In the studio tonight, the sports people were talking sports. Bit of a stretch, I know, but we encourage them to extend their interests and pursuits as far as possible. There is, and I don’t know if you know this, a football game this weekend. I understand it has captivated the attention of many advertisers, and appetizer connoisseurs. Big game, so they talked about it on the big talk show. They had props.
It promises to be a compelling matchup for a change. That’s the consensus opinion, though the “for a change” phrase might be a bit more singular. Perhaps the game will be more intriguing than the commercials which have underperformed of their own accord in the last few years.
Think about those young viewers. They don’t watch TV anymore. The biggest TV event of the year, a cultural touchstone unto itself and the youths don’t get to see properly creative creative.
I wonder if AI will come to ad agencies’ rescue one day. I wonder if they’ve already written an absurd ending to the Super Bowl. We’re probably due another one of those.
Eagles by two scores.
At the Chick-fil-A drive thru on Saturday — we get lunch there on Saturdays, it’s a whole thing — we found ourselves behind a car with a wiper on the rear window. I held forth on the point and purpose of the rear window wiper. Once, when I was young and full of promise, it was important to be able to demonstrate an ability to talk at moderate length on any given topic.
You want five minutes on soybeans? I can give you seven minutes on soybeans. Here’s the outline.
The soybean is a legume native to East Asia
Edible bean with many uses like soy milk, soy sauce, tempeh
Cheap source of protein for animal feed
Flowering is triggered by day length
Bees like them because they are high in sugar content
The fruit grows in clusters of three to five
One of the top staple foods in terms of major nutrients
Brazil produces more soybeans than us, but no one else does
The Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri and Illinois are our top producers
Research suggests there’s a slight health benefit to soy consumption
Soybeans, as a topic, was where it started. Do you know a topic? Can you sell your topic? Can you make a metaphor from it? Can you sell the metaphor?
I was never an extemporaneous speaker. I was barely a prepared speaker, but I like to learn and be prepared for the extemporaneous things. It seldom comes up, but at some level, it’s a decent enough party trick. (But if you do it frequently, you’ll be in the sad lonely corner of the party.)
At any rate, I set out, in that drive thru line on Saturday, to see if I could do a few minutes on the rear window wiper. Turns out I could.
But!
This evening, in the parking deck, I saw this, and realized the entire argument was just right here.
If I ever find myself driving something that requires a rear window wiper, I’m going to Wipertags. One extravagance deserves another, I suppose.
I cleaned out the garage Friday morning. But let me back up to September.
In September, the gas guy visited the house. He was there to replace the meter. Only there were flowers in the way, so he left us a nice note, asking us to remove the flowers, so they don’t get damaged in his work. This was about 45 minutes before The Yankee’s crash, so I got around to doing the flower removal — they were all weeds, anyway — in November. But I’d misplaced the note with the phone number in the interim.
Last week that door hanger floated to the top of a pile of papers, so I made the call, and we scheduled the guy to come back out. They were perfectly pleasant. No beef was offered for the delay. And the guy would be out Friday.
Are there pets? Is anyone sick? Will someone be home to provide the technician access to kill, and later, restart the pilot light?
So he was scheduled to come Friday. He needed access to the pilot light. All of that stuff sits in a custom corner of the garage. The only problem is that the space around it is perfectly suited to be a place to store extra things. So Friday morning I moved out the cars and slide a cabinet, a shelf and various other small things out of the way.
Friday evening, since I had all of that stuff out of the way, I did the annual air filter replacement, a procedure that is some months overdue.
There are 21 steps to removing the old air filter and putting in a new one. I know this because that is the number of instructions there are on the air filter box.
I felt a bit like these guys.
With that job done — there’s a light with a pleasing blue glow on the front of the air filter system that tells me I’ve been successful — I could put all of the things back into their proper place in the garage. In doing so, we decided five old paint cans could be recycled.
So on Saturday I took them to the waste disposal facility, where I met a man most pleased to do his job, as bubbly as a government employee working on a Saturday shift could be. He happily accepted two of my paint cans, chummily explaining that they had an ingredient deemed hazardous. He could not take the now ancient house paint. Not hazardous, he said. Well, he could take them, but he’d have to charge me $5 a can. Now if I’d brought any of my leftover uranium, he said, he could take that straightaway.
Wouldn’t you know, I left that in the backyard.
But the garage is now cleaner, five paint cans and a handful of junk cleaner, anyway. That’s good progress.
But enough about my Herculean attempts at decluttering. Let’s get right into the most popular weekly feature on the site, the check-in with the kitties. They’re doing great!
Phoebe has developed a real affinity for this blanket, and only this blanket. If someone is using this blanket and she is offered another blanket, she will not be pleased. Phoebe is a blanket snob.
