Tag: pop

Saturday’s Theme Music

-2 degrees C. Sunshine soaks everything in sight. Two runners in cold suits run up the street. It’s a tough hill, so I am impressed, especially in this weather. Then I pour coffee and sip, reflecting, I used to do that stuff.

I was thinking about issuing an NTF about me and things I’ve never done or been. I can be a superhero, rock star, astronaut, and other things I fantasized about becoming as a child. It can be a good way to make some extra cash, if I can bring some buyers to the table. That’ll be a task worthy of Hercules. I’ll also need an artist to make me prettier and clean up my looks. But it’s a good winter project.

It’s Saturday, December 17, 2022. The countdown to winter solstice has accelerated. Oh, yeah, other holidays are under way or approaching, too. We like to celebrate solstice with mulled wine, soup, bread and salads. Then we burn a log, write our wishes on little scraps of paper, tie them with string or ribbon, and burn them. Hasn’t really worked as far as granting wishes, but it’s a hopeful and joyous evening. The company and wine is good, too.

While it’s below freezing now, we expect a high of 42 F. Sunrise, when this shine was unleashed on us, 7:34 this morning and daylight’s ebb will fall on us at 4:40. And so it goes. Last night had a solid moon out there and lots of moonshine. I can only wonder about what was going on in the shadows. The cats showed little interest in leaving for change, until 5:37 this morning, when Papi said, I must go out and make my rounds. I’m thinking about issuing an NTF of my cats, too. There will probably be more buyers for them. Maybe if I put my cats in my NTFs, like I’m a muscular handsome superhero carrying my cats. Will that work?

I have the song, “Season of the Witch” by Donovan in my mind, a song which was released in the mid sixties. How’d this come about, you ask. Why do you have that song in your head? Well, that was about looking out the window. As I sipped coffee and contemplated the other side of the pane, Der Neurons began the lyrics, “When I look out my window. what do you think I see? And when I look in my window, so many different people to be. It’s strange, sure is strange.” So there we go. So many recent events might evaporate out of my head and bits of knowledge challenges my recall, but my mind can pull Donovan lyrics from almost sixty years ago.

Going in for another cuppa coffee and a bagel. Stay pos and test negative. Dress appropriately for the weather wherever you are, and whatever weather which you weather. Here’s the music. It’s a typical Donovan style tune. Enjoy Saturday. Cheers

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Friday’s Theme Music

Our sprawling Christmas Cactus is resplendent with large red flowers on its window perch. Wind dances with trees outside the glass. Grass and bushes shiver under the wind’s tickle. 36 degrees F outside, sunshine washes over valley as the clouds have surrendered the sky to blue. It’s Friday, December 16, 2022, just five sleeps from winter solstice and two weeks and a day to 2022’s end.

Our weather has been pingponging between rain, high winds, and then days of freezing fog and stagnant air. Hope this day brings on a change. I don’t think I’m really a winter person. Today’s high will be 46 but the wind’s northern mountain ice edge will make you think it’s less. The clock saw 7:33 AM when the valley was gifted the sunlight’s first direct light. Daylight will go until 4:40 this afternoon.

I was given an earworm yesterday. Running errands, music playing, The Neurons heard a song which made me laugh. Then they kept playing it, and here it is, sixteen hours later, hogging the morning mental music stream. I’d never heard “Victoria’s Secret (2022) by Jax before yesterday, but after arriving home and settling in, I looked up the lyrics to confirm what I heard. This is a song pushing back against body types and body shaming, focusing on the stereotypical Victora’s Secret model, all boob on a skinny body. I applaud the song. Fake bodies aren’t needed. Nor is starving yourself or “going without carbs” as the song mentions. Our adherence to fake images and the efforts to achieve those is a sickness that undermines our national mental health, as is the whole heavy slant toward the need to be young and pretty, as portrayed too many times in movies, television shows, and advertisements. Hope you’ll give the song a listen. Hope you don’t get stuck on the same line that hooked The Neurons, “Victoria is made up by a dude (dude)!”

