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2
May 23

Weirdest disco ever

“It looks like a discotheque in here.”

I was at the dentist, for the I visited the dentist for the routine visit. I had a new, different, more emphatic dental hygienist this morning. She was plenty nice, and she has figured out not to ask too many questions at the wrong time, but she does not yet know how little I want someone’s hands in my face. That’s the part of the dentist’s office — the constantly remind myself not to clinch my hands too tight — visit that is a conscious effort for me.

In a way, it was a relief. With the original lady, who I guess I’ve visited for five years or so, always talked about TV. For the last month I’ve been more particular about flossing, and trying to recall if I’d been watching anything that might match what I know about her interests. We also talk about travel, the OG hygienist and I. Problem is, I’ve only visited two new places since I saw her last, and we don’t have a new trip planned just now. Shame on me.

Also, the dentist’s office has recently finished an expansion. This morning I was on the new side. Everyone there agreed they liked having the work finally done. Finally, no more loud, chaotic noises. No scraping, drilling or machine whining. I don’t think they found this as funny as I did.

For whatever reason, this little room had LED lights in small sockets in the ceiling. These are unrelated to the fluorescents and the work lights, and you only notice them when the Chair of Mild Discomfiture is in the recline position. The one to my right was a green light. The one to the left was an orang-yellow light. That one was blinking. It was flashing almost in time to the music, a pop channel on Sirius XM that, quite obviously, was a little too aggressive for this sort of work space.

A bit later the dentist stopped by. Nice fellow. Easy smile, always interested in what you’re interested in. Interested in you. Of course I see him for about eight minutes a year, so I wonder what it is like to know him at greater length, but he’s probably perfectly pleasant.

This is the first time, since I’ve been paying attention, that he hasn’t tried to upsell me on something. I guess that office expansion is off the books.

I guess he hasn’t noticed that light is on the fritz.

The rest of the day was pretty normal. Someone turned in a key. I did regular office stuff and talked the regular amount to the usual few people. And then, at 5:06, just as I was ready to leave, came in the emails of things to do later this week.

Sure, I could those emails until tomorrow, but then I’d wonder about them all night. Best to resolve them now. Which was an extra half hour. But, humble as it was, I did my part in those projects, and then to the house, where I sat in my recliner in my lovely bride’s home office and talked with her, and then went into the kitchen to talk with her some more. And then we had dinner, and now this.

The first Tuesday evening I’ve had at home since January. It’s always a jarring, pleasant transition. There will be a few more of those as the semester gets put to bed this week.

We haven’t had a Tuesday of tabs in a while, and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve been stockpiling them. These are things that are interesting, that I don’t need to keep, don’t always need to bookmark, but would like to memorialize. It’s the easiest spring cleaning I can do.

This Judas Priest, Roxette, Van Halen, Winger mash-up is the greatest number one single from the ’80s that never was

Here’s the deal: for his latest fiendishly-accessible creation, McClintock has smashed together Judas Priest’s The Sentinel and Screaming for Vengeance with Roxette’s power-pop hit The Look, and bolted on guitar solos from Winger (Seventeen) and Van Halen (Mean Street) for good measure.

The result? An ultra-hooky slice of ’80s-flavoured pop-rock that sounds like the greatest ’80s number one that never was.

Put enough hooky songs together, you’ll eventually find something amazing. Having a hard time picturing it? Press the play button.

There’s a lot of useful things to think about here, but, really, you find yourself thinking “Just tell me what to plant.” How to design an ever-blooming perennial garden:

Your goal for an ever-blooming perennial garden is to have a third each of early-blooming plants, mid-season bloomers, and late-season color. Within each of those categories, split the list into categories based on height (tall, medium, short). Finally, group your plants in each list by color.

People that like hummingbirds really like hummingbirds, and if that’s you, this is for you. Keep your yard safe from hummingbird predators:

Long, narrow gardens allow hummingbirds to approach flowers from either side while keeping an eye out for predators. Trellis-trained vertical vines and hanging baskets containing nectar flowers keep feeding hummingbirds away from ground predators. Thorny shrubs near the garden provide a safe space.

