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Tuesday

music / photo / Re-Listening / Tuesday — Comments Off
10
Sep 24

Day two of a bit of grrr

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.

cycling / New Jersey / photo / Rowan / Tuesday — Comments Off
3
Sep 24

A part of something on two wheels

Last Thursday night we got a series of frantic text messages from two different friends asking if we were OK. Of course we were OK, we’d just been in the backyard. It was a nice mild evening, and everything was fine. Only everything was not fine. Just two miles away two cyclists were killed.

Word spreads quickly in a small town. A fireman heard a scanner and called the bike shop and the local bike shop started calling and texting people and some of them thought, “Two people,” and thought of us. We spent the night with eyes a little bit wider, and a lot more sad.

On Friday we learned it was two guys who grew up around here were killed on their way home. They were hockey players. Both had skated at Boston College. Both became pros. One was a star in the NHL. The other had returned to their high school to coach the team. It seems the driver was drinking, had been drinking for sometime, and in his own little rush, swerved right through them, killing them just a few miles from where they were headed.

One of the guys has two young children. The other was expecting his first kid later this year. They were to be in their sister’s wedding this weekend. And now, there’s a growing memorial on the side of the road.

I went by there this afternoon to see it. It’s a stirring little thing, a series of small town gestures that barely registers in the terrible anguish that has been visited upon their families and friends.

This weekend, through the Center for Sports Communication & Social Impact we started a survey for cyclists in the area, and we’ve been impressed by the number of responses we’ve received, but not at all surprised by what their telling us. We’re going to going the survey and have several ideas about what we can do with the data we’re collecting.

In the meantime, my lovely bride did two interviews with the local media today. One with ABC 6.

She did another interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, which hasn’t been published yet.

They’re asking us, these cyclists who’ve all encountered scary situations, how they can help. The local bike shops want to get involved too.

We went to one of them this afternoon, the ones that were looking for us on Thursday night. They are fed up with losing with losing their friends, worrying about their customers, and making these calls. We listened to them talk about all of it. The stories they can tell. They’re planning a big community meeting, they have the ear of some local lawmakers. Maybe something good will good from this awful mess.

For Johnny and Matty. For our neighbors who ride, from the people we wave at on the road and see on Strava. For all of us.

books / cycling / Indigo Girls / music / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
27
Aug 24

Really got a lot in here

Do we have a lot for you in this post. Let’s jump right in! First, I just came in from watering the pothos plants, and I checked on the spider. She’s still out there doing her thing.

I’ve decided this is a she for reasons that don’t have any basis in anything, really. But he, or she, is one industrious spider. Every day that web disappears. Every night it returns. Almost in the same spot. The angle of it has shifted in the last few nights. Maybe this is better for catching things coming off the prize-winning plants back there.

Looked up how long spiders can live, and this is not a long-term location for my new friend. I’m going to wind up re-positioning this arachnid, if for no other reason than I’ll want this little section of sidewalk back. And also because this is too close to the house, and I don’t want it coming inside when the weather turns.

I bet she’ll have great success in the woods out back.

I got in a late evening bike ride. I started a little too late, which is funny because I’d just been mentally patting myself on the back for how well I time these rides. Usually, I’m back just as it gets dark.

It was still daylight when I started. Here’s the proof, this is about halfway through.

You know how those late summer evenings get, though. The sunset and the gloaming happen more quickly than you’ve lately been expecting. This photo was just four miles later.

And this was an accidental shot, but look at that blurry wrist!

The problem — if you want to think of it in those terms, and I don’t — is that soon after that last photo I made an impulsive decision to add on a few miles. Turned left to add a circuit, instead of heading straight in. That gave me almost six extra miles, which was nice. And about three miles into it, I had to pull the headlight out of my pocket and light the road in front of me.

I have a lot of light on the back of the bike for oncoming cars. But the other thing that’s nice is that I was on sleepy country roads. Over the course of the last six miles of today’s ride I was passed by five cars, and only two of them came by when it was truly dark.

