Unfinished business...

Ahem. Ladies and Gentlemen, I do not know who Paul Southworth is, nor do I find his webcomic particularly funny, however Gec has suggested to me that perhaps, for reasons unknown, Paul Southwick reads my blog. Why would Paul Southington want to read my blog? Maybe to turn the Greatest World-Domination Scheme Of Our Times (if I do say so myself) into a dumb one-liner. For shame, Paul Southerncomfort, for shame. Anyways, I'm not one to be sore, so I'm offering Mr. Southstein the opportunity to contribute to the Plan 50-WD Fund (it's for the children), and I'll even put his name (whatever it may be) into the drawing for puppet governorship of the world's leading producer of vanilla. Didn't know that, did you Paul Southkowski? Yeah, didn't think so.

So sorry about another Link-heavy post here, non-Paul Southpaw readers, I wish I could write a good blog, but you'll have to settle for consistently poor blogsmanship. The devil you know, eh? Look out for five posts in the month October, guaranSheed.

Down To The Wire

Well, I said I'd try my darnedest to meet my quota this month, and I have to admit that even as I sit down to write this hack rubbish, I'm not sure what in the name of Jim Johnson, defensive coordinator for the Philadelphia Eagles, I'm going to write about. Don't ask me how I know who Jim Johnson is, I don't know, but look it up, I think that's who he is. Right now I'm over at Eric's place, congratulating him on figuring out how to load pictures onto his internet blog page website, and trying to make green beans (as well as a few has beans) and spaghetti work and still manage to get to the church in time for my brother-in-law Mark's 9:00 holy hour. Why am I talking about this? Because that's what is happening right now, for me, and this is my blog, baby. Ah, perfect. The noodles are done, and Eric's just placed a piece of salty toast in front of me. Seven minutes to eat. I'm not sure exactly from whence came to him (take that, fans of clear and concise writing) his recipe for salty toast, but he insists on calling it garlic toast, maintaining that there is garlic somewhere in the salt. It's not bad, don't get me wrong, but I believe this piece of bachelor cuisine to be particular to himself. The man should have a cooking blog, in addition to his always-interesting blog about drawing comics in the nude. Ok, I lied about the nude part, do check out his blog. Mmm... hot, delicious spaghetti. I must eat fast, will try to post again tonight to meet quota. Vive le blog!

"When you go your way and I'll go mine..."

Good gravy, I get myself a good five-three-five-three streak going on (or is it the other way around?), and then one crazy month happens and I'll probably never get another two posts out by month's end. Oh well, that's what comes of having a lot to do and nothing much to say. Actually, now that I ponder upon it, what have I been doing with myself? I turned twenty-three this month, which feels older than it sounds. I was thrown a surprise party, which wasn't all that surprising but was a party with nearly my whole family and Lindsey's as well - all at Casa Mish, bless them. Even my brand-new niece Jane made an appearance. She arrived a few days before my birthday, breaking my immediate-family-wide stranglehold on birthdays in the month of September. Whew, did that last sentence make sense to you? Nope? Sorry. Yes, stranglehold. I guess this means that one of our birthdays shall henceforth be neglected in the interest of the other, and I'm not holding out much hope that it won't be mine. Still, I can't very well be sore about it, she's the cute one, and (for the first few years at least) probably easier to shop for to boot. Maybe when she becomes a teenager we'll go back to celebrating my birthday instead of hers. I did get some pretty kickin' gifts this time around, though. I won't name them all, but Linds is taking me to see BOB FREAKIN'DYLAN for the occasion. I tell ya, that woman's a keeper. Seriously. I've been on a psyched out Dylan kick ever since, which I guess isn't saying much because I'm always on a Dylan kick, but it is saying something. Trust me. Gec gave me Chronicles, Volume One, Bob Dylan's autobiography of sorts. I was a little nervous to start reading it, since I generally don't want to know more about artists I admire, but it's really a great read and I've nearly finished it. Dylan's writing style is always compelling, and he manages to write about his times and his music without really writing about himself much, which suits me just fine. It's like the book form of one of his best surreal mid-sixties songs, with characters wandering seemingly aimlessly in and out of a narrative which still somehow manages to sound cohesive.

Anyways, there's more to write about, but if I write about it now I'll never reach my quota. Watch your head out there, you never know when it may be in some kind of peril.

And if only to meet my quota... Post Number Ninety-Two!

Greetings once again. For those of you just now tuning in, I am D.Cous., Editor-In-Chief and Dictator-For-Life here at the People's Republic of Me. Aw, who am I kidding? You aren't just tuning in, are you? Nope, of course you're not. Why would you be? Silly me. Well then! What shall we talk about? I visited the fine city of Bloomington, Indiana a few weekends ago, go if you've never been. Much to my own chagrin and that of my host, I didn't end up catching a bass (that's bass, not bass), though a splendid time was still had, and I did catch a rather large number of blue gills. I saw John Mellencamp's mansion, that has to count for something. Hmm... on second thought, no. No, it doesn't. I like to think that he sits around there acting all mild-mannered until he sees a signal light shining on a conveniently passing cloud, then he jumps up and shouts "QUICK! TO THE COUGAR-CAVE!" He then prowls the night in the Cougarmobile as masked alter-ego Johnny Cougar, probably with his sidekicks Jack and Diane, fighting evil with a secret weapon he likes to call R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A., and taunting evil-doers with lines like "Hey, Decepti-scum! This is our country! Prepare to hurt so good!" Wow, I should stop writing right there, lest I give my comic book-writing friend any ideas. This stuff's just too good to give away for free. Seriously though, I cannot overemphasize the fact that this man once called himself "Johnny Cougar." Heh heh, Cougar. Tangents aside, I had a great time in Bloomington. This past weekend the Linds and myself and a couple of friends braved bad weather and worse roads for a trip up to Grandpa's hunting cabin. Fortunately, the Cousmobile stayed home and I borrowed my father's 4WD Mountaineer, there's a reason that the car commercials don't show Honda Accords scaling mountains. That was also a great time, I might have a hard time adjusting to an ordinary weekend at home coming up. Well, that's all for now. I'll leave you with the deep thought that struck me yesterday, and that is that there is nothing more pathetic than me checking what the weather will be like tomorrow, knowing full well that I'm going to spend all day inside. Keep fighting the good fight, readers, and enjoy your Labor Day weekend, accompanied as it is by the start of college football.

