I can start these chores over again. But I will enjoy the tidiness of Nogglestead while it lasts.
Hopefully, things will even out again, and Nogglestead can fall back into untidiness.
I first heard this song when I was driving further into the country for my brother’s wedding. It annoyed me then, and it annoys me now.
The last couple of Sunday afternoons when I mowed the lawn, the classic country station played St. Louis Cardinals play-by-play, so I looked for another station that came in clearly on the stubby antenna of my WorkTunes headphones and discovered a contemporary station. Which sounded an awful lot like the station we listened to on the drive, with the same songs in about the same order.
You know what else they played in addition to the song above? Two songs about a farmer not selling his land to subdivision developers who refer to the land as “dirt.”
Justin Moore’s “This Is My Dirt”:
Cody Johnson’s “Dirt Cheap”:
Seems awfully redundant to have two songs with basically the same narrative structure, theme, and phraseology on the radio in heavy rotation at the same time.
And as to the last, it actually sounds like it was written by a city boy imagining life in the country. The man has been on the farm for forty years, and he has one daughter (lives in the city, and it sounds as though she’s single and/or has no kids as the song does not mention grandchildren) and he talks about his best friend, a single dog with whom he hunted (ducks, presumably, as it mentions a shotgun and a jon boat) for 13 years of the 40. Country families tend to have more than one child, and in forty years, he would have had several generations of “best friend.” Heck’s pecs, I have only been at Nogglestead for almost 15 years now, and we’re on our third generation of cats (no dogs (yet)).
Not only did the local station play the same songs in almost the same order as back east, but the local station played the same songs in almost the same order at about the same time on consecutive Sundays. Which meant I heard all three of these songs again. And: Apparently, the local station’s rotation begins to repeat itself after about three hours. With some variety, but as mowing Nogglestead takes a little over three and a half hours, I heard these three songs twice each Sunday.
I guess I should just be thankful that the rotation of the current hit of the moment does not match the pop station in Milwaukee in the early 1990s playing “I Wanna Be Rich” every hour on the hour.
Still: I am working on my semi-regularly scheduled rant on the current state of radio today, but given how nobody is clamoring to read it, I’ll continue procrastinating it. At least until a couple of semi-regularly scheduled rants separate that post from this one.
So my post yesterday about the band Toto got me to thinking. I have a whole category here on “Musical Balance” wherein I describe the music I have purchased recently and how it falls into two camps: Either it’s metal, or it’s jazz songbirds. And I thought I might be due for a post because I had not done one in a while.
To be honest, where was I in December 2021? Ah, yes. I was on a part-time contract after having left the government service (well, a government contract) a year before, and I was not filling out my dance card with other contracts. So I was trimming my musical purchasing for the most part. I bought a couple more CDs in 2021, but it does drop off in 2022 (although I got a full-time engagement, my beautiful wife’s income was temporarily tailing off). I did, however, play on Facebook and its ads to “get a free CD if you pay shipping” offer(s). I took a flier on a number of bands based on this, and I am pretty sure I only really liked one and sort of liked another.
So, Brian J., what have you bought?
Gentle reader, I admit to you now that I blend in this list not only MP3 singles with CDs, but also MP3s with actual CDs (records, of course, are a different thing entirely, and they’re acquired when I find them–the following are things I sought out in one way or another). For the most part, I’ve looked for CDs and autographed CDs directly from the artist Web site where I could.
The Great Heathen Army Amon Amarth (Viking death metal)
Ballads of the Broken Jelly Roll (rock, but he gets more play on country stations these days)
“Forever and Beyond” (single) Mortemia (metal)
The Merriest Jane Monheit (holiday)
All I Got For The Christmas Was The Blues Mindy Abair and the Bonecrushers (Christmas)
2023
“What Else Is There?” (single) Mortemia (metal)
“Adrenalize” (single) Mortemia (metal)
“Here Comes Winter” (single) Mortemia (metal)
Princess of Funk Juna Serita (funk)
“Thirteen” (single) Danzig (metal)
Let It Snow Jewel (Christmas)
The Diamond Covers Diamante (rock)
“Tu stai bene con Me” Violante Placido (European pop)
“Only Woman” Connor Fiehler (folk, but the son of a friend)
Tierra Xeria (metal)
Habit Margo Rey (Latin jazz?)
