It's beginning to look a lot like...FALL?!?!

Rain, rain, come this way. Unless you live in the south, you probably don't have an accurate picture as to just how severe the drought is in these here parts. The lakes are doing okay, but the rivers are hurting. The Suwannee River in south Georgia, which normally flows at a rate of 1,600 gallons per minute is currently flowing at 1.5 gallons per minute. Other rivers in Georgia aren't fairing too well either. The Chattahootchie River is moving slower than democracy in Iraq, and that's the main source of drinking water for Atlanta. So things have been very dry here of late. How dry? It's starting to look like fall around here. During times of severe drought trees will shed leaves as they begin to be stressed by the lack of water. My back yard bears hints of October, as the leaves on the trees are starting to turn yellow, courtesy of the drought. The whole state is one big tinderbox, ready to go up in flames at any time, just look at the 500,000 acres that have already burned in southeast Georgia in the past month. Too bad there's no water to put the flames out. I hate to say it, but a hurricane would be good right about now.

Toys in the...crapper

My wife and I wound up watching the American Idol finale the other night. I wasn't really interested in who won, but sometimes it's in my interest to know who the next flash in the pan celebrity will be. To my surprise Green Day performed, doing an excellent version of John Lennon's "Working Class Hero," even if Billie Joe looked liked he'd rather be anywhere but there.

The lowlight of the evening came when Sanjaya Malakar performed the Kinks' "Really Got Me" with none other than Joe Perry of Aerosmith. If you listen carefully while playing the video below, the crashing noise at the beginning of the performance is Perry's remaining street cred falling to the ground. Good Lord, Joe. Thirty years ago you were belting out such great albums as "Toys in the Attic," "Rocks," and "Draw the Line." Now you're playing with a no talent hack singer. If you thought Joe Perry had bottomed out using all those drugs during the 1970s and 80s, that ain't nothin'.

WTF?

This is perhaps the gayest thing I've ever seen, on You Tube or anywhere else for that matter. That poor, poor, ottoman...being subjected to sexual acts like that without a clear plastic cover. Stuff like this is enough to make one think that perhaps Fred Phelps has a point after all.

Bracing myself

Boy, what a crappy start to this week. Had a dentist appointment yesterday afternoon to try and figure out why some of my teeth randomly bother me every now and again. We've done the whole x-ray bit before on individual teeth, and have ruled out almost all of the usual suspects. And I admit to suffering from some anxiety whenever the world of dentistry and me have dealings with each other. After doing a panoramic x-ray so he could see a broad view of my teeth and jaw, my dentist concluded that what the problem is is my bite is off, due to a combination of an occlusion and TMJ. To fix this, and in what he called my best long term solution, he recommended braces.

Braces. At 41 years of age. Just fucking great. What's next, a raging case of acne? I know that braces for adults are not that uncommon these days. My problem is my insurance doesn't cover braces at all, so I'm looking at around $4,000 out of my pocket for this. Just fucking great. Maybe I could sell a kidney on eBay to finance this.

Vista sucks

We've had our new home computer for just about two weeks now, and I can say from first hand experience that Windows Vista sucks. It may look like a Mac OS, but it's sure as hell not as stable as one. I'm almost afraid to reinstall any more of my software. Already Windows Media Player 11 has gone non-responsive three times, requiring three system restores to get it going again. And at the moment I have to run Media Player 11 as an administrator as double-clicking the icon doesn't start the program (and will probably require yet another system restore). And you can't uninstall the player and install a replacement version 11 or an earlier version as MP 11 is part of the Vista OS. To hell with this and to hell with Vista; we should've bought a Mac.

See ya, Jerry

Everyone's talking about what a wonderful legacy Jerry Falwell leaves behind. Sure, a legacy of myopic dislike of everything that wasn't Jerry Falwell. We can only hope that a couple of decades from now Jerry will be as historically relevant as Father Charles Coughlin.

Hall of fame

Normally I don’t care a flip about the annual inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. This year was a little different. For the first time this year the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremonies were broadcast live, and I decided to tune in to watch on VH1. I had an understandable interest this year. One of our local bands, a little group known as R.E.M., was inducted this year. Maybe you’ve heard of them? They’ve had a few hits over the course of their career.

I haven’t really followed them for the better part of the past decade. Since drummer Bill Berry left the band, it seems that the drum machine the remaining members use when writing songs is stuck on mid-tempo and they just haven’t done anything that I want to spend my money on. That wasn’t always the case, though. When I first moved to town twenty-five years ago, there was an afternoon video show on channel 36 in Atlanta hosted by Cousin Bruce Morrow. One day he played a video from some band from Athens. The video sucked but I loved the music. It was the video for “Wolves, Lower” from R.E.M.’s Chronic Town EP. From that time on I was a fan. The following year I bought their excellent “Murmur” album even though some friends thought I wouldn’t like it. I loved it! It was so different from anything I had heard to that point.

I bought each subsequent album they released either on or shortly after the release dates. Of course, living in Athens finding unofficial live recordings is easy to do. The quality of some of these recordings is startling good, soundboard quality even. It really makes me wonder about the source of these recordings.