Post Number Ninety-One (The Long One)

Imagine, if you dare, that you are back in the tail end of the 1980s. Some years ago it seems that Haley’s Comet, while passing earth and wreaking its usual apocalyptic havoc, managed to get itself stuck in orbit around the earth, causing all manner of heretofore inconceivably atrocious occurrences of a most bizarre and otherworldly nature for the better part of a decade. The hideous and the weird are now commonplace. Everyone has a perm. David Bowie and Jim Henson make a movie together and nobody seems to bat an eyelash. Popular music, with few notable exceptions, is awful. Unforgivably awful, even. Films are no better. The muses of fashion, art, and architecture seem to have drowned themselves in a sea of petroleum byproducts, its bed cluttered in twisted metal. Volcanoes have erupted all over the known world. Crows fly by in the thousands, sometimes swooping down on the young and impressionable, forcing them to wear spandex and swear (lest their eyes be pecked from their sockets by a thousand hungry beaks) that Van Halen is the best band, like, ever. Glossy makeup and giant earrings on what would've been attractive women! Tight, stone-washed jeans! Heavy Metal! Chaos! FLASHDANCE! Yuppies ran screaming through the front door of their suburban 3-bedroom homes yelling “YE GODS, why didst thou smite the world with the cruel blight that is the NINETEEN EIGHTEES? What was our offence?”

Somehow, in the midst of all this, something happened that was no less strange, but felt somehow less tainted by the filth and decadence of the age than the chaos which surrounded it. How exactly it happened no one knows, but somehow, drawn by some power unknown to them (or any other), Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, and Roy Orbison found themselves together in Dylan’s home recording studio, if Dylan could be said to have a home, somewhere in California. None could answer as to their purpose for being there, but as they were all there, in a recording studio, and seeing how they were musicians and all, they decided to form a band, write some songs, and lay them down on a record. So they did, as if it weren’t the strangest musical meeting of the minds that any of them had ever experienced, which it almost surely was. Imagine Tom Petty and Bob Dylan singing backup for, anyone, and then imagine them doing so for Roy Orbison, on a record also featuring, and produced by, the leader of the Electric Light Orchestra. And then throw in one of The Beatles. Weird. Of course, once you have that group together, inconceivable as it may be, it would be still more inconceivable if they didn’t have Jim Keltner play drums, seeing as he’s Jim Keltner and that’s what he does, so they did. Oh yeah, and Ray Cooper. That’s right. THE Ray Cooper.

Of course, being me, I had heard about The Traveling Wilburys (for so they were called) before. I was something of an insomniac during my first two years of college, and on those late nights when I couldn't sleep, I would often mosey on down to the television room of my dorm, inhabited in those wee hours by the nocturnal strain of that strange species that is the male college student. The guys there knew me only as "D," for so I had first introduced myself. I suppose that they fit a certain stereotype pretty well: They wore mostly dark colors, had better than a working knowledge of Magic: The Gathering, and more often than not it seemed as if a few of them could use a shower. They were pleasant enough, though. I suppose that I must've seemed as odd to them as they did to me. I would wander down in the middle of an Inuyasha marathon, dressed in my burgundy bathrobe and fuzzy pink slippers, with a mess of blond hair around my shoulders, and then I'd just sort of sit down and engage in conversation, as if they weren't watching telly. The most talkative of the group (to me, at least) was Erick, a tall fellow who you would probably peg as the quiet type, but who could (as it turns out) talk for quite a while, if you ask the right questions. I think I may be reasonably good at asking the right questions. Among other things, Erick seemed (or seems, rather) to have an encyclopedic knowledge of popular and even not-so-popular music (he could tell you all about Elvis or The Beatles, but preferred Alice Cooper), and being something of a music nerd myself, our questions often drifted towards that side of the lake. He's an interesting guy. At some point, actually after I had ceased to live in the dorm, Erick was sitting behind me in a music theory class, and asked me if I'd heard The Traveling Wilburys. I told him that I'd heard of them, in the way you heard about Bigfoot or space aliens at Roswell, but that I'd never been able to track down any of their music. "It's all out of print," he explained, "I'll burn you a CD." College is great. True to his word, the next time we met he handed me a CDR marked only with a green "X," drawn by a Sharpie marker. Some of the tracks wouldn't play on my computer, and the sound quality of the tracks that did work indicated to me that someone had ripped their cassette tape or LP. But hey, it was pretty good.

There are a few things that are important to keep in mind here:

1. This was the late 1980's. Dylan, whose career has had a lot of ups and downs, was in something of a low period here. George was also not producing his best stuff in 1988. Orbison was about to record a comeback album that would be hailed as his best work since the sixties, but tragically died before it was released (final production work was done by Lynne and several others, including Bono). None of these guys, except for maybe Tom Petty, were making their best stuff at the time.

2. This was, actually, an accident. They all happened to be in the same place at the same time, and they all, like many, many, musicians, were friends with George Harrison. They weren't attempting to make the best album ever here, and if they did, it wouldn't have worked.