Anyway, another delightful, slow, 22-mile ride is in the books.

You might recall we went to a rock ‘n’ roll show last Thursday. On Friday I wrote in this space about Melissa Etheridge. Today, and for the next few days, we’ll have a few short Indigo Girls clips.

This year they’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of Swamp Ophelia. And this is a deep cut, a tremendous song off a lush album. A song I don’t think I’ve heard live in decades, and apropos of the moment.

I’ve been in awe of that line about the summer since the 1990s. It’s not fair what Emily Saliers can do with a few lines of verse.

And here’s a 1997 classic to go alongside of that one.

That song — which went to number 15 on the US Adult chart, enjoyed a bit of air play on the radio and was in the last batch of videos I recall on MTV — was inspired by this documentary, which has become something of a classic on its own, while still remaining contemporary even as the sands shift around us.

That documentary itself is three decades old now. It’d be interesting to go back and see the modern version, just so we can marvel at what is and isn’t different.

I finished Walter Lord’s The Dawn’s Early Light. It is wonderful pop history, my first Lord book and I’m sure I’ll go find more of his writing later.

Militarily, his tactics are sparse, and written at a regimental level, but he’s not writing too much about the military action. It might be easy to get bogged down in that, or easy to get it wrong or be incomplete, all these years later, despite his excellent research. It’s a book about the time, rather than the conflict. He basically has it that the places the U.S. did poorly were down to bad organization and ineffective leadership. The places where we did better, Baltimore and New Orleans, were down to a key British army officer being killed and the Americans getting their act together.

And because it includes New Orleans, Andrew Jackson does become a minor character late in the book — a book which doesn’t sit on anyone for too long, come to think of it. Jackson has a few good lines in the text. This is, perhaps, the best one.

I’ve jumped ahead some 120 years in my next book. I’ve started reading about mid-20th century journalist and author, Richard Tregaskis. Updates on that text are something to which you can look forward. Also, more music tomorrow. And a swim! (Maybe … I’m trying to work up the nerve.)

memories / music / photo / Re-Listening / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
20
Aug 24

There’s a hint of live music below

Well, today was just beautiful. Impossibly so. Sunny, blue skies and temperatures settling into the 70s. There was no ambitious mercury in the thermometer. No overbearing sun. Just this …

… and the promise of another day or two of it afterward.

It was this beautiful. I couldn’t decide what to do with the day. Which was weird.

Finally, I settled on sitting outside and reading. It was a good choice.

It was such a good idea, I did it again, sitting outside this evening, listening to the symphonic crickets, flipping through pages of a book, asking myself why I don’t do this all of the time.

I should do this all of the time. Or at least more.

We return to the Re-Listening project. Regular readers know I’ve been listening to my old CDs in the car, and in the order of their acquisition. We’re in, let’s say it is 2006, listening to a 1998 record that I picked up at a library sale. It’s everyone’s 1990s friend, the Dave Matthews Band.

“Before These Crowded Streets” was their third album. Béla Fleck appears. Alanis Morissette is on it. And so is the virtuoso Tim Reynolds — this being just before he joined the band. It was another successful album, even as they were beginning to change some things up. The instrumentation gets more exotic, the time signature experiments are underway, and the themes got a bit more mature, a bit more worldly.

This was the record that pushed the Titanic soundtrack from atop the Billboard charts. Three singles became hits, the record went platinum four times in the United States.

Some of the best parts of this record are the interludes, usually outtakes, between the songs. And the biggest memory I have about this record is actually from a live show. They play the amphitheater in 1998, supporting this record and the version they did of “Don’t Drink the Water” was just about the most intense thing I could imagine seeing at a yuppie party. Here’s a version from that tour, about three weeks earlier than the show I saw. This is sedate in comparison to my recollection.