The cat tunnel is usually more of her brother’s territory, but this weekend Phoebe got interested in it. And then she realized her blanket was up on the sofa.
Recently, we told Poseidon a good joke. How many cats does it take to change a light bulb?
He took it literally.
And if he had thumbs, the answer would be one. He’s very observant. He watches enough to understand that door knobs are important, but can’t figure out how to manipulate them. So, I figure, he can’t be too far off on the concept of light bulbs, either.
Electricity is beyond him, you might think, but he’s helped with plenty of plumbing fixture projects. The other stuff that magically comes out of the wall can’t be too much harder for a smart cat.
I think I’ve only had one wiring project with him in the house. He slept through that, so he’s not yet an apprentice in the electrical arts.
Between Saturday, Sunday and today I got in five Zwift rides. I managed to record five Strava PRs on four of those rides. Three of them were on climbs. Two of those were the same climb. I am not a climber. The other two were on sprints. I am also not a sprinter.
Here’s a bit of video from one of the weekend’s rides. Please note how my Zwift avatar always remembers to hydrate.
Apparently this is the island where aliens first visited. You eventually ride through the front wheel of the lead alien bicycle rider.
I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if the road bent back around and you rode through the back wheel of the second alien bicycle rider? And just a moment later, the road bent that way.
After close encounters like that, you sneak away as fast as you can.
So after tonight’s ride, a few days off, because of work schedules and such. But!
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 60 routes down, 60 to go.
We are showing documentaries all this month — and much of next month. In my role as vice deputy to the assistant auxiliary button pusher, I get to put the discs in the player. (“Soon I’ll be on fries! Then the grill … ” ) Some of these are going to be really, really good.
This one is up tomorrow.
In the office until late in the evening, because we were in the studio tonight. Looking out the window, someone got pulled over on Indiana Ave.
I guess you just park in the two lane road when the lights go on behind you. Having a car on campus is a perpetual exercise in defensive driving anyway, today’s morning commute involved five lane changes in just three blocks, and then you get things like that.
We go back to the car, back to the CDs and return to the Re-Listening project once more. This is an August 1992 record, but it’s 1997 or so when I finally picked this up. A friend gave this to me, or perhaps we traded for it. Either way, it was a solid deal for me.
Six of the 12 tracks on the Gin Blossoms’ sophomore album were released as singles, but I bet you didn’t know that. (I didn’t know, until just now, that “Lost Horizons” was the first single. What a choice that was.) It took more than a year for this record to gain any traction, even within its own record label — what can we say, the music industry is weird — and so you’d be forgiven for not knowing any song here until 1993 or 1994. But about that time, it became hard to escape Robin Wilson and the rest of the guys. This thing ended 1994, it’s second full year in the wild, at 54 on the US Billboard 200, and went platinum four times.
Only their hits fill the emo category. The deep cuts offer a lot of other emotional styles. Here’s the accordion-tinged “Cajun Song.”
Maybe that’s my favorite song on the record.
Here is their September 1994 Farm Aid version of “29.” Robin Wilson is 29, singing about being 29. They all look like kids.
Or maybe this deep cut is my favorite song on the record.
There’s some simple poetry in there that’s appealing.
Then, of course, there’s the last track, which is my other, other, favorite song. Jesse Valenzuela sings the proto-country pop tune, “Cheatin.” This is from a 1993 live show.
If you see the Arizona boys play these days — and we saw them twice last year — they of course play all the hits. Wilson is still Wilson. Valenzuela is still the key to the whole thing. It’s a good quality nostalgia show. Their last new record was 2018’s “Mixed Reality” which will show up in the Re-Listening project much, much later.
Up next in the Re-Listening project, we’ll move to the east, to hear from a Texas-based band occupying the seemingly odd intersection of late-stage folk rock and alternative rock.
It is a lovely shade of gray. There, I’ve said it. One might think that Stockholm syndrome has kicked in once again. Last year it was Feb. 7th when I mentioned that condition. The year before that, it was Feb. 19th. This is a disturbing trend. There was a bit of direct sunlight Saturday. We might have some tomorrow, or possibly on Friday. This photo was from my trip to campus yesterday. It was 2:30 p.m.
There are 80 days until spring arrives.
I was on campus yesterday testing, in my role as the manager of a television, some DVDs and streaming projects that we’ll be screening next month. Documentaries and art aplenty! Some of them look very good. Others, I am sure, will appeal to more discerning viewers. It is a nice collection of titles, to be sure, and now I know they will all play on command. Hopefully they’ll also play on schedule.
But enough about the hour I spent at work on the weekend, and get to the site’s most popular weekly feature. It is time to check in with the kitties. They are doing well.