Though I haven’t followed the band for a while, my interest in them was renewed recently thanks to two coincidental events. My wife entered a raffle at work one day not long ago, and as chance would have it, she won. Her prize pack contained a audio CD and DVD containing R.E.M.’s music from their days with the IRS record label, the band’s 2003 live DVD “Perfect Circle,” a t-shirt (which fits my daughter much better than me or my wife), and a hat.

Knowing I was a fan she gave me the pack, and I was thrilled to receive it. One evening my daughter and I sat and watched the DVD of old IRS-era videos. She knows the band only through one of their songs being featured in the movie Chicken Little. It was a wonderful experience rediscovering the band and their music which played part of my life’s soundtrack during the 1980s and early 1990s. Of all the videos the band made during the 1980s, the one for Can’t Get There From Here stands out amongst the rest. Partially filmed at an abandoned drive-in theater on North Avenue in town, the video shows the silly and irrelevant side of a band known for its social activism. The drive-in has long since been redeveloped into an apartment complex. A few years after the video was shot a girl was raped at the site, leading to a public outcry (probably led by developers) that the site encouraged crime and something should be done about it. It didn’t work. The site’s been redeveloped but police presence in that area is still pretty high, as is the crime rate. But I’m sure the developers got their moneys worth out of the property, being such caring people and all.

About the same time my wife won the raffle it was announced that the band would be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was with this recent awakening that I watched as R.E.M. was inducted into the RRHF. Watching Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, as well as the train wreck formerly known as Van Halen, being inducted, I thought perhaps I had tuned in too late to see the quartet from Athens be inducted. But they came at the end of the program. As the band came out after Eddie Vedder’s introduction, I noticed that Peter Buck was carrying a glass of wine. Uh, oh, I thought. I hope this ends well. For the most part things did end well, and it’s always good to see Bill Berry playing with the band, though it’s a rare event these days. At the end of the band’s obligatory post-speech set of songs, Pete Buck’s wine finally kicked into overdrive. During the end of “Man in the Moon,” Buck picks up his Vox amplifiers and tosses them off the stage. I was horrified, not because it looked like Peter was apparently hammered, but because he THREW VOX AMPLIFIERS off the stage. If you know musical equipment, Vox amps are the shit. The only other amp I’d like to have is a tube-driven Portaflex bass amp. I’ve played through a Portaflex on a couple of occasions, having turned it on and left it on for over an hour, letting the tubes get hot before playing. And now I really want one.

Now that R.E.M. is in the hall of fame, I’m reminded of stories about the band members that I’ve heard over the years. One of my favorites comes from a friend of mine who has known the band. A long time ago a friend of his lived in the same apartments that Michael Stipe was living/squatting at the time. He came home late one night to have his attention drawn to a nearby dumpster by a noise that was coming from inside. Turns out it was Stipe, laying inside on the trash, repeating over and over, “I have become the dumpster…I have become the dumpster.”

One of my friends from college used to work in a restaurant downtown. On one particular evening his girlfriend was late picking him up after his shift was over. A customer and his wife offered a ride home, which he accepted. The first thing he noticed was that they drove a nicely restored Plymouth, which could go really fast and hang tight curves—as he experienced that night. In the dark of the backseat he noticed that with every turn the car made, something came flying across the floorboard, striking him in the ankles and shins. After a few times of being struck by this object, he reached down to pick up the unknown object. It was an MTV video music award. The driver was Bill Berry with his (now ex-) wife Mari, the moonman award tossed into the backseat like a discarded McDonald's wrapper.

My encounters with the individual members of the band haven’t been as exciting. In my teenybopper days working at a Burger King, Bill Berry came through the drive thru one night and managed to miss the left hand turn after ordering. He was also present at one of the last Pylon shows at the end of 1991. I was standing stage right near the front with a friend of mine when I looked over my right shoulder to see who/what was behind me. Standing a few feet away was Berry, a can of beer in his hand, wearing loose fitting grey sweatpants tied off with a rope/thick string, a sweatshirt with a tear around the collar, eyes no bigger than slits. He looked like an extra from the Pirates of the Caribbean films, but he was clearly having fun.

I’ve always admired and respected Mike Mills as a bass player and musician. When I first picked up a bass guitar, it was the basslines from R.E.M. songs that I used as my starting point on how to play. In fact, it was the Chronic Town EP that served as my “tutor” on how to play a bass. One evening I was downtown at the Georgia Bar downing pitchers of beer with friends of mine when I saw Mills hanging out at the popcorn machine with Pylon bassist Michael Lachowski. We had finished our last pitcher for the evening, when I, emboldened by the beer, decided I needed to go over and introduce myself and tell him what an influence he had been on my playing—which I did. After cornering him for a few minutes, it was time to go. As I left, I heard someone else come up and introduce themselves to him. I knew at that point that I had done something very uncool, as nobody was bothering him until I did. My friends gave me some well-intentioned grief about the encounter, to which I asked them to kindly shut the fuck up. Since then I’ve made it a point to not bother any of the band members should I encounter them in public. The last time I saw Mike Mills in public was at the end of 2002. My daughter and I were at an eastside restaurant waiting for our order when she ran in front of a grey-haired gentleman getting a refill on his drink. I told my daughter to be careful about running in front of people, but I never recognized that it was Mills she cut off until he was leaving. His grey hair made him look so old.

