Category: memories

Today’s Theme Music

In light of the beer news of acquisitions, sell-offs and mergers, I thought I’d go with a brew theme. What could be better than Cream’s ‘Strange Brew’. Most Americans and many other world citizens have watched Donald Trump win the presidential election to become the President-Elect. His support and campaign were also pretty strange brews, as was the whole election cycle.

So what the hell? Let’s finish this year and see how far the strange brew carries us. BTW, be sure to check out Eric Clapton’s clothes and hairs. Woo. Stylin’. Sadly, perhaps tragically, or comically, I remembered being adorned in somewhat similar styles in my teens.

Life sure is a strange brew, and fashion can be the strangest brew of all.

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Today’s Theme Music

Randy claimed he wasn’t racist. We believed him. “Some of my best friends are black,” he said. That was true. We knew them. But coming from Alabama, he said a lot of racist – and sexist – things. He was a genuine throwback, but he was genuine. Still, that didn’t keep us from getting indignant about his attitude, pissed off at him, and worried about getting our asses kicked.

That’s exactly what Rich said that night at the St. James Infirmary in Mountain View, California, around 1994. “They’re going to kick our asses.”

‘They’ were the black people who dominated the club and were having a great time dancing. Randy called the music being played ‘Black music’. He saw nothing wrong with that as we argued with him. “Play some white music,” he yelled whenever a song ended. That prompted a lot of heads swiveling our way and deep stares.

Eventually, the DJ said, “Would the gentleman who wants some white music please come talk to me.” Randy did. Randy got along with everyone. After he returned, he said, “They’re going to play some white music.”

The white music that was played was one of our favorite drinking songs. We were in the military and we did a lot of drinking. We liked to gather in a circle and sing this song.

Randy passed away from cancer in 2016, sixty years old. He never changed, to my knowledge. But his Facebook page mourning his passing has a number of entries by black people from his church lamenting his passing. He was a character.

Here’s Meatloaf with ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Lights’, 1977. 

 

 

4

Blackbird

I’m often frustrated with myself, questioning my mind, cringing at things I’ve done in the past, and challenging my motives and stances, and trying to learn and grow. It’s complicated and wearying.

Part of this is about being a guy. As a guy, I enjoy speed, power, football. I’m a beer drinker, but was a Jack and Coke guy for decades, and a cigar smoker. I was known for being hard-ass about getting the mission accomplished.

The other is about being a human. As a human, I want peace, freedom and equality for everyone. As a human, pro football is barbaric; speed and power – Formula One, NASCAR, fighter jets and rockets – are unnecessary indulgences. As a guy, those things are awesome, and pro football, as practiced by the NFL, is cerebral but violent, graceful, fast…and violent.

Within those boundaries, I grew up in love with speed and technology. They’re most ultimately married in aerospace technology in my thinking, part of science fiction’s magnetic appeal. And within that domain, there is little like the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird.

I was stationed at Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, Japan, for four years in the early 1980s. Kadena AB has long runways and is strategically located on the Pacific’s edge. Blackbirds, dubbed Habus by the locals, flew in and out all the time. Being down on the flight line and watching one take off just after sunset, when the sky is a diluted Royal blue and watching those big engines release orange and blue tongues, was beauty in motion. Wheels up, they turned up, and quickly disappeared. I watched until I could no longer see it.

New Atlas has a terrific interview with a Habu pilot. Brian Shul was shot down and left for dead in Cambodia before being rescued. Eventually becoming an SR-71 pilot, Loz Blaine had a nice piece on him, well worth reading for the human side of people using this technology.

The two links embedded in the article are also worthwhile. Both are funny. One is about an air speed pissing contest posted at Opposite Lock. The other is about doing a favor for an ex-SR-71 pilot via a slow flyby and giving some young boys something to talk about, published on Foxtrot Alpha.

I hope you check them out and enjoy them as much as me.

4

Things I Don’t Miss

Didn’t need to scrap ice off my car this morning because it’s garaged. I felt for the neighbor out there de-icing his vehicle. There, I thought, is something I don’t miss, which launched me into musings about what else I don’t miss.

I don’t miss lite beers in any shape or vintage. Thank the gods for micro-brews and craft beers!

I don’t miss saving and counting pennies to buy a bag of pretzels as a treat or to go the movies. My years of extremely tight budgeting taught me the value of budgeting and saving but I enjoy indulging myself now, and I don’t miss those days at all!

