Topics for Further Discussion: The Last Time

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Harry Ramble

The last Bicentennial Minute was broadcast on CBS-TV on December 31, 1976 at 8:57 PM EST. It was narrated by black activist Huey Newton, who asked Americans to “fight the oppressors of our modern slave state, down to the last bullet and bomb, just like George fucking Washington.”

The last $1 Video Rewind Fee was paid by Steven Blakely at a Blockbuster Video in Scobeyville, New York on November 2, 2000. The video was a VHS copy of Turner & Hooch (Touchstone, 1989).

The last validated instance of one person interjecting “That’s what she said!” into a conversation and eliciting a laugh occurred on February 12, 1997 in a Steak & Ale franchise in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The statement that precipitated the witty rejoinder was “This piece o’ meat ain’t worth no $8.95!”

The last sports contest played at New York’s Polo Grounds was a wrestling match that pitted former Detroit Lions defensive tackle Alex Karras against an American brown bear. The three-round match, which was televised on ABC-TV’s Wide World of Sports on July 22, 1964, was won by the bear on points, 22-13.

The last unicorn died of dehydration in a sumptuously appointed third-floor bedroom in the Neverland estate of recording artist Michael Jackson on June 12, 1992. The animal’s existence was known to four people on Earth (Mr. Jackson, the child actor Macauley Culkin, and the animal’s two full-time caretakers, Wanda Jefferson and her daughter, Duchess.) The animal died as a result of Mr. Jackson’s decision to terminate the employment of two-thirds of his estate’s staff on June 6, 1992, based on the advice of his astrologer.

The last person under the age of 70 to wear a fedora in public without coming off as a preening, clueless jackoff was Gerald Kelly on January 10, 1986. The event in question was a Human League show at the Lyceum Ballroom in Glenland Falls, Colorado. (Howard Jones opened.)

The last person “roasted” on the recurring NBC variety series “Dean Martin Celebrity Roast” was US Secretary of Agriculture Douglas C. Melton, on May 15, 1982. Featured speakers included Sammy Davis Jr., actor Werner Klemperer, writers Vincent Bugliosi and Norman Mailer, comedian Artie Johnson, former Chinese General Secretary Mao Zedong, impressionist Rich Little, and dancer/entertainer Charo.

The last piece of bulk rate mail bearing a provocative “teaser” statement on its exterior to be opened and inspected by its recipient was opened by Alice Teagarten of Oneonta, New York on March 30, 1997. Its compelling statement, “CANCER cured by this Common Root Vegetable!!! You’ll never guess what it is!” did not prove sufficiently persuasive to convince Ms. Teagarden to invest three small payments of $8.77 to “discover hundreds of secret all-natural remedies straight from Nature’s Bounty!”

The last person to “walk on the moon” was Lawrence T. Gaines, assistant director of photography under Stanley Kubrick, on April 11, 1969. Mr. Gaines had his picture taken with a “moon lander” as workmen disassembled the moonscape set assembled on a closed Warner Brothers soundstage as part of President Richard Nixon’s “Operation Blue Moon.” Related: The last person to “moonwalk” was Isaac Yudin on November 7, 1998, at the post Bar Mitzvah celebration for his friend Elliott Freedman.

The last meme posted on MySpace to go viral was uploaded by Doris Hendershot on December 1, 2008. The meme, a Photoshopped rendering of three cats in an animated gif file, featured the cats singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” in the voice of actor/celebrity Neil Patrick Harris. The account was last updated in March of 2012 when actor, recording artist and new owner of MySpace, Justin Timberlake, commented on Ms. Hendershot’s post, saying, “Love it!” Ms. Hendershot has not replied.

The last person to purchase Internet pornography with a credit card was Howard D. Utley on September 5, 2005. The purchase, Black Poles, White Holes, crashed Mr. Utley’s RealPlayer media player.

The last surviving member of the Lenni-Lenape Indian tribe died in 1802 at the Chester County Poorhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania. The Lenni-Lenape peoples occupied an area ranging from New York’s Hudson Valley through most of eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware when the first European explorers arrived in the 16th century. In Chester County, a rock with a plaque affixed to it commemorates the death of Indian Hannah (Mrs. Hannah Freeman, 1730-1802).

The last unsolicited query letter sent to a literary agency was written and mailed by Susan Kennedy on September 7, 2006. The letter, a moving testament to the narrative quality and sales potential of Ms. Kennedy’s first book, The Caretakers: Book One of The Sentinels Series, was deposited in the IN basket of Peggy Markson, an unpaid intern who had returned to Dartmouth College two weeks prior. The letter remained there, unopened, until the contents of the IN basket were emptied into a trash bin by a custodian, Sheila Johnson, on December 12, 2006.

The last person to genuinely “give a fuck” was Viola Studgeons, upon the occasion of the Fox television network’s decision to option a fifth (and ultimately final) season of her favorite show, Ally McBeal, on May 5, 2001.

Related: Topics for Further Discussion

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2012 US Income Tax Form 1040, Submitted as Haiku

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Harry Ramble

Wage and debt despair,

lost hours duly invoiced.

A life written off.

Learn a Hot New Dance Step in Minutes: Top 15 Songs of 2012

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Harry Ramble

This summer, I spent a lot of time driving my daughter and her friends to summer camp. The trip took about thirty minutes.

On day one, I had a CD in the player. I know I picked something simple and bouncy and upbeat to appeal to the kids, but I can’t remember what it was. It might have been the Cars or the Dandy Warhols.