Other than weather, writing, exercising, and socializing with people and cats, life is moving at a slower pace. I need to carve out more reading time. That’s my significant complaint, other than the nastiness of life for so many and the general mess called politics. Stay positive, test negative, and so on. Time for my morning coffee rations. Have a super one. Here’s Jax. Cheers

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Thursday is found and stuck into place. Just like that, the puzzle known as 2022 gets closer to completion. Fitting these final pieces into place is a challenge that I best face when I’m coffee-fied. They’re so very similar. Like yesterday, today, December 15, 2022, is cold (29 F this morning), foggy, with wee, thin sunshine doing little to dint the gray quilt of fog and clouds and chilly winter air. Even the floofs are muttering, brr, with Papi leveling a dagger gaze at the world in expression of his disdain for the weather.

Though sunrise kicked in at 7:32, light at 6:27 AM was astonishing. I easily navigated through the house to let Papi out. Sunset will arrive at 4:40 this afternoon to close out this puzzle piece. Our temperature’s high point will be 5 C.

My wife popped home last night from her holiday book club and said, “I have the weirdest earworm.” She then sang the Texaco jingle. “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star, the big, white, Texaco star.” I had to laugh at that one as I tried remembering when I’d last heard it.

I have a different song in my morning mental music stream. Out walking in the cold day yesterday, I spied multiple home challenged folks trying to keep warm. It’s a constant thing here. We as a community pursue multiple prongs to help, chasing something sustainable and permanent as a solution. It’s been no bueno. Watching them and thinking about them, wondering how they’ve come to be in this situation, The Neurons fed “What’s It Like” by Everlast from 1998 into the music stream. I share it with you for theme music on this December day.

Stay positive, test negative, etc. I’m up for coffee once again. Here’s the music. Hope you enjoy it and experience a day that helps you finish the puzzle that’s you.

Cheers

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

A winter Wednesday morning to you. No snow here in the lower levels, but the temperatures and air quality has us singing that winter is upon us. No surprise, it being December 14, 2022, a nose hair short of mid-month. -2 C and foggy out there. The fog will grumble and fuss around the trees and houses for most of the morning but burn off and permit sunshine’s entrance. Daylight crept through the valley’s fog at 7:32 this morning. By the time the sun lowers its from our presence, the air temp is supposed to jump up to 46 degrees F. It may do so but yesterday’s 42 degrees felt like 34, as they say.

After perusing some morning news headlines, I pulled an early cup of coffee, and wrote the dream journal up. Les Neurons then then pulled me down a ‘where are they now’ path about a one-time neighbor and co-worker. We were serving the Air Force together at Onizuka AFB in the mid-nineties last century. Before Onizuka was renamed to honor an astronaut killed in t he Challenger disaster, it was Sunnyvale Air Station. It went from Air Station to Air Force Base to Air Base after being renamed Onizuka.

That has nothing to do with my friend. Last which I heard of him, he’d gone to Turkey on an unaccompanied assignment, returned to Florida, divorced, and retired. He and I ‘connected’ on Facebook but little was ever there of him except for annual birthday greetings from people I don’t know. He’d quit responding to those a decade ago. Alive or dead, The Neurons wonder.

Today’s song, brought to you by The Neurons and their ‘where are they now’ tour, is “Cut Like A Knife” by Bryan Adams from 1983. This is because the tour subject loved this song. Midway through a party, he’d request it. If he’d imbibed enough and it was late enough, he’d sing and play air guitar to the song. Thinking of him, I think of that song, and cigarettes and beer.

Hope you enjoy it. Stay pos and test neg. I gather from reading digital news papiers that a growing body of folks eschews such quaint measures as masking, testing, etc. “It’s nothing,” you read more often online even as rates of flu and COVID climb. Certainly, local store experiences find my wife and I in a tiny minority when we’re masked while shopping. Oh well, live and learn.

