Welcome to Catober, where we daily highlight the kitties, because once a week isn’t enough. They also get their own posts in October, because they slipped that into their contract when we weren’t looking. So, I’ll take turns highlighting each cat. Tomorrow we’ll have some amazing Phoebe cuteness. You can see the full collection of lovely cat poses right here.
I’m mid-thigh in grading things. Fortunately not hip deep, and only that deep because I stayed up far too late — even for me — grading stuff. And so today I graded stuff. Tonight, I will grade other things.
At this rate I’ll be grading things all day and night tomorrow. I believe I have it paced out so I can finish grading on Thursday. Just in time for this weekend’s stuff to start rolling in for grading next week …
Whoever set this schedule up deserves a talking to. Me, it was me. I deserve a talking to.
Here’s a video I shot on yesterday’s bike ride. There are a lot of fields turning a beautiful, bright yellow just now. I might have caught these just a few minutes too late in the evening for the color to really pop. Still lovely in their own way.
Since it is the beginning of the month, we should check in on the mileage. September was a good month, my best September ever, and it turned into the fourth most miles in any one month, be they ever so humble. And we can see the progression through the first nine months of the year on this neat little chart.
The blue line is this year, the red one is last year, and the steady green one is a simple what if projection of doing 10 miles per day. I’ve been trailing behind that, sadly, since mid July. Now I’m making progress and I’ll be back over the green line before you read this.
And there are some humble, yet cool-to-me milestones coming up on the bike. You’ll be underwhelmed.
I’ll be whelmed.
That’ll be the extent of it.
Let’s get back to the Re-Listening project for a brief update. This is the one where I’m listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order in which I acquired them. At some point, I figured I could write about it to pad out the site with a bit of content — share some videos and the like, but these aren’t reviews, because no one cares. So let’s get to it, so I can get caught up. (I’m only behind by three albums, I think.)
We’ll return to 2006 or so, when I picked up a copy of Live’s 1999 record, “The Distance to Here.” It was the band’s fifth studio album, it went platinum in a month, debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 chart, topped the charts in three other countries, and settled into the top 10 in a half dozen more. They promoted three singles from the record, all which became at least moderately successful on the Alternative Airplay chart. But it never really worked for me. This is the last Live album I bought, and by the time Ed Kowalczyk left the band a decade later, I had no idea.
But I have two things here. This works a whole lot better now, for me, than it did back then. It could be a small doses record at the very least. And one or two of these tunes could be sticky — which is sometimes good and sometimes “get out of my head.”
The other thought was centered around this show at a concert. I saw the band at a festival when they were touring on this record. They closed their set with this song, and they were working out the instrumentation so that, one-by-one, the band slipped away off the darkened stage. Then there was only Kowalczyk, and the whole sweaty crowd was singing along and he stopped strumming his guitar, they kept singing, and he waved and walked off. It was better than this version, which came about some years later, but similar.
Kowalczyk rejoined the band after a few years away. And then he fired the band. They were all, as I recall, southeastern Pennsylvania high school classmates who got their break soon after, and became a 10-years-later overnight success. And now, they’re taking turns suing each other or some such. Kowalczyk is touring with the name, but all new band mates. They just came off the road from a midwestern swing last week.
In the next installation of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try out a pretty decent tribute album I’d entirely forgotten about — which is entirely the point.
And now, back to grading. And next for you, more Catober!
I have been asked by the house’s executives to get right to the important part of the day’s activity, which is, of course, the most popular feature on the site. So we will go directly to checking in on the kitties.
Phoebe is usually the driver of this, because she knows she is very photogenic. Just sitting on the landing of the stairs, look at those pretty eyes.
She does not want to share the mail, however. Sometimes she gets mail, but she’s convinced all of it is hers. She sits on it.
Oh, sure, she lets us have the bills, but she keeps the bulk mail, magazines and the like. She’s not supposed to be on the counter, but our cats are jailhouse lawyers, and they’ve figured out that if you’re sitting on a bank mailer, you’re not sitting on the countertop.
Poseidon is no better about countertops. And here he is, different day, same counter, sleeping on a box full of produce.