And, oh good lord, you’d have thought I had passed out frosty refreshing bottles of vinegar laced with ant poison. The kids were absolutely stricken with loathing. I think my daughter apologized for my very existence. It was like everyone’s puppy died.

Needless to say, we switched right on over to 92.3 hot hit radio and those kids were just pleased as punch. All of them (two twelve-year-olds, a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old) sang right along with every song. They were little divas and knew every line, especially the ones with lewd content. They expressed great interest in the half-hourly “Dirty on the 30″ scandal-sheet gossip update and knew every celebrity referenced therein. (I had to switch away from that feature about twice a week when the content would cross the PG-13 threshold.)

As the summer progressed, I came to enjoy my 30-minute daily exposure to pure, unadulterated pop-hit, Top-10 radio. I grew to enjoy that song about the girl giving her number to a guy in a club (even though it might be crazy) and that other song about the guy hoping to get his whistle blown. Yes, the songs are fairly simple and assembled from a limited toolbox of melodic effects and beats. But they’re catchy anyway and derive much of their energy from the sheer over-the-top enthusiasm the vocal performers bring to the songs. I guess I enjoyed more than anything else the kids’ uninhibited joy in hearing them.

Those songs aren’t here (with one exception) because I didn’t buy them and put them on my iPod. I didn’t need to; I heard them every morning in the car. But the experience served as a handy reminder of how narrow and regimented my supposedly eclectic listening habits are. Music doesn’t necessarily have to be comprised of one dour recluse pushing a piano off a ledge and boom-miking the result. When it comes to music, the kids are usually right. That’s what I remembered this year.

Anyway, here’s the list. Most of the songs have YouTube links. The Spotify playlist is at the bottom (minus the Windy and Carl song, which isn’t on Spotify. Click the YouTube link for that one.). As in previous years, placement on the list is governed strictly by the number of plays it got on my iPod. If it got a lot, it’s here; if it didn’t, it’s not.

Kill For Love / Chromatics

The last time I bought sunglasses, a few years ago, I was in a Sunglass Hut in the Monmouth Mall, looking at Ray-Bans. Most sunglasses look stupid on my head, so I had to search awhile before I finally found a pair of aviators that I liked. I turned to the clerk in the store, put the sunglasses on, and said, “What do you think?” She was probably eighteen years old. She smirked at me and said, “They’re very ’80s.” “Honey,” I replied, “That was my decade.”

First Contact / PS I Love You

I have this thing about the last song on a record. Sometimes otherwise terrific artists just put too much thought into songs. You’re listening to that second track on a record and you can tell you’re listening to the 12th take of a song that sounded much better on the first take. And there’s some weird production touches on it, too. And then along comes the tenth song on a ten-track record and all that mannered preciousness drops out. The last song on the record is often the longest track and it’s sometimes a shambolic mess. That one’s the keeper. PS I Love You is Paul Saulnier. He seems to have been around a long time without putting much out. I’ve had a song of his from a Rocket Girl Records comp, “I Want You,” on various iPods for a decade. And now there’s this one.

Doom 84 / Screaming Females

So there’s this band that hails from my old college town. New Brunswick, New Jersey. It’s a straight-up power trio in the mold of Husker Du or Dinosaur Jr and it’s led by Marissa Paternoster. And the caterwauling noise she makes with both guitar and voice is, well … Hendrixian. “Doom 84″ starts off like Jimi at Monterey, breaks down at the three-minute mark, coheres into a colossal Black Sabbath stomper, and then it really takes off. For eight minutes. It’s an amazing thing. Screaming Females are already the best thing to ever come out of New Brunswick and soon they may be the best band anywhere.

Hey Jane / Spiritualized

I once donated $330 to a free-form radio station during a fund drive on the condition that they play the full 17-minute version of Spacemen 3′s “Rollercoaster.” So I have always had an affinity for J Spaceman’s druggy, draggy, fuzzy, untethered, psychedelic space epics. This one, clocking in at a mere 10-minutes plus, sounded different, though. It had an almost poppy, bouncy, uplifting feel. It sounded clean. Released in March, it was a bona fide spring anthem. The link above is the amazing video for it, directed by AG Rojas, which is flagged for mature content. You should definitely sign in to see it if you haven’t already.

This Summer / Superchunk

A lot of people blame Superchunk for emo, but they’ve got it all wrong. Superchunk (like their contemporaries Dinosaur Jr, also featured here) were indie-label guitar heroes at a time (late 80s, early 90s) when that kind of noise was hard to find. Their lyrics (when you could decipher them) were intimate and introspective without ever being maudlin or self-pitying. Dinosaur Jr is back now, issuing epic after epic like they never went away, and Superchunk too, peeks its head out every once in a while, even if they’re only releasing the occasional one-off EP or single these days, like this one. Anyway, here’s the only entry on the list from the CEO of a highly influential and successful record label. And an instant-classic, punk-pop summer anthem, at that.

Elephant / Tame Impala

I’ve noticed that Jeff Mangum has resurfaced, appearing here and there to play some songs. There may even be a new Neutral Milk Hotel record out in 2013 or thereabouts. I suspect he came back because he heard footsteps. Tame Impala is a band that could easily have fit on the Elephant 6 label, back in the early 90s. Shaggy, loose, sprawling, psychedelic in that Olivia Tremor Control way. This song is a straight-up pop gem, trippy and hooky in the best sense of both words.