I don’t miss military recalls, deployments and twelve hour shifts. I don’t miss midnight shifts, either, or pressing uniforms and getting haircuts all the time. Mission success was satisfying and I met some excellent people and saw the world, but I don’t miss all those other military accouterments.

I don’t miss cable television. Cable was cool and fun for a while but as it developed into a commodity and charged more and more while offering me less and less, it became a huge weight of disappointment. The smart television, Roku and streaming services aren’t perfect but they’re better than cable.

I don’t miss all those company meetings. Six AM, 9 PM…on some days with IBM I was on telephone calls and sorting and answering emails for hours. Don’t miss them at all, nor the annual performance report rituals. I really don’t miss completing expense reports. Just like the military, I enjoyed the company of some great people while I was with IBM (and the companies IBM absorbed, NetworkICE and ISS). Them, I miss. I also get a little misty eyed about the absent paycheck and its company.

I don’t miss old technology.  Take my old floppies – please (badaboom – tish). You can take them to where the IBM Selectrics and my Brother portable typewriters are buried, along with my old KayPro 10 and Zenith 150, and my clunky SVG and EVG color monitors, and 4.87 and 10 megahertz operating speeds.

It’s a short list of what I don’t miss. I had a good time through it all and came out fortunate in the end.

What don’t you miss?

 

 

8

Today’s Theme Music

I was doing things differently on Thursday night. That change in routine delivered me to television channel surfing.

Television channel surfing has changed during my lifetime. We didn’t really have channel surfing in the early days. Our home enjoyed four channels for a number of years. Rotary dials, and later push-buttons, controlled the channel selections and volumes. That met getting up to change the channel or turn the television up or down. Schedules were pretty fixed and everything was well-advertised. Little was controversial because most of it was being buried the way a killer hides a body. Surfing really exploded with development of cable television and the remote control.

Now I have remotes but no cable. My television comes to me via a Roku in the study (a.k.a. ‘The Snug’) and an Internet connected ‘smart’ television in another room. The rest is received over-the-airways.

OTA is growing in popularity. Stations showing old shows are growing with it. I watched the ‘Comet’ television station the other night along with ‘Me TV’. On one of them (I was surfing, remember), I came across ‘Barney Miller’ reruns and watched two episodes. It was cool seeing Hal, Ron, Abe and the others, people who have aged or passed on, and enjoy some of their skills and talents once again, along with the writing, directing and producing talents of all those people behind the scenes. The shows ignited a flood about fashion and bell bottoms, too.

You probably know where this is headed if you’ve read anything of me. The ‘Barney Miller’ theme song has lodged in my head like a deer tick in my calf. I must rid myself of it, and to do that, others must hear it. So, please, I beg you, men and women of the Internet, play this song and relieve me of my suffering.

To be fair, it’s not bad as theme music goes. Reminding me of old jazz, it begins with a slow, low bass line, and then the song builds in tempo as more instruments are layered in, becoming an upbeat tune by the end. Go ahead, take a listen.

 

 

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What Christmas Means to Me

Santas in the malls

Music in the stores

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Watching out classroom windows

Hoping for the snow

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Mom working extra shifts

Dad in Vietnam

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Sledding down some hills

Crashing into trees

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Coming in with frozen clothes

Discovering I have frozen toes

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house

And eating holiday ham

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Visiting with Jewish friends

Wishing others “Happy Holidays”

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Singing ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’

And ‘Hark! The Herald Angels Sing’

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Putting up a pine tree

and untangling all the lights

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Trying to find the perfect gift

And almost always failing

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Working on a military base

Thousands of miles from home

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Driving home through snow and ice

Hours behind the wheel

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Watching ‘A Christmas Story’ two hundred and one times

And cheering on Rudolf in his annual plight

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Filling up a giving tree

And donating to others in need

This is what Christmas means to me

 

Gazing at a clear cold starry night

And thinking of the times

 

This is what Christmas means to me

 

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Good morning, Mr. Phelps.

Thanksgiving is yesterday’s news until next year. Black Friday has commenced.

Winter is coming.

Now it gets serious.

You’re going to what today…? Diet? Exercise? Shop till you drop? Keep talking with the voices in your head and writing while maintaining a reasonable facade of sanity?

Drink till you drop, or never eat or drink again?

