gimme your lunch money!

As if I need this kind of aggro on a Monday morning. X forwarded me this NYTimes piece written by David Carr (Night of the Gun). It seems like less than a month since I bitched about some portion of the music industry; and now this? About 15 years ago Pearl Jam sued Ticketmaster (or maybe it was the venues under contract to Ticketmaster: same thing) along the lines of monopoly or antitrust issues. Talk to the lawyers in the family if you need actual legal jargon. The gist was that Ticketmaster and the contracted venues didn’t allow artists to set prices and / or service fee details. Basically, just about every venue of size in America was under Ticketmaster contract so if an artist wanted to play that venue they had to essentially agree to Ticketmaster rules. The options for any band back then, if not playing within the established contracted circuit, were limited to places like the Cheyenne RodeoPlex. Pearl Jam, in the final judgement, didn’t win its lawsuit. I remember how music fans reacted to the entire string of events: very supportive of the band at first, but not overly concerned that they lost; the band almost became a joke of sorts. Why? Well, Pearl Jam was then standing on top of the World – the biggest draw, the most sales, the king of kings. I think everyone figured that it cost the band nothing to step forward and complain because they’d just go home to Seattle when it was over and still be ridiculously wealthy. It seems quaint now, doesn’t it? But don’t we want the artists with the muscle to flex it on behalf of the fans and smaller artists? All Pearl Jam was trying to do was keep ticket prices below $20 and service fees under $1.80 per ticket. Now, I’m not going to wander off and find a calculator to sort out the inflation index and the difference between the $20/$1.80 situation of 1994 and what would no doubt now be a $125 ticket with a $20 service fee. I think Pearl Jam probably attacked the system from the wrong legal angle – and no doubt lost on those legal grounds – but they were so far ahead in seeing what was happening to the live music industry that it’s frightening. It’s doesn’t matter much to me that in 2009 most big-time artists make almost all their money from touring; that’s not an excuse for overcharging, service fees, and artist-sanctioned scaplers. I guess if I’m going to pay $100 for a Springsteen ticket then so be it; but, I’m not cool with paying an additional $20 for ‘service fees’. Even if I had walked down to the Verizon Center to buy my ticket I would still have been responsible for that extra $20 for Ticketmaster. And for what? My time? My money? Now we find out that Ticketmaster is pushing fans off to a ticket black marketer that they own and where they scalp tickets – are we really surprised? Nope. In fact, the idea that the ticket market for any big show is open to all is a joke. One of my hockey ticket connections – an agent of sorts – told me a few weeks back, before the Springsteen tickets went on sale, that she had here order in and would be picking them up Monday morning (I think the pick up was actually from the venue.) Needless to say, they were immediately resold for a 250% profit. And now onto Mr. Springsteen…

First, he contracted to sell his new album only through Wal-Mart. For that, he gets a big piss off from me. He’s tried to back off now and admit that it was a mistake – but primarily because someone pointed out that their labor practices are for junk – and he, as spokesman for the people, shouldn’t support Wal-Mart; true enough. But more importantly, he shouldn’t be cutting out local records shops and dealers. Lord knows, his success has never been based on local fans and businesses. Now he’s caught up in this Ticketmaster scam because he – and other big names – didn’t step up way back in 1994 and take a stand against the behemoth. He can try to backtrack now and say that he had no idea such nefarious activities were occurring, but who’d believe it? He is just as responsible for creating and releasing the monster as anyone, and feigning shock and surprise is embarrassing. As if Ticketmaster isn’t a drain on music fans’ lives; merging with the equally monopolistic Live Nation would truly be disastrous. Live Nation has almost completely taken over ownership of most live venues and combining that with the mega ticket distribution specialist will only increase fees. It’s hard for me to be critical of artists charging a free market price for their wares; it’s not hard to complain about fees that are nothing more than free money to a third party. Apparently, free money that is then used to pawn off overcharged tickets from the same vender and ‘surprised’ artist. And, if I might say, charging people $125 for a ticket takes entertainment spending dollars out of the pockets of folks who might actually use some of that money to see a show at Iota, Jammin’ Java, or the Black Cat; venues that are the lifeblood struggling musicians.

I rest.

p.s. If you must know, my first concert ticket (Kiss/Uriah Heep, 1976) cost $5.50. We were shocked - SHOCKED - when prices skyrocketed to $6.50 for my next show (Steve Miller Ban, 1977).

i can't believe that you need my love so bad....

I'm not sure what triggered the rock n' roll tonight but I was watching the very first Huey Lewis and the News hit (Do You Believe in Love) and then started to wander a bit. Feel free to depart the blog at this point if you must; there's nothing deep going on here. I did a bit on Guns n' Roses a few months back so I decided to pull up a well-recorded version (BBC, no doubt) of Knockin' on Heaven's Door from the 1992 Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. This was not long before they returned to Wembley the weekend before Use Your Illusion (I and II) was released. You get some Axl, some Slash, some Dylan. I owned this on CD single, if you can believe or imagine something that crazy.



There's no reason why the next step should be to this song aside from the fact that I think it's in the great hall of fame: The guitar, drum, bass, and Rob Halford trying to kick your ass by singing, is first ballot stuff. I'll admit that I know next to nothing about the great metal bands but I first heard this diddy when my friend's band (Doc Friday) added to their live set and practiced it often. My friend Buzz, of playing the saw and cutting hair fame, ripped some guitar on this baby. Maybe since Buzz was in town last night it triggered this strange memory. This cut of Green Manalishi is from the 1985 Live Aid concert session in Philly. Get out the headphones and turn it up to 11...



t

how it crumbles

Ah, ethics. Now we’re talking some spirited discussion.

After reading this my very first impression was that I hate when parents sell kids’ junk at work. I hate it; I’ve cleared the air.

The next thought that crossed my mind, uninvited, was what would I do if I had a kid that needed to sell a pile of stuff for an organization? I’ll assume that they like the group, enjoy being a member, and want to do well at whatever activities are on the agenda. My first inclination would be to walk door-to-door with them in our neighborhood while they did the knocking and selling. It seems like parents are pretty willing to escort their children out-and-about on Halloween if they feel the need for safety or supervision, right? Why not one long evening of going door-to-door selling something for a troop and showing your child how to interact with people? After a first evening of selling I’d imagine the kids would be more comfortable, and willing, to strike out on their own during the day over a weekend. How about doing it in pairs? Or threes? What I have a hard time marrying up is the time invested in a Halloween escort tour that essentially involves getting free candy, and the unrealized cookie-selling escort tour that raises money for a troop. If anything, the lessons learned through sales – per the Scouts – should be far more important than the bag of junky Halloween candy parents spend their time supporting. Maybe committing another night or two a year to working on sales with your scout should be added to the calendar. As I’ve been typing this doctoral thesis or sort, I’ve realized that I wouldn’t have a second option in my cookie sale bag when my child came looking for help. If I were to push it I’d say that selling to my friends might be all right but nothing beyond that circle interests me. The rub is this: if an organization needs to raise money to support itself then it should do it in a more straightforward manner. If cookies need to be sold then ask parents if they will sell cookies; don’t pretend the kids are doing the work and reward them with sales gifts if there’s no way to equalize the process. I’d probably be more inclined to donate money to my child’s troop then I would be to sell “their” goods at work under the auspices that they are doing the selling while the troops look the other way and hand out awards. I think the best solution I’ve seen is to have the troops work tables at places like grocery stores: events where they are putting in the time and effort to sell while still fulfilling the safety requirement demanded by parents. Or, simply take all cookie sales on-line, distribute the orders troops, and they pass them to the scouts to deliver in their neighborhoods. Wouldn’t the cost be the same?

Then again, I could do without Girl Scout Cookies – I don’t find any emotional attachment to the culture of cookies.

As a final thought, the parent complaining about the eight million things her daughter needs to do should probably back off and let the kid be a kid. “Okay, little Jimmy. You’ve got to get to your nuclear fusion club early tonight and work hard. The moment you are done I need you to run out to the Hummer because I’ve got to get you to your LSAT review course. What? Yes, I know you’re only thirteen but you’ll need to prepare long and hard for that entrance exam. I’m not going to support you forever.”

t

I want my two dollars!