Fainting In The Presence Of The Lord / Windy and Carl

I seem to have stacked all the really long songs up here near the top. And this one’s the longest of them all at almost 19 minutes. On my nightly runs, this one provided the soundtrack for a good two miles. “Fainting” is the apotheosis of everything Windy and Carl. It’s the zenith of their atmospheric, ambient, shoegaze ethos. It’s the sound the heavens will make when our sun goes supernova, its corona expanding outward to engulf our little earth in a healing maelstrom of fire. I don’t know where Windy and Carl could go from here. So, anyway, go ahead. Give it a listen. There’s a YouTube clip in the link above. See Also: Mladic by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

I Know It Oh So Well / Dinosaur Jr

Last winter, I was at Yankee Stadium, watching some of the Rutgers – Iowa State Pinstripe Bowl. I left at the half and took the train back to Penn Station. Instead of getting off at Penn Station, though, I stayed on until 14th Street and got off there. I knew that the music venues (The Ritz, CBGBs, Brownie’s, the Mercury Lounge) and the music stores (Tower Records uptown and downtown, Sights and Sounds, Kim’s Video) I’d haunted for years were all long gone. But I figured I’d at least see some things I remembered from the late ’80s through the ’90s. But … nothing. The hole-in-the-wall bars, the humble stores, the bodegas, everything was gone, replaced by high-end boutiques, restaurants, and big-chain suburban-style establishments of every sort. Everything was so bright and well lit, it was disorienting. At several junctures, I found myself walking west when I thought I was going east, or north instead of south. Eventually I blundered far enough south to find St. Marks Place and one bar, the Grassroots Tavern, an old NYU watering hole, that still existed. Inside, it was all changed around, too. I sat at the bar amongst a coterie of bewildering hipsters, had a beer, and got the hell out of there.

Loner / Burial

Burial is one of those acts I listen to all the time, but they never quite make the iPod-play, year-end cut-off, so I was surprised this one is the first to appear here. Burial is an anonymous British dubstep artist putting out eerie, noirish, echoey dirges about as far from dance as you could imagine. (He has since been identified as William Bevan.) This song, the second track on the Kindred EP released in February, starts out like many Burial tracks, with someone who sounds like John Cusack whispering “I think there’s something out there,” amidst Enoesque synth churn. But then it takes off with an almost poplike momentum and closes out on a gospel note. Surprising!

Shadow / Wild Nothing

It’s amazing how much neo-shoegaze nostalgia is out there right now. Most of it doesn’t rise above the level of cover-band noodling (I won’t name any names), but Wild Nothing nails the aesthetic pretty accurately, while bringing something original to the endeavor. Sometimes, instead of putting a Ride or Slowdive CD in the player, I’ll put Wild Nothing’s Nocturne in instead. That’s a compliment. See Also: Drift Away by Bleeding Rainbow.

Youth Without Youth / Metric

Ha! Here’s a banger. It’s not all pensive, introverted noodling by pale, undernourished sensitive types, here at the EZED Top 15. Does anybody remember Kasey Chambers? I never know anymore; I’m getting pretty old, and a clip for “Crossfire” doesn’t even exist on YouTube. Anyway, this chick sounds like her, backed with, like, the Knack, or something. I like the Jeff Lynne-styled robo-voice that sings harmony on the chorus, too. See Also: To Touch You by the Young Prisms

Gangnam Style / PSY

Oh, there’s always a ringer here in the yearly EZED Top 15, and here it is. I played the ass off this one from late summer through the fall, and the rules are the rules, iPod-plays-wise. When I first heard it on the radio, I was reminded of the first time I heard Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome To The Jungle.” I remember wondering, Is this a hard rock song or a parody of a hard rock song? Like “Welcome,” “Gangnam Style” is so goofily exuberant, so blissfully unaware of its own silliness, that it crashes right through the back wall of parody and into a new room called genius. When I finally saw the YouTube video (which is about to garner 1 billion views) and realized that the singer was a chubby Korean guy with his own doggy-style dance, I was hooked. See Also: Kick Out The Epic, Motherfucker by Dada Life.

It’s You / Lust for Youth

I was driving around this summer, returning from the beach with my family, and searching for a song on the radio. (Hot Hit 92.3 FM plays a LOT of ads.) Anyway, I wandered up the dial and suddenly New Order’s “Blue Monday” blared out of the radio from what had been a commercial place on the dial. I almost drove off the road. Here in America (and especially here in the NJ/NY/CT tri-state area) we simply don’t have alternative-rock radio. The last major radio station of that sort was WLIR/WDRE out of Garden City, Long Island in the 1980s and early ’90s. This odd, new station played something considerably less impressive afterwards (Pearl Jam?), but for a moment, hearing New Order coming out of my radio, I was transported back to my music-listening heyday, driving aimlessly around suburban streets listening to Graham Parker and the Feelies. (It turned out that this perplexing new station was only playing old alternative hits for a week or two, until it changed over to sports-call-in radio WFAN.) Lust For Youth sounds exactly like my out-of-body New Order experience. Fuzzy, crackly new-wave music four times removed and placed in an unfamiliar context.

The House That Heaven Built / Japandroids

I didn’t know there was anyone left out there who had the chutzpah to put out a genuine, arena-sized love song with enormous fist-pumping choruses in the style of … I don’t know … The Alarm or Love and Rockets. If someone can put out “The House That Heaven Built,” can unironic Van Halen revivalists be far behind? What about REO Speedwagon? Aren’t they due for another look?