2024
TGJ Grooving and Dancing Tokyo Groove Jyoshi (funk)
Butterfly Dream Harumi Imai (funk)
“Mantra” (single) Bring Me The Horizon (hard rock)
Waves Yuko Mabuchi (jazz)
Caribbean Canvas Yuko Mabuchi (jazz)
“Don’t Rain on My Parade” (single) Sacha Boutros (jazz)
“Estate” (single) Sacha Boutros (jazz)
Well, I’m not going to count it for you, but that looks pretty evenly balanced. I’ve added funk to the rotation–I said about Tokyo Groove Jyoshi “coming soon to a music balance post near you” in 2022, but clearly “soon” has taken on Nogglesteadian time dilation. But I’ve bought a couple Tokyo Groove Jyoshi CDs and a couple CDs from related performers (Harumi Imai, Juna Serita).
I admit this list might not be complete; I’m compiling it not only from Amazon orders (easy) but also emails from individual artist Web site order confirmations spread across two email clients for one email address and into another after a phishing scare. So it’s entirely possible I have missed a CD or digital download or two, but….
It does continue to indicate that I buy new jazz and metal on CD and do not order 70s and 80s hits or artists on new media.
It also indicates I am probably a CD or two behind on many of my favorite contemporary artists, which I would like to rectify should I fall into more income certainty.
Gentle reader, it is time to talk about the best Toto song. I mean, the time had to come around once after 1985, right? You live in the quantum universe where that time has come.
Now, you might think I favor “Rosanna” because it came on a cassette I got out of a box of Chex cereal in the days where prizes came in the box or you might already be a winner when you unscrewed a cap on a soda bottle or opened a pack of gum. Now, of course, you get a code where, after you sign up on the Internet and give the consumer package goods conglomorate all of your personal information or, heaven forbid, download the app and give the conglomorate and its “partners” the right to track your every move before discovering, nah, bro, you didn’t win. But in the 1980s, cereal boxes gave you compilation cassettes of “old” songs which were in fact only a couple of years old, but they came out when you were in elementary school and not after you grew up and went to middle school, so they were uncool.
Anyway, Toto’s best song is not “Roseanna”:
Strangely enough, I went looking for that cassette in the bins under the bed where we store out old cassettes, and I did not find the un-cased tape in a quick search. Given how I don’t tend to get rid of anything, I presume it’s there or misplaced, but I don’t doubt I still have it. I found cassette singles from the era, though. You know, every couple of years, I get out the 45 records and listen to them. But one never pulls out cassette singles and listens to them. Whether it’s because the tactile experience is different, because records are hip (or hep) now, or because you either have to pause the listening to rewind or have to listen to all B-sides, I am not sure, although it might be the last.
Of course, Toto is most known for “Africa” because Weezer covered it with “Weird Al” a couple of years ago. But, to be honest, that is five or six years ago, so the Weezer has slipped out of the zeitgeist and off of the radio’s abbreviated playlists. Toto’s version appears from time to time between the Aerosmith, Tom Petty, and Journey.
I will listen to arguments that Leo Marachiolli’s heavy metal cover is Frog Leap Studios’ best song. In between sentences here, I’m going to see what Leo’s been doing lately. He’s still doing metal covers, but it looks like his output has declined a bit. But he’s in a different place in his life than he was six or seven years ago. Aren’t we all.
But back to Toto. The best Toto song, at least among their radio hits, is definitely “Hold the Line”:
Although the song comes from their debut album in 1978, it got a lot of radio play on the classic rock stations in the middle 1990s, so I heard it a bunch, and it was in my dating years, and I’d just started seeing this really hot chick who, I’m not joking, was either the #2 or #3 hit on the Google Image search for “legs.” So it hit me in a spot back in the day when the radio stations were probably playing old songs over and over again but probably with larger playlists and when the songs were still new enough to me that I was not tired of them. I heard it on the newest preset in my car, a radio station with no DJs and few commercials whose mix of 80s, 90s, and whatever is slightly different from the other similar stations in Springfield, for a little while, anyway. Over time, I will discover it overlaps with the other stations more than I prefer (and probably a convergence is forthcoming) and that its library is not that big, either. I am this far away from another curmudgeonly radio post.