Hummingbirds will line their nests with soft plant fibers, such as lamb’s ear, the plumes of ornamental grasses, and fuzzy seed heads from clematis and milkweed. They’ll also use spider silk to bind and anchor their nests. If you notice webs in your yard during breeding season, keep an eye out for any entangled hummingbirds, and gently remove them.

One more set of yard tips for you … Use cheap LED and solar lights for pro-quality landscape lighting:

In daylight, my garden is a beacon of color and texture, but when the sun sets, the yard becomes a black hole. Delivery drivers struggle to see the house numbers or find the footpath, and I hold my phone flashlight awkwardly to avoid tripping as I take out the trash. Sure, lighting would help, but I didn’t have in-ground electricity already wired, and I’m not about to put it in. I was also skeptical of investing in solar lights, since all previous efforts had been cheap but ineffective, but I recently decided to give it another shot—and I was delighted with what I discovered.

I know what I’m not doing this weekend. 1,851km Zwift session rider says he lost 5% of his body weight and damaged his organs:

“Riding up to 1,800km, I was clearly being very damaged, so going on to 2,000km was looking unrealistic,” he says. “With the window by my side I could see my physical profile had been destroyed. My thighs had lost a lot of mass and [were] far narrower than at the beginning. Cupping my buttock, I could feel a huge amount of it had gone – it was no wonder why my saddle comfort had changed.”

That’s something like 1,150 miles in 60 hours. That guy does a lot of endurance efforts, and he’d planned and trained this one for months. Even still, he paid a real physical price. After he lists the impacts, he said he “didn’t do any strenuous exercise for a week after and my walking had a strange gait to it.”

A few hours at a time is plenty, thanks. There will be a bit of that tomorrow, outside even!

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1
May 23

Happy (cold) start to May

On March 1st I wrote “The final trick of winter is upon us.” I know this, because I just looked it up. I was writing about the first blooms of the year then. It is, I maintain, a part of a cruel meteorological and botanical pattern.

And here we are, two months later, and the high was … 52 degrees. Honestly, that temperature felt like a sympathetic sop. It felt much colder. Gray throughout, and 40 mile per hour wind gusts.

May 1st. What a joke.

Enough grousing. Let’s get to the site’s most popular weekly feature, the Monday look at the cats. Phoebe, as I write this, is sleeping on a big, comfy blanket. But the other day, she was sitting in the morning sun. She seems to be willing me to take her toys out of that basket, but it looked artistic, to me.

Poseidon, as usual, is judging everything.

So the cats are doing great, but they, too, would like it to be a little warmer, even though they’re unburdened by their inability to read a calendar.

I saw this on a classroom white board. I don’t know what the purpose of the exercise was, or why the notes stayed on the board …

… but it is kind of fun to try to make sense of it all. Whatever it was, I was encouraged to see several variations of being supportive got listed.

Also, the colors tell some other story, I’m sure.

I had a ride Friday night, and then another on Saturday. Part of the Saturday ride was spent in virtual Scotland. This is a short, stiff stage called City and the Sgurr. Sgurr, I just learned, is Gaelic for “high sharp-pointed hill.” I believe it.

And then there was the fever dream that is part of the Neokyo course. What is that thing?

I could not bring myself to get in the saddle yesterday. The sofa was too comfortable, basically. But I did get in 27 miles this afternoon.

And since we just wrapped up another month, let’s check on the mileage chart. The purple line is what I’ve done.

That horizontal part marks the two weeks A.) we were out of town, and B.) I was fighting off a cold. So a light March — despite five consecutive days of pedaling — but I’m still ahead of all of my humble little projections.

This isn’t a lot of mileage, not really, but it’s a lot to me.

We return to the Re-Listening project, and we return to the summer of 1998. The Spice Girls became a foursome, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston started dating, Mulan was released, and so was Win 98. But I was listening to Shawn Mullins. “Soul’s Core,” a bit overwrought as a title, is the fourth studio album. (The title stems from a lyric which we’ll get to in a moment.) This is the one that had “Lullaby,” which you probably liked, until you didn’t. It made it to the top of the Adult Top 40 chart and peaked at ninth on the Modern Rock chart. Shimmer also cracked the top 30 on the Adult Top 40. The albums went platinum.

Here’s the lead-off track, with an entirely different instrumentation.