Letters To The Metro (Zombi Remix) / Mogwai

I don’t know about you, but I stopped buying Mogwai records years ago. I mean, I like Mogwai, but if all Mogwai records are alike (muted, keening strumming, punctuated with occasional startling outbursts of corrupted noise), then you might as well stick with Young Team. But Mogwai is a canny outfit and this terrific set of remixes of originals from the Mogwai record Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, released under the title A Wrenched Virile Lore, reveals that the members of Mogwai understand their repetition problem as well as we do. This Zombi Remix (no, I haven’t Googled Zombi, I’m assuming he’s some producer somewhere) re-imagines the Hardcore track “Letters To The Metro” as something Tangerine Dream could have released on one of their surpassingly excellent early ’80s soundtrack records (Thief, Sorcerer, Risky Business).

Notable Reissues

Moe Tucker: I Feel So Far Away

“Spam Again”

When Moe Tucker sings “I’m going to work, baby baby, to make a dollar, to buy some Spam for me and you. I can’t stay home with you today,” or “It would be nice, after working all week, if I could buy a little something for me. I can’t go to a movie or buy a book, I can’t even buy a bottle of Coke,” she’s not setting up some allegorical figure she can use to dramatize the plight of America’s downtrodden masses. She’s describing her day as a single mother, trying to scrape by on a Walmart job. Tucker is an anomaly, the former drummer for a world-renowned band (the Velvet Underground) who lives a hand-to-mouth existence when she’s not keeping time for Lou Reed or sitting in with the Raveonettes. This compilation isn’t a reissue necessarily, though most of the songs it collects were released on labels consisting of little more than a PO Box and have long been unavailable. The music itself veers all over the place, from Buddy Holly-style rave-ups to folk songs to propulsive blues workouts, all carried by Tucker’s distinctive, hectoring voice. Well worth looking into.

Donnie and Joe Emerson / Dreamin’ Wild

“Baby”

When I first heard of this one, my Smirk Radar started pinging like crazy. You see this kind of thing all the time. Some hipster “discovers” an unschooled outsider act and decides they’re the best thing ever, despite the fact they can barely play their instruments. Think Frank Zappa and the Shaggs. Or WFMU huckster Irwin Chusid. This one is different, though. Donnie and Joe Emerson made Dreamin’ Wild in 1979 in a home studio built for them by their father. They were teenagers in rural Washington state, hundreds of miles from anyone even tangentially related to the music biz. The record itself has a sensibility far removed from the punk rock and disco that ruled 1979. It’s a kind of blue-eyed soul classic made by two young farmer boys who taught themselves guitar, drums, and production techniques mostly by listening to the radio. So they pressed a few hundred copies of Dreamin’ Wild, slapped a Sears Photo Studio shot on the jacket, and moved on with their lives. Thirty years later, some blogger found a copy of it on a mantelpiece in a junk shop. And now it’s here.

My Bloody Valentine / EPs 1988-1991

“Feed Me With Your Kiss”

The My Bloody Valentine reissues arrived this year, finally, and they were a bit of a disappointment. They offered virtually no new material and didn’t sound any different than the original CDs released from 1988 through 1991. This 2-CD set compiles all of the original EPs, two of which had been long out of print, plus two previously unreleased and unexceptional tracks. I already owned all of this material in one form or another, but I still enjoyed driving around this summer, reliving a time when each of these EPs was a crackly, fuzzy, soaring, secret communication from an obscure realm far away.

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Top 10 Things That Need to Go the Fuck Away: 2012 Edition

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Harry Ramble

Yay! It’s that time of year again. Time to take stock of the year behind us. Time to celebrate the best and brightest our culture and society have had to offer in the most recent calendar year.

Yeah, but fuck that. Here’s 10 things that have to go, in no particular order.

Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen is to middle-class white people as Jay-Z is to inner-city black people. He’s the reason the revolution never happened. He is the conduit by which legitimate rage and fear and despair was channeled into T-shirt sales. He is the soothing balm slathered on the guilty consciences of David Brooks and Chris Christie and Barack Obama. He is, as Leon Wieseltier described him in the New Republic, “the least dangerous man in America.” I’m no revolutionary, and I believe that stupid people generally get what they deserve, but bad songs are bad songs. Springsteen didn’t always write bad songs. He started writing bad songs right about the time that goopy Southern drawl appeared in his voice and he started doing that gospel shouting thing from the top of Roy Bittan’s piano. Somewhere between 1988 and 1992. (Some would date Springsteen’s sell-by date to 1984-85, but that doesn’t allow for Tunnel Of Love.)

Anyway, listen to “Racing in the Street.” Then listen to “Shackled and Drawn.” Both are protest songs, of a sort. The first is written and performed by someone recognizable as a real person. The second is written and performed by a well-meaning fathead who clips song ideas from the pages of a copy of Mother Jones on the waiting room table in his therapist’s office. Springsteen is reputed to be a big fan of Elvis Presley. He is said, by those close to him, to have learned much from watching Presley’s decline and fall. He has, to his great credit, never become Elvis Presley. Instead, he’s become Colonel Parker, anthemizing his fans’ grievances and re-packaging them in $75 Super Deluxe Editions.

