The Sound of Music

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks in my sector of the blogiverse, with music and fiction taking up about equal amounts of my time. Because there’s sufficient material to warrant two blog posts, I’ll deal with the music aspect in this one, and begin work on the fiction part of it tomorrow.

When Just an Earth-bound Misfit posted a link to Susan Boyle’s video last Monday (see the heading And Now For Something Completely Different), I never dreamed I’d be devoting this blog post to music. But Susan’s singing is superb (her video was viewed more than 30 million times in less than a week). And inspirational. And I couldn’t let it go without expressing my admiration for her talent.

On 4/07, Tarleisio, blogging as MoltenmetalMama, posted The Rock’n’roll Redemption Infinite Playlist, Part One. On the 10^th, she posted Part Two. In her inimitable writing style, she reflects on enough heavy metal to start an industrial machine shop. If you’re a “metal” fan, you’ll find treasure trove enough to keep your blades rotating for a week. You’ll have to google each group to find the YouTube videos, but it’s a small price to pay for total eardrum destruction.

Badtux the Snarky Penguin has proof that music is a ghost that haunts the instrument and that only the adept can properly communicate with it. Sungha Jung, a young Korean boy and guitar virtuoso extraordinaire, does a lot of pickin’ and virtually no grinnin’ to prove he’s a serious musician who’s on familiar terms with the ghost. Scroll down the page (if you wait too long, you may have to backpedal a page or more) to find the two videos.

And I would be remiss not to mention Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, who posts a music video daily. His most recent offerings include “The Boss,” Sound Tribe Sector 9, and The Beatles. Gee, with this much music on tap, I sort of feel like singing.

If only I could.

No Life on Mars

Who would have thought that the delightful Gretchen Mol is sexier as a brunette than she is as a blond? But there it is.

Last night’s finale of the prematurely terminated series Life on Mars was a real zinger. Suddenly, the series’ title began to make a little more sense in that the show was provided a rather loose connection to the red planet. But, hey, an honorable mention is better than no mention at all.

Still, the show was neither about life on Mars or living on Mars, so a more accurate title would have been Life on the Way to Mars While in a Defective State of Stasis. But that would have given away the ending. Besides, it’s too long to fit inside one of those little rectangular boxes used for the TV program listings.

Time will tell if Life on Mars’ replacement is worthy. If it isn’t, I’ll go back to watching Medium, which appears in the same time slot. Oh, yeah, and I’ll be watching for LoM to show up in syndication; I missed the first few episodes due to a previous engagement with Ms. Arquette.

Sanity Poised for Comeback? Maybe! Maybe Not!

“A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it. This new civilization brings with it new family styles; changed ways of working, loving, and living; new political conflicts; and beyond all this an altered consciousness ...” —Alvin Toffler

Toffler’s quote is especially prescient in that it describes, with concise precision, exactly why our country’s most cherished institutions have run off the rails and why there seems to be so much difficulty in getting things back on track. The big culprit here is stagnation caused by fear of change, lack of imagination, and a dearth of critical-thinking skills. Oh, yeah, and an overabundance of greed.

Only by thinking “outside the box” (to run an oft-used cliché deeper into the ground) can we begin to effect recoveries of the environment, the economy, and the decaying social infrastructures that most of us depend on. I’d say “thinking outside the buns,” but that would probably offend our leaders—and the wealthy corporatists that pull their strings—because their leadership style depends on keeping their collective head inserted rather far into their collective anal orifice.

Stopping the Slide

Unless we employ a miraculous new source of energy that is at once safe, sustainable, abundant and cheap, life in most first-world nations will, over the next two or three decades, come to more closely resemble life as it existed in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries rather than that which is visualized by conventional 21^st-century futurists. Sorry, no flying car for you.

While the current socioeconomic system collapses beneath the weight of its own deficiencies and inertia, people wonder how things got so bad and clamor for government to do something. What many people don’t realize (or won’t admit to) is that they, too, are complicit in creating the problems that now threaten to disrupt life as we’ve known it. No one wants to face reality when it challenges the perceived safety of personal comfort zones and threatens the American way of life.

Nor do many people seem to realize that government has been co-opted by the same corporate interests that led us all astray, so that any expectation of real help arising out of government action amounts to little more than wishful thinking. If past performances are indicative of government’s capabilities of delivering help to the common people in times of crisis, then whatever effort government puts forth on our behalf to deal with current crises will either be wrong or a case of too little too late.