I used a live version of “Anchored in You” because I really wanted to use the live version of “Gulf of Mexico.” I wanted to see if he’s still singing it as Gu’f.

He does, in places.

There are two conditions where Shawn Mullins absolutely excels. One is in a big harmony, which will come up in a future installment of the Re-Listening project, and the other is when he’s just playing his guitar. The guy figured out the singer-songwriter thing and he’s sticking with it.

But that song is a good illustration of something said to me in passing once. I wish I could remember who it was, but it was obviously someone that I respected a bit. He found Shawn Mullins pretentious, and I found that deflating. And then I think about that lyric there, “I hear a voice from my soul’s core saying freedom’s just a metaphor you got nowhere to go … ” and I get it. There is a something there that’s a bit much. But we sometimes glaze over the awkward for the good. This one is really, really good, even if you don’t know the predictably tragic tale of Richard Brautigan.

He’s writing a lot of character studies, but he’s doing so without a larger thread. It’s both a shame and a relief.

Here’s a fun game to play with your friends. Ask them what musical characters they want to have sequels or updates on. They’re probably not going to understand, so make up something about Jack and Diane. Whatever happened to those two crazy kids? Shouldn’t we have another look in on them? Your friends will understand, and then Jack and Diane are disqualified from the game.

I want to know what became of this character. And, also, how in the world he was able to cram so much color in a three-minute song.

For a while, this CD was a vocal warm up. I would drive into the studio in the very, very dark pre-dawn hours and hum and sing along to a few of these songs. It was a good way to get the instrument working at 3:00 a.m., and, I always hoped, it would lower my voice just a tiny bit. You want your voice to sound authoritative in your first live hit at 4:30. That was the idea, any way.

If you’re now wondering what became of him, Shawn Mullins is another one of those guys who got his fame accidentally, who isn’t in it for stardom.

But, in 2018, to mark the 20th anniversary of his major label debut, he re-released the record with new musical arrangements. That was his most recent studio album. Mullins is doing some limited shows this summer. I’ve seen him a few times over the years. I once took a date to see his show in Atlanta. It was a good show, and everyone had a nice time, even if he wasn’t really her taste.

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26
Apr 23

These stories, let me tell you …

I dropped my car off at the mechanic this evening, but let me back up. A weekend or two ago, on a day when it was actually, you know, warm in April like Mother Nature was paying attention to the calendar, the A/C in my car was not … what’s the word I want here … conditioning the air. Oh, it’d blow and blow, but it could not cool and cool.

So, freon, I figured. Then the weather turned wimpy again and I promptly forgot about the problem. But this week I remembered! Not because it was warm, I just remembered. So I googled. The place I get my oil changed does air recharging. I drove there Tuesday morning, to inquire about their services. The guy told me, in some detail, that they don’t do that anymore. Which is odd because it is right there, on the website.

I drove to our local mechanic. They’re about two miles away, but the trip takes forever because of the bad drivers and the guy who had clearly never towed a boat before. And also the geese and their goslings that were waddling about. You put a roundabout near a pond and they just think they run the place. And the guy with the boat trailer doesn’t know how to make a gentle curve to his left.

Finally I made it to the mechanic. Having diagnosed the problem myself, professional that I am, I simply asked the guy when we could get the car into their rotation. Let’s make this convenient for everyone, I said. He was more than happy to make that happen, but only after he mentally rebuilt an air conditioning system aloud there at the desk.

We’re gonna drain it. And then fill it. And then we’ll inject it with dye. And then see if there are leaks. It went on like this for some time.

Great. Here’s the thing: when I can I drop it off? I just want to get it in and out as quickly as possible, so as to not inconvenience my wife.

So we resolved to drop it off Wednesday night. And now I have no car until tomorrow, probably.

And I told you that because it was either the car story, or the apple story. My lovely bride is thoughtful enough to pick up apples for me at the grocery store. Last year I decided the Cosmic Crisp was the best offering in the produce section, and now they are always in the fruit crisper.

She gets them every week. Five a week. I have one for each day at the office. Peanut butter sandwich and an apple, that’s me.