Here’s the tunes. I need to wrap up morning activities, and head to the coffee house for writing activities. Hope your day is safe but enjoyable. Let’s go on a limb and say, productive, too, right?

Cheers

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Tempting Tuesday’s Theme Music

Misty and 25 degrees F. Graylight bangs in through the windows. Gray stillness enthralls the landscape.

The cold outside works with the moment to tempt my spirit to cozy up under my duvet and covers and just hang tight in that warm cocoon for just a little longer, perhaps until March. The mists rule beyond a few hundred feet, depriving me of any mountain views. As far as I know, the lip of the world’s end is just over on the next street.

This is Tuesday, December 13, 2022. Not much of a holiday vibe rings the air. Sure, there’s Christmas music on store speakers. Holiday music thrills the coffee house ambiance off and on through the hours. Stores have some holiday items on display but overall, it feels like the holiday launch was premature and already peaked. Now we’re just waiting for the finale and the curtain fall so we can applaud and go on to the next big thing. Perhaps this is only my sentiments. Not many people seem jolly. Anxious is more how I’d color them. Anxious and tired.

It’s going to be 46 F as a high today. Of course, these are the same weather geniuses telling me that it’s sunny out there. Maybe it’s same zip code, different worlds. Sunrise entered at 7:31 but it was already light throughout the house by then. It seems like daylight is already showing up earlier in the morning. The sun show will end shortly before dark.

Freedom is on my mind this morning. I often feel constrained. Most of this is my own doing as I set up schedules to write, eat, exercise, and relax. Cats (2) and wife (1) add to this constraint, by their needs and wants. So does house and car mischief and the business of residing in the U.S. So I chaff. Even so, I know others have it much, much worse. It’s a fascinating thing, a web of emotions, logic, and expectations. Not complaining, I protest, just stating it as I see it.

The Neurons noted my subject on their radar. Their response was adding “Freedom! ’90” by George Michaels to the morning mental music stream. The song is about freedom and reflects his feeling that he’d lost freedom because of his stardom. Cry me a sea, right? But many celebrities end up on Michaels’ path, lamenting what success has done to their privacy. It’s a tricky labyrinth to follow, but that’s seen in most endeavors attempted where success is found. Success pulls admiration and brings more pressure to succeed and be. It ends up like golden handcuffs.

Now, I knew this song when it came out in 1990. Heard it on the radio all the time. Knew of Michaels and his success. But I’d never seen the video associated with the song. Seeing it today, I read more about Michaels’ reflections and frustration with success and freedom.

I know, waa-ville. Okay, I accept that. Stay positive and test negative. I’m up for a cup of coffee now. The cats are with me. Not that they’ll be having coffee — I shudder to think of them hopped up on caffeine — I mean, woof — but they’ll accompany me as I leave the office, make the brew, etc.

Here’s the tune. Hope your Tuesday works out well. Cheers

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Monday’s Theme Music

Chilly and cloudy, Monday touched down. The 7:30 sunrise glowed over a damp land. Clouds dropped their bottoms, hiding the ridges so I don’t know if snow is up there. It’s 36 F now. The weather systems and complications of axis tilt and our position in respect to the sun has 40 F as the day’s high before we spin away from the sun again at 4:39 PM. Then our temperature will drop to minus 2 C. Despite the cloud blockade, they say it won’t rain or snow.

This is 12/12/2022. We’re approaching December’s midpoint. And we’re hurtling toward winter solstice again. Also coming into view is a bevy of holidays with all the traditions, partying, celebrating, and observances which accompanies the holidays like a rock star’s entourage.

I don’t know what The Neurons are thinking today. After I finished with my dream journal and then posted one dream recollection (a drecollect) online, The Neurons put “Elvira” as covered by the Oak Ridge Boys (1981) in the morning mental music stream. Why the heck was Elvira selected? Don’t know. I know the song and several more by them as they were on the radio, and we lived with the radio on in the car and at home during that period, first in Texas, and then on Okinawa. Also, we met up with my SIL during leave when we moved from Texas to overseas. She was a huge ORB fan at the time. Like her and many others, I enjoy Richard’s deep solo. (Yeah, I needed to look up his name.)

