That Wacky DNA!

I found this photograph of Barack Obama's grandparents absolutely amazing. His grandmother, as you're no doubt aware, is poorly, and Barack is suspending his campaign Thursday to be at her side, which is as it should be. I wish the Obama and Dunham families all the best.

It's the grandfather that makes the photo so astonishing: I've shown the photo to some folks at work, asking if they could tell whose grandparents they are. None of them picked up on it until I told them, but afterwards they could easily see Barack's face in his grandfather's: the jawline, the ears, the eyes, the tilt of the head.

One of the folks I showed it to noted that the photo points up what many people miss: That Barack Obama is as much white as he is black -- he is, she said, from all of us.

I was crestfallen this morning to read of Obama's family troubles and the suspension of the campaign -- for altruistic reasons, but also for selfish ones: I was looking forward to attending the Obama rally in Leesburg tomorrow, and assumed the suspension went into effect immediately. Later, I found that he would begin the suspension on Thursday, after the rally. Yay for me, I guess.

Charging the camera...

Chicken or Shit?

Yesterday, young Betty and I hauled ourselves down to Leesburg to knock on doors for Obama. When we told the campaign workers that we'd come from Lovettsville, they sent us back there with a list of 35 doors to hit -- we knew the area, could best plan a route, etc. Which was true. Thirty-five doors around rural Lovettsville, where home-lot acreage often runs into the high two figures if not higher, is no small effort, and both Betty and I were plenty footsore by the end.

Given the ugly tone of what I've been seing on television and in the blogs, I'd expected something much more depressing than the experience actually was. No one set the dogs on us -- I think being greeted by a father-daughter team with a clipboard was disarming for a lot of folks, and I was always careful to say I was a near neighbor. Only one woman closed the door on us with anything like asperity, and nearly everyone was unfailingly polite, even when saying they were voting for McCain. No racial slurs, no "socialism," nothing that I'd half-dreaded confronting.

We're nice folks in Lovettsville.

What did surprise me was the number of people -- well over two-thirds, in my estimate -- who told me they were as yet undecided. I don't how many were saying it because they didn't want to tell me who they were really voting for, and how many truly hadn't made up their minds. In retrospect, I'm glad I hadn't read David Sedaris' Shouts and Murmurs column from the latest New Yorker:

“Who are [the undecided]?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”

Then you’ll see this man or woman— someone, I always think, who looks very happy to be on TV. “Well, Charlie,” they say, “I’ve gone back and forth on the issues and whatnot, but I just can’t seem to make up my mind!” Some insist that there’s very little difference between candidate A and candidate B. Others claim that they’re with A on defense and health care but are leaning toward B when it comes to the economy.

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

Probably best not to go canvasing with that image in your mind.

Tipping Point

As it is The Matriarch's birthday, I took her to lunch today to regale her with prezzies and an update on the family. Macaroni Grill near her place, Italian Wedding soup and a Pizza Siciliana that the waiters and cooks were kind enough to leave on a windowsill to cool before serving -- wouldn't do to burn a patron's mouth with piping-hot pizza.

Our waiter was a rather chirpy young fellow of perhaps 23 summers, with a small, carefully tended chin-tuft and pointy hair. He presented me with the check, and we did the formal credit-card minuet that always extends a restaurant visit by ten minutes or so. My pen was poised over the receipt to enter the amount of his tip as I calculated twenty per cent of $27.67 -- his service had been quite good and his manner genial -- he opened his mouth to speak.

"So, did you guys watch the debate last night?"

We allowed as how we certainly had, and I went back to my calculations, wondering if this young man was at all aware of how dangerous his situation was -- was this really a topic he should be broaching just as I'm making out his tip?

"Yeah, I don't know. I think Obama won the thing, but I've got friends who are gonna vote for him just 'cos he's a black guy."

Now I'm calculating fifteen per cent...

"Really?" sez the Matriarch, who's been canvassing for Obama this week. "And how do you feel about it?"

"Oh, I don't know if I'm even gonna vote at all. I just don't know anything about Obama, what he stands for. I think McCain would be a really good leader, but I hear he's got a bad temper..."

Ten per cent of $27.67 is easy...

I spoke up. "If you don't know anything about Obama, even after he's been campaigning on your television set for two years, you might try looking up double-yew, double-yew, double-yew BarackObama dot com. It has all his position papers, his stances on issues, pretty much everything you need to know..."

"Yeah, maybe I'll do that. I just don't know if I'm gonna vote at all, though."

All right, let's see... five percent of $27.67 is half of ten percent...

But I was merciful. Wait-staff get shafted even in the healthiest economies, and who am I to punish this young man for depressing the crap out of me?

I gave him the standard fifteen.

"Y'all have a good day now. Hope to see you back soon!"

You Talkin' to Me, Palin?

glumbert - Barack Obama Talks To Himself

Cue the Seven Horsemen

Noted satirist and National Review columnist Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, has endorsed Barack Obama. Explaining why he published his endorsement at The Daily Beast rather than NRO, he notes,

Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first....

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

Palin Meets Fargo

Agent Provocateur

I'm in there somewhere...

I've noticed a trickle of traffic (or is it a trackle of terrific? I can never tell...) coming in from this post at Making Light. The post, about a month old, remarked that the protesters at the RNC in St. Paul were mostly (overwhelmingly) peaceful, and that a few hotheads had goaded the police into a ridiculous overreaction, repeatedly tasering peaceful protesters who were on the ground in custody, busting heads, what have you. All disgusting stuff, of course. But those hotheads... Who were they?

The link that commenter Joel Hanes left in comments was to an ancient post of mine, about Super-Joel Tornabene, the fella who was famously photographed sticking flowers into National Guards' rifle barrels at the Pentagon protest of 1967. (That post flushed out SuperJoel's brother, who popped into the comments to say hi. Good times!) Hanes' comment-with-link came in the context of a discussion of agents provocateurs, some contributors speculating that the St. Paul hotheads had been exactly that -- government-hired ringers who stir up violent trouble and give the pigs peace officers the excuse to bust some heads (or, more contemporarily, exercise their Tasers on helpless prone protesters).

That phrase, agent provocateur, stirs a memory in the Jingo cranium, the beginning of my disillusionment with leftish activism.... [Wavy dissolve lines....]

It is May of 1979 1980.* Your Ned is a sophomore at Kenyon, so idealistic that even his own parents can't stand him. I fell in with a bad crowd of other raving peacenik pinkos, forming that year a little organization we were pleased to call the Kenyon Peace Coalition.

The bugbear of those times was nuclear power (Three Mile Island was only a few months in the rearview mirror), and the KPC got a mailer from the Clamshell Alliance, organizers of a protest at the Seabrook, New Hampshire, power plant, which was under construction and very unpopular with the locals. The protest organizers were very clear: Rather than stand around the gates of the plant waving signs and looking all righteous, we were going in. We were going to occupy the plant, repel all boarders, and shut it down.

But, you know. Peacefully. In accordance with the nonviolent precepts of Ghandi and King. Consensus decision-making.

Yes, yes, I know. They were proposing what amounts to a paramilitary operation, to be carried out under principles of strictest consensus. You can smell the stupid from three decades away.

But to three eighteen-year-olds itching for our places in history, a weekend spent overthrowing the Entrenched Powers of All Kinds of Evil and Stuff -- maybe even getting our first whiff of tear gas! -- sounded like a peachamaroot of an idea. We KPC Kidz got the mandatory nonviolence training at a church in Columbus, packed up a weekend's worth of bologna sandwiches, and ho for New Hampshire.

Thus it was that on a lovely, slightly chilly spring morning in the beautiful town of Seabrook, your Ned found himself soaking wet from a police fire-hose, his bandana once soaked in lemon-juice to neutralize tear-gas but now simply soaked, chanting slogans at impassive state troopers in riot gear at the gates of the plant. One KPC Kid had gotten a faceful of Mace, but the firehose had immediately washed it away, a happenstance we thought pretty funny.