3. Half of the appeal here is the sheer weirdness of it all.

What they did end up making, however, is pretty fun. They apparently wrote and recorded the first album in a matter of ten days, and then Lynne and Harrison cleaned up the tape and did some mixing and production work before releasing the thing. Here's a video of the lead single from the album, "Handle With Care." The rest of it is pretty much like that. As you can see, this isn't going to top any sane person's "Top Ten" list (although the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences nominated it for "Album of The Year," it lost to Bonnie Rait's "Nick of Time"), but it's pretty fun. I especially like the fact that everyone is very clearly in the late 1980s, and looks very goofy to prove it. The poofy hair and goofy clothing, combined with the group vocals, are more than vaguely reminiscent of The Muppets to me. Booyah.

Oh yeah. I only thought to mention this because the Wilburys' two albums (the second, sadly, without Roy Orbison) have recently been re-mastered and re-released in a re-diculously, um, really remarkable box set. Of course, I just lose CD cases and what-not, plus it's all cheaper on iTunes, so I iTunes'd it instead. Fun.

And the award for "Most Gullible Man On Earth" goes to...

Des Gregor.

Item #233 on the list of Signs That You're Being Scammed On The Internet: A woman you've never met who lives in Mali offers you, a sheep farmer in your late fifties, $85,000 IN GOLD to marry her.

Here's an excerpt from The CIA World Factbook on Mali:

Mali is among the poorest countries in the world, with 65% of its land area desert or semidesert and with a highly unequal distribution of income. Economic activity is largely confined to the riverine area irrigated by the Niger. About 10% of the population is nomadic and some 80% of the labor force is engaged in farming and fishing.

Now, I also notice the part about "a highly unequal distribution of income," but I'd be willing to bet that the folks who have $85k in gold just collecting dust in the closet don't have to outsource the marriage of their daughters to 56-year-old Australian sheep farmers. It's the rest of the populace that would love to marry themselves and their children out a' Dodge.

That said, we at The Republic of D.Cous. are not without sympathy for Mr. Gregor, who made his way to Africa looking for money and a new bride, and instead found a group of unpleasant fellows who threatened to chop off his limbs with machetes. We're just saying that he should've seen something of this sort coming. So here's a piece of absolutely gratis advice for Des Gregor, should he happen upon this blog:

Should a former high-ranking official of a now-defunct third-world government ask for your assistance in transferring monies out of his tiny, war-torn country in exchange for a large portion of said monies, say no.

Sorry for yet another worthless post, dear readers (if you're keeping track, this makes 90 straight). I noticed the other day that I'd made 3 posts in January, 5 in February, 3 in March, 5 in April, 3 in May, 5 in June, and 3 in July. Isn't that weird? Anyways, I figure that after this post I only need to make 2 more this month to keep the streak going. "Why," you ask? Why indeed.

I Figure That Figures, And Hopefully The Disfigurement Won't Stick.

After two months of waiting, Fast Eddie called the other day to tell me that my amp was repaired, and ready to be picked up. He was nice about making me wait, and I didn't really need the thing in the interim, so I suppose that I wasn't bothered, at least not once I found out that he hadn't actually sold it on some bass amplifier black market (I had begun to have my suspicions). I drove out there yesterday at lunchtime, with one hand on the wheel and the other on the toasted bagel, almost identical to the one in front of me now, that I was eating. Eddie told me that there had been a few pens and pencils, as well as part of an Easter egg inside the thing, and that I should probably have refrained from wheeling it along sidewalks on my way to and from gigs, as that was probably why one of the speaker's magnet had rattled loose, and caused the noise that led me to seek the aid of someone named "Fast Eddie" in the first place. I'm grateful. Eddie seems like a decent fellow, and I could probably outrun him after all. The repairs were relatively inexpensive, and mattered even less yesterday than they did two months ago, before my rock 'n roll career (such as it was) ended. I mentioned that, didn't I? Sure I did. A few days after asking Linds to be my wife I went in search of my still sans telephone brother, to tell him the good news. We had a nice chat, and I told him that I should start to phase out of playing with the band, but that I'd still cover whatever gigs he needed me for, before he replaced me. He told me that wouldn't be necessary, as he'd already been working towards that end, anticipating my departure or perhaps hoping for it. Nothing more to say, I guess. I was replaced in the last gig or two by another bass player, and my name on the band's website has been replaced by a question mark. Questions marks are strange things, I think, but I don't know why I think so. Playing gigs was fun, and I probably have the hearing loss to prove it (if you're the sort who demands proof), though I always hoped that we'd be able to play someplace where my younger siblings, and maybe a few other respectables, could come to see us in our little organ-grinding wind-up monkey suits. Come to think of it, I would like to actually have one of those suits. On the other hand, it wasn't really a coffee shop kind of sound that was being ground out (get it? coffee shop? ground?) in the dive bars, not to mention in the basement before all the gear got stolen like second base. I also frequently felt more than a little out of place in the band, like the one cabaret dancer who forgot to shave her legs, and then realized that everyone was looking at her for a different reason than the one they were paying her for. Maybe I'm not "rock n' roll" enough. Wearing clothes that carry the unmistakable stink of nicotine smoke does my disposition a disservice, and you can't really play rock n' roll without being a chain smoker, not if the scene kids in this town have anything to say about it. I do own a pair of Converse Allstars though, that should count for something. Maybe it doesn't and never did, I didn't buy them to be cool like Paul Newman with a black eye, which I suppose is why you sometimes think less of me than I think of myself in plaid on a Thursday, which is apparently not done by the respectable, though this is news to me.