Here’s Phoebe in that Saturday morning sunlight. The curtains flew open, as they do in the morning, and there was this warm, yellow light rushing in. She might have been as stunned as I was about it.
Poseidon … he’s hanging out in the sink again.
Don’t let the charming face fool you. That cat is a piece of work.
Got in a nice Zwift bike ride on Saturday. I wimped out on yesterday, though. There just didn’t seem to be a good time for it, I told myself. Wimped out entirely. But, on Saturday, I rode through a volcano.
I wonder what the sulfur would do to your breathing if you could put a road through the inside of a volcano. Also, I wonder if you could put a road inside a volcano. It seems to be a stretch.
Anyway, aside from taking Sunday off, I’m still well ahead of projections for the month. Plus I have tonight’s brief ride, and perhaps one tomorrow morning, to add to the tally. This evening I rode the 2018 UCI Worlds short course. Two climbs, and I set Strava PRs on each of them. And then I bested my time on the sprint segment, and thought I would collapse in my run up to the finish line.
Zwift says I finished the course in second place. I assume that means today. I assume only two people have ridden that course today. Anyway, my avatar was having a fine time on this descent. He, who doesn’t always abide by the strictest rules of physics, hit 57.6 miles per hour on this descent.
That’s a bit faster than I’ve ever gone on a real road.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 51 down, 69 to go.
According to the new rules I just made up for the Re-Listening project, we’re going to gloss over the discs that are cassette tape replacements. This was a good decision which, of course, takes place near the possible end of cassette-to-disc upgrade period. (Hey, it was the nineties.) I’m listening to them, you can be sure. And the five-and-a-half minutes I spent at one red light yesterday (thanks city planners!) helped make sure I got through this next disc, which was U2’s “Achtung Baby.” Released in late 1991, it would sell 18 million copies worldwide (and I have two fo them, I guess …) and it won a Grammy for best rock performance. Making the record, their search for evolving their sound, almost broke the band.
Of course, a few weeks ago Bono said they were always almost breaking up. They were also recently hoisted for all to see at the Kennedy Center Honors and, now, here they are, getting glanced at in the Re-Listening project.
Turns out they re-released this thing on the 20th anniversary, and again on the 30th anniversary. There was also a video release, the worldwide tour, five singles, a documentary, a concert film, and who knows what else. It’s amazing we aren’t sick of this but, Achtung Baby, it’s still a great record.
Of those five singles, three hit the top of the American charts. The other two landed in the top five. They could do no wrong for a while there. And these days they get roasted by Borat.
So … among the deep cuts … Normally, as I get into the music, I try to conjure up an anecdote or a memory that I’ve associated with the work. That, and being a space filler, is the point here. But this is record is going on 32 years old now, and my memories aren’t all that great. But you know this got dropped into my knockoff Walkman a lot.
Bono is, I think, one of those people who made it OK to think of being a tenor. And now he’s adding some depth and texture to his voice on this record. Who knows where sounds come from, really, but I bet some of the croaky things he does all over this thing are why I do them when I sing along to stuff in the car now.
Amazing rhythm section alert.
And the last track on the album, though this album never really ends for all of the work others have done covering it. (Aside: Look up “One” covers sometime. It’s impressive how many people tie that into their own work.)
After this tour they’ve apparently only played it live twice.
Know what U2 are doing again? All of the classics! They’ll soon release “Songs of Surrender,” a reimagining of their old works. Nostalgia sells, and it moves a lot of units. Let’s listen to the first track, a version of “With or Without You” you’ve waited on for 36 years.
It’s interesting, and risky. Here you have one of the most iconic songs — a band-defining guitar riff, a picture perfect bass line and that big cathartic wail — and invert the entire thing. Starting there is definitely a statement. We’ll all have to give it a listen to find out what’s what. It is due out in March.
Here’s a question — and it is a real and earnest question. I, being from somewhere sensible, don’t have a lot of experience with this. But if it snows on Wednesday, and your car still looks like this on Friday morning, would it be inappropriate if I got out at the red light and scrapped all that stuff off your car?
Here’s another question — again, asked in all earnestness. If the car in front of you, and the car behind you, has the same idiotic problem, which car should I prioritize?
“Two days, y’all,” he said drawing out the y’all, so that you might understand that it is a word of his people, not just something he has appropriated from others, so you realize, This guy is from the South, and he has found your snow care … wanting.
I spent much of my morning working on my calendar. It’s riveting stuff, I tell you, but February is now planned to a fairly granular level. No one ask me for anything, please, lest we upset the applecart.