The attempt to occupy the plant earlier in the morning had been just about as pathetic as you'd expect. Since I couldn't afford to be arrested -- my Philosophy of Art finals were a week away! -- I volunteered to help form part of a human roadblock on a secondary road well away from the planned breach-point. I didn't see the main action, but I was told that perhaps three protesters had actually managed to get through a cut in the fence, promptly to be arrested. The rest of the attackers were chased away by dogs and firehoses. At our little roadblock, we saw the main body of protesters streaming away into the woods; a lone policeman with a dog began wandering down the road our way, and consensus (heh!) quickly grew that our road-blocking endeavors were pointless, discretion the better part of valor, and didn't those woods look like just the thing to melt into right about now.

Oh, we were a brave bunch of nonviolent followers of Ghandi and King!

The protest now took shape around the front gates of the plant -- just as the organizers had insisted it wouldn't -- and this is where your Ned received his first experience of a firehose (really not as bad as you'd expect). The crowd, enthusiastic at first but losing steam somewhat from the wet and cold (far worse than the firehose is what starts to happen to you ten minutes after the firehose in cool weather). At this moment, a guy -- scruffy-looking, three-day beard, much like the rest of us -- grabbed me by the elbow.

"Hey, you look like a troublemaker!"

Huh?

He apprised me of the situation. A schoolbus loaded with plant workers, the day shift I suppose, was attempting to enter the site, but the gate was blocked by the protesters. The crowd's enthusiasm for the consequences of blocking the workers from entering -- busted heads, dog bites, more tear gas -- had waned considerably. The mass of people parted reluctantly to let the bus pass -- in so doing conceding that this was absolutely no longer an operation to shut down the plant. Something was needed to stir the shit.

My interlocutor pressed a box of roofing nails on me. "Whatcha gotta do is, before the bus starts to move, you take some of these nails, prop 'em between the tires and the road, and blammo!"

Blammo indeed.

And that, my friends, is an agent provocateur.

It didn't occur to me then -- that is, the thought, the words, "this man is trying to convince me to commit vandalism in order to provoke minor violence so that the police have an excuse to commit major violence on these people" didn't form in my head. Tear gas and fire hoses have a way of jumbling up your head after a couple of hours. But every instinct I possessed, even at the volatile age of eighteen, told me this guy was Serious Bad News -- and I am not now, nor have I ever been, much of a vandal. I shook my head no, repossessed my elbow from his grip, and wandered back into the crowd.

The bus did pass without incident, so I guess my pal didn't find any takers. Odd, how he didn't do it himself.

But that's the way they work. It just takes one tiny little incident -- and a bus with blown-out tires full of nuclear-plant workers surrounded by anti-nuclear protesters, many of whom are disappointed at not having gained access to the plant and shut it down, certainly qualifies -- to turn a manageable situation into a full-on police riot.

What a species.

Update: Recalling this story has unleashed a flood of memories. On the morning of the action, I was riding in a van whose driver had volunteered to take some fifteen of us to the staging site. The town cops knew damned well what was coming, and were using any excuse to nab protesters before the thing got under way, meaning that a van full of fifteen people was a mighty vulnerable object indeed. He had us all lie on the floor.

Suddenly the driver said, "Oh, shit!" A cop car had apparently taken interest and was tailing us. The driver pulls into the parking lot of a little general store. He points to the nearest person -- me -- and says "Go in there and buy something! Look normal!"

Whistling nonchalantly, I ankle into the store, fishing in my pocket to see what I had.

I had exactly one dime. For my phone call, you see, after I'm busted. My wallet's back at the campground.

I look around the store. Of course, even in 1979 1980* you couldn't buy even a pack of gum for a damned dime. My fine mind racing -- what to do? what to do??? -- I hit upon the perfect solution. I strode manfully up to the clerk...

And asked for change for a dime.

Perfect!!!

_____

*Fuck you, Wikipedia

Bless the Good Ship National Park Service and All Who Sail in Her!

I don't know about you, but for your correspondent, the sun shines just a little brighter, the birds sing just a little more sweetly, the clouds take on just a bit a more benign fluffiness, on those Mondays that follow that Any Given Sunday when the Washington Reagans kick the snot out of the sorry, stink-assed, dogfaced titty-babies who call themselves the Dallas Cowboys. In Dallas! In Dallas!

That's some sweet Monday Morning Goodness.

That isn't what I want to talk about, though.

A shortish period of enforced leisure came to an end Friday when a job, its start-date cruelly put off for a week, reared its head. I fought the heebie-jeebies of both boredom and terror (have you read a newspaper or a blog lately?) by going into Full-On Raging Tourist Mode.

Well, think about it. The kiddiewinks are in school, so they can't follow Daddikins around the museum or park declaring their boredom and demanding ice cream. Wonder Woman was beginning to show signs of wear and tear, the result of a bored and anxious hubby out on the screen porch with his face glued to a laptop screen reading the 250th comment in a week-old thread at Sadly, No! Something had to give, and I decided to visit my anxieties and ennui on our National Park System.

I'm very glad I did.

Monday, the first day my soon-to-be employers told me to cool my heels, saw me at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, with my camera and binoculars dangling foolishly from my neck. (I regret to say that I'd forgotten to actually charge the camera's battery, giving me a useless, clunking appendage to carry around all day, but ah, well. I'll just pretend I took all these; who's gonna know the difference?) It is possible to drive into the center of the town, if you know the Backdoor Bolivar Heights trick, but as I say, I was in Full-Tourist mode, so I parked at the lot at the edge of town to take the Park Service Bus in with the retirees and the schoolkids on a field trip.

While waiting for the next bus, I stopped in at the little Visitors Center, which was manned by a Park Ranger. I picked up a copy of Joseph Barry's The Strange Story of Harper's Ferry, a 1904 history more notable for its eccentricity than its accuracy -- it contains a short version of John Mobberly's life that (rather amusingly) gets very nearly every fact wrong. I mentioned this to the Ranger, and he perked up considerable; he knew everything -- everything! -- about Mobberly, who after all was born only a few miles away and whose lifeless body was strung up in Harpers Ferry, the townspeople dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood to keep as a souvenir.

It's unsurprising for a Harpers Ferry Park Ranger to be interested in this tiny, obscure Civil War guerrilla but what was remarkable was the intensity of his interest. We talked through two bus cycles, all other calls on our attention the merest trifles. He did attend to a few other customers, folks wanting directions or maps, but -- and this is the point I wanted to make -- he was willing to talk to me as long as I was prepared to listen.

Down in the town, I arrived just in time for the Ranger-Guided Tour, and I joined the small crowd around a trim gentleman with a white nineteenth-century vandyke beard and smart straw hat. He warmed to his topic, John Brown's 1859 Raid, a chat he'd clearly given many times before, and in which he expertly elucidated the circumstances in which the United States found itself on the cusp of tearing itself apart. The tour began outdoors, then made its way into the Provost Marshall's office, where maps and a large mural, showing Harpers Ferry at the time of the Raid, helped him paint his word-picture. We were invited to compare the town in which we stood to the mural: The munitions factory that attracted Brown here is gone, as are many of the commercial buildings that depended on the factory. The town has flooded many times, and all that's left of the mills that lined the riverbank is river-smoothed stone foundations. The tour ended at the firehouse itself where Brown's sons and many of his followers were killed by Marines under the command of Robert E. Lee.

The mural at the Provost Marshall's office triggered a memory of George MacDonald Fraser's classic Flashman book, Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, which put Flash Harry in with Brown's raiders. After the Ranger's tour was over I went back in to get a squint at it. Some of the buildings in Fraser's picaresque and very funny book are no longer standing, and I thought if I could place them on the mural I might understand the plot better. The Ranger, fresh from his hour-long lecture, was standing near the mural, and I caught his eye.

"Excuse me," pointing at the mural, "is this the Wager Hotel?"