Hungry Hungry Hippos: The Movie

This is a real thing. Hasbro has entered into a partnership with a film production company called Emmett/Furia to develop Hungry Hungry Hippos into a feature movie, along the lines of Battleship. There was a time in this country when smart people cynically sold stupid things to stupid people. Harry Cohn, Louis B. Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn. Whip-smart, unscrupulous Jews who got their start selling tin-plated utensils and tomato seeds from the backs of wagons. That golden age is over now. Today’s Hollywood executives grew up with GameBoy and Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles and PC caches full of porn jpegs. They’re not selling Hungry Hungry Hippos: The Movie to people because they have nothing but contempt for the hapless consumers who make them rich. They’re selling Hungry Hungry Hippos: The Movie to consumers because they genuinely believe Hungry Hungry Hippos is a good thing.

Top 10 / Top 40 / Top 100 Lists

Regular readers of this feature (yes, pay attention, both of you) know that I like to close out the year with a list of Top 15 Songs. You should feel free to ignore this year’s edition of that list. (If I get around to it.) Because it’s a bunch of shit. The year’s best songs never appear on that list because I haven’t heard the year’s best songs. You haven’t either. The year’s best song was probably written by some guy with a guitar and a drum machine in Gainesville, Florida who played it once on stage at Loopy Lou’s Bar & Grill but threw it away after he got booed for not playing “Free Fallin”.

Soon Pitchfork and Consequence of Sound and Slate and whoever the fuck else are going to publish their Top 100 Songs / Albums / Videos / TV Ads / Whatever of 2012. Here’s the thing about those lists. They’re all going to be the same. They’re going to cite the same items in minutely varying order. The consensus has already been arrived at and no one’s varying from it one iota’s worth. The same publicists are sending the same books / movies / records to the same arbiters of taste. Those arbiters don’t have the time or inclination to read / watch / listen to anything else. This state of affairs is endemic to the institution even when the time frame being considered is fairly large. (The #4 record of the Rock Era is always My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. The #23 record is always the Replacements’ Let It Be.) Compress the time span being considered to twelve months and what have you got? Dirty Projectors and Grizzly Bear.

Rutgers Scarlet Knights Football

How can something exist for 150 years and have no identifiable characteristics whatsoever? The Rutgers University football program has no discernible history. In 1869, four guys went out onto the campus green and kicked a pig bladder around for twenty minutes, an event which qualifies as the first-ever college football game. Since then? Nothing. No traditions, no big wins. They’ve never been the champion of anything. They have no rivals, bitter or otherwise. It is a testament to this utter historical vacuum that their recent season-ending loss to Louisville (for the championship of a laughing-stock conference that has already been abandoned and left for dead by every halfway-viable member, including both Louisville AND Rutgers) was widely billed as Rutgers’ biggest game ever. This is a team that once erected a stadium atrium monument to its 10 Biggest Games Ever … and five of the games were narrow losses to major college programs that had committed the sin of looking past Rutgers to some other much more important game on its schedule.

The Rutgers Scarlet Knights wouldn’t even merit inclusion on this list if the program wasn’t so damned expensive. The Rutgers football program has been so incredibly unprofitable that it costs every Rutgers student $1,000 per year in extra college costs just to support it, making it by far the poorest return on investment among major college sports programs in the nation. The good news is, Rutgers is now moving to the Big Ten. They’ll continue to lose on a regular basis, but each loss will cost a lot less.

Occupy Wall Street

You would think this boatload of recent college graduates with worthless communications degrees from SUNY would at least be capable of communicating a coherent message. Here’s the message: A tiny consortium of billionaire bankers and venture capitalists, working in tandem with bought-and-paid-for politicians, have gamed the system to create a permanent underclass of underpaid, debt-ridden Americans. These overlords used to steal the occasional million here and there, and sometimes they went to jail. Now they steal billions every day, grinding every worthwhile institution in America down into dollars, which they ship off to tax-free off-shore havens. And now you can’t sue them, you can’t arrest them, you can’t even question their actions. Here’s the message we got instead from Occupy Wall Street: an ironic hipster with a tiny beard, a droopy Dr. Seuss Cat in the Hat hat on his head, holding a sign saying “Fuck the Rich.”

Martin Amis and Russell Banks

Have any two writers working in the English language ever fallen off so suddenly, precipitously, and catastrophically? Everybody complains that popular fiction is so utterly crappy, but let’s face it, if 50 Shades of Grey was better written, it would just annoy its intended audience. Same with each year’s Stephen King or James Patterson best seller, most of which are ghostwritten at this point, anyway. But what are we to make of Martin Amis and Russell Banks? These guys have written at least four of the canonical works of 20th-century fiction (Money, London Fields, Continental Drift, Affliction) and nowadays they’re handing in the literary equivalent of Expository Writing 101 term papers cribbed, slapdash, from random Wikipedia entries. Actually, I guess you could make a tired post-modernist argument for books cribbed, slapdash, from random Wikipedia entries.

There’s no excuse whatsoever for Yellow Dog or Rule of the Bone or Lionel Asbo: State of England or Lost Memory of Skin. You can’t read these things. You can’t even skim them. Amis appears to be perversely thumbing his nose at every reader who ever cared about his work, becoming the real-life equivalent of one of his thuggish London louts. And Banks? I have no idea. After tossing his Lost Memory Of Skin into the garbage, half-read, I went to YouTube to watch an interview with him, looking for signs of Alzheimer’s. What does Russell Banks’ editor say to the other editors at the NewsCorp Christmas party? I guess he just keeps his head down and assumes unexpressed sympathy on the part of his colleagues.