He’s waiting to see what’s inside. He loves trying to chew on some of our veggies. This summer he discovered corn stalks. Corn stalks are bad for cats, so we have to hide them. And we have to hide them when he’s not paying attention, because he remembers they’re in the fridge, or stored away here or there. He remembers long after they’re gone. He’s probably dreaming about corn there.
And when there is no corn, he might switch between pouting about it, and trying to charm you into getting some for him.
But we, of course, tell him no. He’s never one not to try, though. He’s a persistent little so and so.
The cats, you see, are doing well, and they thank you for your interest.
I had a nice cool swim this afternoon. It was a 1,720 yard swim. They’re getting a little faster of late, but there’s only so much improvement of which I am capable of. I know it, because I can still shave chunks of time off in pretty decent increments. Probably it’s the cooler water.
Also, I’m swimming enough to know when my arms will stop protesting and just do the work. And I’m close to knowing lap lengths just by feel.
But to demonstrate my ability: this is the summer where I’ve finally started to swim in a straight line.
More or less.
Let us return to the Re-Listening project. Here, I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, and I’m playing them in the order of their acquisition. I’m also writing about them here, because we need the content. These aren’t reviews, because they’d be woefully out of date and I’m no critic. They are, however, sometimes full of memories, and a good excuse to post a few videos. These songs are from 2003, from an album I got in 2006 or so, of the overnight success, Howie Day, who was, in fact, a seven-year overnight success.
“Stop All the World Now” was the second album and, the major label debut, for Day. Critically, it got a lukewarm reception, but it went platinum in 18 or 19 months, and the third single, “Collide,” which you heard on the radio and in TV and movies a lot, was certified gold. And, two-plus decades later, it holds up as a pop-rock record.
And it’s full of hum-along songs, tunes you pick up quickly on the first or second listen and want to come back for a few more times. This is the fifth track on the album, and it fits that bill with an instrumentation that feels simultaneously earthly and ethereal, which seems a feat.
It is also of it’s time. But, there’s a small window on the musical calendar where rock was in an ebb and alt was disappearing and singer-song writers with some indie-pop sensibilities could fill some airspace and some evenings. I don’t really know what that means, except that I do, and it also sounds right.
This was the first single from that record, the first time a broader audience heard him. It was August 2003, and this sounds like that. I don’t remember the first time I heard that song, but I do remember the work I was doing late that summer.
I was doing interviews and producing a documentary on an upcoming tax referendum. (The tax went to a statewide special ballot vote that September, but this is Alabama and so it didn’t just fail, but failed spectacularly. The director of the state Board of Education was in tears on TV that night.) Also, at about that same time I was busy covering Roy Moore being removed from the bench as Alabama’s Supreme Court Chief Justice. Being Alabama, he got another shot at the bench, largely on the same religious rhetoric that got him kicked off the first time.
Probably I picked up on Howie Day a little bit after that. Sharp-eared listeners might have found him on the “I Am Sam” soundtrack, which we featured here a few weeks ago. He covered “Help!”
This will be quick, because I am behind. (Watch this now become a 3,000 word, two-hour post.) It was a lovely day, foggy this morning, but then the low clouds turned into mist and it all rolled out just before noon. The mercury got to 81, found that this was an appropriate effort for mid-September, and stared there. It was all delightful.
Two news items piqued my interest today. If you get two a day, you’re probably working too hard at it. If you get more than two a day, you’re probably living in a decade-long election cycle and you should put down the phone, close the computer, and walk away. So I stopped at two.
This first one, simply because I came up with a slogan that should appeal to two opposed elements of modern society, Republicans who think their pets are at risk from their neighbors, and anyone else that would like to not catch an illness from a sick neighbor in denial.
A Republican candidate for New Jersey governor introduced new legislation Thursday that would prohibit people from wearing masks in public, just weeks after a similar bill was passed in Nassau County on Long Island.
The bill would prohibit masks in certain circumstances, but even its sponsor, Sen. Jon Bramnick, acknowledged that it is a long way from passing.
[…]
According to Bramnick, there are people using masks to disguise themselves and commit crimes, and that’s who he wants this bill to target.
He believes that ultimately it would be an additional charge when a crime is being committed and that “legitimate mask wearers have nothing to fear.”
The bill would make it a petty disorderly persons offense for people to congregate in public while wearing masks or obscuring their faces in some way to conceal their identity.