"Flashman and the Angel of the Lord," he said, simply. I gaped.

"Well, that's what you're reading, isn't it? Nobody's ever asked me about the Wager Hotel who hasn't read it."

Amazing. For the second time that day, I found myself deep in engrossing conversation with an extremely knowledgeable person who cared profoundly about his topic. He recounted MacDonald Fraser's researches at Harpers Ferry (describing them as impeccable and thorough), noted historical unlikelihoods that were necessary to advance Fraser's plot, other books -- fictional and non- -- I might enjoy, recited parts of Uncle Tom's Cabin, offered his nuanced and subtle opinion of Brown's motivations and heroism, listened to my anecdote about John Stevens, expounded on the relationship between the Irish navvies who built the C&O Canal and the African slaves who lived here (Why didn't slave labor build the canal? The slaves were more expensive than the Irishmen! No joke), and answered a question about the now-destroyed bridge over the Potomac.

Again, the point must be made: I was the person who had to (regretfully) end that conversation. At no point did he ever betray irritation at my boatload of questions -- quite the opposite -- nor did he ignore anyone else who came into the office with a request for a map or other information.

Both of the Park Rangers who spent an hour each out of their days to entertain, to explain, to elucidate history for a curious civilian, were uniformed U. S. Government employees. Dedicated, decidedly underpaid, extremely knowledgeable civil servants. Believe it or not, there was once a time when the U. S. Government was a place where you looked for employment if you wanted to help people, to advance the cause of human ennoblement. I can't help but think that that spirit might have motivated the two men who made my day so enjoyable. About in my mid-teens, I started hearing exactly the opposite -- the first stirrings of the Reagan Revolution. It grew and grew until it became conventional wisdom: Government doesn't solve problems; government is the problem.

Wonder where my Park Ranger friends' retirement funds went today.

Is There Anything Else You Need To Know?

Offered without comment (mainly because I'm projectile vomiting into a nearby flowerpot):


Watch CBS Videos Online

A D.C. Tableau

I received this yesterday, in an email from a trusted friend, a former co-worker of the author of this anecdote. It is not -- I repeat not -- a viral email making the rounds. It is, I'll grant, a friend-of-a-friend story, but I trust implicitly the person who passed it to me, and know that he does not brook urban legends lightly. I have left it unedited, save to redact the author's name and to make one edit for clarity. DC Coast is a restaurant at 1401 K Street.

From: [name redacted]
ok, so it's highly possible that my mccain confrontation may be boring you to tears by this point, but it never fails to infuriate me every time i think about it. here goes:

so - i'm in the valet parking lane outside DC Coast at 14th & k streets, in my car (a miata, mind you, not exactly a tough-girl ride). as i'm waiting for the valet attendant to come, sitting with my hazard lights on, a car comes flying down 14th street and moves into the service drive - which is exactly where the valet stand is.

rather than be patient, the black town car that is now behind me immediately puts the car in park, turns on the brights/high beam lights, and a man proceeds to get out of his own car and come to my car window. all of this happens in a flash - in a matter of seconds i go from calmly waiting for valet to banging on my car window. important to note - this is all in full view of those also waiting along the sidewalk and in the DC Coast front-window area.

a roll the window down, and a man is yelling at me, cursing (f-bombs and the like), irate that i need to move my car immediately and that i get out of his way. i look up.....it's JOHN MCCAIN.

no, i'm not joking.

i don't want to get sued for libel/slander, so i will only state my opinion on this part - but he was quite red in the face and (again, my opinion) clearly smelled of booze. after the initial fear wore off, i started laughing, rolled up my window, and drove around the block so he could pass.

maybe it was a past-life-miata flashback, but i'm not sure what raised his ire to the point of f-bombing an innocent valet parker...but it raised MY ire enough to call the washington post's reliable source [gossip column]. i relayed my story and suggested they could contact others outside DC Coast who witnessed the scene.

at the time, he had not yet declared he was running for president, but evidently his reputation was already known. the post called to confirm my story with mccain's office - and while his office denied it, the post had said this was not the first story of this type they had heard, but unfortunately it would be a case of senator-said/unknown person-said.

if you think this is quality behavior for a would-be U.S. president, feel free to vote for him - but if this kind of temper can be sparked by something as minor as driving in downtown traffic, do we really want him as the leader of the free world?

Pitchforks & Torches at Dawn

Pardon me while I emit copious streams of bile from every hole in my head...

A nose job in a hospital with a private nurse in attendance had been something of a rite of passage for Joan Asher's children. But when her fourth and last child was ready for her own rhinoplasty recently, Ms. Asher asked her to postpone it.

The financial markets were simply more out of whack than her 16-year-old's proboscis.

"The other noses were more prominent," the stay-at-home mother from a tony New York City suburb in Westchester County told her 16-year-old daughter. She could get hers done when things settled down.

The financial crisis on Wall Street has New York's well-to-do reeling....

Boiler Room

"That was your homework—to watch Boiler Room."—Lisa Taylor, Ameriquest loan agent, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2005

Yeah, that plan to put all our Social Security money into Wall Street sure looks like a winner from this end, don't it?

Dean Starkman explains the mortgage meltdown as clearly as I've seen it done.

"This American Life" did a great show in this back in May. I listened to the podcast while waiting for Freddie to finish soccer practice, and by the end of it I was a wiser -- if exponentially sadder -- man.

The Grownup Strategy

Wow. For two minutes, a presidential candidate for a major party sits and speaks directly to the American people -- and addresses them like they aren't gibbering idiots. The Grownup Strategy.

Wonder if they'll fall for it.

This Thing Must Be Done

John McCain wants a blue-ribbon commission to ponder the economic hell in which we find ourselves.

Barack responds:

Now I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for all of the problems we’re facing, but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to. Because the truth is, what Senator McCain said yesterday fits with the same economic philosophy that he’s had for 26 years. It’s the philosophy that says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down. It’s the philosophy that says even common-sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise. It’s a philosophy that lets Washington lobbyists shred consumer protections and distort our economy so it works for the special interests instead of working people.

We’ve had this philosophy for eight years. We know the results. You feel it in your own lives. Jobs have disappeared, and peoples’ life savings have been put at risk. Millions of families face foreclosure, and millions more have seen their home values plummet. The cost of everything from gas to groceries to health care has gone up, while the dream of a college education for our kids and a secure and dignified retirement for our seniors is slipping away. These are the struggles that Americans are facing. This is the pain that has now trickled up.

So let’s be clear: what we’ve seen the last few days is nothing less than the final verdict on an economic philosophy that has completely failed. And I am running for President of the United States because the dreams of the American people must not be endangered any more. It’s time to put an end to a broken system in Washington that is breaking the American economy. It’s time for change that makes a real difference in your lives.

If you want to understand the difference between how Senator McCain and I would govern as President, you can start by taking a look at how we’ve responded to this crisis. Because Senator McCain's approach was the same as the Bush Administration’s: support ideological policies that made the crisis more likely; do nothing as the crisis hits; and then scramble as the whole thing collapses. My approach has been to try to prevent this turmoil.

In February of 2006, I introduced legislation to stop mortgage transactions that promoted fraud, risk or abuse. A year later, before the crisis hit, I warned Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke about the risks of mounting foreclosures and urged them to bring together all the stakeholders to find solutions to the subprime mortgage meltdown. Senator McCain did nothing.

Folks -- particularly my local readers in the DC area -- this thing must be done. Virginia is the place where the whole shitstorm is going to play out. Fuck lipstick. Fuck sex-education for kindergartners. We must be warriors.

"This Is Water."

I can't know what was in David Foster Wallace's mind when he took his own life Friday. He was a little less than two years younger than me, and a far better writer and thinker than I'll ever hope to be. The news that someone in my age cohort couldn't take it anymore -- whatever "take it" means in this context -- is saddening and frightening both.

