Tag: Status Quo

Worth Talking About

The Nation featured a strong article about climate change and civilization collapse. The article, “We Are Witnessing the First Stage’s of Civilization’s Collapse”, is written by Michael T. Klare. They base their analysis and insights on Jared Diamond’s 2005 bestseller, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Many, many people around the world, including US citizens, have firsthand experienced with a weather disaster or two in 2023. The article’s greater point is how so many leaders are willfully ignoring what’s happening, continuing with traditional methodology of energy and human activities as though all of this will go away. Mr. Klare points out that it’s not going away; it’s getting worse. The Canadian wildfires are a blazing example:

“The fires in Canada: As of August 2, months after they first erupted into flame, there were still 225 major uncontrolled wildfires and another 430 under some degree of control but still burning across the country. At one point, the figure was more than 1,000 fires! To date, they have burned some 32.4 million acres of Canadian woodland, or 50,625 square miles—an area the size of the state of Alabama. Such staggering fires, largely attributed to the effects of climate change, have destroyed hundreds of homes and other structures, while sending particle-laden smoke across Canadian and American cities—at one point turning New York’s skies orange. In the process, record amounts of carbon dioxide were dispatched into the atmosphere, only increasing the pace of global warming and its destructive impacts.”

Mr. Klare goes on to with information about the megadrought coating the United States, citing stats that show 99% of that region suffers drought, and it’s growing. Michael Klare cites flooding in China in 2023 and its resulting damages. The article was probably prepared for publication before Hawaii’s recent fiery mega-disaster and the first tropical storm in over eighty years to strike California.

This is an article worth reading for a problem that needs serious action. Unfortunately, political divisiveness and fervent capitalism will probably undermine any united, focused action to cope with these changes. We as a civilization are choosing to fail. Imagine that; imagine being a business who decides they don’t want to grow or make money, or a sports team who decides that losing is best. For that’s what we are, people and nations who are choosing to accept disaster and fail. The status quo will continue until we fade away, like the people of Bonita Pueblo, the Mayans, and the Viking settlements of Greenland.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Wednesday has broken. Feb. 8, 2023 has arrived on the calendar’s red carpet. Sunshine splashes through all the southern and eastern windowpanes. Cats find floor beams. The weather advisors say it’s 36 degrees F in my Ashlandia slice, sunny with few clouds, and a high of 56 degrees F on the plate. Sunrise cracked the night at 7:16 this morning while sunset is out over 5:34 PM. That’s enough daylight to lift my spirits and unplug me from that SAD cycling.

Springish clues turn my head to yard clean up and prep. Bushes and trees to be pruned and tidied, more leaves to be cleared from the yard. Want the house painted this year, too. Hiring folks for that.

Breakfast — oats with walnuts and raisins, flavored by cinnamon — has been consumed, cats attended three or four times. Half a cup of coffee drunk, black, no sugar.

My hospice friend is no longer on hospice. He finished the journey, eighty years old. On the other hand, Mom keeps fighting on, delivering news that she has ‘abdominal cocoon syndrome’. Fascinating what happens in our bodies.

I have a song in mind today from 1968, “Pictures of Matchstick Men” by Status Quo. It’s a classic in the sense that it brings home that sixties psychedelic sound. Hope you give it a listen to see if you know it, remember it, like it.

To the clouds and beyond. Stay positive. Make this day yours to remember. More coffee, please. Cheers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxc3V6-swfg

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Crossroads

Looking out

And up

Listening

Thinking

Speaking

And singing

Going to weddings

Graduating school

Walking the dog

Meeting friends

And lovers

Embarking on trips

Returning home

Cooking meals

Cleaning the house

And car

Speaking on phones

Disconnecting

Eating food

Drinking coffee

Or tea

Trying to decide

What to do

Where to go

What to say

Or wear

Wondering how to respond

Questioning

When to surrender

Make a stand

Or walk away

It’s such a crossroads

This day

This time

This moment

And year

Here comes another

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Friday’s Theme Music

The day has pivoted, the world has turned, the calendar page is flipped over to Friday, April 8, 2022. Our weather has turned, too, dropping about twenty degrees. The sky is a study in conflict of blue, white, and gray. But, hoo-rah, we’ll have some rain showers today.

It’s 53 degrees F out there, according to my desk weather station. A high of about sixty is guessed at. Quite windy right now, as the air moves the trees and drives the cats back into the house. Sunrise was at 6:42 AM. Sundown will fall about 7:44 PM.

The neurons pulled a song out of 1973 and stuffed it into the morning mental music stream. It’s apparently related to the words, ‘the night time is the right time’. From that grew the Status Quo song, “Caroline”. If you’re not familiar with it, this is a rocker, children. Sadly, I don’t think I’ve heard it played anywhere for about thirty years. Had the album on vinyl but didn’t replace it on CD. Sad face. Nice version played during Live Aid 85. Like the addition of the piano, which the original song lacked.