I don’t have many stories about Pete Buck, or at least he’s managed to fly under the radar. During the band’s Monster tour in 1994-95, three-fourths of the band members went down with some sort of physical ailment: Berry with a brain aneurysm, Stipe with a hernia, Mills with appendicitis. The only person to fail their pre-tour insurance physical? Pete Buck. There was also a local musician who went by the name “Mad Dog” Melton. Mad Dog had a reputation for getting really, really drunk before he went onstage. One day someone thought it’d be a good idea to have Buck keep an eye on Mad Dog, keep him sober before showtime. Talking about putting the fox in charge of the henhouse. When the time came that night for Mad Dog to take the stage he was blitzed. If I’m not mistaken, his entire set consisted of an obscene limerick and a few chords on his guitar before he fell off the stage. Mad Dog fell off this world in August 2006.

So that’s it...stories I’ve heard about the members of R.E.M. that are moderately amusing but will never, ever, turn up in any written accounts or books about the band.

While my ukulele gently weeps

This is just incredible, especially when one considers that a ukulele has only four strings and is tuned a bit differently than a regular guitar. The players name is Jake Shimabukuro, and apparently will be going out on tour with Bela Fleck.

Fool me twice? I don't think so.

Nobody reads my blog anyway, but if you've been keeping up, perhaps you'll recall my tirade last year upon finding out that my order for season football tickets at the university I work for (and graduated from) would not happen, even though they charged my credit card for the tickets.

At the end of last week what should appear in my mail but the order form for this year's season football tickets! Wow! I looked the form over, and thought that perhaps this year we'll put in an order and see what happens, especially now that I know that they keep part of the money they charge you. Even asked my daughter if she'd be interested in going to a few football games this fall; of course, she said she wanted to go. And for one brief, shining moment all was right with the world.

And then I looked at my ticket priority number, which looked suspiciously like my priority number from last year. Suddenly the idea of submitting the order form required a serious rethinking. If I didn't make the cut last year, given the number of big money donors in Atlanta who have never set foot on this campus as a student but who somehow end up with season tickets (go figure), the odds of getting tickets this year seemed to be pretty much non-existent.

With that in mind, I quietly folded up my ticket order form, walked down the hall to my computer room, and sent it on a Voyage to the Bottom of the Shredder. Once again, a big Fuck You to the campus ticket office. You sold whatever soul you had when you decided to follow a path that takes the ability to get tickets away from true fans and into the hands of people who simply have a lot of money and really don't give a shit about the university.

Mazal tov!

For today I am a man, as I now have business cards!

Oy!

Ah, the end of another semester. Once again students who have taken their last final exam today have been ringing the damned campus bell all friggin morning. There have been more "dongs" than a South Korean phonebook.

This morning looked like it was going to be "one of those days." You know the kind: something frustrating happens first thing and it sets the tone for the rest of the day. Today one of our faculty members met his class for their final exam, only to find another class in their classroom taking a final. Normally classes meet in the same place for finals as they've met for classes during the term. Not today. This class was never added to the final exam room schedule on campus. Oops!

The office that arranges rooms for classes managed to find another room a few doors down for this class' final exams. When the faculty member went to the room, he found it empty save for two females...in a back corner of the room...making out. This guy is pretty opened minded, so he wasn't bothered by the sight. He was, however, a little take aback by the response when he told them the room was needed for an exam. One of the girls replied, "Can we have ten minutes to finish up?" WTF? Ten minutes to finish what, pray tell? Holy shit...sometimes I love working on campus. Sorry, no pictures were taken.

It's a fast machine

The last time I bought a new computer it was the beginning of February, 2002. I was in the final stages of college, and used student loan money to buy it. For the past five years that machine has faithfully chugged along, providing me a place to write research papers, crunch numbers in statistical software, and playing Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on many occasions. But as time wore on, as most computers are wont to do, it began running more slowly as I loaded more software onto it and more crap found its way into the registry.

My plan was to go shopping for a new machine come June. And as the saying goes about the best laid plans, my plans went awry this past weekend as my wife and I went out and got a new computer for home. I must say this friggin' thing rocks! It's really nice to have a computer that takes less than 5 minutes to boot, and will respond immediately when I click on something. Sure, it's a bitch reinstalling all the software I need to use, not to mention trying to move email inboxes from the old machine to the new. Running a close second in the bitch competition was backing up and copying all the data from the old machine that I wanted on the new one--20+ CD-Rs were involved with that endeavour, 10 alone on just my music files.

I think what I like best about the new computer is the 22 inch widescreen display that came with it. This mofo is HUGE and the image quality is perhaps the best of any monitor I've ever owned or worked with. The computer is set up to run as a media center, complete with an array of video inputs and outputs, so I'm eager to throw a DVD in the drive and see how it looks on the monitor.

Only minor gripe I have is the Vista OS. Just because you make it look like an Mac OS doesn't mean it's as easy to use or as stable as an Mac OS. C'est la vie. Back to installing software.