This political season has been so far even more frustrating, depressing and shocking than the 2004 fiasco, and obsessively reading political blogs for weeks on end, as I have, has whipped even my even-keeled mind into a case of the Howling Fantods. The idea that this country might be poised once again to swallow a pile of bullshit so dense that it bends gravity, makes me want to climb a clock-tower and just start taking people out.

I won't, though. Wallace was my age, but if I'd been born a few years later and been blessed with the same educational opportunities, I might have been privileged to hear Wallace give the commencement address at my alma mater.

That way sanity lies.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

Wrecking Crew

Still frantically typing away, radio silence nearly lifted...

Meanwhile, watch Tom Frank drive around My Fair City and talk about his new book, The Wrecking Crew... I'm particularly amused by the ritzy neighborhood where a security goon throws him out.



(Via.)

Sing, O Muse!

Not an easy business, this pooching-out-a-book dodge. Some days at the salt-mines go well enough, but others leave me feeling emotions not dissimilar to those no doubt felt by the writer fella played by Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."

So as not to wind up chasing my family about the Overlook Hotel with firemens' hardware and discussing the affairs of the day with spectral bartenders, I find other, less violent diversions. Say, poetry.

The double-dactyl form has always interested me, and I thought I'd try my hand at it....

Heeeeere's Johnny!

Clickety-clackity
Jack at the Overlook
Sat at a table
Composing a lay.

'Twas dullness itself, this
Poeticality;
Jack's been, of lately,
All work and no play.

Well, That'll Learn Me

Damn, damn, DAMN!

As the good Agent 86 said, missed it by that much!

'S what I get for

1. Not working Friday
2. Not checking my work email on Friday
3. Not checking my work email all weekend, on ideological grounds
   
4. Being a naive little bloggie-boy about how the Washington Post feels about reprinting scurrilous crap from the Internet
   

Poop. The letter they did publish was weak, weak, weak.

Mr. Jingo;

We are in receipt of your letter to the editor and are considering it for publication.

We need to verify that you wrote the letter and did not acquire any portion of it from other sources. [Other than properly attributed quotes.]

Damned right I wrote it all by myself. It was a corker.

We need to know that you are using your real name.

I did, of course.

Did you send or post this letter or a similar item to any other media, internet forums [including washingtonpost.com], or blogs?

Oh, fucksocks!

We need to know, if it is not already mentioned, what your involvement if any is with the subject matter.

I am, sir, the privatest of citizens, and beyond the obvious emotional gratification the act engenders, I have no personal interest in pointing out that Mr. Gerson is a twat of the first water.

Please respond to this email with the verifications.

Please provide us, if you haven't already, a day and evening phone number that we can contact you for any questions we may have.

We will need to edit the letter for style and/or space considerations.

The initial edited version is below, please let us know if you have any concerns regarding them.

Further editing may be needed as we approach deadline.

Thank you for the submission,

John

It was intact. They hadn't touched a word.

To the Editors of the Washington Post

Sent this off this morning...

Dear Sirs;

At first I was puzzled at Michael Gerson’s discourse on satire (“Vulgarian at the Gate,” Wednesday, June 18, 2008). Why, I wondered, does he use his forum at the Post to point out what a great many of us know already: namely, that Al Franken (now running for Senate) is a comedian who has occasionally used naughty words in speaking truth to power? Comedians are supposed to make people like Gerson uncomfortable — that’s what they do.

Then it hit me: Gerson’s column was itself satire! How else to explain a harangue on “civility” by a man who, in his role as White House speechwriter, was the leading advertising copywriter for the Iraq War, now in its fifth year, with more than 4,000 Americans killed, nearly 30,000 injured, and countless tens of thousands of Iraqis dead, and millions more displaced? The author of the “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” image, demanding more “civility” in political discourse! Hilarious!

Mr. Gerson can lecture us from his fainting couch all he likes. But as he does so, I encourage him also to consider the difference between that which is merely vulgar and that which is obscene.

Respectfully,

Neddie Jingo

Edit: Just received an auto-email back that strongly suggests that since I posted this here, my letter won't be published. Ah, well.

Pasq Wilson, 1960-2008

It is with great sadness that I interrupt the book-deadline-imposed Radio Silence here at Neddie Jingo to observe the passing this week of a great friend from many years ago.

Pasq Wilson (he would have loathed being remembered by me under his "real" name William Waldo) was my very good friend at Kenyon College from 1978 to 1982. We went through many adventures together, did Pasq and I. We were bandmates; we were present at the founding of both the Conscious Bugs (a thoroughly ridiculous improvisational musical troupe) and the Kenyon Peace Coalition (a rather more serious endeavor, which still survives today).

I recall with particular vividness a moment when Pasq rose to my rescue at an occasion where I failed. A long time ago, I posted in these pages a story about a visit to the Kenyon campus of the loathsome Gen. William Westmoreland. As history would have it, the visit coincided with the announcement of the resurrection of draft registration by the Carter Administration, in reaction to the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviets. (Does history ever stop presenting us with hideous ironies? Apparently not.)

The events described in the post referred to happened exactly as I recounted them. At my side, as they did, stood Pasq Wilson.

But later that same day, as we picketed the Alumni House where the good general was staying, I was approached by a local radio reporter.He stuck a microphone in my face and demanded to know what we thought we were accomplishing with our silly picketing, our idealistic college-student posturing. This was Rush Limbaugh Radio, before that Big Fat Idiot began his odious career. The hostility dripped from his voice, the contempt, the disdain.

I was utterly speechless. I was unable to articulate. Wasn't prepared for this one. A hostile reporter. Yikes. My eyes beseeched Pasq. He rose to the occasion -- all 20 years old of him.

He leaped in front of me, protecting me. Demanded the reporter repeat his question. Absorbed it. Cogitated. Elucidated. Replied.

His answer was perfect. Utterly perfect. Absorbed the hostility, shot back with pugnacity. A rock-n-roll patriot, defending his soil. Nobody could have done it better.

Somewhere along this time, we were having dinner at the local Ponderosa Steakhouse -- paid for by Pasq; no one was more generous with found money. As we dissolved into general hilarity -- who knows if Dame Sativa or Dean Lysergos might not have been lurking somewhere nearby? -- Pasq rose to drive home his essential debating point, "Gabba-gabba-HEY!" He crashed into the hardworking busboy, sending about $200 worth of flatware and cutlery shattering across the restaurant floor.

Several Kenyon undergrads durst not show their faces in that Ponderosa for many moons after that.

Yet the point was made, and made full well: Gabba-gabba-hey!

I lost track of Pasq after Kenyon. Occasional reports might make it back to me, reports of poetical publishing ventures in New York, of tenures at the Naropa Institute under Allen Ginsburg. At each report, the inevitable conclusion would suggest itself: This is the life you were supposed to be leading. This is what, when asked your career path in junior-year high-school tests, you promised yourself you'd be doing.

Instead, I played it safe. I got the nine-to-five. I got the family path. I got the workadaddy world, where your friends don't die after "short illnesses."

Pasq lived it, everything that I enthusiastically endorsed and then avoided like a coward. The Life on the Edge.

My hat's off to you, my old friend. Thank you for rescuing me from that awful conservative-talk-radio goon. Thank you for knocking over that busboy. Thank you for everything else, too, from talking me through panic to letting me talk you though your own panic. From protector to needful supplicant, sometimes in the space of a day.

That's what friends do.

Goodbye, my friend.

Umm, Boss...?

...Looks like I won't be in to work today. Or for the next few days.

Here's our driveway this morning at about 8 AM. It's deteriorated quite a bit since then, and the rain's still coming down. Some of the erosion is now so deep that even a high-riding four-wheel-drive truck can't negotiate it.


Obviously, the Internet's still working, and the power's still up. Rain's still bucketing down, and there's a lot of water still to come down off that mountain.