Here’s the opening of the article at CNN:

(CNN) -- On Monday, Congressional Republican leaders put out a list of what they call wasteful provisions in the Senate version of the nearly $900 billion stimulus bill that is being debated:

The Senate is currently debating the nearly $900 billion economic stimulus bill.

Here is the list of wasteful provisions they came up with in the release. I’ve added my earth-shattering remarks after each.

$2 billion earmark to re-start FutureGen, a near-zero emissions coal power plant in Illinois that the Department of Energy defunded last year because it said the project was inefficient.

- Oh, earmark! There’s a catchphrase. I’d like to see a review of the Bush administration’s DoE report. I will say that this is based purely on my hatred of Bush, I won’t lie. In my defense, haven’t the conservatives been pushing the idea of “clean coal”? Suddenly, any hope of making coal clean(er) is mockable?

$246 million tax break for Hollywood movie producers to buy motion picture film.

- What is this? I think this little nugget simply mists our vision (along with the earmark comment above) before reading the rest of the list. Once you read this you immediately thing “What the hell is going on.” I would imagine that this $246m is questionable at best.

$650 million for the digital television converter box coupon program.

- Shoot, I don’t know who came up with the converter box program but it’s there and it’s not going away. When you suddenly get millions of American homes with no TV in a few weeks you are going to have a riot on your hands. That doesn’t mean I think it belongs in the package, I’m just donning my riot gear.

$88 million for the Coast Guard to design a new polar icebreaker (arctic ship).

- I don’t know if this icebreaker (the “artic ship” wasn’t needed to clarify) will be used for scientific research but I’m guessing it has some value in that area. I wouldn’t call it wasteful.

$448 million for constructing the Department of Homeland Security headquarters.

- Is this one of those “shovel ready” projects? If so, it’ll certainly boost the economy in the D.C. area (I think it’s planned for SE) and provide jobs, right? Based on what I’ve heard from just about every economist on the spectrum, it is the jobs and unemployment that need to be solidified before anything else turns around. Now, we may not need a new HQ and that would certainly be an issue.

$248 million for furniture at the new Homeland Security headquarters.

- Hmm. Let’s call this wasteful spending. I think that if your furniture costs more than half the price tag of your new building then you’re doing something wrong. Imagine building a million-dollar home and then spending $600K on furniture.

$600 million to buy hybrid vehicles for federal employees.

- They make this sound like we are buying 30,000 Priui and handing them out to employees. Opa! How about it probably being a buying program for fleet vehicles for federal employees? Again, spending and responsibility….I hate that!

$400 million for the Centers for Disease Control to screen and prevent STD's.

- Fuck health. Sorry. I think every penny we spend on preventive healthcare comes back tenfold in the end. I think my father might have better numbers on that…and I apologize for the profanity.

$1.4 billion for rural waste disposal programs.

- Fuck waste. Oops. Okay, I’m pretty sure we need waste disposal, right? Once again we are in the spending area where it provides jobs and economic lift.

$125 million for the Washington sewer system.

- Well, the federal government is responsible for a good bit of the D.C. funding, it being a federal city and all. And, if you don’t know, there must be at least a dozen water main or sewer bursts in D.C. every week in the winter. Employment? Spending? I’m cool with it.

$150 million for Smithsonian museum facilities.

- Tourism. Tourism. Tourism. Let me put it this way: isn’t tourism one of the huge economic boosts for just about any major city, and by default, the economy. Secondly, if you’ve been to D.C. and enjoyed the Smithsonian, gratis, then think about coming here with the family of five and paying $10 for every Smithsonian building you want to see. Before you know it, you’ll be into museum costs to the tune of about $600 for the week. Don’t worry, you can eat Ramen in your hotel room.

$1 billion for the 2010 Census, which has a projected cost overrun of $3 billion.

- Doesn’t the taking of the Census employ loads of people? We’ll have none of that! Doesn’t the Census affect elections and voting districts? Isn’t it important?

$75 million for "smoking cessation activities."

- See healthcare above.

$200 million for public computer centers at community colleges.

- And the problem here is what? Education? Learning? Kids and adults trying to better themselves and enhance the economy and our standing in the world? Shenanigans!

$75 million for salaries of employees at the FBI.

- They make this sound like it’s merely a raise for everyone there. That’s not it, right? Are we hiring more people in law enforcement? That’s crazy.

$25 million for tribal alcohol and substance abuse reduction.

- Beating a drum.

$500 million for flood reduction projects on the Mississippi River.

- I have two things to say here and they are both pretty straightforward: JOBS and KATRINA.

$10 million to inspect canals in urban areas.

- I’ll go along with more jobs here. I’m guessing there are plans on the books to catch up on infrastructure projects that have been put on hold.

$6 billion to turn federal buildings into "green" buildings.

- I think the Republicans thought this meant green paint. With the quote marks it really does seem sneaky: do they mean non-green buildings? Liberals. I think the work involved would be an economic boon and the feds really need to get buildings upgraded.

$500 million for state and local fire stations.

- Let the fuckers burn. And screw the police, too.

$650 million for wildland fire management on forest service lands.

- This is in here simply because they are Republicans. They couldn’t allow this to stand.

$1.2 billion for "youth activities," including youth summer job programs.

- I’ll again defer to my father’s opinion from my youth. He felt that kids should have work opportunities in the summers. Let me ask you this; if we were to put $500 million in the pockets of youth through a summer jobs program, do you think they would spend it? On what? They can’t be serious with this objection.

$88 million for renovating the headquarters of the Public Health Service.

- Again, I know the feds need some remodeling but some of the plans may need to be put on hold, especially when it comes to new buildings.

$412 million for CDC buildings and property.

- Disease has been eradicated. Get rid of the CDC!

$500 million for building and repairing National Institutes of Health facilities in Bethesda, Maryland.

- See above. (I have a good friend who’s a chemist at NIH and I know her lab is a piece of junk.)

$160 million for "paid volunteers" at the Corporation for National and Community Service.

- Well, anyone involved in community service or as a community organizer clearly has no future.

$5.5 million for "energy efficiency initiatives" at the Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration.

- More energy efficiency. Can we get off this? Drill, baby, drill.

$850 million for Amtrak.

- The only thing I’ll say here is public transport. If you don’t live on in the Northeast or along the seaboard you don’t know how important Amtrak is for reducing traffic. Having said that, isn’t Amtrak one of the worst run organizations in the country? Or am I making that up?

$100 million for reducing the hazard of lead-based paint.

- Lead is a problem?

$75 million to construct a "security training" facility for State Department Security officers when they can be trained at existing facilities of other agencies.

- I’ll take their word that there are other facilities for the training…with this caveat: since the conservatives have been hell bent on scaring the living shit out of everyone for the last eight years isn’t this a bit rich?

$110 million to the Farm Service Agency to upgrade computer systems.

- I don’t know anything about this. Nor do I have anything witty to say.

$200 million in funding for the lease of alternative energy vehicles for use on military installations.

- I know the military and they need some energy efficiency.

I think I’d probably question and/or remove about 5 or 6 billion of these “wasteful initiatives”. My calculator runs that out to two-thirds of one percent of the proposed $900 billion. Is the package perfect? Nope. Is it worth bickering over what would amount to about $23 of my monthly take home pay? Nope. But once you open up with words like earmark and Hollywood, you're golden. Hollywood, gay liberals!

If they want to simply pose and blow smoke up our skirts then they've done a fine job. But don’t pretend that all this evil stuff is being thrust upon us. Do you see any repairs being done to Ted Stevens' house, nope. You know what? I don’t want any stimulus package that is spending nearly a trillion dollars of taxpayer money. But aren't these the same politicos that voted for, and released, $350 billion of the first package and have nothing to show for it?

That barn door needs closing.

expedition

Let’s play a little multiple-choice Jeopardy. Here are the possible answers:

A. H
B. G
C. X
D. Kt

Here’s the question, ready your buzzers: When asked why they didn’t sleep soundly on Friday night the response was this: “It must have been the three Jameson’s I had at the strip club.” Good luck.