They’re still at it, of course. Ten studio albums and something like 17 live albums later. Touring machines, who even knows how many millions of concert tickets they’ve sold at this point. But I know some people who have purchased a lot of them. My god-sisters-in-law (just go with it) and their large entourage see them a lot, probably four or five different dates a year. And they invited us to one of them. It was my third or fifth time seeing them, and my first in 20-plus years.

I don’t think I even mentioned the concert here. We left the show early for some reason that was never explained. The group gathered and walked out and, I said Who doesn’t stay for the false finish, let alone the encore? And the answer was, the crowd of people we were with, for some reason.

Though I blame DMB as the sole culprit in the outlandish ticket prices we’ve seen explode in the last several decades,
they still create a happy crowd. And their tour continues right now. They’re playing the northwest, before heading back east in late September for some festivals, and then a few fall dates in Mexico.

We’ll go north, to Canada, when next we return to the Re-Listening project.

But what will we get into here tomorrow? Be s ure to stop by and find out!

adventures / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
13
Aug 24

Two nights and one day

Late last night, technically early this morning, I took out the garbage. (Now, isn’t that a way to start a post!?) And it was there that I coined a new phrase. That phrase is “Anything worth doing is worth doing with an LED light.”

The expression came about because I didn’t have my phone on me — always when I need a camera. So I went in to grab my phone, which made me realize that it was too dark to capture my subject. So I went back inside for a camp light. Because somehow, in the darkness, I saw this guy.

My new friend stuck around for quite some time, posing up a storm, allowing me to photograph him in profile. When I turned to get those head-on shots, it got curious and started walking toward me. On the fence post the mantis got bold, and turned to reach out to me. Unfortunately, for the brief moment the air sparring went on, I was unable to get the auto=focus on the phone to cooperate.

And then the mantis jumped, flew, or fell off the post. I was careful, walking away, to make sure it wasn’t underfoot.

I was called for jury duty today. I wasn’t called today, but I had to report today. They called me a month or so ago. It’s an interesting process. I received a postcard in the mail. Log in to the site, create the 4,397th password in your life. Watch a poorly produced 28 minute video extolling the very real virtues of our judicial system. Log back in to the site and certify you watched the video.

You are informed you’ll get messages, via email and text, on when to report for jury duty. And I was told it would be yesterday. But Friday I was told to report today, Tuesday. At noon, thankfully.

They could have said 1:30, because that’s when we finally got pulled into a courtroom. This after checking in and two rounds of taking attendance. People of all ages remember how to say “Here” when their name is called.

People sat quietly, scanning their phone, reading books and so on, and then a deputy who takes his courthouse duty Very Seriously commanded us to go upstairs to the courtroom. So we did. A moment later he came in and said, no not this second floor courtroom, but the courtroom on the third floor. And, thus, he lightened up a bit and found himself able to make a joke or two. Meanwhile, I’m thinking, someone in the courtroom upstairs is potentially counting on some of these people.

We made it into the courtroom. Two prosecutors, a defense attorney and his client. The judge and three clerk/staff members. Two deputies. On the way into the room we received a pencil and a seven-page document. These were the voir dire questions. The judge explained a few things, had us watch an even lower quality video, and then read the entire seven-page voir dire document to us. Then, he brought in the partial jury. It seemed they need to find four more people. So the clerk would call a name from this selection pool, and the person would go the bench. They played white noise in the courtroom so the rest of us couldn’t hear the private conversations. This went on, one by one, until the jury was full.

My name did not get called. At the end of it, it took about three hours, the judge said our service was fulfilled and thanked us. Everyone fairly well scrambled from the courtroom, as if you’d pulled a fire alarm.

The trial is scheduled to run through mid-September, which would have been a problem at work, so I’m glad I did not have to go through voir dire. Just as well. It’s a double murder trial. As I’m no longer under consideration for the jury, I tried to look it up, but it was four years ago in a virtual news desert, so there aren’t a lot of details available.

Tonight, we went outside to see if we could catch the end of the Perseids. It was a perfect night for it. Nice and mild, with a beautiful cricket symphony coming from our right.

I saw two, maybe three. My lovely bride saw four.