Our dying economy is based on the false premise that it can grow indefinitely, but ours is a finite world that long ago exceeded its carrying capacity, and the resources that fuel the economy exist only in finite amounts. There is nothing in all of reality to suggest that our current economic system is in any way sustainable.

Precious little time remains in which to stop this slide into utter chaos. While politicians, Wall Street titans and corporate CEOs debate endlessly about the relative merits of this stimulus plan versus that stimulus plan and quibble over which group of elites is the rightful heir to all the proposed taxpayer largesse—and whether or not to pay bonuses to the very executives that created this financial debacle—the likelihood of bailing out the economy before it hits rock bottom grows ever more remote.

No amount of money injected into the economy at the top end will aid in economic recovery. Anything that serves to make wealthy people wealthier without first passing through the hands of the working class will do nothing to lift the working class. Because money always finds its way to the top (and rarely vice versa), the only way to kick-start a stalled economy is to inject the money at the bottom and let nature run its course.

Dim Bulbs & Bright Ideas

The warm feeling I get whenever I’m yet again reminded that morons still occupy—and exert undue influence in—the higher levels of government hierarchy is not, in reality, related to the warm fuzzies, but is more akin to “heat of anger” of the kind that has a high probability of ending in homicidal violence. Are you following this, Representatives Krieger, Esquivel, Garrard and Schaufler?

What these geniuses want to do is register the bikes of Oregonians who are over 18 years old. Using the same fee schedule as applied to cars—$54 every two years. Making bikes more expensive to register than motorcycles. Killing incentives for people to ride bikes. Hindering efforts to clean up the environment, get a handle on global climate change, and achieve energy independence. Leaving the originators of this ill-conceived plan open to the criticism they so richly deserve.

The problems with H.B. 3008 are varied and many. Not only does this bill suck like a Dyson on steroids, if it becomes law the potential for unintended consequences is huge. What if, on your morning commute across the Hawthorne Bridge, you found your way impeded by hundreds of horses and riders? And think of the parking problems that would ensue once all those horses and riders reach their downtown destinations. Okay, not too likely a scenario, I admit, but hey, anyone twisted enough to zoo bomb on a fixie at midnight is probably twisted enough to swap out a bike for a horse just to prove a point.

Might not bicyclists, forced to pay the same rate as automobile drivers for the right of access to the state’s network of streets, roads and highways, begin to insist on their right to unrestricted lane use? If you thought that following some oblivious twit traveling at 55 mph in the passing lane was slow, how are you gonna feel when you find yourself following an obstinate cyclist, who’s only trying to make a point, at 20 mph? Can you say “road rage”? Can you say “murder”? Can you say “guilty, your honor”? Can you say “how do I get this shit out of my grill”?

Are all of the possible unintended consequences of the negative kind? Not necessarily. There’s a slim possibility that we’ll see a decline in identity theft as professional identity thieves rush to fill the burgeoning market for identity forgers. Picture, if you will, the senior citizen bike rider who’s just been detained by an overzealous traffic cop. “Honest, officer, I’m only 15-and-a-half. Says so right there on my learner’s permit.”

There’s a better, more equitable way to fund the public thoroughfares we all depend on. Rather than dump a disproportionate amount of the burden on bicycles that cause relatively little damage to road surfaces—compared to their four-wheeled counterparts—and which, unlike their four-wheeled counterparts, put exactly zero carbon emissions into the atmosphere, legislators should rethink the whole concept of vehicle registration.

A “one size fits all” vehicle registration fee schedule is not the ideal method for raising money for roadway maintenance; it has a tendency to punish frugal people and reward extravagant ones. A far better method would base its fee schedule on vehicle weight, which is the primary causative factor in road surface destruction; the higher the weight, the higher the fee.

All vehicles, including motorcycles, bicycles, skateboards, rollerblades—in effect, anything with wheels—should be weighed “light,” i.e., without operator, passengers or cargo, to arrive at the appropriate fee for each specific vehicle. A progressive fee schedule would be determined by weight brackets, say in 100 lb. or 500 lb. increments, and fees assessed accordingly.

And, as a concession to all vehicle owners, the State of Oregon could make an allowance for each vehicle—say the first 100 lbs. for free.

Sounds fair to me.

Jindal Jabber

When Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal delivered his rebuttal speech to President Obama’s address to Congress on Tuesday night, I was reminded of Sheriff Andy Taylor delivering one of his homespun homilies to a contrite Barney Fife. Except, of course, that Jindal’s speech contained a lot more bullshit and made much less sense than anything Sheriff Andy ever said to his numbskull deputy.

