Spitball Army

My music collection is much too big.  I have listened to most of it, but statistics argues against the possibility of me ever, realistically, listening to it all again.  There is just no way.  This is why I love my iPod, which travels with me in the car as a radio substitute, always on and hiding in the glovebox, reminding me of the many treasured musical moments I have had, playing out my musical legacy randomly, constantly surprising me with its choices.

It seems that my beloved iPod was as happy as I to be travelling out of town for several days last month.  How do I know this?  The little hard drive was somehow telepathically linked to me and was aware of my various activities, and chose to express itself through its musical selections.  Here are a few illustrative cases:

– I attended a typically stunning classical recital by Gil & Orli Shaham at Spivey Hall in Morrow, Georgia.  Getting back in my auto, feeling elated after the concert, I turned on the car stereo and wild, thunderous applause came roaring out of the speakers.  When it finally died down, a woman on the stage – the object of the adulation – proclaimed

I know…I’ll sing ’em all, and we’ll stay all night!  I don’t ever want to go home!!

Then Judy Garland launched into “Over the Rainbow.”  It was the closing moments of the Judy at Carnegie Hall CD, a record that I haven’t even heard all the way through.

– Two days later, driving around in South Carolina, a live version of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” came on.  That’s such a great song, and the version that played was the acoustic rendition from the Untouched Takeaway album.
[audio:Nick_Lowe___Whats_So_Funny_Bout_Peace_Love_and_Understanding_(acoustic).mp3]
I was sharply focused on the song: it reminded me of the September 2007 solo acoustic show Lowe did at the Somerville Theatre that I was fortunate to have seen.  Song over.  Next song was a Robyn Hitchcock song called “Clean Steve.”  At 1:40, Robyn sang the following lyric:

Clean Steve lent me a pound in 1974
That was a lot of money then, I was extremely poor
We had a party three years later
Clean Steve wore a robe
He brought a new Nick Lowe cassette and played it in the road

Damn! I thought.  It’s programming songs as a running commentary on my life!

– Trip over, I drove away early in the morning, headed home to Birmingham.  As I turned right onto the ramp leading to I-26, “On The Road Again” by Willie Nelson started up.  I swear I am not making this up.  If the iPod had eyes, it would have winked at me when I whipped my head around toward it in astonishment.

Just three, maybe four, more reasons to embrace the machine.

Yes, it is true, according to this reasonably objective website.  Hussein is an Arabic name given to a male, and it means “handsome one.”

So, what’s the fuss?

Here is a transcript of the controversial segment of Bill Cunningham’s introduction at yesterday’s John McCain rally in Cincinnati.  The Arabic words have been translated into good old vernacular English.  I think it is quite complimentary.

“At some point in the near future, the media is going to peel the bark off that good-looking fellow Barack Obama. That day will come. Then you’ll know the truth about his business dealings with Rezko, when he got sweetheart deals in Chicago and the illegal loans that he received. At some point the media will quit taking sides in this thing and maybe start covering Barack Obama‘s other handsome attributes.”

Having recovered from the all-consuming frivolity of yesterday’s Birthday anagrams, I decided to anagramize the name of my place of residence: Birmingham, Alabama.  The results are curious, if not quite up to par with yesterday’s results:

– Mammalian hag rabbi.
– Hail! Brain bag mamma!
– I’m a ham lamb bargain.  [I really liked that one.]
– A Bahamian, grim lamb.
– Man! I’m a hag limb Arab!
– I’m an alarm hag Bambi.
– I’m a hag lamb, I’m a bran.  [So, that’s where they get bran.]
– I am blaming Arab ham.

Okay, enough already.

The list just goes on and on, but there aren’t too many that are coherent beyond being a grouping of several small words.

While helping my Mom out with an anagram puzzle, I resorted to cheating – yes! – by searching the internet.  There I found a website with a software program that allows you to anagramize (new word) any word or phrase you can provide.

So, in honor of my own birthday (today), here are anagrams of my full name:

– I am a jerk of crudeness.  [I will concede.]
– Jesus! I’m a ranked force!  [Ranked near the bottom of the list, anyway.]
– I am confused as jerker.  [No, not that confused.]
– Nursemaids face Joker.  [Romeo & Juliet meets Batman.]
– A jerk adores fine scum.  [The finer the better.]
– Fried Roman Jesus cake.  [Something eaten during the Easter observance in ancient times.]
– Juice darkness or fame.  [I’ll take juice darkness for $400, Alex.]
– Jerk a mendacious serf.  [I had to look “mendacious” up.  It means “lying” or “intentionally untrue,” which is a perfect fit for this phrase.]
– Jesus! Fine, mad croaker!  […said the judge at the Westminster Frog Show.]
– Rejoiced funk amasser.  [I don’t know what it means, either, but the idea of someone happily amassing funk appealed to me.]

You can apparently get quite a lot of mileage in this exercise using the words Jesus and jerk.

My back yard has become the gathering place for three of the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells.  A yellow tabby that I call Thomas is the least fearless of the bunch, and will calmly lay in the driveway until I get within six or seven feet of him, then ZOOM! he disappears.  The smallish black cat – the runt of the trio – generally hides behind the woodpile or underneath my back porch.  One sight of me, even two houses away, and he’s gone.  The fuzzy (read: mangy) brown cat – the only one with a collar – will sit on the short garden wall in the back yard and taunt me to chase it away by broadcasting a high siren of a growl in my direction.  I guess he thinks the yard belongs to him.