Legitimate mask wearers. Police will know the difference.
Look, politicians who need to demonstrate their tough-on-crime bona fides push these sort of proposals, without a single care about putting high risk and immunocompromised people in greater danger, all in the hope of squashing protests and heightening surveillance. That’s all we’re talking about here.
But here’s my idea. And it works as a slogan or bumper sticker.
You can’t eat the dogs or eat the cats if you are wearing a mask.
Start with this basic question: What if a troublemaker simply decides to disguise his face with large sunglasses and a hat, instead? Are we going to criminalize sunglasses and hats, too? Where will it end?
Not to mention all the enforcement and constitutional problems that this bill presents. Even with an exception for people who wear masks for medical reasons, it’s a threat to personal freedoms, because it leaves it up to the cops to decide whether someone has a legitimate medical reason for wearing a mask at a public gathering.
How will they know that? It’s subjective. And based on past experience, we know what that means: Police will disproportionately stop and question Black and brown people, who have also been the most likely to continue wearing masks to protect against COVID-19.
And, as Jim Sullivan of the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey adds, this “overbroad and vague” bill “also gives law enforcement the ability to target people based on their political beliefs.”
This think piece … from Dan Froomkin, curiously enough, is just about the most frustrating thing you’ll find today.
The Donald Trump who melted down on the debate stage Tuesday night is not a well man.
He sounded like a lunatic. He expressed his belief in things that simply aren’t true. (Think: “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”) He was easily distracted. He repeated himself. He lied egregiously.
Is he competent to be president?
That’s a question journalists should be asking, prominently and relentlessly, until Election Day.
[…]
Concerns about Trump’s mental state are hardly new. They’ve been raised for years on social media, in opinion columns, and on cable TV. But they’ve generally been avoided by traditional news reporters.
The good news is that this is officially no longer a story that’s too hot for reporters to touch. A permission structure has been established — by the New York Times’s star political reporter Peter Baker no less.
PERMISSION?!? I yelled to no one at all. PERMISSION? NOW YOU HAVE PERMISSION?!?
Press Watch is an independent non-profit organization devoted to encouraging political journalists to fulfill their essential mission of creating an informed electorate and holding the powerful accountable. It is funded by donations from readers and the philanthropic community.
The Trump era, like never before, has exposed the weakness of the elite media’s refusal to be seen as “taking sides” in matters of public interest — even when it comes to verification of facts and democracy. As a result, corporate political journalism ends up spreading lies instead of shouting the truth. It engages in false equivalence that normalizes outrageous political extremism.
[…]
This website is intended to agitate for change. It encourages reporters to fight disinformation more enthusiastically and effectively, especially when our democracy and people’s lives are at stake. It identifies best practices that others can emulate. It urges the reality-based parts of the industry to explicitly condemn Fox News and other far-right propaganda outlets as disinformation operations.
People who love journalism are deeply troubled by the media’s loss of credibility with the public. Press Watch’s view is that we lose credibility by not fighting more assertively for the truth.
Permission. You don’t need permission. Or political cover. You need the support of your publisher and to inform your audience. A person, any person, running for high office is always under the microscope. Or should be. I can’t image how the news business has lost it’s credibility.
Permission.
It was a lovely afternoon for a swim, so I swam. My arms and feet took me one mile, but I ended up at the same place I started from. And that’s laps, to me. I say my feet, but it was mostly my arms. I am not a good swim kicker.
I keep forgetting to kick. Then I remember, and I kick. For about 15 yards, maybe less, and then I stop again. And a lap or so later I’ll remember, Kick! And so I kick. Maybe 10-15 years, and then I forget again. And I did this today for 1,720 yards. It was nice.
Back outside for the nightly chores, the view above was peaceful.
You can hear kids playing, and a few adults chatting up the street. It’s a perfect, mild THursday, and why wouldn’t they be outside doing those things until deep into the evening?
Let’s dip our toes back into the Re-Listening project. I’m playing all of my old CDs in my car, in the order in which I acquired them. So, I figured, why not write about them here, too? Pad the site! Content is king! And there’s nothing better than 20-year-old content!