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to get it done, whatever you’re pursuing today. Here’s the music to use at pivotal moments to build momentum and carry you on.

This message will self-describe in five seconds, taking whatever you’re reading this on with it. Oh, come on, don’t act surprised. Planned obsolescence has become a fine manufacturing art. Its destruction will help the economy because you’ll be forced to buy a new one. So it’s really a blessing.

 

 

0

I Lament

I lament that there doesn’t seem to be any good Thanksgiving songs in America. Christmas songs are being played in many stores. Why didn’t those Pilgrims and others write some good Thanksgiving songs? What happened to, “Hark, the herald Pilgrims sing, Thanksgiving has come again?”

Nobody sang, “I’ll be home for Thanksgiving, if only in my dreams.”

Nobody marched to the chant, “I don’t know but I’ve been told, the Thanksgiving dinner is getting cold. I don’t know but I concede, roasted turkey makes me sleep.”

Disappointing.

Perhaps, per my wife’s view, Thanksgiving doesn’t deserve a celebration because of all the Native Americans killed as they took over the ‘new world’.

I lament that I don’t know much about Christmas in other countries. It’s been a few decades since I was overseas for the holidays. Are Christmas songs being played in stores in Japan, Europe, Australia, et cetera, already? Do other countries have their versions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Do citizens in other nations have any idea what I’m writing about?

I lament that my rear end falls asleep so easily. By ‘falls asleep’, I mean it becomes uncomfortable and grows numb. I want to know: have studies been done? Does writer’s butt affect other writers besides me?

I lament that I have but one lap to give to my cats. Tucker is a big fella and takes up the entire lap. That doesn’t stop Quinn, a small fellow, from making the attempt. If Quinn is already occupying my lap, Tucker will go high and attempt to perch on my chest or shoulder. Not comfortable.

Our two recent rescues, Boo Radley and Meep, haven’t demonstrated any lap interests. Boo likes sleeping alongside us, following the standard cat practice of tucking up against a leg or hip. Meep keeps his distant. He’s not socialized to co-exist with humans well. We’re working on it.

I lament that so much fake news and false information permeates the Internet. Worse than relying on this information, when it turns out to be false, or worse, deliberately false, it undermines other information. I come more and more to distrust news on the net. It requires greater due diligence on my part to vet information, and that’s just damn wearying. It’s nice to impossible to fix false information once it’s out there. Stories that were proven false as far back as 1998 get some cosmetic updates and become circulated as a new truth.

Of course, I lament that I tend toward globalization. When one corporation or politician is caught lying, I tend to brand them all. But then, there is a rich history of corporations and politicians lying to us and misleading us.

Likewise, I lament that there seems to be some seriously flawed understanding of the star system, when people give one to five stars to hotels and restaurants.

3

Today’s Theme Music

Theme music is all about being a signature song. I offer them as a signature song to establish the day’s tone. For today, I’m dropping into the wayback machine and pulling out a little theme song from a television series, ‘Bonanza’.

‘Bonanza’ was a television series produced and aired on NBC from 1959 to 1973. Meanwhile, it was syndicated and shown as reruns. It wasn’t unusual to walk into someone’s house after school and see ‘Bonanza’ on the telly. Most amusing to me is that visiting its set in the Lake Tahoe area really impressed people. Paris and the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramids, rock of Gibraltar, the Louvre, etc…nah. But the house where Hoss, Ben, Little Joe and the rest strutted? Wow. 

The show’s title came from the expression for a big discovery of ore. Hope your day brings you a bonanza. Thank you, Jay Livingstone and David Rose, for creating this music.

2

Each

Each day brings a new requirement to re-balance priorities, needs, desires and the rest.

Each week brings an increasing gentle awareness of time.

Each month brings a new assessment of what’s been done, what needs to be done, what hasn’t been done, what you hope to do.

Each season brings new requirements for clothing, repairs, vacations, work and celebrations.

Each holiday brings a new influx of decorations – ghosts, Santas, elves and reindeer – and renewed promises to clean out the previous collection of decorations. Each effort bring renewed efforts.

Each departure brings thoughts and reflections. Each arrival brings anticipation.

Each year brings fresh nostalgia and growing awareness of mortality.

Each morning brings a new hope.

Each hour brings a new beginning.

And each thought brings a new perspective.

Each time, it’s not the same.

And each time, you wonder how has it changed?

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