Sunshine is blasting through the southern windows. I think coffee will go swell with that. Stay pos, test neg. Here’s the boys with their tune. Cheers

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Sunday slipped into space with the weariness of an old ship being brought into port the final time. Rain and cold air heralded his arrival. Lackluster sunrise contributed its presence at 7:29 AM, or as the house floofs term it, midday. They’ve been up a few hours, pranking one another, running around, and asking me to play with them. “In a little while,” I slur with sleep-induced laziness.

Welcome to December 11, 2022.

The floofs have eaten and are now asleep. It’s 2 degrees C out but don’t worry, it’ll spunk up to 44 F before the sun slinks away at 4:39 PM. It’ll get down to 34 F tonight and up to 46 tomorrow before dropping to 25 tomorrow night. We’re expecting snow showers sometime during this up and down cycle.

I have “She’s Not There” in my morning mental music stream. It’s the Santana version. Yeah, a repeat, delivered by Les Neurons after I answered a survey about my recent replacement part shopping experience. I detailed it more in the post, “Replacement Part”. Anyway, I commented to the company that they’re not there on the weekends. Les Neurons shuffled from ‘you’ to ‘she’ faster than a floof can eat a treat. The Zombies did a great job with the Argent written song in 1964. I know it well and admired it. But Les Neurons keep playing Carlos Santana’s guitar from his group’s cover of it in 1977. Who am I to argue with my neurons? Might as well argue with the floofs or muses. Those are all arguments I will lose, along with any engaged with my spouse.

Stay positive, test negative, and if you fail, try again, right? I need some coffee. Here’s Santana and the song. Have a better one. Cheers

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Do your Saturday dance if you got one. Because, yes, it is Saturday.

It’s also December 10, 2022. If it’s your birthday or anniversary, happiest of them to you. Do your celebration dance. And if you’re having donuts or a special breakfast, do your celebration dance for that. I’m doing my celebration dance in honor of coffee. I got it, I’m drinking it, I’m dancing.

The windstorm ended shortly after dawn at 7:28 this morning. Rain stopped a little before, leaving large puddles across the back patio which greatly displeased Papi, the ginger floof prince. Clouds broke their clinch. Sunshine and blue sky are squinting out, asking, “Is it over?” Snow still dusts and crusts many ridges, tree lines, and peaks above our elevation. No snow down here toward the valley floor, though. We’re happy for the snow where it added to the pack or entertains others. Looking out, the windstorm didn’t take over any trees, fences, houses, roofs, etc. It was a lot of noise and a jolt of tension but it’s done. 37 F outside right now. 48 F is the anticipated high temperature. Sunset comes at 4:39 PM.

Without irony nor surprise, I can tell you that The Neurons picked up on the wind theme for the morning music. I heard them talking in my head, remembering wind songs. There is a chunk of them from the rock era. Some surprise was found when they pulled up Santana and “Song of the Wind”. Released on an album in 1972, I listened to the album pretty extensively. It has more of a jazz infusion that the harder rock or progressive rock that The Neurons usually cheer on, but back when I was sixteen and drawing and painting, I found this comfortable music as accompaniment. Later on, when I was living in the Philippines, I would listen to it and sip wine while I drew or read. So good memories come with this album. There is beautiful guitar work on it, of course, cuz it’s Carlos, but there are also impressive musicans who gravitated to him, and the interesting percussion work often featured in his songs.

Stay positive, test negative, and celebrate what you can. I’m celebrating more coffee. Here’s the song. Hope it helps move your day in the right ways. Cheers

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Friday’s Theme Music

My fellow Earthers. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. It’s also Friday, December 9, 2022.

I’ve been following a local online debate. A newly elected city councilor wants to change the time when the meeting begins, move it up an hour. He argues that will allow more people to attend. Well, let the debate begin.