Our weather here has come out of the freezer yet I see the 40s and 50s forecasted for today might turn to snow showers over the next two nights/mornings. Why I’m telling you this, or why you might be interested in it, is beyond me. If you really wanted to know what the weather is like in northern Virginia you’d probably look it up for yourself on the newfangled internet. The real reason behind my forecast is to pass along a tidbit learned about life on the Hilltop. Our front yard – and by default, the driveway parallel to it – is very steep. I think I paced it off a few months ago because I want to get some degree of climb so I could call Car Talk to find out if going up the driveway really used a lot of gas. (I never called, just so you know.) For the engineers out there I think the length of the climbing portion of the driveway is about 30-40 feet and the footage of gained altitude is probably close to 15-18 feet. Is that possible? Let me know. What we’ve learned is that if there is any indication of snow in the forecast then we need to park in the street well in advance of the dusting. Even with just the first flurries last Tuesday morning, Galactica decided it was easiest to just slide its 3,600 pounds right down the to the street. That’s not a great feeling when just across the street from the foot of the drive sits two or three pick-up trucks working construction at the newly built house of our neighbors. Needless to say, you won’t be driving back up the drive anytime soon. The secondary issue became the Tuesday night/Wednesday morning ice storm that followed, and it was a good one. Even with the grand decision to park in the street it became clear that not shoveling the steps (as if you would in Virginia…) before the ice storm was a mistake. The steps became a deathtrap, walking on the grass/yard that is just as steep as the driveway and covered in snow ice wasn’t an option, nor was attempting to walk up the drive a smart choice. I needed a spelunking set-up and Sherpas to get to or from the front door. The little man in the house took one look outside and decided the best way down to the street was to run from the top of the drive and slide down, while standing up, to the bottom and tumbling into the street over and over again. Ah, youth. X eventually took all the ashes from the fireplace and scattered them about the steps after two days of misery. Suddenly, as if by novelty, the ice melted and traction was restored.

Plans are taking shape for the summer and it looks like L. will be here for a month and we’ll all spend a week up on Lake Memphremagog up in Quebec. After that she’ll be back to the Plains of Nebraska and her first year of high school.

p.s. On Sunday afternoon I witnessed my first Alexander Ovechkin hat trick. It was a blast.

no money for something

The president signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act today – the first significant piece of legislation of this administration. The name may have slipped the mind but the Supreme Court decision last year was an abomination. If you don’t want to wander hither-and-yon to read the details, I’ll try to summarize the basics as best I can:

Mrs. Ledbetter worked at a Goodyear plant in Alabama for twenty years. Her pay for the position she held was about 40% less than her male counterparts but she didn’t realize it until near the end of her career. She filed an EEOC complaint for discrimination immediately after learning of the discrimination. She won her case with the award totaling $300,000 for punitive damages (the limit), and $60,000 for two years of back pay; the two years is also the maximum allowed under the law. Goodyear appealed and won which led to Ledbetter taking the case all the way to the Supreme Court where she lost the case. The majority ruled, or interpreted, that the statute of limitations for filing a pay discrimination complaint is limited to 180 days from the initial discrimination – or something like 18 years earlier. Ledbetter argued that every paycheck was effectively discrimination and so the clock reset every pay period; it’s sort of hard to file for discrimination if aren’t aware of it until years later. Ledbetter, at the time she finished working that job for 19 years was still making $6,000 less per year than the newest, and lowest tenured, employee doing her same job. All the other employees working the same position were also male. It was heartwarming to see that that the Goodyear’s Gadsden, Alabama factory, after the case, transferred a 60-year-old woman to a job that required her to carry Hummer tires. That’s a quality company.

The Congress attempted to pass a new law last session after the Supreme Court ruling but it was filibustered by Senate Republicans. Some of their arguments involved lawyers making money, huge payouts to discrimination filers, and endless cases. From what I’ve heard and read, the $300,000 and two-year back pay numbers are maximum limits so any cases, with the law as it was written, wouldn’t climb into the multi-millions. The new law passed last year merely adjusted the statute of limitations. And why wouldn’t it? Who knows how much co-workers make? Why would you ask if you didn’t know anything was wrong? Essentially, the Supreme Court ruling implied that as long as a corporation could snow someone for six months then they could continue that behavior until the end of time with no recourse on the employee’s side.

Even though Lilly Ledbetter didn’t benefit for the new Act, we’ve finally arrived at a solution that’s been accomplished by making the system work as it should have in the first place: Congress passing the bill and the president signing it into law. Well done.

Author’s note: all profanity-laced tirades directed at Chief Justice Roberts; Justices Alito, Thomas, Scalia, Kennedy; and John McCain, have been censored.

Have a nice day.

glass houses

Nothing gets the ire of fans more ramped up than when a people’s icon is absolutely hammered in a review or opinion piece. When I saw the title of this piece at Slate.com I knew I could bypass the source article and move right along to the comments section for the best value from my entertainment dollar. Once you open on Billy Joel you must know full well that you’re going to get an earful – and he didn’t even massacre the Uptown Girl period which deserves a poison pen more than any other. I suspect the piece might generate more comments than any other in Slate’s history. You might as well have started bashing every person’s grandmother.

In my attempt to show some solidarity with the author, as well as showing support for the rabid commentators and their love of Billy Joel, I’ll present two sides of a similar melee that I find perfectly acceptable: Bruce Springsteen. I’m a big Springsteen fan but I’m also confident enough in my understanding of how musical tides roll that I can safely say he’s only been producing at about a 25% success rate over the last eleven albums, barring one that I’ll cover in a minute. From The River through Magic, and I own them all, only one in three songs, at best, are keepers. Some albums were stronger across the board than others, like Nebraska and The River. But, if we’re being honest, we could have done without most of Tunnel of Love, Lucky Town, Human Touch, Magic, The Rising, and Born in the U.S.A. If you want the best of Springsteen then you’ll always fall back to Greetings, The Wild…, Born to Run, and Darkness; those were the real glory days. I’ve twice seen him with the E St. Band (Athens, Greece in October 1988 and London in 1999 or 2000 on a short tour) and both shows were good, but not great. They certainly don’t appear on my list of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen. To be fair, I don’t much care for huge venues regardless of who’s playing so maybe the lack of feeling is based on that prejudice. I would suspect that if Bruce and boys showed up at the State Theater in Falls Church, set up the kit, and rocked in front of a few hundred fans for three hours then it would probably make my list. But, that hasn’t happened anywhere in decades (at least not where normal fans could attend) so it doesn’t count, does it? The one stunning piece of work he’s produced since about 1980 was the CD and DVD with the Seeger Sessions band. The compilation of those live shows in Dublin is fantastic.

My point, since you’re asking, is this: I could write a similar piece on Springsteen’s work over the last 28 years or so. What has enabled him to continually draw massive crowds is twofold: the depth of his music catalogue allows him to go for three hours and still be hitting on the best stuff. Second, he puts on a great live show. What does it mean? Well, he’s a massively talented artist who has a great collection of music that’s unfortunately been spread a bit too thin over the last few decades. I wouldn’t go so far as to pull out the “he’s a hack” argument that seems prevalent in the Billy Joel article but I’m sure any negative darts thrown at Springsteen would get the wolves a-howling.

Of course, he’s playing D.C. in May and I have an inkling to go if I can swing a good seat.

Before I send you off on your own to study the world, I’d like to pass along this nugget from online reporting last night or early this morning. Feel free to create your own comedy bit.

LONDON (AFP) – Chelsy Davy, the former girlfriend of Prince Harry, has confirmed to friends reports of their split by changing her profile on her "Facebook" webpage, British media reported on Monday.

The 23-year old at the weekend changed her personal profile on the social networking site to read: "Relationship: Not in One", signaling an end to the five-year romance, the Times newspaper reported.

The prince, third in line to the throne, and Davy were reported to have split after the pair found it increasingly difficult to see each other.

t

splish splash

We managed to complete our jaunt to east central Virginia with little problem. The drive is about 3 ½ - 4 hours without stops and once you get far enough east the scenery turns quite lovely as you skirt and then climb into the Alleghenies.