Some folks live uphill from us, sharing that driveway, and the situation for them is, if anything, worse. We'll split the cost of the driveway repair with them, and figure out what to do about groceries. I'm thinking about those goddamned bunny rabbits in our hedgerow, all 8000 of them. Might be time for them to contribute their fair share to the larder. Be vewwy, vewwy quiet...

Submitted Without Comment

Funny!

(Tried to embed it here, but something was gebollixed with the code...)

Bob Dylan's Balls

Not long ago, I came across a recipe for meatballs that Bob Dylan had included on his Theme Time Radio Hour. At a loose end for something to cook for tonight's diner, I grabbed Bob's
ingredients and threw them together.

They were delicious. Best meatballs I've ever eaten.

The Perfect Meatball

3 minced cloves garlic
¼ cup vegetable oil (for frying)
1 pound ground meat (equal parts beef, pork, veal [I used only beef--ground pork is icky])
¼ cup grated Parmesan cheese
9 Saltine crackers, finely crushed
½ teaspoon salt
black pepper
oregano
dried basil
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
¼ cup water
1 egg
1 teaspoon tomato paste

Heat the oil over a low heat in a large Dutch oven. In a big bowl, add the meat, garlic, cheese, crackers, and spices. Mix lightly with your fingers. Don’t be shy—get into it. In a small bowl, whisk the water, the egg, and the tomato paste. Add the egg mixture to the meat mixture. Mix it lightly with your fingers. Form it into drum shapes, or balls. Cook in batches, over medium high heat, until it's browned on both sides. That will be about five minutes total. Serve 'em up with some potatoes, or some spaghetti, or just make a sandwich out of them. You're gonna love 'em.

Only thing missing: Gravy. Threw a tablespoon of flour into the pan, hotted it up, after the balls were cooked and staying hot in a 300-degree oven. One cup of beef broth, stir constantly until it's reduced by half and thickened. One cup of cream goes in, cook till it's just on the edge of boiling. Serve separately, with mashed potatoes. A nice vinaigrette salad, mebbe some bread...

GREAT balls. Bob Dylan makes DELICIOUS balls.

Best thing is, as you're cooking, you are not only free, but encouraged, to spend the whole time talking like Bob Dylan. "Well, you jis' th'ow in 'em cracker crumbs an' spices, en you jis' getcher fingers innat ground meat an' mix it awl up, don' be afraid, getcher fingers awl greezy..."

And when you're done, be sure to send any leftovers to tax-de-duc-tible char-i-ty or-gani-za-tionnnnnnnnns!

G'Phwarg-Glarb-Flang -- ROCK!

Alexi Laiho of Children of Bodom. Freddie got this one off the DiamondVision; the live ones were not so good.

Merriwether Post Pavilion, Columbia, Md, April 26, 2008: Gigantour. Headliners: MegaDeth; openers (in order of appearance): High on Fire, Job for a Cowboy, Children of Bodom, In Flames, Megadeth.

When I was in college, my then-girlfriend left our school to go live in Boston. She ended up sharing a house with members of a struggling New Wave band called the Zoo Types.

(Wow. Here's a kick in the stomach: Googling the Zoo Types, I found out that their leading light, Tas Calo, died just last month. The guy who posted the linked announcement, Screeg Neegis, was a fixture around the house. Jesus. Memory. Th' fuckin' Internet and its psychic powers... Tas was one of the Good Ones. I'm slightly devastated.)

At any rate (now that I have my emotions under control), I have a memory of the Zoo Types, one of those recollections that plant themselves into your consciousness and then expand and flower as time reveals their fundamental truth. They decorated their house with marvelous band memories, little bits of flotsam that had crossed their path, the mementos of rock-n-roll veterans.

Taped to the refrigerator was a manifesto written by that very selfsame Tas Calo, the band's bassist. It read, in part, "I will never again play in a band in which the bass parallels the guitar."

(I mean, holy fuck! The guy crosses my mind for the first time in nearly thirty years, and I find out he died a month ago! Please, let me regain my composure...)

What Tas meant by his slightly gnomic declaration, was that, in the Post-Punk Era, the era of Rock-and-Roll Dumbness was over. If the bass plays the root note of the chord the guitar is playing, in essence, the band is playing "In-Na-Gadda-Da-Vida." The whole band is playing one stupid blooze riff in unison, and the results. while providing a nicely satisfactory heavy sound, are boring, boring, bow-ring.

The New Paradigm, according to Tas' manifesto, was what Paul McCartney, James Jamerson and Brian Wilson had already been doing for years: Creative rock-bass playing, choosing notes that somehow comment on a harmony, or widen the sonic palette of an arrangement. Take a listen to Colin Moulding's bass playing with XTC: Pure bass heaven. That's where Tas Calo wanted to go. Intelligent bass. Sophisticated bass. Bass that's been to college.

You can call me a philistine if you want -- I can take it -- but Heavy Metal has always shrieked to me of bass-paralleling-guitar. It's actually an unfair, knee-jerk judgment: Listen to the bass in "Smoke On the Water" -- it's actually doing some pretty interesting things, for all the song's Spinal Tap dumbness: Playing eighth-notes to the guitar's quarter-notes, Roger Glover actually takes the riff to nice places, commenting on it, embellishing it.

Which brings me to the concert under review. When my son brought Heavy Metal back into my roots-and-jazz-obsessed life, I didn't appreciate its presence. I think the last time I came into contact with it was a late-night "Headbangers' Ball" episode in the Eighties -- perhaps I'd fallen asleep in front of Saturday Night Live, I don't know. I do remember thinking that hair-circles were pretty fucking stupid, that the relentless hair-thrashing must lead to sore necks in the morning, and that the music was all parallel bass-and-guitars.

My eyes have been opened, and yet they remain closed. The first two acts, High On Fire and Job for a Cowboy, just couldn't have sucked worse. High on Fire -- granted, they did thank MegaDeth for even including them on the tour, so that was kinda sweet, I suppose -- but good Lord, did they suck. Job for a Cowboy, a quintet, had a fine drummer, but the stagecraft was hilariously overdone: every sixteen bars, the four-man front line would switch positions so that each instrument was playing to a different section of the theater -- Cordless Clusterfuck Choreography, I think we could deem it without cavil. The first time I laughed at it, I looked cautiously over at Freddie to gauge his reaction: To my immense relief, it was clear that he understood just exactly how jive the whole thing was too. Good kid.

Then, the great revelation of the night: Children of Bodom were fuckin' excellent! I raised the devil horns! They suffered ever so slightly from the destroyed-vocal-chords school of HM singing -- H'm flarg-m-grbl-blag! delivered from the throat of Cthulhu Himself -- but that seems to be pretty much the Way You Do It these days. But I was able, amid the Sturm und Drang, to detect actual lyricism -- moments of, like, actual melody radiating forth. And Alexi Laiho can fuckin' shred! I was quietly pleased that my son, the flesh of my flesh, showed the excellent taste to pick a quite fine band to go teenaged-gaga over.

I do have to say, I was impressed by the drumming in every minute of five-and-a-half hours of Heavy Metal. The boys in the audience (about 90% of the house, average age about 20) were glomming onto the guitar shreddage; I was most impressed with the drumming. So that's where all the great modern drummers went! Seriously, keeping sixteenth-notes going on two kick-drums is seriously athletic work, and every one of these guys kept it up for minutes at a time.

In fact, that's what started me thinking about bass playing in HM in the first place. That concert-space was rigged to let those sixteenth-note kick-drums just roar; the bass guitar was pretty much a sonic afterthought. So if the Kick-Drum Is King, why, the thought occurs, not let the bass do some independent work? Why not let it reach for color notes, for non-root component notes? It's not like the bottom end is gonna suffer, with all that enormously compressed Heavy Metal Thunder coming from the kick drum?

Oh, and, by the way...

...MegaDeth can just suck my cock.