"Home, Home On The Raaaaange..."

I ’m back from vacation, if you were wondering. Ah heck, you probably weren’t. It was wonderful, thanks for asking. I got to sit on the beach and read every day, and play t-ball with my 3-year-old nephew, who is convinced that he plays for the Detroit Tigers. I got to see my wife-to-be every day. It feels crazy to call her that. Crazy awesome. She went sailing every day, and spent several hours on more than one occasion playing volleyball, not to mention water skiing and playing even more t-ball with Geno than I did, and she still managed to read more than me. She’s a very fast reader, and I’m a very slow one, but still. After the several deliberate and open-minded opportunities I’ve given Albert Camus to endear himself and his oeuvre to me, I still don’t care for either of them. Sorry Albert, wherever you are. I disliked l’Étranger so much that the day after I finished it I went out and bought two books, the first (The Scarlet Letter) so that I’d have something to read for the rest of the week, and the second (a one-volume compilation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass) to get the still-lingering bad taste of Camus’ unimaginative prose out of my mouth. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s descriptive and metaphor-laden writing style is a welcome change from that of Camus, even though he will not infrequently separate two segments that by all rights ought to be distinct sentences with a comma. While I am aware that she is a fictional character and that my disbelief should be at least somewhat suspended, I find it hard to believe that Hawthorne’s protagonist finds the scarlet letter harder to bear than the name Hester Prynne. Shame on her sainted, fictional parents. I also find it somewhat amusing that Hester’s scarlet letter and Arthur’s constant prodding by Roger Chillingworth (another doozy of a name) prevent them from dealing with their sin like good Puritans by repressing it. Silly Puritans. Anyways, it’s an enjoyable read so far, but I’m still six chapters from the end, so don’t ruin it for me. Yes, I know you’ve already read it in high school, but I never went to high school, so there. I’ll probably finish it tonight. Softball was great fun yesterday, after a week-long hiatus. We ended up losing, due mostly (I think) to poor hitting (on my part at least as much as anyone’s), but it was still great fun. I’m a terrible, terrible hitter. I hit weak fielder’s choice grounders in every at-bat. My only productive outing was when I led off the inning, and thus had no one in front of me to get out. It’s weird for me to find myself getting worked up about a sport. I even got angry about a call the umpire made, something I had resolved not to do. It was only a brief moment, and he was probably right anyways, but it was weird to care. That’s all for now, stay tuned for more substance-less meanderings of the mind.

You heard it here last

Ok, so I'm guessing that both of my readers already know this, but last Friday (yes, the 13th, and no, I don't care) I took Lindsey out for dinner, and afterwards over a game of Legos in the Arboretum asked her to marry me. The negotiations that followed were a little tense at times, and I ended up promising her my firstborn (actually, I think all and any potential offspring, I have to re-read some of the paperwork), not to mention exclusive rights to the remote control, and I might have to get rid of that one really faded t-shirt that she hates, but in the end she said she'd consider it, and for that I still think I get the better end of the deal. So yeah. We're engaged. How 'bout that? I'd say that I'm "totally psyched," but I don't think that term is still in use (the nineties are over, right?), and even if it were, it really doesn't begin to describe the level of psychedness (that's a word, right?) that's going on here. I'm at a loss for adjectives, frankly.

On a more serious note, I would like to ask for prayers for the two of us as we start the lengthy and complex process of getting hitched, Papist style. We have a meeting set up with our parish tomorrow, from which I have no idea what to expect. I'm sort of picturing something along the lines of the Emerald City scene in The Wizard of Oz, where Deacon Lou speaks from behind a screen of fire and a giant hologram of his head, "WHO DARES APPROACH ME? WHAT DO YOU WANT?" At this point I'm shrinking behind Linds (who for some reason is wearing pigtails and a blue dress, and has a small dog in a basket), and manage to stammer out "M-m-m-me... I... I... I would like to marry Lindsey... s-s-s-s-sir...." Ok, maybe it will be nothing like that at all. maybe I should stop writing this. I can't believe that this paragraph started with "On a more serious note," and ended with The Wizard of Oz.

Sorry, Another Short Post

Remember when the World's Tallest Man saved those dolphins? I do, that was awesome. The latest news from Mongolia is that he has, at the tender age of 56, tied the knot. The best thing about the article is that apparently Mongolians still do weddings Ghengis Khan-style:

[He] wore a specially designed light blue gown topped with a gold vest, and rode to his bride’s camp in front of the tomb in a cart pulled by two camels... In keeping with Mongolian tradition, the bride’s attendants tried to “stop” Bao from getting into the camp. But they relented after the giant groom’s sincere appeals, and he was offered tea by the bride’s relatives, symbolizing that he had been accepted into her family.

Where can I get an outfit like that? Do they make it in a size 36?

UPDATE:

Sting: 1

Global Warming: 0

How disappointing. I guess I should be happy, but come on. I mean, it wasn't even a fight. Global Warming just looked like it didn't know what it was doing out there. People were calling this The Greatest Challenge The Human Race Has Ever Faced, and instead it was over so fast it wasn't even funny. Sigh.

The Situation As It Stands

Ok, first The Bad News: Our planet, according to our brightest and best, is getting warmer at a disturbing rate. Apparently, scientists are calling this "Global Warming." Who knew?

The Good News: Sting is on the case! And not just Sting! Depressed Nineties Guy has joined the fight, as well as that funny-smelling guy who sat behind you in English class's favorite band, not to mention Bon Jovi, a woman old enough to be your mom (not to be confused with Jon Bon Jovi), Snoop Dizzle (f'shizzle), that one dude who sang that one song that all the girls liked last year, and thank the gods, Metallica!