Professional Sports Testing for Performance Enhancing Drugs

It has been suggested that certain performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) may have a detrimental effect on the future health of athletes. You know what else is dangerous? Slamming your fool head over and over, thousands upon thousands of times a year, in hundreds of meaningless PeeWee league and high school and college practice sessions, on blocking sleds, tackle dummies, brick walls, and opposing players. There are enough celebratory head slaps and chest bumps in a typical endzone celebration to put you or me in an emergency room. Why do players play football when they clearly know it will destroy their health? Because they like to fuck cheerleaders. Because they might get on TV. Because each and every one of them would gladly trade forty healthy years as a tax accountant for five years in which they get to walk into the VIP area of Steve Wynn’s nightclub of the month in Vegas and have every model and every TV actress know who they are. That’s why.

But what about baseball and soccer and chess? Don’t these same PEDs confer upon athletes an “unfair advantage” in competition? You betcha. These PEDs — stimulants and pain killers, testosterone and human growth hormone and Adderall — do indeed provide such advantages. That’s why roughly 100% of elderly male owners of professional sports franchises fill and refill personal prescriptions for exactly these PEDs forbidden to the players who work for them. All the time. That’s why middle-aged Hollywood actors and actresses take them, too. It’s why Sally down in data entry got that big, ungainly boob job. It’s a competitive edge. That’s how science works.

The Afghan War

Here’s a secret about terrorism you might not know. If terrorists wanted to attack us, they could attack us every day, with impunity, no matter where the U.S. Marine Corps 3rd Battalion is currently deployed. On Monday night, they could ease a rented panel van onto the tracks of a passenger rail line as the 9:15 approached and walk away. On Tuesday night, they could take a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher (about $5000 retail on the weapons black market), trudge into the swamps south of an international airport, and shoot down a plane. On Wednesday, they could empty a test tube of plague into the pool at Caesars Palace Las Vegas. (Lindsay Lohan would be so pissed.) On Thursday, they could disrupt the Internet with technology and know-how common among disaffected teenaged 4chan hackers.

You see what I mean? You can’t guard everything, everywhere, at every time. You certainly can’t guard against it by using a colossal, unwieldy military armored group the size of a small city, with its own Taco Bell franchises, TV stations, and golf courses. We, as Americans, should be glad that there aren’t very many people out there who want to kill us, just because they hate “Freedom.” On the other hand, we should also wonder at our inability to stop a war that nobody wants and nobody believes in.

The 18-to-49 Year Old Demographic

I am 50 now and my opinion no longer matters. It stopped mattering last year. (That’s why I write this blog.) Forty-nine is the cut-off in terms of meaningful statistical analysis of popular trends and products and services. Everywhere you go, that’s the demographic parameter that matters. People eighteen to forty-nine years old determine the shape and purpose and very existence of everything we have here in America. They’re the target audience that TV advertisers are seeking. They’re the clientele prized by the proprietors of every nightclub and shoe store and pet accessories outlet. They’re the focus of every focus group. You know why? Because there’s no future in old people.

Mitt Romney

Remember Mitt? He ran for president of the United States for six long years. From February 13, 2007 until November 6, 2012. He was in the news every damned day. And now he’s gone. The dog on the camper roof. The income tax filings he never shared. That weird Mormon underwear he never mentioned. The “Faith in America” thing. The binders of women. That little wince he believed was a smile. I wake up every day and I think, Hey, it’s okay, all that shit is gone now. Feels good, doesn’t it?

Election Morning After: GOP Soul Searching Begins

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Harry Ramble

BOSTON, MA — With the results in for the 2012 U.S. Presidential election, Democrats have what they believe is a voter mandate for their fiscal and social policies of the last four years, while the Republicans are left to pick up the pieces. Already, key GOP political strategists are sifting through the ashes of a failed Romney campaign, seeking clues as to where the effort went wrong. There’s no shortage of finger-pointing and blame-shifting, but many well-placed party operatives have been candid in their opinions of where Romney lost his way, while others have suggested measures targeted at getting the party back on its feet after the electoral drubbing they received on Tuesday.

Many of these GOP operatives were willing to speak off the record to our reporters. Here’s what we’re hearing:

1. “Let’s just SAY that Mitt Romney won. Mitt Romney IS president of the United States. Is it true? Who knows? Let the fact-checkers worry about it. As long as Hannity says it’s true, our Tea Party crowd will never know the difference.”

2. “Clearly, the 18th century movement to expand the vote beyond wealthy white male landowners hurt us in this election.”

3. “Our last minute policy initiative to offer “Tuesday Double Coupon Bonus Savings” on angioplasties and hip replacements as part of the Ryan Medicare Reform didn’t give us the boost we were looking for.”

4. “Next time, we’re not going to craft our entire election platform as a means to get to the right of Herman Cain.”

5. “The Obama re-election team’s state-of-the-art voter-targeting metrics and advanced computer modeling of voter turnout in battleground states were exceptional. On our side, the binders full of women that Mitt gave us were virtually useless.”

6. “We should have positioned Paul Ryan as a “rape baby.” I mean, look at the guy. It’s definitely plausible. And it’s inspirational. ‘Woman raises baby of her rapist and he grows up to become a vice presidential candidate.’ We could have carried Ohio with that.”