Before Jindal finished telling his disingenuous story about how he and real-life Sheriff Harry Lee defied FEMA bureaucrats to come and arrest them for trying to rescue people from rooftops in flooded New Orleans, another memory began to surface; something about Jindal’s face looked eerily familiar. But, as the Governor’s speech went from lame to lamer and my outrage over his remarks inferring that volcano monitoring is unnecessary spending threatened to make my head do a Mt. St. Helens, I temporarily lost that train of thought.

Hey, if the cost of volcano monitoring displeases Jindal so much, maybe he could apply that same reasoning to other early warning systems; think how much money the government could save if it cut off funding for NASA, USGS, NWS, USFS, and other organizations tasked with gathering information that has the potential to save people’s lives. Applied evenly, Jindal’s logic could turn everyone’s life into a crapshoot (or a crapchute—take your pick). And I’m sure that billionaires would appreciate the resulting tax breaks. But, I digress.

The following day, many of the blogs I follow featured a portrait photo of Bobby Jindal, and the memory I spoke of earlier once again tried to surface. Then—suddenly—a random thought, summed up in a single word, made the memory complete. Freckles! Simply add a sprinkling of freckles to Jindal’s face and you’ve got a near-perfect likeness of Mad Magazine’s poster boy.

In fact, the resemblance is so striking that I now propose that all future displays of Bobby’s portrait photos be accompanied by the caption, “What, me worry?”

And when Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin campaign for the Presidency in 2012, they can do so using the campaign slogan, “What, us worry?”

I’m still undecided if this is something I should worry about.

The Beginning of the End . . .

Environmental degradation, global climate changes, pending food and water shortages, a looming energy crisis, a burst housing bubble, massive (and growing) unemployment, unrelenting war, a pending transportation crisis, crumbling infrastructure, and a foundering economy based on unsustainable revolving credit should be enough to tell us we’re doing something wrong. Is anybody paying attention? Probably not, at least not until this season’s reality TV shows have run their course.

A perfect storm of calamities has overtaken us, and none of the proposals so far put forth by the President, the House, the Senate, Wall Street buff . . . er, tycoons, the Federal Reserve, corporate CEOs, and all the other pay-to-play or paid-to-play performers in the powerbroker hierarchy are ambitious enough or smart enough to head it off or to even mitigate some of the damage it’s causing.

Politicians afflicted with tunnel vision and an ingrained belief that political expediency is the best tool for addressing whatever problem arises are as much to blame for this perfect storm as the people who set the various components of the storm in motion by manipulating the economy for personal gain. If they realize that dealing with the core problem, the economy, in exactly the right way will cause all related problems to resolve themselves, they’re keeping it a closely guarded secret.

In regards to the economy, forget about recession; that car went behind the pit wall a long time ago and a full-blown depression replaced it. As our economic engine continues to lug down to a standstill, what we need, now—more than a gear change to bring the engine back up to speed—is a complete change of vehicles. Maintaining the status quo is not a viable option, and doing more of the same things that got us into this mess is not going to get us out of this mess.

While most people who are in a position to do something about it agree that some type of stimulus spending package needs to be implemented quickly, few agree as to how much money to spend and what to spend it on. Rather than entertain ideas that will actually work, the GOP (Greedy Obstructionist Politicians) snipe at Democratic proposals while arguing (erroneously and disingenuously)) that free markets and tax cuts for the wealthy are the best solutions.

Meanwhile, the Democrats steadfastly refuse to grow the spines and/or the balls necessary to tell the Repugthuglicans that they’re no longer in charge. Did Rome burn while Nero fiddled around? As a matter of fact, it did, and much the same thing seems to be happening here, only on a larger scale.

The key to getting the economy back on track is to get money moving again, and only banks and government have the financial clout to make it happen. Middle-class/working-class people can’t and won’t be much help; until their jobs are secure and future paychecks guaranteed they aren’t likely to spend money on anything but absolute essentials—the most basic of basic necessities. One-time stimulus payments are more likely to end up buried in the back yard than they are to flow into the economy.

Letting the banks fail would have dire consequences for the economy and therefore is not an option, but before forking over huge amounts of the taxpayers’ cash to bail them out, government should reinstate all of the regulations that were removed since the beginning of Reagan’s deregulation orgy and impose a few new regulations to insure against further abuses.