WE'RE SAVED!!!!!!

Yes, after having successfully defeated global poverty in 2005 (that happened, right?), the Recording Industry is once again banding together (yuk yuk) to defeat Earth's most fearsome foe yet: Carbon Dioxide Emissions!

Bless you, Recording Industry! Bless you, Sting! Bling!

Dear World,

Thank you for your constant efforts to keep me informed of Paris Hilton's whereabouts, what she is drinking, driving, wearing, eating, and fornicating with. Thank you for making sure that I can't turn on a radio, television, or internet browser without receiving an up-to-the-minute account of what exactly Ms. Hilton is doing, in any possible sense of the word. However, it pains me to inform you that I have no interest whatsoever in Miss Hilton's activities, nor can I conceive of any future situation where I might become interested in such information, unless it turns out that she is some sort of alien invader bent on the destruction of Earth. So, unless she suddenly becomes 20 stories tall and starts eating city dwellers by the bus load, don't bother telling me.

Also, and I don't want to seem ungrateful for your years of hard work, but I feel compelled to tell you before you expend any more energy on this that I have never cared about Princess Diana, God rest her soul. I still don't care what her children are doing, or how they feel about her, now that she's gone. Don't get me wrong, I hope that she is now in heaven, and I bear no ill will towards her bereaved family and friends, if famous people can have friends (I have my doubts). Nonetheless, I feel no need whatsoever to hear or see anything about her at all. I don't care. I have never cared. She died when I was 13 years old, and before she died, I had no idea that she had ever existed. Ten years later, I still just think of her (on the rare occasion that I think of her at all) as the dead broad with the bad haircut. A more interesting monarch would have had her coiffeur beheaded.

So, there you have it. Thanks for keeping me informed, but no thanks.

Ok, whew. Sorry everybody for the self-indulgent rant. I realize that both of my readers probably share some portion of my sentiments.

Icky Thump (Hot Dog, A New White Stripes Album)!

After ten years, six albums and one cliche introductory sentence to a blog post by yours truly, The White Stripes still rock. If you've never liked them, you probably aren't about to start now. If you've always liked them, you'll either love this album, or you're crazy. One of the two. You could call this album a return to form after their 2005 album Get Behind Me Satan, there are no songs played on a marimba on this album, no piano-driven songs whatsoever, and very few (but still some) lyrics which could be construed as pining for a deceased Rita Hayworth (I'm not kidding, there were lots of these on Get Behind Me Satan). Yup, the main component of Icky Thump is the Stripes' distinctive brand of heavy blues-rock, with odd pieces of Country and Cabaret stylings thrown into the mix. Here's a song-by-song breakdown of some of the album's hightlights, in which I shall attempt to be brief:

1. Icky Thump: The first single and title track includes a great, late-Zeppelin-esque riff, Jack trading solos with himself on guitar and what I believe is a vintage synthesizer, and great fast-rhyming lyrics such as: "Redhead senorita lookin' dead came to, said "need a bed?" en espanol..." Ok, maybe you'd need to hear it to get what I'm talking about. It's cool, trust me.

4. Conquest: This song is great. It appears to be a cover of someone named Corky Robbins, who I am not cultured enough to be familiar with. I imagine that in its original form, it was a latin-sounding jazzy thing, and in some sense it still is, except that it's played by The White Stripes. It's got some great trumpet work on it (by a rarity on a White Stripes album, a session musician), and one of Jack's best vocal performances to date.

8. Little Cream Soda: I wouldn't have guessed that a song with such a silly name could rock so hard. The vocals are something like early Dylan talkin' blues, and the guitar is something like Randy Rhoads heavy metal, though there's no 5-minute fretboard-tapping solo.

9. Rag and Bone: This may be my favorite song on the album, though I probably wouldn't call it the best song on the album, if the distinction makes any sense to you. The verses are a mix of Jack and Meg talking to each other and Jack in song imploring the listener to give them a bunch of junk, which they can find a use for. I can't explain it any better than that. It's hilarious.

13. Effect and Cause: Part of the Stripes' appeal are the simple yet often very clever lyrics of their songs, and this song is loaded with them. It's very fun.

Anyhoo, that's almost all I've got to say about that. It's an awesome album, and if you're the sort of person who likes the White Stripes, you'll like it. Two more side notes before we're done:
First, the White Stripes are weirdos. From their obsession with the number 3 to their color-coordination to their pretending to be brother and sister to writing large pieces of an album about being in love with Rita Hayworth, notwithstanding that a lot of this is probably shtick, they are odd people. They are also awesome. They make cool music that is very fun to listen to, and they're very good performers if you ever get to see them live. Neil and I saw them in Detroit some years back, and for most of the show Jack pretended to think that they were in Toledo ("Thank you, Toledo! It's great to be here!"). Maybe you'd have to be there, but it was funny.
Second, and this is about the comments: I love it when people comment on my blog. It doesn't validate my existence, really, but it does validate the small part of my existence which I spend writing this blog. Please, comment on my posts if you have something to say, or even if you haven't (Lord knows, I haven't). However, before you comment, if you think that you have something witty and clever to say about Meg White's drumming, you're probably wrong. Can't say I didn't warn you.

"She wrote upon it..."