In the middle of the day I realized that not everyone knows the expressions “song and dance” and “dog and pony show.” I’m not sure if that’s a generational issue, or perhaps I was misheard. Either way, it will surely make me self-conscious. I sometimes tell people to break a leg, in the show business sense, but there’s going to be a day when someone doesn’t know the phrase, and I’ll sound like a callous, violent person.
“He was very helpful. He asked me twice if I had any questions before he left. And then he told me to break bones. But the weirdest part of all was, he said it in a kind of cheery voice.”
I’ve got to work that out of my lexicon.
Late in the day I had the chance to watch people use a state-of-the-art studio and control room as props again. This never fails to amuse. I also met a folklore major, who taught me a bit about folklore. I now feel as if I can enroll in a folklore 101 class, sneak in late on the second day and be ready to learn.
Folklore is fascinating, as an area of study. I was in their building in October, and admired some of the class offerings on the walls. Some looked worth trying, not that I’d be a folklorist, whatever that actually is outside of the academy.
Looking at classes years and years later, when the pressure is off and it doesn’t matter so much, is an interesting exercise. And, you find, your horizons broaden when you’re not contemplating tuition.
I left the office promptly at 5 p.m. today. First time since Monday. Saw the daylight and some sunshine on the drive back to the house. First time since … I’m not sure when. Maybe Monday, but nothing is jumping out at me. Could it be last Friday?
Anyway, the days are slowly getting longer, which is encouraging. The view in the backyard this evening was even more so. What’s that blue stuff back there?
It is the first sign of spring, if you’re desperate. It’s the first time you’re going to be tricked by the prospect of spring, if you are foolish. There are three stages to this trickery. This is the first stage.
I’ll be foolish. I’ll take it. It isn’t spring, not even close. But that doesn’t matter so much when you see the sun and sky actually, finally, beating up the clouds, even if it is just for the small part of one day.
The next CD in the Re-Listening project is another media update. I had “Throwing Copper’ as a cassette, even though it was released in 1994. (Remember, late adopter.) So in late 1996 or early 1997, I had to get a CD copy because I still wanted to play it a lot, because it was the 90s, and I was young, and Ed Kowalczyk screamed a lot. And the rhythm section on that record is pretty decent.
“Throwing Copper” was the mainstream breakthrough, after two smaller records and an EP. And it was a huge success. Two of the five singles went to number one, and “Lightning Crashes” sat atop the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart for ten straight weeks. After it had been on the Billboard 200 album chart for a full year, the record hit number one. It sold eight million copies in the US alone.
It is amusing to me that these guys were all about 24 when this record was released. Picked up straight out of high school, dictionary in hand and angst to share.
Since it was that broadly popular, and since this was a tape-to-CD upgrade for me, and because it is getting late into the evening, here’s just two quick tracks from later in the album. I always enjoyed this bass line, even as the song goes well against the general feel of the rest of the record.
And then Kowalczyk goes full Kowalczyk three-and-a-half minutes in.
This was the hidden track, and the slide guitar is so atypical, and works so well. It still doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this was on as I drove away from campus today, and it still works.
I saw Live three times in concert in the next few years. They put on some great shows. Then the music got more exotic, and then the tensions within the band got weird. I’m trying to make sense of it on Wikipedia now. The singer left, or was uninvited or something. The band continued without him, which seemed weird. He sued them. Then the original band got back together for a time, then fired one member. There was another lawsuit, and now Kowalczyk is the last original member still playing under the name. That’s the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, I guess.
Since I premise the Re-Listening project as a quick stroll through the memories that got pinned to some of this music … I remember, and I am being as vague as possible here, a job I had in high school. I worked with a guy who was a college frat boy. He was funny, goofy, nice, and guaranteed to fall into some sort of trouble. You know the sort. There was a young woman who worked there, too. She was nice, attractive and guaranteed to be trouble. You know the sort. They got pregnant. “Lightning Crashes” was their song, which, I mean … really.
But that was 1994. To be young just then brought a certain set of choices, just as any other period. I wonder how long those two lasted.
I got in a quick ride before dinner tonight, tapping out 33 miles on Zwift, racing to finish before the batteries on all the necessary devices died. (The speaker didn’t survive the ride. My phone and iPad just barely did.) Tonight I got in two routes in France. I set three Strava segment PRs, somehow.
This lighthouse spins as you’re riding through the digital countryside of northern France.
I’m in an interesting place for the month. Earlier this week I compiled my highest volume months of bike riding, in terms of miles. It’s still a humble number, but this month was in 9th place overall. After tonight, this month is now my third best month. Tomorrow, it’ll be second. Maybe I can make it my most prolific month before it’s over.
May as well get something out of January.
The 2023 Zwift route tracker: 48 routes down, 72 to go.