Except, this week — and believe me, this is the short version of the story — I didn’t pack a lunch yesterday, so I did not eat an apple. (Sometimes a guy just wants Chipotle.) That means I had an extra apple.

And today I ate two apples.

Neither of these stories are good, I am aware.

Hey! Look! A new banner! Now I just have to go back in time and update a lot of graphics.

Anyway, after we dropped off the car, I went on a bike ride on Zwift. It was just warm enough to go outside, but I’m still on this self-imposed Zwift mission.

Today it was Muir and the Mountain, a 24 mile ride in Watopia. There are … gulp … dinosaurs.

I wonder how programmed or how free formed these things are. I’m sure there are better industry terms. Maybe I should ask one of the game designers at work. All of these background creatures are moving, but does everyone see the same pterodactyl in the same curve? Does that big plant eater always sit right there, or can it choose another tree?

At one point, there’s a tyrannosaurus rex, or something of that sort, striding alongside the road. But what if he veered to the right, leaned over and took a snap at me?

This route has the Epic KOM, no longer the biggest mountain in the game, but plenty stiff. It’s 5.9 miles of climbing, where you gain 1,364 feet. When you get to the top, there’s an ibex. On some routes that feature the Epic KOM, you are immediately gifted an extra climb. They call it a “bonus climb,” but this is a horrible name. I’d been going slowly enough, but after a half hour pointed upward, now I have to go uphill for another three-quarters of a mile? And the gradient pitches up to average 14 percent?

That’s pretty steep, and it’s a horrible little climb.

Strava tells me I’ve gone up the bonus climb four times. I was slow today everywhere, this was my third slowest time.

The 2023 Zwift route tracker 101 routes down, 28 to go.

Back to the Re-Listening project, where we can now catch up … until we are behind again. If you’ve forgotten: I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order that I acquired them. These aren’t reviews, but a glance back and a happy glimpse of memory. This is an excuse to fill the page with words and drop in some YouTube embeds. It’s about whimsy, as most music should be.

It is guilty pleasure time. Even at the time it seemed like a guilty pleasure. And it does now, too. But I still like it. Today we’re discussing Train’s debut album. (They’d released it independently in 1996, but that doesn’t count here.) We’re in 1998 here, I bought this in the late spring, probably. I saw them at a small venue that summer. They were still something of a California act at the time, so most of the people at that particular show didn’t know them yet, but that changed soon enough. They produced this record for pennies, but it went platinum on the strength of the three singles that you’re currently trying to banish from your head.

This is was always one of my favorite songs on the disc.

I saw them in concert several other times. And I caught a recorded show on TV early during the stay-at-home part of Covid. They never grew out of the live party band vibe. Never needed to. They were always fun in the nineties and in the oughts. I wonder if they’ll ever change that up as they, and their devoted fans, age.

Speaking of devoted fans. I don’t remember who all the people were, but I was in a car with a college buddy and we were driving two girls he knew from here to there and Widespread Panic came on the radio and she scoffed at that. Widespread — she pronounced with the air of haughtiness that can only be mustered by someone who clearly knows what they’re talking about — had sold out. They were not, she said, like Train.

I thought my buddy, a proper musical snob, was going to crash the car. I was driving the car.

For a debut album, this always struck me as well produced, and rich with deep cuts.

And here’s their end-of-the-night ballad.

One of the best things about listening to the old CDs are the hidden tracks. Do I remember which discs have them? (Usually.) Do I remember how many? (Mostly.) Do I remember what the songs will be? (Almost always.) What will I do to fill the time before they begin playing? I usually fast forward. And I wonder what brought about this little element of music. I wonder how long they pondered over the circumstances and the timing. And I wonder if anyone, back then, actually overlooked the hidden tracks. Surely someone did.

Egg on their face, no?

There are two hidden tracks on this CD. I don’t know why this didn’t get put right up front.

A few years after this CD came out I ran into these guys in a pancake shop one morning. They were playing a set of weekend gigs in town and they were … almost running on their own power that morning. For some reason I have forever associated how they looked that day with how they might have recorded this second hidden track.

Train has become one of those bands with a rotating set of players. Pat Monahan, the lead singer, remains the only constant. But, the band has 11 studio albums (I do not have them all — should I?) and three Grammy awards. And they’re touring right now, they have 50 more dates in the United States this year.