7. “Romney endorsements from Meat Loaf and Ted Nugent were helpful. But when last-minute negotiations with Foghat and Brownsville Station broke down, that really hurt us. For 2016, you can bet we’ve already reached out to all the members of Grand Funk Railroad and Thin Lizzy. Those that are alive.”

8. “Let’s have our lawyers get a recount started in Pennsylvania and Ohio. We recount some ballots for a few hours and then we get the Supreme Court to strike down the recount as unconstitutional and award the election to ~~George Bush~~ Mitt Romney. Somebody get Scalia on the phone.”

9. “That SuperStorm Sandy thing that Obama pulled off was sheer genius. KILLED our momentum. For 2016, we’ve got to get ourselves a California earthquake and get in FRONT of that fucker, media-wise.”

10. “In retrospect, our targeted GOP voter initiative to reach out to Hispanics, Why Don’t You Just Self-Deport Yourselves?, didn’t resonate favorably. We should have emphasized the emotional bond Mitt has with his undocumented landscapers right from the start. Also, maybe done some photo ops with Ricky Martin.”

Related: Mitt Romney for President!

Related: Detours to Nowhere

Netflix Profile, Your DVD Reviews (588)

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Harry Ramble

Michael

I suppose this is a silly film and no one here likes it much, but I do. If I were one of God’s angels and I were a man, I would definitely be John Travolta and all the women would leave their boyfriends and dance around me. I can’t even remember the last time I danced with a man, even for one song in a club somewhere. Imagine in this day and age, going out on a date with dancing, instead of to some bar with the football game on TV. I cried when John Travolta saved the dog and I even cried when he danced. He’s such a lovely dancer. My friend Evelyn says angels are all around us and I hope she’s right, though she also buys rosaries and mass cards blessed by the Pope on Amazon. John Travolta is so charming and graceful and has such nice eyes that of course he would have to be gay and have sex with men in steamrooms, as they say now. Surprise, surprise, I say. There are no charming men in real life.

28 out of 93 members found this review helpful

The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Complete Second Season

This show is probably one of my first memories. It was always on Channel 2 on Sundays after All in the Family and my mother would cut up a quart of butter pecan ice cream into four slices with a knife she ran under hot water. Mary was so sweet and Lou so gruff and Ted so dumb and Murray always knew the perfect thing to say. My dad, this was the only show he ever laughed out loud at, this and the Carol Burnett Show. I guess I was six years old. My dad worked for 35 years in the same place as an engineer for GM, designing office spaces. (Imagine having such a job today, designing offices for your company!) Every year, there was a company picnic in July and a Christmas party in December, and my dad knew everyone and everyone knew him. There were softball games and bowling teams and on Thursday nights my mom went out with the other GM wives. “Generous Motors,” they called it, and they weren’t kidding. I always loved how Mary had her desk and Murray had his and Lou’s door was always open. You could tell that they all really loved each other and they loved coming to work. Where I work at the customer service center here in Wichita, no one eats together in the break room. No one talks to each other. Even just five years ago, you at least knew the other girls’ names. No more. Mr. Grant never timed Mary Richard’s trips to the ladies’ room on his watch, but the work still got done. Of course in the last season of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (spoiler alert!) everyone gets fired from the station, so the joke was already on us, I guess.

18 out of 45 members found this review helpful

50 First Dates

Anyway, the walrus and the penguins are cute. And so is Drew Barrymore, who’s good in everything. I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but does anyone find Adam Sandler believable as a sensitive guy with a heart of gold? Really? Back when I still had my looks, I used to turn a deaf ear to guys like Adam Sandler and keep on walking. Canned sweet talk and their eye always on the main chance. Now the whole world is Adam Sandlers. Thirty-year-old teenagers who grew up on computer p*rn, video games, and Korn. 50 First Dates? How about fifty variations of some guy buying you a drink and asking you if you “like it freaky?” Some slopey forehead eager beaver with steroid arms and a beer belly who thinks making a video on his phone of you having sex is “nasty hot.” A video you can bet will be on his friends’ phones 40 seconds after he’s out the damned door. Adam Sandler, every one of ‘em. I’m old enough to remember when certain “extras” were off the menu until you at least were committed in a relationship. Now, every guy you meet wants to do it up there on the second date. (And you know what I mean, “up there.”) Or maybe your friend would like to “get her freak on” too? Yes, how did you know! That’s exactly what I want! To get naked with a woman I used to know from the law office and have sex with some drunken fool I just met with a tribal tattoo around his neck! Because I’m so freaky! Not that I even meet guys anymore, since it turns out that thirty-five was the magic age that renders you completely invisible.

11 out of 37 members found this review helpful

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

Enjoy it while you can, kids, that’s all I’ve got to say. It’s a moment in time and then it’s gone. I had my chances. God knows I could have settled for less. And you know what? I’d be happier today if I had. That’s the honest truth. In movies like this, they say it’s a mistake to settle for less than the moon and the stars and choirs of angels singing when you let some guy feel your boobs. But settling for less is the dirty business of this life and you’d best get to it while you got something to hang a price tag on. The guys who cheat and the guys who drink and the guys who can’t keep a halfway decent job and the guys who wear lifts in their shoes and have five different accounts on OKCupid? That’s most of the guys out there, in the end. I was engaged once, a dozen years ago. Or engaged to be engaged anyway, when Justin got drunk one night and hit me. Just hauled off and belted me. He’d never hit me before and he never got the chance again. I was still young enough to have my little circle of clucking hens, all of us little office girls up to our hips in a month’s worth of drama. Burning up the phone lines. Some of those girls got married and some didn’t and most of them are gone today, who knows where. Justin got himself a good-paying job digging wells for the county and he never did get married. He lived in a big style for a while and then he got his