The Jefferson Pools in Warm Springs, Virginia are one of those rare finds you encounter when traveling the world. As I was floating in the waters I was trying to sort out why they haven’t become one of those hateful, overrun, over managed and overpopulated venues. As I was thinking so deeply, and floating about on the floaty noodles, I ended up taking a little nap; that’s how hard I was thinking. Even though they’re owned by the Homestead resort just up the road in Hot Springs you’d never know ownership falls under that massive, and apparently highly overrated, golf and resort club. Maybe in the spring, summer, and fall it’s more crowded than on a nice, clear, cold weekend in late January but we may never know since I’d rather be there when it’s cold. After checking in at our Inn (The Inn at Grist Mill) on Saturday afternoon we popped over for an hour’s soak before they lock up that sheds at 5pm. The layout is made up of two octagonal wooden shacks that provide cover over the men’s and women’s baths – both baths are simply pools of hot springs (a perfect 98°) over and the creek bed. The sheds include dressing rooms and a platform that encircles (enoctagons?) the waters. There are no luxuries beyond the amazing waters and provided towels: no heat, no curtains, and no nice robes. You come in wearing your duds, strip down to what God gave you, pop in the water, soak, hop out, dry off (quickly), get dressed and move along – an hour seems to fly by. In January, when it’s about 25 degrees outside, the drying and dressing is the final revitalization; there’s nothing quite as shocking as drying, shivering, and trying to get the warm clothes on as quickly as possible. On Sundays from noon to 1pm they allow the guys and dolls to intermingle…with swimsuits. We learned on Sunday that the women’s bath is only 4’10” deep and the men’s is 6’8” (of course, we each knew our own shack depths from the previous day; we just didn’t know the other’s). The Eleven, as expected of tall people worldwide, chose the men’s bath and subsequently had the place to ourselves for the whole hour before driving back to the NoVa. Once you get over your initial trepidation upon entering the shacks o’er the magma for the first time, they’re unbelievably relaxing.

Our room at the Inn was perfectly designed for our needs. The queen bed was outfitted with very nice cotton sheets, the fireplace was stocked with wood, and they deliver a breakfast basket in the morning. The basket idea is ingenious: you give them a ring to let them know you’re up, choose coffee or tea, and they pop over in five minutes flat with the goods. The basket includes a thermos of coffee, scones, butter and jams, cups, cream, sugar, and orange juice. All you do is sit around watching the TLC network and nibbling at your breakfast and sipping coffee. We had dinner on Saturday night the Inn’s restaurant which was all of 50 feet from our building – makes the arrival timing for dinner pretty simple. The food was probably about a B- on my grading scale but we were limited to either trout or salmon; they seem to have a much broader selection of meat and poultry. Considering that the restaurant’s greatest attraction is proximity it fulfilled its task. Of course, if you don’t eat at the restaurant you’re limited to a choice of no other place that we came across in the small village. I’d imagine you could drive some country roads to the nearest towns and find grub but who’s really interested in that?

Our one misadventure occurred as we pulled off I-81 for a quick stop for coffee in Harrisonburg, VA. As we were pulling into a parking place and disembarking at the Starbucks (hey, we were only looking for convenience!) we noticed we were going to end up behind a group of about 15 high-schoolers who’d just piled out of a tour van of some ilk. The last think you want in your life – ever – is to be behind 15 high-schoolers in any situation that requires decision making, let alone in a Starbucks. As they stood in a sort of line nattering at each other about coffee I realized I’d need to take evasive action to keep my sanity. All I wanted was a short cappuccino and a venti misto. As I sidestepped the amoeba-like coffee horde and swooped toward an open register I heard this conversation between the barista attempting to be helpful and the first high-schooler in line:

Barista: So, what kind of flavors to you like?
Confused Kid: Uh, I don’t know.
Barista: Do you like coffee?
Confused Kid: Uh, I don’t know.

This was not going to go smoothly at all. In my defense, it seemed the kind-hearted barista had taken on the mission of handling all orders from the vanload of youths so I didn’t feel too bad. As we escaped moments later with our coffee in hand the entire situation had deteriorated to the sound of…

Barista: Well, what do you like?
Confused Kid: I like lunch.

Love to all.

t

my remainder

I didn’t want to get into this discussion because it’ll make me sound like a crazy old man. Unfortunately, it has been forced upon my mind by current events. I’d like to refer you to a previous entry from the blog. Feel free to amble over and take a look, I’ll wait for you here.

The elementary school down the street – and one math teacher in particular – has determined that the kids in his or her class don’t know how to divide or multiply. They’ve attacked this great mystery by deciding to teach kids how to multiply and divide, huzzah! (I picture a sixty-year-old math teacher with a tidy brush cut, rumpled suit, and heavy black-rimmed glasses guffawing about the classroom as his minions fail to properly carry remainders; you create your own teacher.) A few weeks ago the house was suddenly overrun first with long division, and then with multiplication problems. The multiplication was not of the tables sort but the multiplying of three- and four-digit numbers with decimals. This new fangled math was met with suspicious eyes and minds by those under 5 feet, 5 inches. Who could have possibly invented this method? It’s mad! I think we should go back to coloring squares on a big square graph and then counting rows and doing magical tomfoolery. Ah ha!, I say. That doesn’t actually work in real life when you aren’t carrying around a bag of colored pencils, a pile of graph paper, scissors, and have time to sit on the floor at work and count squares. It makes you look simple. It warmed my soul in its mathematical corners to listen and watch as paper was gathered, pencil sharpened, brackets drawn, and numbers managed. The pattern and method, proven through time, had finally arrived at the Hilltop: a bit of multiplication, a dash of subtraction, the carrying down of the next digit, rinse, repeat, add a decimal, input another zero…voila! I was really beginning to get the feeling that all was lost in the educational system as I continued to watch a fifth-grader doing homework that required him to “underline” the tens place! Circle the thousands place! Color in the pie and then subtract the green stuff from the pink wedge!

Even with my old man bubbling over and seeming crazy (I’m not), there’s some evidence, if you can call consider standardized tests as evidence, of the mathematical ability of our children devolving, right? Maybe I’ll wander off and do some research to support that broad statement but I think it’s true. Once you get off the path of very strong suburban and / or private school systems, I’m pretty sure the maths numbers are staggering. Do you know why? I’ll tell you.

Grab a colored pencil, some graph paper, and take this down…

Hey to all

t

come on in, the water's fine

The Eleven is off to Bath County, Virginia come early Saturday morning. (At some point in the next few days the boys are off to Omaha for a four-day weekend.) X was looking for somewhere to go for a little getaway and has latched onto Warm Springs, Virginia. Apparently, there are warm springs there – not hot springs, that would be TOO warm – but nice, tepid waters. We’ll drive about four hours across Virginia, something I didn’t know could be done, and stop just short of needing our passports to enter West Virginia. Our soaks will at the famous Jefferson Pools (so named after George Jefferson of Manhattan), not hot springs, and buildings that look surprisingly like this:


That’s right. It’s a woodshed built over the warm pools – one for guys, one for gals. I’ve checked the Saturday and Sunday weather predicts and it looks like 15 for the low and 31 the high. I'm packing some whale blubber to rub all over myself and some birch branchs in case a horde of Finns show up. Of course, I’ll probably just drip dry when we hit those high temps; maybe my new friends, Mika and Heikki, and I can just stroll back to the Inn in flip-flops and Speedos® while taking in the crisp, cool mountain breezes.

We’re booked at the Inn at Gristmill. The room looks very nice and includes a fireplace, though what one might need a fireplace for is beyond me.


The Inn also has an on-site pub which will hopefully have a number of whiskeys and bourbons available upon my return from our warm soak.