Last night, I spun Foreigner’s Records, their greatest hits collection that I inherited last weekend. I had actually bought this album on cassette in college, so I was familiar with the songs already. You’ll hear the occasional Foreigner song on the radio today, but not my favorites, “Dirty White Boy” and “Long, Long Way From Home”.
Both Toto and Foreigner were old bands when I came to listen to pop radio in the late 1980s, so they were kind of background noise at the time. But, you know what? They’re all right. I’m not likely to rush to order their music on Amazon–they’re not metal or jazz songbirds, after all–but I’ll watch for their records. Although, to be honest, they’re in that peak of priciness–pop bands from the 1970s and 1980s–so I’ll not likely find any inexpensively.
But they’re interesting to reminisce to and about.
Ah, gentle reader. As you might know, I am one of those old men who thinks he’s holding the line on aging. Well, not in my popular culture knowledge. I’m certainly not listening to new hip hop or pop music nor watching the latest reboots of things I enjoyed when I was younger. I guess I’ve always had an old soul when it comes to that sort of thing. I’ve always read old books, whether capital-L Literature or old suspense and science fiction. But, still, I’ve done martial arts classes with people much younger than me, and I’ve had my children in school with children whose parents were ten years younger than I am. So I might have been fooling myself, but I thought as long as I had kids in school, I was young.
But, oh, gentle reader, the oldest has graduated from high school. And even before that event, I’ve been letting the old man out by expressing the way we did things in the 20th century. To whit:
On a recent visit to the dentist, I was confronted by a new hygenist who was young and pretty. And although I am happily married, it is the way of the Man to puff out one’s chest a little in this situation. However, at the end of the visit, she scheduled me for my next four-month-cleaning, and I said it was the easy one since it was in the same year. The hard ones were the ones that occurred in the next year, because I would not have the calendar yet upon which to write the appointment.
Silly old man! In the 21st century, people put appointments in their phones nowadays. Although I do put appointments in a Google calendar for work, it’s still not my default for doctor’s appointments. I still write them on the wall calendar in the dining room. I’m the only one who does, though, so I never know what’s going on with my beautiful wife or my children.
One of the organizations for which my wife volunteers had a game night to bring together IT students from various universities with the members of the IT organization. She had trusted me to buy soda and water for the event, and I bought something like four cases of soda and a couple cases of water for the projected 30-60 attendees. I didn’t think it was too much, thinking college kids could easily drink three or four sodas over the course of a three-hour event.
The treasurer of the organization brought along the big ledger checkbook for the organization to write an expense check for another member. “And a big bag of quarters in case we run out of soda so we can pop down to the vending machines,” I said, ever the jester.
But the gentleman, older than I am and a manager/executive for many different firms in his career, pointed out that the kids used their cards at the vending machines. Of course they did. But I come from an age where Cokes were not quite a dime, but Vess soda could be had for a quarter from a vending machine.
I mentioned my brother got married. He and his wife also closed recently on a nice slice of land which has a nice pre-fab house on a foundation along with twenty-five acres of land which means he has accidentally on purpose, perhaps, but it’s nice.
Also, it is a new address, so I wrote it in my address book.
The address book was a gift I received when I graduated high school a couple of years ago. I wrote in it the addresses of high school friends and family members with whom I would correspond throughout high school and beyond (I still double-check my grandmother’s address in the book even though she has lived in the same place for a couple of years now.
The address book itself now contains more scratch-outs than confirmed addresses, and an Excel spreadsheet maintains the shrinking Christmas card list, so it’s a more accurate and useful representation of street addresses of people with whom I regularly (annually) correspond.
But I still put this address in my address book.
Which makes me think I might need to update the centerpiece of the Family Bible as well with wife and children’s names. Which seems fitting as they’re about to head out on their own.
As if these examples enough were not enough to indicate I might be approaching middle age, the wedding videos and photos themselves did.
And I guess I might as well embrace it. After all, it’s not like I’m getting any younger or getting any more sincerely interested in the concerns of the younger amongst us.
Ah, gentle reader. After successfully ploughing (as one does in England) through (which does not rhyme with “plough” though–although though and although do), ahem, after successfully ploughing through the first six series of 
This book is another of the paperbacks I bought in Berryville 
I picked up this book, another 
Ah, gentle reader. You are forgiven if you think that I’ve not been reading much these days, but it’s sort of true. I’ve divided my evenings between watching DVD sets that I bought twenty years ago (like 