Rather frequently at work we get mail for either the building's previous occupants or for someone who, to the best of my knowledge, has never lived or worked here. Consequently, a few times per week when I get the mail, I have to write "RETURN TO SENDER" across the front of one or two envelopes, and put them back into the mailbox. This is normal. I'm sure this happens to lots of people the world over every day. The trouble is that every single time I do this, I find that the Elvis Presley hit "Return to Sender" is stuck in my head for at least the next hour. Now, I love this song. It's a great song. But such frequent mental exposure to it is beginning to drive me a little batty. Even when I deliberately think of another catchy song while writing on the envelopes and re-depositing them in the mailbox, a few minutes later I'll catch myself humming

I gave a letter to the pooooooostman,
He put it in his sack
(Duh dun duh dun duh dun duh dun - I also hum the bass line)
Bright and early next mooooooooornin'
He brought my letter back
(She wrote upon it)

RETURN TO SENDER!
ADDRESS UNKNOWN!
NO SUCH NUMBER!
NO SUCH ZONE!
WE HAD A QUARREL
A LOVER'S SPAT
I write I'm sorry, but my letter keeps coming back
(Duh dun duh dun duh dun duh dun....)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! Somebody help me. Please.

If Only For The Sake Of Updating

Most of the other bloggers I read seem to be on some sort of hiatus of late, so I guess that's my excuse to anyone who says that I should be more on top of things. Of course, perhaps they've also taken a break from reading blogs, and so my excuse will fall on deaf ears. Either way, I'm updating now, and have managed to spend two, wait--three whole sentences talking about nothing but updating, or not updating. Sweet. It's June now, for those of you who don't own calendars, Memorial day already seems like a distant memory, which in my book means that it's officially Summer. Our softball team is still whatever the opposite of undefeated is (repeatedly defeated, if explanation is needed), but I for one am still having a great time with it. I've been playing infield all season, which might have something to do with the team's woes (not to be confused with "whoas"), but I prefer not to think of it that way. I even played shortstop for a few innings a couple of weeks ago. I tried to protest with strains of "isn't that where the best defensive player is supposed to play?" but time was short (no pun intended), and to the infield I did go. Sigh. For no reason whatsoever, I'm going to spend the rest of the post talking about some of the media I've consumed of late:

Music:
I've been on something of a Band kick for the past week or so (capital B), after putting my seldom-used copy of The Basement Tapes in my car's CD player on a whim. It's one of the few Bob Dylan-related things I've bought that I didn't really like, in fact I don't think I'd played it more than once since purchasing it some years ago, before college. I hadn't even ripped it onto my computer. Since then, I'd become something of a fan of The Band, since checking The Last Waltz out of the college library a few years back, and purchasing their first two albums shortly thereafter. I can still hear what initially turned me off of The Basement Tapes when I first heard the two-CD set: Bob Dylan barely sings on the whole album, but he does speak on quite a few tracks, and many (perhaps most) of the lyrics on the thing are less coherent even than Dylan's previous three albums, which were filled mostly with psychedelic imagery and twangy Fender country blues, with some beat-poet aesthetic thrown in for good measure. Suffice to say that while The Basement Tapes were made between two of Dylan's best (and very different) albums (Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding), they really don't represent him at his best, and I bought the CDs because I was a fan of Bob Dylan. Also, while it has been claimed that some of the recordings were doctored with overdubs later (neither here nor there as far as I'm concerned), the "album" is still essentially six guys goofing off in a basement with musical instruments and home recording equipment in 1967, so the sound quality is far from (shall we say) pristine. What surprised me was how much of the album (primarily The Band's numbers, and a few Dylan gems) I really really liked this time around. There's a reason that this thing was one of the very first (and almost certainly the most famous) bootleg recordings for years before it was officially released by Columbia. Anyways, I'm not going to tell you to run out and buy the thing as quickly as you can. The Band's music isn't (or wasn't for me) all that accessible on your first listen on nearly any level. There really aren't catchy pop hooks, polished (or, for that matter, Polish) vocals, or anything of the kind to draw you in at first. I just really like it, that's all.

Book:
At the request of my friend John, who now has a blog about baseball (and, specifically, Sabermetrics), I finally got around to finishing Moneyball , the only book I've ever read about baseball (or for that matter, sport). While I'm not about to move into my mom's basement and start a blog about baseball (or even get more books about it), I have to admit that I actually enjoyed the book. This may be because the Michael Lewis (the author) is a storyteller more than a baseball guy, and so the book is rather accessible to someone who probably watches less than ten whole baseball games in a year, and that's counting an extraordinary two trips to the ballpark, and in a year when the Tigers go to the World Series (I do like baseball, but I'm no die-hard by any stretch of the imagination). Perhaps what makes the book so likable is that for a book about baseball, very little print is spent talking about the events of a baseball game. Almost none, actually. What makes the book interesting is that it's basically about the Economics of putting together a baseball team, written by someone who is not an economist, nor does he work in baseball (this is a good thing: constituents of both groups tend to alienate and/or bore those outside of them). He just likes the story, which is basically the age-old sports underdog story, but this time it's about financial and strategic savvy. Rather than the "Little Team With The Big Heart That Won Against All Odds" story, you get the "Little Team With the Small Payroll That Won Lots Of Games By Hiring Good Players That Nobody Else Thought Were Valuable For Relatively Small Amounts Of Money" story. Doesn't sound quite as catchy as a made-for-tv-movie title, but it makes a far less over-told story. Along the way it allows one to chuckle at some of the conventional wisdom clichés that dominate pro sports and their commentators (one of the reasons for my limited interest in televised sport is the idiots they always get to comment on the games). One of my favorite parts of the book is how Billy Beane (General Manager of the Oakland Athletics, and the book's protagonist) has to keep reminding his scouting staff that when hiring ball players, The A's are trying to win games, rather than sell blue jeans (the book suggests that guys who look good playing baseball tend to be paid more than those who don't, because people tend to think that they play better, even when this is verifiably not the case). Anyways, the book is fun and pretty easy to read if you're into that sort of thing (or, in my case, even if you're not). My only cautionary remark is that it is still about professional sport, and therefore occasionally contains the kind of language which you would expect from such a testosterone-fueled environment.