Calculated, slick, professional, whatever you want to call it, it was exactly the same fucking show I saw in 1976, at the already-washed-up Uriah Heep's gig at the Koncertgebauw in the Hague. My first rock show. All of 16 years old, I walked away nauseated. Same smarmy showmanship. Same self-satisfied rockstar chest-puffing. Same fuckin' stage moves, even: On prearranged cue, the bass and the second lead guitar skip across the stage and switch places, play to alternate sides of the house. Yecch. Lame shreddage, feeble audience-puffery, clearly rehearsed "sponteneity." Revolting.

They did open the bass up, though. Oh -- and the only harmony singing of the night -- if limited to about four bars in the opening number. That's why they're the pros.

I'd like to see the same audience turn out for Gid Tanner and the Georgia Skillet Lickers. See what happens. Yes, sir.

Pray For Me

Or at least my precious, precious eardrums...

I am taking Freddie this afternoon to see Gigantour at Merriwether Post. Perhaps you have not been privileged to know of this phenomenon that is sweeping the nation's youth; I know I hadn't heard of it until Freddie started following me around the house, making sighing noises, and muttering, "I wanna see Children of Bottom!"

Huh?

Turns out Children of Bodom, a hard-rockin', not-talkin' Finnish outfit, is touring with In Flames (Sweden) and MegaDeth (The Eighties) this summer. This is what I have voluntarily subjected myself to, for the love of a son.

Ah, well. You'll find me cowering behind the concession stand, fingers in my ears, humming Buddy Holly songs to myself as I gently rock back and forth. You know. Self-comforting behavior.

Gimme Some o' That Technology!

I've been snuffling around at Wikipedia, trying to figure out the answer to a conundrum for my book. Not to quote it or anything (oooh, you naughty boy!) but just to understand the thing.

I've "known" as a matter of received knowledge that these old Victor 78s I've been listening to rather obsessively could be no longer than three minutes, because that's how much a 78 side could contain. But as I look at the timings of these things in digital format (because, pout pout, my editor won't buy me a Victrola and a stack of eyewateringly rare and expensive 78s, the catchpenny swine), many of them are quite a bit longer than that. In particular, "Darlin' Cora," recorded by B. F. Shelton with Ralph Peer in 1927, is 3:50 long, according to iTunes.

At any rate. My problem to solve. But reading a Wiki article on the history of recording technology, I came across this paragraph, which elicited a hearty guffaw. Also, I laughed.

In the 1930s radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi developed a system of magnetic sound recording using steel tape. This was the same material used to make razor blades, and not surprisingly the fearsome Marconi-Stille recorders were considered so dangerous that technicians had to operate them from another room for safety. Because of the high recording speeds required, they used enormous reels about one metre in diameter, and the thin tape frequently broke, sending jagged lengths of razor steel flying around the studio.

Yes, I can see why it didn't catch on....

George Martin, on the talkback mic: I'm afraid we've a spot of trouble, lads.

John Lennon: What is it, Georgie?

Martin: Well, you see, we've had to call an ambulance for Geoff Emerick; I'm afraid there's a spot of blood on the tape op's chair. And on the ceiling, too, now that I look. Oh, dear, and splashed about the studio walls, too, rather higgledy-piggledy. It's going to take ever so long for EMI to have the cleaners in.

Paul McCartney: It's that bloody Marconi machine again, innit? That's the fourth tape op we've lost this week!

Martin: Yes, the razor-sharp, high-tension recording medium wrapped itself around his head and torso a right treat. Rather looked like a Chinaman undergoing the Death of a Thousand Cuts three months in. Well, bright spot: Geoff's screams of agony have died away somewhat. Don't know if that's because it's stopped being quite so dreadfully painful, or because he's weakened from loss of blood. Blessing for the rest of us, at any rate. Shall we run though that new one, then? What is it? "You Should Know Your Mother"?

He Takes the Call

Time: Perhaps 2004.
Scene: Men's room, Former Employer. A four-seater.

Your Correspondent is in Seat One, enjoying the Morning Excremeditation, with a copy of perhaps a Dilbert book, or some other light reading. I am alone, as is my earnest wont. (I cannot make Those Noises with anyone else in the room. I just cannot. I will wait till somebody leaves before committing those mortifying, though, I recognize, thoroughly human, noises. I have experienced physical pain in order to avoid this mortification. Call me an eccentric.)

Somebody comes in. Ah, nuts. Maybe he's just in for a Number One. Maybe he'll just wash his hands and go.

Nope. Stall Four. Down go the pants. In for the Long Haul. Boogers.

A chirping sound comes from Stall Four. His cellphone goes off.

He.

Takes.

The.

Call.

Before he could even get to the second syllable of "Hello?" I was pants up and gone.

He! took! the! call!

If you want to grow old with me, if you want to sit with me in a rocking chair on a porch in our dotages, drinking moonshine whiskey, smoking cheap cigars and telling whoppers about girls we've had and cars we've boosted, you will never -- that's never -- have taken that call. You will have perhaps fished it out of your pocket in the pool of trouser at your feet, flipped it open, seen who it was, and flipped it shut -- and the reason you will have done that is to shut the fucking thing up, so others can go about their business in peace without a fucking cellphone ringing six feet away.

You will not have taken that call.

Jesus Suppurating Christ on a frying pan. Civilization's over, kids. We're headed for a New Dark Age. A Nude Ark Age. Blame cellphones. I know I do.

Freddie Amuses

Driving home from soccer practice yesterday. The news is on the radio -- the Pope dominates (as he does). Freddie (14) muses, "When he was young, do you think the Pope wanted to grow up to be the Pope? Like, he aspired to be the Pope?"

I thought for a bit. "I don't know about the current guy. I do think the last one, John Paul II, did want to be Pope when he was pretty young."

"So do you think that when he was a kid, he'd be outside in the back yard, like, pretending to be Pope? Blessing stuff? Waving to imaginary crowds?"

The ensuing mental picture was worthy of a chuckle...

Thank You, Donnie G.

Don Geronimo, half of the Washington afternoon-drive radio comedy team of Don and Mike, retired today after 23 years with Mike O'Meara, and over 40 years in radio. His last show this afternoon was a somber affair, in which he revealed that doing the show after the violent and untimely death of his wife Freda Sorce a couple of years ago was simply too full of painful reminders. He hasn't been psychically right since then, and I wish him all the best in his healing.

Don could be a spoiled child on the air. He could be painfully cruel to idiotic callers. He could bore the listener with his petulance at the station's management. But when that show was hitting on all cylinders, when it was really working, it was unquestionably the funniest thing on the radio. I don't listen to something daily for 17 years without being convinced of its quality.

Other shock-jocks who try to be funny just get the formula wrong, wrong, wrong. They are aggrieved. They are sarcastic. They seek victims. The Don and Mike Show first repelled me when I heard an early incarnation of it in the late Eighties, at WAVA. They too were cruel and sarcastic and aggrieved.

When they moved to WJFK in the late 80s, something truly clicked. The show became utterly compelling listening. The personalities of the hosts and their coterie of side-men gelled. They learned the subtleties of sarcasm, what attracted and what repelled the listener. The show became, rather than a series of preplanned "bits," simply a four-hour-long conversation among three or four people in the studio and unscreened callers, reacting to events of the day. The show they put on on Sept. 11, 2001, will go into the record books as one of the most cathartic and healthy things ever broadcast on radio. If for nothing else, I'll be eternally grateful to them for talking me down off the windowsill that day.

Don began his radio career, he revealed today, at the age of 11, as a volunteer for Armed Forces Radio. He is roughly my age, and I know what I was doing at 11. It wasn't radio. He came to the radio comedy business late, after a long career as a wandering record-spinner. His contempt for what radio has become -- a marketing-driven sarcasm of its former self -- was daily palpable. In his chest there beats a rock-n-roll heart. He is a patriot.