Next in the Re-Listening project, we’ll go from a California pop-rock band to a Georgia singer-songwriter.

It all makes sense if you were listening to the radio in 1998

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21
Apr 23

The officially recognized beginning of spring

It has been cold and damp all day. Mid-fifties and wet socks are no way to live, but that’s how we’ll approach the last week of April. The rest of the weekend’s forecast doesn’t look much better. At least next week the sun returns which, hey, April.

It might have hit 55 degrees this morning, in the pre-dawn hours. So, this year, my seven-year-long hypothesis, the Little-500-marks-the-beginning-of-spring hypothesis, has not held.

The long-range forecast suggests we’ll maybe hit 70 degrees … sometime before the first week of May is over. Maybe.

This is our chance to catch up with the Re-Listening project. Catch up, that is, until the next CD is over. Which means we might be behind again by Tuesday. Such is the pace of things, when you’re listening to old CDs in the car. I’m not sure how I run through whole albums so quickly, I will probably run out of music before I figure that out, but 40-or-so minutes goes fast, considering the small amount of road I cover.

Anyway. We’re cruising down memory lane. It is the summer of 1998, the summer of Natalie Merchant. “Ophelia” was her second studio album, her only one to crack the top 10 on the Billboard 200, where it settled in at number eight. It went platinum in the U.S., largely on the strength of “Kind & Generous” which broke into the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay Chart.

That’s the one you remember. The first track, the title track, is a total mood setter.

For some reason it is easy to remember the talent that Natalie Merchant put into all of her work. She left the regular artist route to do other things, but this record is full of examples of a quality of work that her fans appreciate.

And, in the interests of time, I’m skipping over the great wah wah guitars of “Frozen Charlotte” and the piano ballads like “My Skin.” Mostly just to get to the last song, a cover of “When They Ring Those Golden Bells.” It’s a popular and important gospel and bluegrass song from 1887, written by a French immigrant, a man who fought in the Civil War, the American-Mexican War and, for something even more intense, was a clown and a circus leader.

Dolly Parton has covered it. Jerry Lee Lewis has covered it. But this duet between Natalie Merchant and Karen Peris is something to behold.

Like so many things that take place when you’re the age I was when this CD came out, I didn’t have the ability or insight or patience to fully appreciate this album. But what I missed out for in 1998 I enjoy more today. Ophelia is always a fine listen.

(Natalie Merchant has released a new album this year, her first in six long years. (Update: I had no idea she’d gone through this terrifying surgery that almost robbed her of her voice.) And she’s touring this summer in support of that album — 37 dates in the U.S. and Europe between now and November.)

Back then, though, I wanted something more like what came out that fall, when Pearl Jam released “Live on Two Legs.” It’s a series of live recordings from their summer tour. It debuted at number 15, and went platinum. It’s a quality of recordings far superior to most any bootleg you might capture. But the band was a bit more restrained by this point — Eddie Vedder was 34, after all, and the rest of the band was right there, too. One review called it a “thank you” to fans. To me, today, it feels more like a valentine to Pearl Jam’s part of grunge. But in 1998, no one thought in that way just yet.

There’s more to the timing in retrospect. This was three years after the band revolted, almost alone, against the Ticketmaster monopoly. That stand effectively clipped their wings in the United States from 1995 to 1998. It’s also two years before the tragedy at the Roskilde Festival. Less important than all of that, the musical landscape changed underfoot.

It is technically proficient for the genre, and a good ride for fans. And, clearly, they don’t want this embedded.

If you play that on YouTube, though, you can hear the full album. It’s worth hearing, even if you’re familiar with the catalog, though there’s not a lot new there. The last time I saw them was a few months after Roskilde. Grown men were crying; it was a bit much. It was in that period of the official bootlegs, and I have a copy of that 2000 show somewhere in this collection.

Pearl Jam, as a band, are still on tour. They have a mini schedule for late this summer. Eddie Vedder is doing a few solo shows, too.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shiver some more.

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20
Apr 23

Spring begins here tomorrow

I visited Chick-fil-A drive-through for lunch yesterday. The local Chick-fil-A now has multiple touch points along the drive-through path. It eats up half of their small parking lot, but they are incentivizing drive-through customers if you’re using their app. We use the app for our regular Saturday lunch run.