Or so I told myself before I sat down to write about 2003’s “Long Time Coming,” Johnny Lang’s fourth studio album. I picked this up in 2006 or so. And, for me, it’s a record I’d listen to once in a long while. It doesn’t find a lot of extended play or repeats. Lang was a gifted performer — sadly, he’s had some health issues that took him away from music — and it’s important to remember here that he was 22(!!!) when he released his fourth album. But, with the exception of a few moments this one doesn’t really stand out as his earlier efforts did. It made it to #17 on the Billboard 200, which was his best placement yet, and great for mere mortals. His live record at the Ryman, in 2009, would climb to the second spot on the blues charts. And that makes sense, the guy was a seriously talented live perform.
This record, though, it wasn’t highly received, and while it hasn’t aged poorly, it isn’t a fine wine. And the Re-Listening project isn’t meant to be a review. I’m just posting music and occasionally trying to summon up a memory to go with a song. But I don’t have any here, because it just didn’t get that many spins. Right from the first track, you can feel the genre fusion beginning. There’s a bit of a lot of things on this album, and maybe that’s part of the issue. And, again, the guy’s 22 years old.
I’ve always thought this song should be on infinite rotation in produce sections across this great land of ours.
Tell me that you wouldn’t happily puzzle over the ripeness of that pineapple during that chorus.
If blue-eyed soul and blues had an exemplar … well, there are many … this would be one, too.
And that’s sort of the difficulty here. Lang had been blowing away critics and fans since he was 15 or so. Here, it just felt a little workmanlike.
As we realize, over and over, music is a strange business.
And there we go. Fifteen-hundred plus words. As I said, I’m behind.
I am waiting for a phone call. I waited yesterday. I have waited today. Tomorrow, I’m making a lot more phone calls. I am tired of waiting.
While we wait … it has been brought to my attention that I did not run the site’s most popular weekly feature yesterday. Apologies have been rendered and forgiveness offered, contingent upon my remedying the situation. So here we are, checking in on the kitties.
The other day I was removing boxes from upstairs to the recycling staging area — the garage — but Phoebe got there before I could complete the task.
So those boxes stayed just like that for a while. Finally, she moved. Finally, I convinced her there would be other boxes. Also, I reminded her of the other three or four boxes that are always around for her.
At some later point, she curled up next to me for a mid-afternoon nap. I have resolved to not being inside on beautiful days such as that, but there’s no resisting a power move like this. She covered her eyes, and everything.
Poseidon is ready to be plugged in. How else can he know if I am keeping up my end of the cat photo feature bargain? (People tell him, I’m sure.) Fortunately for me, he doesn’t know the difference between a power plug and a network plug.
He’s still not online. Good thing, too. He’s definitely the cat that would land us in the news for buying $4,000 of catnip and self sealing stem bolts.
And much like his sister, if there’s something he can climb into, he’s already been in it twice.
When the groceries come in, he is very helpful. He surprises our storage procedures, chews on plastic, examines the vegetables, raids the pantry, and climbs in the bags. Much of it happening faster than I can type it.
He is a boundless source of amusement.
We return to the Re-Listening project. This is the one where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the car, in the order of their acquisition. It’s an excuse, one I didn’t need, to listen to my old music. And I’m writing about it here to pad the site, maybe share a memory or two, and to include some good music. These aren’t music reviews, because no one needs a decades old review. This is a 2002 CD, one that I picked up used a few years later, in about 2006, just to round out my collection a little bit. And it’s a soundtrack.
“I Am Sam” was a Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle. Diane West was in it too, and so was Dakota Fanning. But most people just remember Penn, and the Beatles covers.
It begins with “Two of Us,” a song my lovely bride and I sometimes sing to one another.
We all come to discover Rufus Wainwright in our own time, and that is right and as it should be, I’m certain of that. And track three was when I discovered Wainwright, and my goodness can he sing.
The whole album is easily findable online, of course. And there’s a some good stuff on there, if you like the Beatles, and aren’t bothered by covers of Beatles classics. I’m hit or miss on some of their catalog, but there’s something for everyone. I like the Wallflowers, Eddie Vedder, and Stereophonics covers.