He got his first job as a radio deejay at the age of 16, after lying about his age. He became an astonishingly adept board-operator -- a skill he put to great comedic use on the Don and Mike Show, assembling and playing sound-clips that ran into each other surrealistically. One of their best late bits was a huge assembly of quotes from John Wayne movies, which they would use as a kind of Magic Eight-Ball, asking the Wayne Oracle questions and playing the clips at random. Very funny, very Dada.

But Geronimo's talking about his experience as an itinerant deejay provided, for me, the finest and highest moments of the show. He would adopt an exaggerated deejay voice to "talk in" records (the Don and Mike Show didn't actually play records, this was all for comedy's sake). You "talk in" a record by doing deejay patter over its opening strains. The best deejay knows how to time his patter to end the instant the vocal begins; absolutely no one in the world is better at this than Don Geronimo. Don is very proud of the fact that he once "talked in" "Stairway to Heaven"; the opening recorder-and-guitar passage is about two minutes long. You never talk in "Stairway to Heaven." It's a Deejay Law.

Don's funniest radio story? I think it was the time that he described losing a job in some podunk town for getting the phrasing just wrong in his patter: "It's a beautiful Saturday, highs in the nineties, so wear something flimsy, gals... Traffic and weather together on the eights here on KRCG, and now, everybody Come On Eileen!"

He did it on purpose, of course. I told you, a rock-and-roll heart.

I had to listen to today's farewell show in my car, as that's where I've heard the huge majority of the show over the last 17 years. In his last segment, he spun a couple of records, just for old times' sake. The first he dedicated to his family: Jimmy Buffett's "Come Monday." I was picking up a pizza for the fam, and I listened to that segment sitting in the pizzeria's parking lot. The second song, which, of course, he talked in perfectly, was dedicated to the fans. The Beatles' "In My Life."

I'm afraid I blubbed a bit.

Don, I'm going to miss the shit out of you, you imperfect, petulant, childish bastard. God Speed, Radio God!

I highly recommend popping over to hear some Don Geronimo air-checks from the late 70s and early 80s. And ask yourself as you're listening to them, What have they done to my radio?

OK, You Rock-and-Roll Patriots...

Draw me a connection between Frank Zappa and "Jesus Christ Superstar."

You need only two degrees of separation.

These degrees may include song lyrics, band members, musical passages, or biting and chewing poodles.

Two degrees shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be two. Three shalt thou not enumerate, neither enumerate thou one, excepting that thou then proceed to two. Four is right out. Two degrees. Of separation.

Ve Haff Vays...

More unintentionally funny comic panels here.

"So, they laugh at my boner, eh?"

Bubbles

Not that I'm any kind of expert, but a visit to a hair salon must be something like a trip to a cathouse.

I'd noticed myself getting a tad shaggy these days, so I made an appointment for today at noon, a little place near work. The girl on the phone asked if I wanted to "see" anyone in particular, and as I hadn't patronized this place in a good long time, I said no.

I walked into the place and announced myself. Unisex hair places try very hard for that ultramodern feel, lots of brushed aluminum fixtures, photos of sexy models on the walls, glass and chrome furniture -- I'm sure it's the outcome of a lot of very careful psychological research. All the stylists in the place, nearly all of them quite attractive women, are dressed in black, black, black.

Again, the receptionist asked me that rather intensely uncomfortable question: Is there anyone in particular I'd like to "see"?

Now, for me, a haircut from a sexy babe in stylish black clothing is a rather, how do we say, erotic experience. It is, I'll admit here and now, the closest thing I get in my life to permission to perv out a little bit. From the shampoo, her fingers massaging my scalp with foofy shampoo, to the cut itself, as she leans in very close to get just the right angle and a pert breast brushes my back, her breath and perfume mingling with the fruity hair-care-product smell of the place, as, in the mirror, all the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo: The whole thing serves to put rather unwholesome thoughts into the Jingo cranium.

And I don't think I'm alone in this dirty little secret.

So asking me if there is anyone in particular I'd like to "see" is a big semantic matzoh-ball. The intention of the question and its interpretation are oceans apart. Most female customers will understand it -- correctly -- as a challenge to assess the competence of the stylist who gave her her last cut; got a good one, repeat. Bad one, move on. This male customer, who happens to like women very very much thanks for asking, thinks it's exactly the same question that they ask at the front desk of the Mustang Ranch. I do suppress the urge to look around the room until my eyes light on a cutie-pie who's just my type and point and say, "Well, that petite blonde in the ass-pants and sleeveless t-shirt, she looks like a goer!"

But just barely.

Instead, I shake my head, a little sadly. "No, I'm new here." Thinking, I'm at your mercy. Please pick me a nice one. Oh, and by the way, if you can read my mind, you'll be forgiven for declaring me a complete and utter pig and throwing me into the street.

I got the only dude in the place.

What's worse, he gave me a real nice haircut. I got his card.

I can't go back.

Tick Talk

WASHINGTON, DC — March 26, 2008. A local conference of IT professionals was thrown into disarray when an outbreak of deer ticks in the beds of Omni Shoreham Hotel conference attendees forced hundreds of information-technology workers into the streets of Washington, DC, at three o'clock in the morning, fearing Lyme disease and worse.

"This totally sucks, man!" shouted one displaced technology worker, clad only in his plaid jammy-pants and Anakin Skywalker t-shirt as he froze, barefoot, in the street outside the venerable hotel. Exterminators swarmed the sidewalks around him, vying for the order to spray individual rooms for the dangerous, disease-bearing insects.

All is not completely lost, however. One attendee used the occasion to perform some valuable entomological research; with some highly specialized sonar equipment he "just happened" to have in his room, he was able to trace and document the communication patterns of the revolting critters.

"Yeah, they talk really fast!" said Jim "Ethernet" LaPorte, of Kankakee, IL, in town for only one night. "You gotta slow it down a lot, but if you do, you can totally hear 'em saying, 'Must... eat... blood...!'"

Representatives of the Fox Television network have reportedly been in discussion with the ticks about the development of a movie deal with the marauding arachnidae. However, they have met with little or no success.

The idea that ticks possess the ability to communicate with humans has most reputable entomologists scratching their heads. "Beats me," said one local professor of entomology. "Didn't ever think of that before. Talking ticks. Huh."

---

The headline in Variety the next day:

TICKS ATTACK TECH TALK
TECH CLOCKS TICK TALK!
TICKS, FOX EXECS NIX TALKS!
TICK TALK?
TICK TALK!

Marking the Resurrection

My work buddy Jason spent his Saturday in a far sillier way than did we, who prepared to mark the Resurrection with deep contemplation and fervent prayer.

This sort of thing must be stopped, for the greater good of the Republick. John Adams would not have approved.

Goddamned Insolent Bunnies

This year has been a bumper crop for bunny rabbits chez Jingo. Can't walk from house to garage without tripping over one. I just made the trip up there for liquid refreshment, and a bunny sat in my way, glaring insolently, like a soccer hooligan at a referee. As I walked, it moved just enough to get out of my way, and sat its ass back down in the grass. Insulted -- I thought I was a bit more threatening to the property's leporine population than that -- I moved toward it again. Again, it moved just enough to get out of my way, and then plunked its fat little ass down in the grass.

That's it. I'm going Farmer MacGregor on their asses. Ate my whole cucumber crop last year, little bastards. An exemplary rabbit stew with spring vegetables begins to take shape in my perfervid mind. I will leave it, untouched, by the forsythia under which they camp.

Also, them lazy-assed dogs are going to get a very firm talking to. If I have to resort to the words of Captain Nolan at the Battle of Balaclava -- "There, sir, is your enemy!" then that is what I shall have to do. I take no pleasure in it. No satisfaction.

Time to man up.

Timeshifting

These days, I've been listening to podcasts from NPR on my commutes to and from work. One of these is "Car Talk," with Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers. A regular feature of that program, to which I'm sure nobody needs any introduction, the Puzzler. Ordinarily, I gloss over the Puzzler, because they usually involve Higher Logic, small bits of paper with cryptic notations on them, or algebra, which I leave to the pros and concentrate instead on the often very funny byplay with the callers.