We'll send word as the weekend progresses.

a beginning

man! this is one, long song

I was listening to the Sound Opinions podcast on my walk to work this morning and as they were discussing the agreement to remove digital rights management (DRM) software from iTunes-purchased music, my mind start to wander back in time. What interested me was the conflation of digital music capabilities and their relationship to singles and albums created by artists and marketed by big record companies. Way back when, as a ten-year old haunting the corridors of Omaha’s Westroads mall, about 1975, I remember endlessly buying 45s for $.79 - $.99. Each song was lovingly selected after having listened to AM radio (WOW and KOIL in Omaha back in those days) and remembering just which songs Kasey Kasem played on the countdown the previous Sunday night. The “record buyers” back in those days primarily bought 45s and eschewed the LPs that were marketed and pushed on FM radio – you had to be driving a 1970 yellow Chevelle SS to be someone who actually bought complete albums on vinyl or 8-track: 10cc, Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder, Aerosmith, ELO, Blue Oyster Cult, and the Steve Miller Band. Record sale profits were based on the sale of millions of singles and dozens of one- or two-hit single releases from artists; seriously, take a gander at the top singles of 1975 (1976 was even more amazing for pure singles):

Love Will Keep Us Together – Captain and Tennille (saw them twice in concert!)
Rhinestone Cowboy – Glen Campbell
Philadelphia Freedom – Elton John
Before the Next Teardrop Falls – Freddie Fender
My Eyes Adored You – Frankie Valli
Shining Star – Earth, Wind, and Fire
Fame – David Bowie
Laughter in the Rain – Neil Sedaka
One of These Nights – The Eagles
Thank God I’m a Country Boy – John Denver

I owned all of them on single except Freddie Fender (my brother had the album…on 8-track…in his Chevelle), and Fame by Bowie. I’d guess that if you were a music buyer back then you might have owned a couple of them on LP. My point being this: we’ve been through entire eras where music was purchased primarily as singles and not albums. At some point in the late 1980s sales seems to move full force toward full-length albums; about the time near the tail end of cassettes (awful!), the birth of CDs, and the industry’s opportunity to eliminate singles – they no longer provided a format for singles sales. By that time music had become much more compact to carry and people didn’t much seem to care that they had to buy the $18 CD just to get the two or three songs they wanted. But, we’ve always been a singles species even through we passed through that bit of history where they weren’t available for purchase. How do I know? How about the 71 volumes of NOW! That’s What I Call Music in the UK and 29 volumes in the U.S? The UK version has been around much longer (they are even more singles oriented than the U.S. – see, Top of the Pops) but when the U.S. version launched in 1998 it proved very successful. All of the U.S. Now CDs have gone platinum and almost half have gone to #1.

What this sort of proves, via my twisted logic, is that the idea behind selling singles on iTunes – and the “sky is falling because no one buys full albums anymore” argument –is a false ideal. The industry has known forever that singles are what props up the whole building and they even spent the entire 1990s proving the premise true once again by cramming endless singles bands down our throats: Britney, Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, Destiny’s Child, Hanson, Christina Aguilera, Hootie, blah blah blah. I can safely assume that no one has ever uttered this phrase “Man, that new Backstreet Boys album really connects with me. The B-side was such a surprise after the smooth musicianship of the A-side.”

The shock of the DRM implementation decision was that the record companies (it’s always been their requirement, not Apple’s…although they certainly didn’t suffer) felt the need to limit the movement of legally-purchased digital music. It almost seemed as if they were saying that since they couldn’t rely on the big dollars for selling albums as a single unit that they needed to figure out a way to place limitations on the singles that people were picking-and-choosing from the iTunes store. They feigned amazement when they watched as people purchased only the song Delilah by the Plain White T’s instead of dropping ten bucks for the rest of that crappy album. They have for two decades been essentially getting $12-$20 for one song – now they only got $.99. They are, after all, the ones who trained us to love singles and it was forty years spent getting us ready for the digital music era that no one apparently foresaw arriving. Suddenly, they were lost.

DRM was something that was simply a petulant child’s reaction to losing money – taking a ball and going home. It only caused consumers to react poorly when confronted with the idea that legally-purchased music was limited in its digital use for the purchaser. DRM wasn’t ever going to stop pirating or free downloading any more than naming a drug czar was going to stop drug use – it was just a stupid, knee jerk reaction. The vast majority of music lovers will pay a reasonable price for music. For those of use that buy full albums we might pay something like $5 at emusic.com (yours truly), or $16 at a local record shop. It depends – if emusic doesn’t have the release then I’ll go to Melody Records and buy the CD. What I won’t do, for whatever reason, is buy a 12-track full-length release from iTunes for $10 if there are going to be restrictions. And, in my guilt-by-association mindset, I won’t buy a single from iTunes for $.99 for the same reason – restrictions.

I don’t see any of this as directly related to piracy or the flow of free music: that’s another issue to me (hey, I hadn’t read the slate article before I starting spouting off). All of my music is paid for because I think the artists deserved the money. What DRM did was force consumers to try to separate the artist from the company and the artist always ended up getting punished by the deeds of the industry. It was too hard to figure out if Prince or Sony was being the jerk in the process because the end result was simply that we were paying too much, living with restrictions, and fighting back against the entire beast.

I think I’ll let you go. If you got this far, well done; if not…well, you’re not reading this so I have nothing to say to you.

dork meter

Every year the NYTimes publishes a Year in Review quiz that I find utterly fascinating; it's a Brunswick Stew of everything you might find in the news throughout the year. I did all right this year getting 50 out of 118 - I know that might seem poor but you'd better give it a go before grading my attempt. What this entry is really about is the portion of the review that isn't really numbered as a question but merely titled "Red State/Blue State" that asks you to remember two things about the fifty states and the District of Columbia: did it go Dem or Republican in the election and how many electoral votes does each carry. There are two compartments in my brain that gave me serious hope about my success: the 2008 election that seems as if it were yesterday (to include my endless reading), and the game Landslide that I played in my youth. I vividly remember Landslide and all its election iterations -picture a geeky kid memorizing electoral votes even though I didn't know a wit about the Electoral College. It simply seemed like math and a big old conundrum as I was trying to get elected President of Brookside Dr. in Omaha, Nebraska. Right. I tuck into the table, stick my tongue out to enhance my deep thought, and have at it. I'm quite proud of my results - and I'll pass them along since you asked.

1. I got 50 of 51 states (and the District of Columbia) correct on the Democrat/Republican vote. I misfired on Michigan even though Obama won that baby by 16%. I guess I got a bit crazy staring at the table and still had Michigan as a battleground state in my head. That's a bad miss on my part...just saying.

2. I got 14 of the 51 exactly right on electoral votes and 15 within one. Overall, 40 (of 51) of my number were within three. My average miss - on the 37 that were wrong - was 3.08 votes.

3. My biggest gap was NY which I imagined as 47 electoral votes but is actually only 31. I was also off by 8 votes on Texas and Michigan. It seems like once you get into the big numbers it all gets a bit blurry.

4. Having said that, I nailed California and its 55 electoral votes.

Maybe I'll apply to be a political savant - not a strategist - because I'm apparently only good at memorizing inane facts. I bet if there were somewhere I could be quizzed on Monopoly properties, rents, and hotel fees....

If only.

jai ho

Not that I need the Hollywood Foreign Press and their Golden Globes to validate my tastes, but between Mickey Rourke stumbling up to win best actor and Slumdog Millionaire winning best picture, it's a good opening to the season. I finally found the closing dance scene from Slumdog. The movie may not be for eveyone but it is fantastic.

t

just a little nip

Who exactly are the senior members of Al Qaeda? I don’t have the time to go back and sort the exact number of senior members that have been killed but I don’t think “senior member” means much anymore. Aren’t those positions just reloaded with the next guy in line? Aren’t all these senior members just calling themselves senior members like program managers call themselves program managers? I’m certainly not impeaching the work the military and CIA are doing – I’m merely chuckling at the Administration(s) that always act as if they’ve got the eye chart that outlines who’s who in a terrorist organization.

I’ve started reading the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series. L, who’s read just about every series of children’s/fantasy books, declares the Olympians series to be her favorite. As a reference, the Harry Potters are down around fifth and the Gregor the Overlander series is in at around number 3. I’m sure she’s my kid because she creates her own power lists. I’ve decided that the best birthday gift this year will be Kindle with some book buying coupons included. She’s the perfect test bed since she’s always carrying around books and rereads just about everything. Once she gets that thing loaded up she’ll be in heaven...and noncommunicative.