  1. Moving the meeting an hour forward will allow more people to attend, those in favor say. Some moms have said, “Yes, I can attend at four, but I can’t attend at five.” The meeting goes for three hours.
  2. No, others say. “I’m still at work at four, or I’m driving home. I can attend at five but not at four.”

So each side uses the same argument. There were no complaints or calls for the meeting start time to change before the new councilor brought it up. Also, each side points out, the meetings are televised, streamed, and recorded. It feels like another variation of the daylight savings time argument, which can be reduced to, which is better for me? By extension, if it’s better for me, it’s better for all.

It’s foggy outside, Alexa tells me, and 34 F. She’s staked today’s high at 46 F. Says, expect rain. Except there’s no fog outside my windows. I can see distant mountains where snow is sprinkled across the green pine ridge. The winds are picking up. A drizzle has begun. The house floofs are not happy. They’re clambering for reparations because the sun isn’t giving them the shine they like. All reparations have been rejected — kibble, canned food, treats, and catnip. Attention is okay, they admit. They will take some scratching and stroking, but when I stop, they shout, more, more, more, like Billy Idol in fur, with less piercings.

As for the sun, it curved over the earth’s shape and into our valley at 7:28 this morning but remains sequestered behind sturdy clouds. Departure time for sunshine is 4:39 PM.

You can probably guess the song will be Billy Idol with “Rebel Yell” from 1983. Soon as that comparison went through my gray matter, The Neurons exclaimed, “Ooh, ‘Rebel Yell’, Billy Idol, yeah,” and began playing the song. Bourbon called Rebel Yell inspired the tune. I guess that’s a kind of scratching that satisfies some itches.

Speaking of scratches and itches, I’ll need some coffee. This is the first day of the rest of my life, you know. Stay positive and test negative. Here’s Billy with the music. I must admit that the video, with the musicians sneering, smirking, and posturing, gave me a laugh. Hope you enjoy it. Cheers

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Thursday’s Theme Music

Howdy, peeps, and merry Thursday. Have we got a Thursday in store for you. Sunshine and — well, not yet. No clear sunshine, not yet. Not with that plate of clouds guarding the valley sky. Which also means, um, no blue skies, either, not yet. Maybe later. Although today’s winter weather advisory has some skin in that outcome.

But it is 44 F under all that wintry sky. No signs of incipient precipitation, other than, you know, clouds. And today’s high will be 45 F, so we have that going for us.

Not bad, no. Others are enduring worse, yeah. We await the outcome of the weather advisory and hope for more snow up on the mountain’s packs. The sun stepped up at 7:27 this morning and will retire from valley duties at 4:38 PM. This is Thursday, December 8, 2022.

I enjoy posting the day’s sunrise and sunset every day. Tracking how those times change for my valley through the year’s action helps me solidly envision planet Earth’s tilt and rotation as it speeds around Sol. Sometimes I try looking closer to see myself, peering down at the racing planet surface as it flashes by about 1,000 miles an hour. But I’m usually in the house or in a car or the coffee shop, only emerging to check mail, do some work, or take walks. A small percentage of day is actually spent ‘outside’. When I am outside, I’ll often look up and wave, thinking that either ET civilizations or government satellites will spot me. Just being friendly, you know?

Canned Heat and their 1970 song, “Let’s Work Together” came up in the morning mental music stream. The Neurons heard me pleading with the muses yesterday while I was walking and glancing up for spy satellites and aliens, “Can’t you guys get organized and work together?” The muses seem to like rushing the writing room en masse and then throwing things at me from different angles to see what sticks. I type like mad, write notes, and make plans, but it’s all ugly intense. Hearing my plea caused The Neurons to dig into the music memory box and tug this song out. I used it as theme music back in 2018 but it feels like it’s time to use it again.

It’s also a good song for dealing with some issues of the day, like divided politics and climate change. Just saying.

Stay positive and test negative. I’m getting The Neurons a cuppa coffee. I’ll probably have one, too, and grab some for the muses as well.

Here we go. Enjoy the music. Merry Thursday. Cheers

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