The notion that the claim to ownership of my own property was being loosened from me became clearer yesterday, when I returned from a week out of town.  A couple of neighbors had been keeping an eye on my place, and one of them had kindly placed both issues of my Sunday New York Times on the front porch.  When I picked up the edition from the 24th and pulled the blue plastic bag from it, a bitter acid smell slapped me in the face.  I immediately dropped the bag, looked at my hand and, raising it to my nose, got blasted once again by the unmistakable stench of cat urine.

I don’t know about you, but the mental image of a tomcat walking around the yard pissing on everything isn’t one that I like replaying.  I have two cats of my own, one female and one male – both fixed – and there for a while I was having problems with the yard cats tormenting my cats when they went for an excursion onto the front porch (which is, thankfully, screened in).  Though I never caught them in the act, judging by the smelly evidence left behind, the toms were jumping on the ledge surrounding the porch and spraying everything including the mailbox and the recycling bin.  Apparently, these items were in their way.

But to take aim at the New York Times, sitting in its drab, inanimate way somewhere in the middle of the front yard, makes me suspicious that Thomas and his small gang of feline hoodlums have been contracted by timeswatch.org to assure that I avoid pissing my time away reading smelly left-wing liberal propaganda.

Charleston, South Carolina is a great food town.  I mean, really great.  Especially if you like shellfish and seafood.  Years ago, I was taken to a restaurant downtown called Carolina’s, where I ordered the most amazing crawfish pasta dish with a spicy tasso ham sauce.  Absolutely “to die for,” but something to live for, as well.  On my recent trip to the area, I had tentative plans to go to Carolina’s again, but found out that they no longer serve that dish…WHAT?!  I was crushed.

We enjoyed a Thai dinner at Pattaya on Highway 17 on Mount Pleasant (I had my favorite dish, Chicken Panang, which I get regularly at Surin West here in Birmingham, and at Pattaya it had a powerful kick beyond what I’ve ever gotten at Surin), and lunch at RB’s at Shem Creek (my scallops were flavored wonderfully with pepper and oil), where the view over the water was a calming tonic.  The best meal, however – probably because it was completely unexpected – was at Jack’s Cosmic Dogs, a roadside retro lunch joint on the rustic north part of Highway 17 in Mount Pleasant.
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A month ago, I posted that damn talking cats video from YouTube on this site.  There has since appeared another version of this same video, with the cat voices dubbed with burping and other sounds of bodily functions (just like in Blazing Saddles).  I laughed again.  My Dad, if he were around, would have laughed even harder than I did.
httpv://youtube.com/watch?v=3NdzRg4DGzw
Burping and farting cats as entertainment…see how far we have come?

Look at all of those Johnny Mathis records!!
(photo: Philip G. Pavely, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

For sale: 3 million record albums and 300,000 CDs; rare and out-of-print titles, all varieties of American music from classical to hip-hop.
 
But it’s much more than vinyl and jewel cases.

“It’s the history of music,” says Paul Mawhinney, the owner or Record Rama Sound Archives in Pine. “It’s my life’s work.”

Mawhinney, 69, is reluctantly parting with a collection he started more than 40 years ago. Legally blind and fighting diabetes, he wants to spend more time with his five grandchildren.

The collection is worth millions of dollars — Mawhinney’s personal estimate is at least $50 million — but he has received only one solid offer.

That bid of $28.5 million fell through. Other parties have shown interest, and Mawhinney says he continues to talk to a few interested parties. He has set of goal of selling the collection by March 1.

“I’ve had a lot of people that wanted it, but they don’t have the right kind of capital,” he says.

While Mawhinney’s albums are a record collector’s fantasy, they are beyond the financial reach of most vinyl enthusiasts. That’s unfortunate, because there are a lot of desirable items…

More story here.

The official website here.

Thanks for the story, Jeff!

Amy Winehouse could bounce back from her most recent troubles with a holiday album of Jewish tunes, if her producer pal Mark Ronson gets his way.The Grammy-nominated DJ met up with up Winehouse recently to discuss a possible follow-up to her smash-hit album Back To Black and was amused by the singer’s quirky plans to pay a musical tribute to her Jewish roots.He tells Rolling Stone magazine, “We’re talking about making a holiday record, with Christmas songs on one side and Hanukkah songs on the other. She’s got songs called, like, “Kosher Kisses” and “Alone Under the Mistletoe.” She was kind of f**king around, but I was like, ‘You have all these amazing records to play for Christmas, like Motown and Carla Thomas and the Charlie Brown Christmas, and unfortunately, us Jews have nothing that cool to listen to. So we should do something.”

More here.

From the “Just when you think things related to the Birmingham city government can get no more bizarre” department, this article from al.com, in which the really salacious parts are highlighted with bold type:

Suit challenges Langford’s first computer charity
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and JOSEPH D. BRYANT
News staff writers

A charity Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford created more than seven years ago to give every child a computer faces scrutiny from a donor and federal prosecutors over its use of more than $1 million in taxpayer money, including payments on personal credit card bills, expenses for “elaborate” trips and checks written to a star of gay-porn films.

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