I just learned that the European version, which I do not have, has a Nick Cave rendition of “Here Comes the Sun.” Nick Cave is brilliant, but I’m afraid it’d make me sad. That’s the song I played when I did the newscast that George Harrison died. It’s been 23 years, this November, and that’s still what comes to mind when that song comes on. But when this soundtrack is in the player, I’m just waiting to hear that Wainwright track.
The movie itself, I remember thinking it was a missed opportunity.
In the next installment of the Re-Listening project, we’ll try an unimpressive bit of little blue-eyed soul.
But tomorrow, we’ll have a bit of history to contemplate. Be sure to come back for that.
I was chatting with a friend who got a new phone. He’s rightly impressed by the quality of the images it takes at night. And they have greatly improved, haven’t they? If we can solve the digital zoom problems, and let people take high quality photos of the moon, that super computer in your pocket will really be something.
Even money on which impossible thing phone designers can solve first. Thing is, they do so many other things pretty well, or excellently, those are the next big things they can brag about in ads. Generative AI ain’t it, designers.
Anyway, I stepped outside to take a photo for comparative purposes. It’s been a pleasant discovery of late to learn that my phone, a bit older now, still takes interesting photos of the night sky. I went out to demonstrate this, because why not? But it was one of those nights common to the season. A bit overcast. Still, a few stars amidst a pixelated background.
When I came back inside and looked at the photo again I was impressed. The camera caught light reflecting off the maple leaves. The light is coming from a small handful of solar powered yard lights, mounted 80 feet away.
How much harder can it be to let me take archival quality moon photos from the small rectangle that also plays music, games and shows me maps?
It’s time for another installment of the Re-Listening project. This, as you might recall, is where I am listening to all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. It’s a fun bit of nostalgia and good music and I’m writing about it here, for days like this, so I can pad out the site. This isn’t for review — because who cares? — but it is an excuse to put some good music here, and sometimes they come with memories.
Today the memories go back to 2005-2006 or so. It’s another used purchase, a Barenaked Ladies record, their sixth record, 2003’s “Everything to Everyone.” This was a year before Steven Page started wondering about his future in the band, six years before he left. And 15 years before they were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. They released three versions of this record. One was a standard 14-track effort. The limited edition features three bonus tracks from some improvised acoustic sessions. A special edition included a DVD. I got the one with the extra tracks.
And here’s the thing, despite my love of the band, I am not a big fan of this record. Some of the songs, if anything, are too catchy.
Consider this earworm.
That was the last single off the record, and it was released only in Canada. The first single is another song that’s too sticky, even if the video is appropriately ridiculous. The theme is too, I suppose, but it will be in your heads for hours if you listen to it more than once.
Most of my recollection of this record is hearing those two songs too often, and at times it seems like that’s all that’s on here, but there are some great understated efforts on this project. Ed Robertson is always good for one of these.
I’m in the group of people that wishes Page and the rest of the guys could put it together again. BNL works well as a foursome, but Page’s voice and stylings make the band truly great.
Mixed in here are a lot of songs that were more political than their previous efforts, but also a lot of sounds and themes that felt like the same old band, familiar as the old flannel you were wearing when you discovered them. (Though I was probably wearing a henley.)
Come on, this was released in 2003, but that absolutely feels like a henley … if a song can feel … like a shirt.
This one’s just nice. That’s all, that’s it. It’s just nice.
But here’s the problem. I said I had the limited edition with the extra tracks. Here they all are. This is an acoustic version of a song I shared a moment ago.
The acoustic songs have improvised percussion, which makes me want a concept album of their catalog with entirely improvised instruments. (They’re so talented some of those songs would come off better than their originals, I’m sure of it.) And here’s an acoustic version of “Maybe Katie.”
Seriously, there’s a part of my mind or my memory or both that thinks this is an entire record of just those two songs. I wish I could recall the circumstance behind that impression. It must have been a hard drive to somewhere.
This is the last extra song, and I have no recollection of this one whatsoever, because see above.
The next time we return to the Re-Listening project, we’ll check out a soundtrack from a 2002 motion picture. And, it’s a soundtrack of cover songs. You probably know every one of them. If you’re familiar with early 21st century films this should click into place for you without any more hints. You’ll hear some of them, probably, next week.
But, first, come back here tomorrow, too. Because we’ll have something fun to help us mark time until the weekend.