I was thumbing through my Concise Oxford English dictionary just now and as I fluttered through the pages I came across an index word (?) at the top of a page: doch an dorris. I thought to myself, “What the hell is that?” and stopped to take a gander. Here’s what is said at the entry: variant spelling of deoch an dorris. Ah, I see. Hold on a second and I’ll be right back…

A deoch and doris is a 17th century Scottish and Irish term for a “final drink taken before parting; a ‘drink at the door.’” I know I won’t get a straight answer when I get X cornered at home because she’ll have already read this entry; but, based on the freakish nuggets of information that cling to the dusty corners of her brain (along with her pub expertise), I’ll bet she knew what it meant. She’s so lovurly.


I just got an e-mail from Jill Biden. I know I should have been able to produce the first name of Joe Biden’s wife – I saw her at the final celebration in Chicago – but I had absolutely no idea. I did riddle it out before opening the e-mail so I should get points for that, right?

paper cut

X swung by the library after piano lessons last night to pick up a few books she had on hold. You might imagine she’d have reserved some mysteries for bedtime reading, maybe a gardening book, or possibly a compilation of poetry. Nope, nope, and nope. She needed The Complete Book of Sharpening and another volume on Japanese Woodcutting, or some such. What I learned just before slipping off to sleep was that the most important thing to avoid when working a high carbon blade is overheating. Did you know that? I didn’t think so. This book is no pamphlet; it’s more than 200 pages of sharpening, science, and the cutting of stuff. If I were manly I would already know everything in the book – in fact, I might actually read the book. I’ll stick with my cooking tomes, pre-assigned Global knife sharpener (and the ceramic configured “V” for the German swords), and Sur Le Table catalogs. I think the second chapter of the book opens with something like this, “If you thought we’d continue without a chapter on physics, you’re horribly mistaken.”

We started to try to sort out summer plans. I think L will be here for a month between mid-July and mid-August with everyone spending a week at some cabin, in some northern area, near some water. We’re also trying to get her summer camping plans in order for D.C. – I wonder if Sidwell camps (which she attended last summer) are going to be more crowded now that “the girls” attend during the school year? Maybe I should get cracking.

We learned this morning that G's math teacher took a good, long look at confused children and decided they actually need to learn how to do long division. Really? You mean the little circles and squares they were taught as a "system" is actually worthless. Shocked. SHOCKED!

t

jules

I know I've been delinquent and probably been blabbing on about hockey too much, but here I go again...quickly. The Flyers are in town tonight and the Eleven will be there together trying to fight off irritating Philadelphians. I give you one of the great skits ever done - it's the mentality the Caps need against the Broad St. Bullies tonight.



t

sport on ice

They played 50 years of Bears’ games at Wrigley Field. It’s been home to the Cubs since 1916. Yesterday, it hosted the NHL Winter Classic which showcased the 701st game between the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks. Both teams wore throwback uniforms and lit the red light 10 times. The picture above makes it look a bit more impressive than it did on TV: I think the area around the rink looked shoddy, the camera tower angle wasn’t great, the stands in the outfield were to far away, and a baseball stadium probably isn’t the best choice for hockey. There’s talk of the Capitals being involved next year and that’d be great. I propose a temp ring and temp seating for about 20,000-25,000 on the National Mall…at night. Illuminate the Capitol, the monuments, and have at it. There are tons of Metro stops nearby and no one would need to drive and park. The only issue would appear to be rain; makes ice slushy. Otherwise, the temperature isn’t much of an issue (they’ve played hockey outdoor in Vegas) – and it’s been plenty cold the last few days. I don’t think you need to manage 40,000 – 70,000 for a hockey game. Get the stands and fans right up against the glass (didn’t happen yesterday) and make it more intimate. As an addition, the Caps won their 10th game in the last 11 last night at Verizon Center. The Rangers and Flyers are on deck over the next five days.

Pumpkin – the large cat - has decided that he needs to remind us every morning at about 6:30am that he’ll be wanting some food to get him through the day. He puts his huge head against the crack at the bottom of the door and loudly mewls. As we were getting ready to leave this morning he also pointed out that he’d like some more cool fresh water in his bowl; day-old water wasn’t good enough for his delicate tastes. This is what the house has turned into.

In a related story, apparently we're having pumpkin soup for dinner. Go figure.

Happy New Year to all.

booked

Even if you haven’t heard from me for awhile everything here is going very well. We’ve swapped children in the house: two boys out, one girl in.

We had a very nice Holiday with folks coming and going. Wondertwin #2 and family came over Christmas Eve for something resembling a big English roast: roast of Sirloin, roasted veg, sweet potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, gravy, dessert, etc. Gift opening was after dinner and the kids did stockings on Christmas morning. The cats evacuated the house while the screaming, paper, and pile of activities were in full swing.

Yesterday afternoon L. and I headed into the Library of Congress to meet and chat with the Librarian of the Children’s Literature Center. I found out during my volunteer training session at the LOC that she enjoys, and welcomes, having kids come back and visit even if the library’s rules are fairly strict on the 16 year-old age limit to get into the reading rooms. I called her in the morning and she graciously invited us in for the afternoon. She’s been there for twenty-five years and absolutely loves the job – I love the job. The reading room is beautiful designed and she gets to spend her days doing what she truly loves. She’ll be the first to tell anyone that she has the greatest job in the World and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. She’s an absolutely joyful person. (Here’s a blog entry from someone in Minnesota that perfectly describes not only Sybille Jagusch, but the library as a whole. We, too, saw the paper globe.) Toward the end of our personal visit she looked at me and mildly chastised me for not planning ahead with her. She let it be known that when L. comes back this summer we need to send her a list of books we’d like to see and she’ll gather them up for another get together.

After our lovely visit we grabbed some coffee and hot chocolate and walked north to Union Station for a little browse. The beautiful station has been remodeled in the last five years or so and reminds one of a European station: nice shops, restaurants, cafes, and the perfectly large and glamorous arrival/departures board. We strolled around talking about taking a train to NYC this summer – I picked up some magazines since RR stations are the best places for periodicals – and we then headed over to K St. to meet X for a dinner date. She recommended The Iron Gate and we enjoyed a fab meal in a restaurant quiet on a Monday night during the Holidays (no congressional staffers around these days). X did a few appetizers, I had a tagine, and L, as expected, had salmon and gratin. A shared date pudding with rum sauce finished the meal. It was a nice end to a lovely day.

This afternoon we 're heading back to the city one more time to grab lunch at the café in the Museum of the American Indian and to visit the newly reopened American History Museum. L. will be toted to the airport at the break of dawn tomorrow and flown back to Omaha – school begins anew on Monday. I’ll work through Saturday to cover my time off over the last week and then we’ll begin a New Year.

Love to all.

hey, psst

I was heading out of the shops the other night and strolled through the men’s section which had classic holiday gifts for men on display: slippers and dopp kits. (There was also a table full of nail clipper/tweezer/shoe shine kits. I don’t include them on the classic gift avenue – they’re just junky.) A few things to point out; ideas that might clarify the problem with both gifts. Let’s take a look at slippers. Women get cold feet (not wedding cold feet – lack-of-blood cold feet) and for some reason they assume we get cold feet. That doesn’t actually happen unless we’re hanging out at Everest base camp. The slippers generally make our feet hot but we try to wear them, regardless. The dopp kit (feel free to look that up if you aren’t up with the vernacular of youth) doesn’t actually work anymore. We are way to metrosexual to run with a dopp kit, primarily because all our lotions and potions tend to leak if they end up in cargo. You’d be better off giving us a box of Ziploc freezer bags…really. Here’s my take on gifts for guys, and I know this might fly in the face of the slipper discussion, but we like mostly the same stuff you like…if you’re wondering. A cashmere sweater, a nice watch, a good book. I swear, if you give me more slippers or something that isn’t a Ziploc bag…

I’m the midst of compiling my best albums of 2008 list that is due, and required, to my music group by Christmas. I’m torn on a number of entries but only because I was less inquisitive this year than most. For the first time I’m thinking of going with only five nominations – all of which are strong – and not padding the nums to get to the magical ten. Once again, Minneapolis will be well represented.