I've gone on too long to continue, I'll write about the rest of my doings and media consumption later...

And then it was Friday...

I'm sitting here consuming a bagel, toasted with cream cheese, and due to the fridge being devoid of the regular variety, a "Coca-cola Zero." I've got to say, if you close your eyes and think of the most beautiful things in the world, it still tastes not as good as regular Coke. Any big plans for the holiday weekend? I haven't any big plans per se, but a significant amount of small plans that add up, so it should be a real doozy. I'm excited, though. Softball, rock n' roll, wedding, Pentecost, etc... I really hope to squeeze a little BBQ in there at some point, barbecued food may very well be the best single thing about summer, and summer is pretty great all-around. Let's see... what to write about... Reens just got back from the Land o' Saints and Scholars the other day, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit jealous. She sent the bitches to Puppy Camp (also known as my folks' house) for ten days, so K and I had a quiet house (I think we were there at the same time all of twice), and the bitches, whether from boredom or overplayfulness or perhaps malace, killed a few of Owen's kittens. Poor Owen. My dear mother's homeopathic hijinks continue with what appears to be increasingly wreckless abandon, such that Snake Oils and unpasteurized milk now seem commonplace, though still unsafe for consumption (lest one contract "Consumption," yuk yuk). If you had asked me last week what Kombucha Tea was, I'd have guessed that it was something on Star Trek that Klingons used as an aphrodesiac. I'm still not sure that this is a bad guess. That's all for now, hopefully more to come soon. I should mention that I don't in any way vouch for the accuracy of Wikipedia articles, but you ought to know that already.

Assorted

Oh my stars and constellations, an update! The poison ivy game is going as well as can be expected, thanks for asking, which is to say that I haven’t yet reached Round Three. Let me see, where to start. It really has been a while, hasn’t it? Let’s see…
Lindsey and I went to see the band Over the Rhine a while back (nearly two weeks), that was awesome. The venue (The Ark) was small and we sat in the second row off to the right of the stage, Lindsey sang along to the songs, and I think it’s safe to say that we both had a great time. I’d picked up their two most recent albums (Ohio and Drunkard’s Prayer) in the few months since getting the tickets so that I’d know some of the material (I’d only heard of them before through Lindsey), which turned out to be a good move, since most of the songs they played were from those albums, with the exception of a few songs from their forthcoming album. They started the show with “Born,” one of my favorites, and ended with “Stella’s Tarantella,” one of Lindsey’s, the whole set was great. Lindsey stole the drummer Mickey’s setlist after the show, then we hung around for a while to meet the band, and Linds bought a poster and got the band to sign the back of the t-shirt she’d made.
The following weekend I went out to GR once again, this time for the wedding of some friends. As always when I go out there the company was great, and time flew by. I finally got to meet Lindsey’s boss Donna, who was as awesome as I’d heard she was and more, and is also a pretty good dancer. It was a great wedding, and this time out nobody caught my merriment on cell phone video and showed it to my girlfriend’s entire family, so I may have left with some shard of my dignity intact. Eh, maybe not. Sunday evening I had a close call with a leak in my tire, which Lindsey’s neighbor graciously fixed, allowing me to get home that night. Praise God! I never did understand a word that he said, but that stranger sure did fix my tire.
This past weekend was a busy one, but fun. I played softball in Saline on Friday night, which I had to leave early to get to a gig in Ypsi on time, only to find out that our band had been pushed back in the bill, and I would have had time to finish the game, run home, and change before running out. As it was, I played in a grimy bar full of indie scene kids with colored tape on their Chuck Taylors and t-shirts of bands that they really really hope you haven’t heard of in a sweaty company softball team t-shirt, athletic pants, and running shoes. ‘Twas amusing. Saturday I drove down to Hillsdale for commencement, saw a lot of friends for a short period of time, cracked jokes with them about "Pomp and Circumstance," commencement speaker Mitt Romney (the speech had nothing to do with graduation, and everything to do with “I’m Mitt Romney, and I’m running for President”), and the name of Hillsdale’s new Student Union, cheered loudly for my friends as they walked across the stage, ate Chinese, and went home.
Sunday I went to Mass, then stopped at home to wish Mama a happy Mother’s Day and to watch a dozen donuts get devoured by four siblings in approximately 2.4 seconds. I stroked my beard in an old man sort of way and explained to them that “back in the day” a dozen donuts would have been split between all 13 of us, and we were grateful, darnit! On the way back to Saline I received a call from Dean, who informed me that he was hanging out with my housemate, and wondering if I was planning to go with him back to Hillsdale for Justin & Emily’s wedding. Apparently, I was running late. I arrived home a few moments later, straigtened my tie, and we hit the road. We arrived with plenty of time to spare, the wedding was nice, the reception was nice, cake was served, and a splendid time was had by all. Offhand, I'd say that the reception had probably the most Salsa music of any Dutch wedding I've ever attended, not that I've attended many.
Anyways, that's all for now. I hope that all's well with you.

It's Time To Play... The Poison Ivy Game!