As it stands, Timothy Geithner’s bank rescue plan is a formula for failure. At the least, government should nationalize the failed and failing banks, fire the executives responsible for this disaster, cancel all bonuses and “performance” awards, sell off the fleets of corporate jets and executive limos to someone who can afford to waste the money, and do whatever else it takes to restore solvency and put the banks back on the path to profitability.

What we are witnessing now is nothing less than the end of life as we know it, and the situation is sure to get worse before it starts to get better. That’s just the way these things work. But the end doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing; the end of one thing could be the beginning of something new, of something more equitable and fair for everyone, of something that measures wealth not in terms of money but in quality of life.

In the end, reality will trump political ideology. In the end, we will either get it right or we won’t. If we get it right, the end will signify the end of the beginning and suspend the game of politics as usual. If we don’t, the end will be just that—the end of everything human.

Cynic that I am, at this point in time I’m betting on won’t.

B.A.D.! B.A.D.! B.A.M.!

It all started Sunday afternoon when I landed on Chuck for . . . to play a little catch-up. When I finished reading Chuck’s latest post, I could barely see the top of a graphic posted right below the heading Blogroll Amnesty Day, but it grabbed me, so I scrolled a little further down the page to see what it was all about. And before I realized that I was about to open a can of worms, I opened the can of worms.

Not long after, I arrived at Jon Swift, where I learned even more about Blogroll Amnesty Day and how bloggers use it to promote other blogs while promoting their own blogs in the process. From there I made my way to Skippy the bush kangaroo, where I let the ‘roo apply some polish to my newfound knowledge until I was convinced that that blog, too, should become a full-fledged member of my blogroll. And from there . . . well, that’s where the aforementioned can of worms comes in. But more about the worms in a minute.

As it turns out, promoting one’s blog the Blogroll Amnesty Day way is nothing more complicated than adopting a liberal blogroll policy; simply blogroll lots of B- and C-list blogs, and get them to blogroll yours in return. In other words, it’s all about exchanging links, much like knowledgeable Webmasters have done to promote their Web sites since the second Web site went online.

Although I think that Blogroll Amnesty Day (B.A.D) is a bit of a misnomer and that it should be renamed Blog Appreciation Day (also B.A.D.) to better describe what the event is about, I understand that it’s an event steeped in years (2) of tradition and that the founders may not be willing to let go of that.

From my standpoint, however, a simple name change may not be enough. Because I do everything slower these days (often, a single blink turns into a two-hour nap), an extended duration for the event would be most welcome, too. Perhaps we could call it Blog Appreciation Month (B.A.M.), instead. More time in which to get things done will give me more time in which to get things done. Or more time to procrastinate; I’ll be happy either way.

In the spirit of Blogroll Amnesty Day, I’m resigned to dedicating the entire month of Feb-roo-air-ee (as Hart Williams admonishes) to adding more blogs to Frieddogleg’s blogroll. I’ll be looking for and adding blogs and contacting those bloggers as time permits. And that brings me back to the subject of worms.

Oh, yes, about the worms. They’ve insinuated themselves into my daily routine, subverted most of my plans for the year, wormed their way into my heart, and generally become the most delightful nuisances I could ever imagine (but can’t imagine doing without). I’ve already introduced you to a few of those worms; I’ll introduce you to many more in the days to come.

And if you’re a blogger who has added this worm to your blogroll, let me know so I can return the favor. E-mail me at peteyATperfecttextDOTcom (mention “blogroll” in the subject line), or post the necessary information in a comment to the latest entry at Frieddogleg.

Don’t let your blog get left behind. Today is B.A.D., and a better day to begin an aggressive blog promotion campaign may or may not loom on the horizon. Don’t miss this opportunity for self-aggrandizement; get started now. You know you want to.

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

One thing I’ve learned since getting high-speed Internet service a few weeks ago is that I’m now able to waste vast amounts of time more efficiently and much faster than I could using a dial-up connection.

Another thing I learned is that making the switch from dial-up to cable isn’t comparable to, say, trading up from a 1947 Chevy to a Porsche 911 GT2, as I’d been led to believe; it’s more like trading up from a ’53 Chevy to an ’86 VW Scirrocco 16-valve, a car that falls far short of Porsche’s brute performance but which, nonetheless, is seriously capable of striking fear into the hearts of passengers when driven at or near its theoretical limits by a competent driver (and capable of striking even higher levels of fear into the hearts of passengers when driven by an incompetent one). But enough of this Internet access-as-car analogy.