I think we’ll have a tree by this evening. X and H are working the sales lot and this appears to be the day it finally happens. We’ll get out the crazy Wisconsin-designed tree stand and get it vertical. I’m not much for decorating so I’ll leave it to the wood nymphs.

catching up, keeping up

I didn't find the song(s) I was desiring but you can watch Mexico City from Jolie Holland's new album.

a remembered review

This little vignette came flush into my head while I was rereading an entry from last year that detailed my created superhero, Door Man. (I only reread entries when the sitemeter shows me that someone ended up googling a strange combination of words that led to some entry from long ago. I'm always interested in which entry busted down the door.) A few weeks ago I was heading back home from D.C. on the Orange Line (probably after a hockey game) and as the train pulled into East Falls Church the crowd readied for the mass departure. A few "excuse me's", light shoving, bag banging, and newspaper leaving behind, and everyone was safely onto the platfrom and heading off to their own cocoons. But then....just as the door closing ding-ding is heard, it is mirrored by calls coming from the distant innards of the seats - "Oh my! Someone left their Blackberry! It's hers, it's hers!" (the crowd is pointing feverishly through the window at Blackberry Lady; innocently walking toward the stairs.) The younger man at the door turns just in time to see the Blackberry flying through the air as the doors start to close behind him. With decisive action, he catches the Blackberry with his right hand and jams his left arm through the closing door. In the slow motion action that followed, he turned to the five inches of open door that was trying to eat his arm, yelled out "Hey lady! Your Blackberry!", crossed his right hand to the opening, and pitched/slid her device across the surface of the East Falls Church platform. To cheers from the commuter crowd he extracted his appendage and raised his arms in victory. Victory indeed!

What little Christmas shopping to be done will be done tonight. I venture out in hope that my return is assured.

Maybe you'll get more later, maybe not. I did find a Jolie Holland video that I'll add when I get home.

t

film fest

I’ll confess to the world that I bailed out of the house yesterday prior to the kids’ birthday party and reptile show. I don’t much care for lots of kids running about or reptiles. It seemed like the best option.

I drove down to the Shirlington neighborhood in Arlington and took in Slumdog Millionaire – which was about the only movie I’d seen advertised in the last six months that I was interested in seeing. The basic premise is this: and kid from slums of Mumbai is on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and ends up answering the questions based on knowledge from his life’s experiences. You’ll need to either go to the theatre or await its release on DVD to sort out the rest of the story. A word of warning: it’s directed by the same man who directed Trainspotting (Danny Boyle) so it has its share of violence. What amazed me about the film is how seamlessly Boyle and cycle between violence, comedy, a love story, suspense, heart-rending emotion, joy, and misery. And still kick you out of the theatre feeling happy, yet beaten in ways. All of the acting is outstanding, the soundtrack is awesome, and the final video during the credits give you a happy nudge as you leave your seat and wander into the cold. Looking back at the movies I’ve seen in the last five years, I’d definitely put this in the top three. Of course, there were a few previews (The Wrestler and Gran Torino) that look promising – is this the time of year when all the good stuff shows up? It seems like we’re a few months past my normal “good movie” season.

I’m going to take a look around the Web this evening and see if I can find at least some audio links, if not videos, of two songs from the newest Jolie Holland CD. The reason this is vitally important is because both Corrido Por Buddy and Your Big Hands are both perfect examples of songs I love. I’m not saying they are my favorite songs of all-time, I do quite like them, but they would certainly answer the question “If Todd could explain exactly what he likes in a song, what would he say?” The answer would be these songs. The jingle of both is perfect. I realized while we were driving home over Thanksgiving that Your Big Hands was the perfect song outline for me…Corrido Por Buddy came along later and jumped into the same canoe.

Our weather is undecided – cold and windy, warm and windy, cold and still. It’ll sort itself out soon enough.

t

sick and tired

Our cats are in the depths of two catuations: ailments and the new Windoor®. Lemon came down with a cold, and the associated fits of sneezing, a few weeks ago. She managed to shake it off with few ill effects but did succeed in passing it along to Pumpkin. It’s hit him a bit harder and I took him to the vet the other night because his breathing was a little labored. After a nice visit with the friendly doctor we came home with some medicine that’ll run its course twice-a-day for ten days. There’s little more interesting work in this world than giving medicine to an animal. They also gave us some medicinal spray to put on their food; allegedly, it’s a more preventive script that might keep the cold from spreading back to Lemon. I think we’d all like to have a little talk with the animal medicine engineers who continue to believe that putting any type of medication in a pet’s food will actually work. I have never had a pet of any ilk (dog, cat, rat) that isn’t fully aware of some crap that’s been “hidden” in their chow. Now, humans? That’s another case.

The Windoor (creative marketing, eh?) has been installed in our kitchen window for cat use. The previously jerry-rigged escape hatch was an old dog door with the door portion removed (too heavy for little cat heads) and towels and blankets acting as cover. It works well when the weather is a lovely, autumnal 75 degrees. Not so well when we’ve got 30 degrees, sleet, howling winds, and a mostly sans insulation house. We installed the new windoor over the weekend and I think we may be near the point of getting our blockhead cats using it. Maybe they’re just being difficult but it’s not such a hard to master. If nothing else, the fact that we pitch them out the windoor three times a day might be getting the point across. Last night, for the first time, we put both of them out as we were heading to bed around 10:30pm and, lo and behold, both critters were back in the house this morning mewling for breakfast.

The Caps game went well last night – we handled the conference-leading Bruins with aplomb. I’d like to claim that my mere presence over the last two seasons has vaulted the Caps to the upper echelons (they are 13-1-2 in games I’ve attended), but I think I merely walked in on a pretty good team shaping up. WonderTwin 2 can now come to games again after the Florida loss in which she was not present – I’ve validated now that it wasn’t her bad karma…or the gold scarfy-thing being worn over her Ovechkin shirt at a hockey game.

Enough.

t

slapshot

Friedman nails it today in words better than I could manage. Since I believe the only way forward for American auto companies is to undertake a serious overhaul – this would have been a grand idea for them to latch onto way back when – this op-ed finally blasts the big, bright light across just how horrible an idea this cash injection/loan is unless the industry provides the necessary mea culpa. Buying typewriters and record albums, that’s brilliant.

The Caps are back in D.C. tonight to take on the Bruins at Verizon Center. My pal Buzz has once again managed to show up for “work” during a Capitals home stand – suspicious? Just so you know, and I know you’re interested , NHL teams carry 23 players on their active roster and as of this morning the Caps have eight of the opening-day players out with injury – and they’ve been out for mostly 12-14 games. The fact that they’ve cobbled together a team made up of one-third minor leaguers recalled from Hershey, and remained in first place, is quite a feat. Hopefully, everyone’s back by the New Year and they can get on a roll through the spring.

One more NYTimes piece today – an art/coffee love affair story. Blueberry bagels…genius.

I also don’t think it’s a good day for you, Mr. Governor, when you have Patrick Fitzgerald all in your business. Having Patrick Fitzgerald showing up to “ask around” is like having Christiane Amanpour show up to do “some reporting” from your village. “What is Christiane Amanpour doing here?”

Love to all

t

play, acting

This is an application I like. I like it like I like iTunes.

I was listening to some Cokie Roberts commentary on NPR yesterday and I suddenly realized just how much I don’t care for Cokie Roberts commentary. She used to seem like a benign voice in the news world but the fact is that she’s quite poor at analyzing or reporting anything. Of course, it certainly doesn’t help that I don’t much care for her views. What triggered it was her “reporting” of Obama’s naming of Eric Shinseki as the Secretary of Veteran Affairs. Her “analysis” was that this move seemed like a poke in the eye of the Bush Administration. (If you don’t recognize the name, Gen (ret.) Shinseki was the Army Chief of Staff who testified before Congress – before the war – that we would need hundreds of thousands of troops to occupy Iraq after the war. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Rumsfeld ran him out for speaking truth to power.) Anyhow, Shinseki served in the Army for 38 years, obviously served at the highest level, was wounded in Vietnam, and may well be the perfect choice for a very high profile and amazingly important position. Imagine someone choosing a qualified person for a job…dang, pinch me. I don’t think the future President is much for sticking things in people’s eyes; I’m pretty sure that the future President cares very little about anything that is thought of the current Administration. Of course, Roberts is too shallow to even imagine it possible – she is effectively belittling Shinseki’s qualifications and service in order to make a high school point. This being only the most current of her Monday morning blah-fests that amount to nothing of import and zero insight.