Stay positive, test negative, say it with me. Mask as needed, vax as needed. Here’s the music. Guess where I’m going now? If you said the bathroom, you’re wrong. I’m heading for the coffee. Cheers

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Mother, May I? Yes, you may.

Yes, it’s May 1, 2021, a Saturday, for official transcripts. 2021’s fifth month has leaped onto our backs, the preceding four months going by on express rails. Sunanigins began in Ashland at 0607 and will cease at 2010.

We were over on Oregon’s coast, admiring the Pacific Ocean, for the last several days. An enchanting host, the Pacific gurgled with bright sunshine and flirted with fog. I love hearing the waves booming over the rocks with great explosive thuds that send shivers through the earth. Amazing.

Back in Ashland, the weather service claims the the days have been sunny and in the eighties in Ashland. If so, the weather slipped us a change up. April showers are falling, though it’s May. I’m for it; give us more rain, please. We’ve already had reports of wildfires. Fire services scrambled and put them all out, but it does give the day an edge to read about this.

Musically, I’m humming the song, “Down Down” by Status Quo (1974). It’s a rockin’ song. Driven by that line, “You’ll be back to find your way, again, again, again, again” (don’t know how many times they say again there), I was thinking, okay, back to writing. You took three days off. Need to get back to it. That’s sort of a party trick for writers, to find your way back, again, again, again, again, etc. That’s why the song occupies my mind space this morning.

Stay positive, test negative, wear a mask, and get the vax. That is all.

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Friday’s Theme Music

6:30 A.M., Friday morning, September 4, 2020.

I did not want to get up. Still sifting dreams, I thought I was due to stay in bed for at least another hour. I’d been up late into the morning, sucking up my latest TV addition, “Mr Inbetween”. An Aussie show, I’m watching it on Hulu. I love his daughter, Britt. Played by Chika Yasumura, she steals whatever scene she’s in.

So it kept me up and awake, and I didn’t want to get up. But the cats, particularly Tucker (my long-hair black and white big bruiser) (he’s a blokey-bloke) and Papi, the young ginger blade, thought the day required my attention. After a bit of failed negotiations and stalling tactics, I yielded, telling them and myself, “Here we go.”

Well, here we go led to the chorus, “Here we go, rocking all over the world,” out of the 1975 John Fogerty song, “Rockin’ All Over the World”. When I thought about it, though, I began remembering Status Quo playing at Live Aid 85.

For Fogerty’s release in ’75, I was a few months out of military tech school, newly married, and stationed at Wright-Pat AFB in Ohio. Ten years later, when Status Quo played the song at Live Aid 85, I was living in a tent city outside Cairo, Egypt, playing war games. Still married, though, but my wife was staying with her family. I believe I dimly recall seeing Status Quo’s Live Aid version while I was heading home, during a fuel stop at Torrejon Air Base in Spain. We had time to kill, so we walked around the exchange to see what was new and get an AAFES burger.

So this simple song is today’s theme music, brought to you by stubborn cats and nostalgia. I decided to go with Status Quo’s Live Aid version because I like the crowd’s energy.

Hope you enjoy it. I know I used it before, if memory serves (but it doesn’t always serve, does it?), but I’m using it again. Remember to wear your mask. Cheers

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Thursday’s Theme Music

An old familiar song entered my head yesterday as I did yard work. Written by John Fogerty, the Status Quo cover of “Rockin’ All Over the World” (1977?) kept me coming.

The mind introduced the song toward the yard work’s beginning. Addressing an issue that I had to do, I told myself, “Here we go.” That invited the song’s refrain, “Here we go, here we go,” in. Once invited in, like a vampire, it can do whatever it was; I’d let it in.

It’s a simple rock song, upbeat and happy, a throwback to simpler times. Your impression of simpler times will vary according to your mileage and mindset, but it works for me.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Another blogger posted about taking his son to see Lynyrd Skynyrd and Status Quo in concert. I thought that’d be a rockin’ thing for a father and son to do together, and he wrote about it in his usual charming and humorous, slightly weary way. Skynyrd was part of my formulative southern rock education. I came across Status Quo much later, hearing quite a bit of them when I lived in Germany for a few years and criss-crossed Europe on different assignments. I don’t recall hearing much of them in America. It helped, I guess, that I had Brit friends who were big Status Quo fans for a while.

Thinking of Status Quo, I began streaming “Beginning of the End” (2007). It’s a regular walking tune for me. Lyrics like, “Is this the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. The way you got me goin’ tells me I don’t know. I don’t understand any song that you are singin’. The jury’s out, we’re gonna let you know.” They play crisply against a hard rock, fast moving beat. Good video to my eye. The London Eye fascinates me, and the band looks like they’re enjoying themselves, like proper rockers should.

Hope you enjoy the tune.

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