20/20 hindsight once again brings into perfect focus the many downsides that always seem to accompany even the most benign of technological advances. For instance, YouTube videos never presented a problem before high-speed; at roughly 11 minutes of download time to gain one minute of play time, they simply weren’t worth the required time investment, and so I rarely engaged in watching them.

But now that video download times outpace playing times by a factor of three- or four-to-one, I can—and do—watch numerous videos every day. So, there’s no time-savings here. In fact, there’s a net time loss. Or should I say a ‘Net time loss?

Then, there are the many visits to the many Web sites I never frequented because they took too much time to load. Well, that’s not a problem now, either. For example, I gleefully spend hours on the Girl in Short-shorts blog because, since incorporating high-speed service into my game plan, the page—with its numerous delightful photos—loads in just under 20 seconds as opposed to . . . well, I don’t know, for sure; I never hung around longer than about ten minutes, which was scarcely enough time to download the photos to mid-page. But now, thanks to Comcast, that’s all in the ever-more-distant past.

Because the time required to access various other blogs and Web sites is now a fraction of what it formerly was, I access more various other blogs and Web sites more often—and spend more time on them—than ever before. But, I suppose, with high-speed Internet service, I can justify just about anything. What I can’t do is reconcile the advantages of a faster Internet connection with the lost productivity that came along with it.

If these “fer instances” prove anything, they prove that modern technology is not always a good thing, that technology, in solving one set of problems, quite often and unexpectedly delivers another.

And so, the bottom line is that nothing’s changed; things are the same way now as they’ve always been.

The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

An Affair to Forget

The good news is that, at least for the time being, Sam Adams will remain Portland’s mayor despite pressures from The Oregonian and Willamette Week, et al, to step down.

To his credit, The Oregonian columnist Steve Duin encouraged Sam to stay and duke it out, as did many of Sam’s more hardcore supporters. We've got more important things to do than worry about whether or not someone has a sex life and whether or not they lie about it (almost everyone does, if not to embellish an otherwise dreary sex life by admitting to affairs that never happened then to cover up affairs that did, or to maintain secrecy about kinky sexual proclivities deemed too embarrassing to talk about). The elephants in the room have been screwing the donkeys for years, but most people are disinclined to even raise an eyebrow—not to mention debate—over that.

What kind of people demand to know the lurid details of another person’s sex life? Nosey thrill-seekers desirous of satiating their prurient interests while paying homage to voyeuristic tendencies, to be sure, but also opportunists hoping to create a scandal for the purpose of taking down a rival, and those mentally challenged insecure souls who leap at every opportunity to vent their self-righteous moral indignation against people with whom they happen to disagree. But mostly it’s people who expect to be lied to—who enjoy being lied to—that delve into the private sex lives of public figures. Why else would you even ask the question when you know that it’s guaranteed—guaranteed—to precipitate a lie?

The whole sordid story of Sam’s brief affair with Beau Breedlove smacks of character assassination for political purposes, and it prompts me to ask these few questions:

Who leaked the story? How was the story leaked? Why was the story leaked? When was the story leaked? Who benefitted from the story being leaked? Was anyone other than consenting adults involved? Who are the aggrieved parties (other than the willing participants whose privacy was invaded)?

The answers to these questions can reasonably be expected to reveal the identities—and the motives—of those with axes to grind.

Does an expression of affection (such as a kiss) between a forty-something adult and a seventeen year-old minor constitute a sex crime? Before you answer, make sure you know the differences between forcible rape and statutory rape; the distinctions between them are huge. Oh, and if you’re a parent be careful how you answer, lest you inadvertently put yourself in the position of having to defend against the criminal charges of rape, pedophilia and incest at some point in the future merely because you desired to express love and affection for your child. You, too, can become a victim of someone’s malevolent intent.

Did Sam make errors of judgment in responding to the allegations? Of course he did. Rather than lie, he could have said, “I won’t dignify that question with an answer” or “My sex life is neither appropriate for nor open to public debate” or “I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours—you go first” or, to put it in terms that leave absolutely no room for ambiguity, “My sex life is none of your fuckin’ business.”

Despite what Sam’s detractors say, Sam hasn't broken the trust of the people. On the contrary, the people of Portland have broken Sam’s trust in them, and in the process made it extremely difficult for him to do his job, which is to conduct the people’s business.

How Sam conducts his personal affairs that are unrelated to the people's business is none of the people’s business.