This week's Puzzler, though, I figured out nearly as soon as Ray Magliozzi read it out. Here it is; see if the answer is as immediately apparent to you as it was to me (quoting from memory):

I visited my friend Mary in her office. As I walked in, she was dialing the phone. She shushed me, saying she wouldn't be a minute, she was calling her husband. The call went through, and when her husband answered, she said, "Hi, Tim, it's me." She then asked a question that would have been a very strange way to open a conversation twenty (or thirty, or fifty) years ago. A strange question for any caller to ask anybody, not just Mary to Tim. What was the question?

Write your answer on a 5000-watt Black & Decker electrical generator, with stereo speakers, full carpeting, eight-cylinder Speedo rack-and-pinion flywheel wind-up, and a pony, and send it to...

Calling the Neddie Jingo Irregulars....

Some few weeks ago, I found a site that was utterly astonishing in its thoroughness and attention to detail. It documented absolutely every bluegrass song in the Classic Bill Monroe/Stanley Brothers Canon, with painstaking notes on recording dates, how many times each song was recorded, by whom, down to Child Ballad number, if applicable.

I've just discovered it's disappeared. Somebody didn't renew a domain name, it appears. Now all I get is a generic Search page.

This is fucking devastating news for my book. I was using that bitch like toilets hadn't been invented. A more useful resource you could not possibly find.

I know there's such a thing as the Internet Archive. Nothing that has ever been posted has actually disappeared. (I know this through dire, dire experience.) But how do I operate it???

Help me, somebody!

The original URL for that site was http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/master/

How can I get that stuff back? Musical History demands to be rescued!

And I will be eternally, pleasure-you-in-a-way-that-will-endanger-my-marital-vows kind of way, grateful...

Edit Next Morning: Turns out, as you Irregulars pointed out to me (and I thank you from the heart of my bottom), that I'd accidentally stumbled across notes belonging to Richard Matteson of the Bluegrass Messengers, toward a book of his own, Bluegrass Picker's Tune Book, published in 2006, which you can get here, and which I've already this morning ordered. I found the notes quite by accident when Googling the lyrics of "The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake" for my "Soul Butter" post a few weeks ago. No violation of copyright (or privacy) was intended, and for any information I gleaned from the notes, the book (not the web site) will be rigorously and properly cited. I did email the site's administrator when I found the notes, to ask about provenances and sources, but never heard back.

Speaking of copyright violations, in the course of the search for the foregoing, someone linked me to a copy of the book at books.google.com. I was slightly horrified to find that the entire book has been posted by Google. Not, as at Amazon and similar sites, the cover and a few representative pages, but the whole flippin' thing! Surely -- surely! -- that's got to be a copyright violation. I'd read about Google's project to make every book ever published available on the Net, but only now do I see the implications. Are we authors about to get the same ass-fucking that musicians get from file-sharing? Why charge money for a book ever again?

A Four-Diamond Girl

I have to confess myself completely flummoxed by the concept of a $5000 hooker.

The WashPost this morning declared at $300 (after, no doubt, a great deal of careful market research, hands on keyboards, no subtle fingers tweaking the Importunate Equipment under the desk) the going price of the kind of lady-of-the-night who will report to your hotel room and place herself at your disposal.

This gives us a discrepancy of $4700 between the price paid by your average horned-up convention-goer and that paid by Elliott Spitzer.

The question burns, like a chlamidia-victim's gorgonzola, what the hell does $4700 buy you?

The girl may be fine, she may be so-fuckin'-refined-she-smells-like-Hyannisport-in-August, she may have an ermine-lined snatch for all I know, but... Jesus Christ! An orgasm's an orgasm, y'know? And post-coital chit-chat's post-coital chit-chat. Does the $4700 girl lecture you on Wittgenstein afterwards? You can buy the same goddamned honey-of-a-spasm for 25 simoleons on 14th Street -- and your provider may even remove her upper plate for extra gratification. If Spitzer had managed to confine himself to that kind of independent provider, he'd still be governor of New York.

It may come as a bit of a shock to my regular clientele when I admit: I've had sex! I've even had really, really, really good sex! So, as an experienced man-about-town, I have to wonder: What is it about paying 4700 clams to dip your wick that is so fucking appealing?

I'm sure it has a whole lot to do with the same Absolutely Nothing that differentiates a $500 bottle of wine from a $50 bottle. You pay it just because you can, because that's what makes the difference between the Rabble and the Übermensch — and for that, Elliot Spitzer will now be privileged, forever, to just go fuck himself.

For free.

Schadenfreude's a Bitch

I'm afraid I emitted a long, low, throaty chuckle when I read this graf. I'm not going to mention the name because I want to stay out of the search engines --they still hold a small amount of power over me -- but read the rest of the article here.

Several recently departed executives contacted this week described the climate at [company name redacted] as acrimonious. They said there had been confrontational meetings of employees as well as screaming matches in offices, as senior executives worried about making their aggressive quarterly ad sales goals.

Bastards are going down.

We Is Not Learning

We read in this morning's WashPost of Conspicuous Organic Consumpion. "Anna Sova Luxury Organics Turkish towels, 900 grams per square meter, $58 apiece. The eco-friendly 600-thread-count bed sheets, milled in Switzerland with U.S. cotton, $570 for queen-size.... [We buy a] 2008 LS 600 hybrid for $104,000 (it actually gets fewer miles per gallon than some traditional makes, but, see, it is a hybrid). Accessorize the interior with an organic Sherpa car seat cover for only $119.99...."

Pretty sharp stuff, for the petroleum-based rapacious destroyer of forests that is a newspaper.

We here chez Jingo are trying to be good green citizens. As they burn out, we've been replacing our incandescent lightbulbs with those newfangled windy-twisty jobbers. I used up the last one just now, and was preparing to throw the package away when a whacking huge observation smacked me like the hot kiss at the end of a wet fist. (Twelve points for ref.) I wrestled the thing to the floor and photographed it immediately:


Do you see what I saw?

The package is huge! It's twice the size it needs to be! The space used for branding the fucking thing is the same size as the thing itself! And of course, what is all that wasted space made of? A little cardboard and a ho-ho-whoooole lot of thick plastic. This package isn't meant to Save the World; it's meant to Sell Lightbulbs. And I, sucker of suckers, thinking I was Saving the World, Bought Lightbulbs. Probably killed about eight acres of rainforest doing it.

Well. The first thing to do, I suppose, is to fish the damned thing out of the trash and put it with the recycling. (There will be a sign on the recycling dumpster: "Bottles and Cans Only!" Screw it. It goes in.)

Now, those little windy-twisty lightbulbs are fragile. Really fragile. You can't wrap them in jute or switchgrass or something. They need a shell to protect them. Maybe the recycled cardboard they make egg cartons out of might do the trick. But with examples like the above, where the need to brand a product supersedes the need to actually be environmentally responsible, we're probably consuming ourselves into extinction.

(Free tip from the Jingmeister: In the few weeks we have before the Collapse of Civilization As We Know it, there's a bloody fortune to be made in the invention of a device that lets you change those lightbulbs on the ceiling while standing on the floor. The thing I use now, the one designed for rounded, incandescent bulbs, has so far broken three of the new ones.)

A Linguistic Conundrum

I am cursed to ponder, this fine early-spring Sunday:

What is the relationship between

Coo-coo-ca-choo, Mrs. Robinson

and

I am the eggman
They are the eggmen
I am the walrus
Goo-goo-ga-joob

The odd thing is, both lyrics were written at approximately the same time. Paul Simon adapted the song for 1967's "The Graduate," and the song was officially released on "Bookends" in 1968. Lennon wrote and recorded "I Am the Walrus" in September 1967.

Was this nonsense phrase, you know, "in the air" at the time?

And why does this question torture me so?