I won’t dawdle too much on the car bailout. Suffice it to say that I’m against it unless there are very, very stringent rules. Very stringent.

X invited me to spend about 90 minutes in a Benetton store the other night. I, of course, accepted.

I hit the Keegan Theatre for last Sunday’s matinee of Glengarry Glen Ross. I was quite a fan of the movie and I think the performance was just as good. There were a few reviews that didn’t much care for Mark Rhea’s performance as Ricky Roma but I thought it was excellent. The problem with that role is that Al Pacino played it in the movie and Al Pacino overacts (or over- Pacinos everything). Pacino is a caricature of himself (much like Sean Connery and Charleton Heston). I would think that if you’re reprising the role you’d find yourself doing a Pacino imitation…it’s too easy. Rhea, who is the founder (?) and board member (?) of the theatre, seemed to wander into Pacinoland for a few seconds at a time before pulling himself back from the brink. Everyone else gets straight As. One thing I also realized toward the end of the show was just how much I think David Mamet and Neil LaBute have in common. Maybe on another day we can talk more.

T

i walked to school uphill, both ways!

I’ve had some good, long discussions with people about education. Since I have a blog and have read some books, I’m an expert. That’s how it works. Of course, I have no training in education aside from my actual education through secondary school and my desire to enter a Chemistry teaching program at George Mason University in August. My primary concern has always been the primary and secondary public education system – I don’t even have the heart to delve into the insane college and university systems that run rampant all across the country.

I don’t think you need to be an expert to know that No Child Left Behind is a horrible program. It’s difficult to understand why any one believes that standardized testing is the way to measure the education of our children. There might be rumblings from behind the curtain that it’s the only way we know of to sort data, but that doesn’t mean it’s right or needed. Most of us have an understanding that SATs, ACTs, LSATs, GREs, and etc. are used as guides to measure the possibility of success in future endeavors, and somewhat as measures of the past, but they aren’t definers of a person’s actual ability to function in society. Here in Virginia there’s an annual test call the Standards of Learning (the SOLs…what a great acronym…) that I’ve watched both boys prepare for each year. Their classroom work ceases for weeks prior to the testing and the teachers simply teach to the test in order to pad the numbers and freak out. I’m pretty sure a good portion of the SOL results carry into the NCLB data pool. My question is this: If the kids are in school seven hours a day for an entire year, what are they learning? Why the need to for the “test teaching” for two weeks? Shouldn’t the basic math, reading, and writing skills have been covered already? Shouldn’t the test be an actual measure of how well the school – and its teachers – are performing? If you read David Brooks in today’s NYTimes you’ll see what brought about this crazy talk on the blog. I’ve been following the Mayor Fenty / Michelle Rhee doings since he won the mayoral election and I’m generally onboard with Rhee’s burn-and-rebuild ideas. (There are some personal vendettas and asides that bother me about her work, but I think the whole is much stronger than those issues.) Merit pay? Yes. If you do your job better than others; you get paid more. If you stink – you get fired. I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I think a complete educational overhaul is easy or cheap. Like anything else in this World worth fixing it’s going to take time, money, and a consolidated effort from the top. We should pay teachers way more than we do, we should finance the schools, we should either figure out how to better manage the money or we should redistribute revenues (or increase them) to make sure the educational system is truly functional. One more thing on NCLB, and something that made it even more laughable when it came into being: if there are fewer than x number of an ethnic or other NCLB grouping in your school, the program doesn’t even count either a baseline educational standard or any improvement year-to-year. Let’s say you have 12 Native Americans at your school – there’s a very good chance that any educational process under NCLB will be moot or ignored. It’s something I learned about while living in the mixed-bag community of Northern Nevada. I think that would qualify as left behind.

The second thing that triggered this all was X’s parent-kid-teacher conference at the New School today. What they’ve managed to do in their little corner of the educational process is get the kids to understand that there’s a program of learning and the program is owned by them. The teacher had the conference run by H. and he was fully able to discuss where he was having problems, where he wasn’t, and how he could improve – and it was dead-on with what the middle school head had learned from his teachers. Wow. What a concept – getting children to understand that their schooling is important and that they need to crackdown and learn. When you see, or hear, about the success of varying systems – about the parents, the schools, and the kids working together – it become clear why there’s so much failures: our inability as parents and adults to convince the kids that they are going to go school, they are going to learn and work hard, and that the work they do now will come back ten-fold as both young adults, professionals, and parents. That’s something that’s truly missing in society.

Fine. You can leave.

malled

I blame this opening on Mary Chapin-Carpenter who I’ve enjoy on-and-off for years. She was scheduled for an interview on NPR yesterday – one I didn’t listen to – to discuss her new Christmas album. Who buys Christmas albums? I think I’ve picked up a few CDs over the last few years when I knew there’d be visitors but they came from the $.99 bargain bin and were merely compilations of Bing Crosby, Elvis, Jim Nabors, and some instrumentals. The last original I bought was probably the Mannheim Steamroller CD back in the late 80s or early 90s. Every year artists seem to trot out Christmas units and I’m baffled by the appeal. There haven’t been any new standards written, right? And if the artists are adding in newer songs they consider worthy of yuletide repeat then it seems a huge risk – most of us want the basics. I sort of see this as the equivalent of performers releasing compilations of great patriotic songs in July: the Star Spangled Banner, God Bless America, etc. If I’m going to even consider listening to those performances of the National Anthem then I’m looking for the best singers ever, not Beyonce or Michael Bolton. There isn’t a singer on my list of favorites who could put out a Christmas CD that I would even consider buying, ever.

I swung over to the Galleria today (yes, it’s just as upscale as it sounds) to return some of X’s J. Crew purchases. She prepped me with a quick “stand firm on the trousers if they give you a hard time” script. It wasn’t required in the end as the store was perfectly happy to take back everything and give back all the dollars. What I did notice, as a small aside, is that every girl working the counter ran about 5’1” and 98 pounds. I could have taken the whole crew if a fight had broken out – it would have looked like a bunch of kindergartners hanging off the legs of the gym teacher at recess as he walks back to the building.

I’m off to the Caps game tonight (vs. the Islanders) and the rest of the crew will be doing some scouting activities throughout the evening.

I know. Life isn’t always interesting.

t

p.s. my kitty has a cold. thought you should know.

the road

During our stroll through Portland on Friday we ended up in a two-level, downtown storefront that served as home to five different businesses: a tattoo shop, a comic shop, CD store, video rental, and gelateria. With all those under one roof I have little need to go anywhere else. I spent time in a real, live CD store for the first time in ages and was dreaming about how much I missed actual interaction with CDs and people in real-life shops. I picked up the new Todd Snider, Sigur Ros, and Rose Hill Drive: folk, pop-tronica, and jam music, respectively. Check, check, and check.

Our drive back went well – to Middleton, NY on Saturday and to Falls Church yesterday. The only traffic issues we had over the weekend came up yesterday. The first was an “incident” along I-81 east of Harrisburg, PA that had our flow backed up for about five miles (and the eastbound joining I-78 from Allentown backed up another six miles). X pulled out her handy BlackBerry and we managed to hop off I-81 and backtrack on I-78 a few miles to SR-22 and then run east to Harrisburg. (I’m only adding in the mappy stuff for those that love to trace my life on google maps.) The last bit of fun was the I-95 to I-495 beltway merge northeast of D.C. A couple of renegades had collided whilst changing lanes and pissed off every holiday traveler. Regardless, we made it home in a respectable amount of time and were able to relax for three or four hours before bed.

The cats tried to play hard to get when we walked in the house but only managed to keep up the disgust long enough for the fire to be lit.

We all yanked ourselves out of warm beds this morning and headed off in the cold rain for work and school. I sense a good laundry and an early evening as darkness falls today.

T