For those of you just now joining us, we're going to play the poison ivy game, the game where you get poison ivy! Are you excited to play? I know I am. Let's get things started with Round One. The object of Round One is to determine who gets poison ivy. The contestants (who may or may not be aware of their participation in the game) are told to avoid contact with a certain three-leaved plant, which can be found on roughly every square inch of earth in the State of Michigan, where our game is being played today. Certain contestants will have been given "imunity" up until this point in the game, where they could touch the leafy foe and be unharmed, but there is no guarantee that this will be the case for any single contestant in the current round. Were you immune last round? You might be immune in this round, but on the other hand you might not. In any case, Round One concludes when one of the contestants notices a rather itchy rash somewhere on their person, most likely somewhere on their person that could not have possibly come into contact with the aforementioned plant, such as a part of the ankle that had been covered by a sock, a boot, and a trouser leg. This is where the fun begins, with Round Two. Play in Round Two is subject to three over-arching rules:

1. The contestant cannot, under any circumstances, touch the infected area on his skin. The penalty for doing so is that all other parts of the body will quickly be infected.

2. The contestant is allowed to use whatever medical treatments are at his disposal - ointments, creams, bandages, snake oil, voodoo, alcoholism, amputation - in an attempt to treat the poison ivy and keep it from spreading to the rest of his body.

3. (And this is the important part.) It makes absolutely no difference what the poor fool tries, it isn't going to work. He's just going to keep on finding more and more festering, infected sores all over his wretched body, that will continue to ooze and itch for a period of time that one might be forgiven for mistaking for the remainder of his accursed life. At this Point, we begin Round Three.

Round Three is always interesting, because it's played somewhat differently every time. In Round Three, the contestant walks out onto a tall bridge, or perhaps a tall building, or maybe even a cliff, and hurls himself over the edge, generally (though not always) yelling something along the lines of "Goodbye, cruel, itchy world." Maybe he goes out and buys himself a cheap replica of a Japanese Katana, sharpens it with all the skill that his suburban upbringing affords him, and commits sepuku. One contestant accidentally (or so we think) drowned himself in a tub of calamine lotion. You just never know what to expect from Round Three!

D.Cous. Once Again Lashes Out At The Man

I feel a little bit like I'm sitting in Pierre Bernard's Recliner Of Rage when I do this, but what good is a weblog if you don't use it to rant every now and then? (Please note that the preceeding question is entirely rhetorical.) To be honest, I was thinking about just letting it go unblogged about, having finally gotten what I wanted, when I stumbled accross this article, and was suddenly swept away by a flood of bad memories of long hours on hold waiting just to talk to someone who was something remotely like a human being, or at least had been such before taking a job with Sprint/Nextel. No, I must write. Too many have suffered outrage at the hands of Sprint's unholy legions for me to keep silent any longer. My outrage and that of a thousand voiceless others shall be channelled through this blog into the vast ocean of the Inter-nets, and yea, it shall brimeth over until the world rises up out of its comfy armchairs and its politely distant social cirlces and its Chrysler 300 sedans, and that great multitude of disgruntled wireless telephone consumers shall cry out as one: KHAAAAaann... er... I mean FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMM!!!!

Ok, phew. Chill out, Cous. You're gonna break the keyboard. Right. To be honest, I'm not totally sure what the oppressed multitude will yell, but it'll be something pretty dramatic, that's for darn sure. You get the idea. By this point, if you're still reading (or, for that matter, if you started reading at all) you're probably wondering what I'm on about, so I should give you a little context: For the past two years, I've been a Sprint wireless customer (my account disappears in two short days, by the way), and at work we have a few Nextel phones, which we are slowly phasing out of use. To that end, I had to call Nextel (somewhat recently acquired by Sprint) to find out when certain contracts expire, how much it would cost to end the contract before expiration, and a few other questions related to the service. It hardly matters what exactly my questions were, because the odds of speaking to a human being at Sprint are slim to none. I would venture a guess that there are more people currently climbing Mount Everest than answering the telephone for Sprint. So, over the course of a week or so, every now and then when I was doing something that did not require leaving my desk, I'd give Sprint a call. The general form of each call was something like this:

*ring... ring... ring...*

Computer: "Welcome to Sprint. Para make-a da computer speak-a da spanish, pressiona uno."

(short pause)

Computer: "To activate your new phone, press one. For all other options, press two."

*2*

Computer: "Please hold. All of our operators are currently assisting someone else, and by the way, your call may be recorded for training and quality assurance purposes."

Then begins a short segment of what, for lack of a better definition, I'll call "music," which lasts for about forty seconds, then loops back to the beginning. I don't know the name of the person who "wrote" this "music," but I'm pretty sure that they were hung following the Neuremburg trials, or should have been.

What happens next varies a bit from call to call. Most of the time what would happen is that I'd put the hold music on speaker phone and do my work for the next two hours, then hang up in frustration at the end of the work day. About a third of the time, however, the computer would put me on hold for about fifteen minutes, and then just hang up on me. I'm almost sure that this is a breakthrough in the growing feild of Bad Customer Service.
But Cous, you're saying, what about those new-fangled Inter-nets? Surely, a company as large as Sprint would have a usefull and informative website. Good question, reader. Unfortunately, belonging to Generation Y (I think), that was actually the first thing I tried. That's where I got the 3 or 4 different phone numbers I used for the above exchange. Let's try a little experiment, just for fun. Go to www.sprint.com, and at the top of the screen, click on the link that says "Contact Us." Under the headings "Customer Service" and "Nextel," you'll see a link that says "Service & Repair." Click it. Did you get This screen?I did. I think you can click it to make it bigger, but in case you can't, it's a very informative page, telling you when the service and repair kiosk will be open at some sort of racetrack, during some sort of race. Or maybe all races. I'm not sure. It just doesn't say. In fact, it makes absolutely no sense. You know the old cliche about monkeys and typwriters? I think they've moved up to computers and html, but have yet to come up with anything remotely shakespearean.

I've run out of time and lost my train of thought at this point, suffice to say that Sprint doesn't like people, and I don't like Sprint. You get the idea. I'll try to post something happy here soon (Lindsey graduated!), enjoy the weather out there!