It’s hopping at noon on Saturdays, of course, so you roll down the window and talk to three people along the way. First there’s the person getting the order. Then there’s the first merge point, three lanes to two, and the a second person who is controlling the order of traffic. Someone else confirms the order, usually after the second merge point which pulls the two lanes into one line, just before you reach the window. Three or four crew members in that little space, and then two people outside of the window that actually hand you your food. On Saturdays, we briefly interact with four people to get our sandwiches; who knows how many people are in the back doing the actual food work.

The point of having all of those people isn’t to speed up the process, but to control the flow. Your wait isn’t at the window, but in the line, with the slow illusion of progress via motion. The other virtue of the setup is that they can put people outside, or pull them in, based on customer rush.

Take yesterday, which is the point of mentioning this anyway. The early lunch crowd on a Wednesday isn’t particularly busy, so I only talked with two people between entering the parking lot, and making the window.

At the window, a guy was leaning out, waiting for me. Big smile on his face. Gregarious, ready to have a chat. (It stands out here.) My food wasn’t ready he said, so he leaned into the little easy chitchat. He loved this, and he leaned in by leaning out of the window. He asked me how my day was and complimented my pocket square.

He wasn’t prepared for what happened next. Instead of having to ask me two or four easy throwaway questions, I started asking questions of him. You could tell this doesn’t happen to him a lot in that job. We talked about the weather and naps and his other job. He works for DoorDash, and I wanted to know if he got to meet a lot of people that way. I asked him if they took care of him there, and how far he drove. And then my food was ready, in my car and I was on my way.

I’d like to think that he somehow took the exchange forward, and was even more enthusiastic with the next several guests.

I once again find myself behind in the Re-Listening project. Somehow a few days go by, and a few more CDs get played and now you have to power through whatever I write about it all here. The point of the exercise being to listen to all of my old CDs, in the order that I acquired them. The secondary point being to write about them here. They aren’t reviews, or the dreaded re-reviews, just an excuse to go down memory lane, and to post a few videos for you.

Which brings us to the only reason most people bought this particular album in the mid 90s.

New Zealand’s OMC released this, their only record, in 1996. I got it as a freebie in 1998. It made it to number 40 on the Billboard 200. On the strength of this song, and three other singles you probably don’t recall, it was certified gold.

How do things catch on half a world away, I wonder. It’d be easier today, sure, but getting airplay from around the globe … it had to be MTV. Whatever it was, the critics liked it.

There is a certain infectiousness to the songs. This was the second single.

This is the third single, and the track that sticks with me whenever I listen to this CD, which is admittedly rare. This is also the first track you hear if you play the whole album and, I like to think, this is why critics struggled to label the record. In 1996, this was a unique collection of sounds.

I bet you never thought of New Zealand hip hop, Urban Pasifika is is called, as influencing the global sound — and that’s OK, I hadn’t put that together before now, either — but here we are, hearing the strains of OMC in other people’s work, and OMC itself enjoying a resurgence on TikTok of all places.

OMC only produced the one record, mostly because of record label disputes. Pauly Fuemana was diagnosed with a rare neurological disorder and died in 2010, just 40 years old.

Which brings us to New American Shame. This was released in March of 1999. Didn’t like it then, and I never, ever listened to it. I am so unfamiliar with it that when the first song began in my CD player — it’s always a question of what comes next in the Re-Listening project — I wasn’t sure what AC/DC ripoff I had picked up somewhere. Kiss without the appeal. Buckcherry without the adhesive backing removed. (There’s nothing to stick to here, is what I’m saying.) It’s a power slop dirty rock ‘n’ roll sound that doesn’t appeal to me, with rote mixing and mastering on the production side. This is the first track, which was remixed when the band signed a major label deal, and released as a single. It hit 35 on the Mainstream Rock Chart and, unless this was your genre, I’d be surprised if you’ve ever heard it.

The rest of the record sounds a lot like that. It has its place, I guess. It’s all the sort of thing you’d heard from the annoying pontoon boat just upstream that ruins your day.

I don’t want to play any more of it here, for fear of that very thing.