31 out of 245 members found this review helpful

Spider-Man 3

arm caught in some machine or another and now he’s on disability. I’d see him every couple of months or so when I used to go out, just a hi or goodbye. That’s it, that’s how life is. The only guys left now are the guys who have nothing and wouldn’t mind sharing some of yours. Or the guys who have plenty and are looking at girls ten years younger than you are, if they’re looking for anything long-term at all. And of course, the gays. More of them every year, it seems. Although I guess we always had the same amount, but they were in the closet. We had our time in the sun, all of us girls out on Cheney Lake in some guys’ boat, drinking beer and telling tales and daydreaming about maybe meeting some guy in the club later that night. This movie, Spider-Man, I saw it and I already don’t remember a thing about it. All the movies and the songs today hardly make sense to me anymore, it’s all comic books and clanging club songs sung by machines.

13 out of 112 members found this review helpful

One Day At A Time: The Complete First Season

This one was on when I was ten or twelve, right when I first started really doing my hair and thinking about boys. Ann Romano had this sassy little bobbed haircut with always a stray lock out of place that had to be tossed or blown back into place whenever she was peeved off at somebody. I did my hair exactly like that and was always on the lookout for reasons to be angry so I could huff a strand of hair out of my eyes and stomp away. All the men buzzed around Ann like bees and she didn’t care a whit. She had her own job at the law office and her own apartment. When David proposed to her, she just said thanks, but no thanks, and grinned her flirty little grin at everybody. Man, I wanted to be Ann Romano when I grew up. And now I have my own apartment, but I don’t have the job at the law office anymore. They canned me after eight years (4 weeks severance) and now I work at the customer service center. In six years, they gave me one cost of living raise, then they cut my hourly rate twice in the last three years. All the bees have stopped buzzing and I don’t grin my flirty little grin at anybody. And there’s nowhere really to go but down. Sometimes I feel like my life is a big house where the lights are going off and the windows are going dark one at a time.

0 out of 13 members found this review helpful

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Mitt Romney For President!

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Harry Ramble

A lot of people thought Mitt Romney would never amount to anything, but I always knew he’d come through in the end, when the stakes were highest.

His back to the wall, faced with declining poll numbers and back-stabbed by GOP insiders, Romney opted to do what all the Republican mush-mouthers and dog-whistle blowers and code-word deployers (I’m looking at you, Rush Limbaugh!) have been too cowardly to do.

Mitt Romney declared war on red-state America.

As a resident of defiantly blue-state New Jersey, I say it’s about damned time those “takers” in the bright-red states of the Deep South and Mountain West got what was coming to them.

They say only Nixon can go to China, and so it must be that only Mitt Romney can take on the true enemies of real Americans by serving up some painful truths to GOP-voting America. When Mitt Romney talks about “takers” voting themselves more and more free benefits without paying anything into the system, we all know who he’s talking about.

He’s talking about all those old people in Florida, checking in for free hip replacement surgeries they probably don’t even need (courtesy of Uncle Sam!) before going back home to work on the ObamaCare is Socialism! banner they’ll be carrying at the Tea Party demonstration on Tuesday.

He’s talking about those libertarian farmers in Iowa and Nebraska, hauling their bushel baskets to Washington and filling them with tax dollars every time the weather’s a little too dry or a little too wet. And their Ron-Paul-groupie farmer friends in Louisiana, selling their farmed fish to the US government at well-above-market rate every time the price of tilapia dips.

He’s talking about that Iraqi war vet in Mississippi, the guy with one arm, half a leg, and a NObama, Keep the Change bumper sticker on the car he’s using to drive into town to cash his “disability” check.

Oh, and the Iraqi war vet’s buddy, that guy at defense contractor Lockheed Martin who keeps selling us $250 million F-22 fighter planes that weren’t used in either the Iraqi or Afghan wars, because they don’t work and never will work.

He’s talking about all those unwed mothers in Alabama and West Virginia, with their scary-high obesity rates and seventh-grade educations, dropping their kids off at government-subsidized daycare centers before going off to work another day, making $7.15 an hour shrink-wrapping chicken breasts at Tyson instead of staying home like Ann Romney and baking pies.

Freeloaders, every one of them, and Mitt Romney is on the case. The numbers tell the story, as Romney, former governor of blue-state Massachusetts, knows all too well.

For every dollar that a resident of New Jersey pays in taxes, he gets back 61 cents in federal benefits. (Hey, we’re #1 in the nation in the category of Getting Nothing For Our Taxes!) Connecticut? 69 cents. California? 78 cents. New York, that pinko Communist haven of Cadillac-driving welfare queens? 79 cents. Massachusetts? 82 cents.

And then, of course, you’ve got your takers, hopelessly devoid of pride or ambition, slaves to government handouts, living off the toil of others with a true work ethic. Come on out and take a bow, Mississippi ($2.02 for every $1). And come on down, Louisiana ($1.78), West Virginia ($1.76), Alabama ($1.66), North ($1.68) and South ($1.53) Dakota. You get the picture. It’s all here in the map, if you want to take a look.

We’re in dire straits here in New Jersey, plagued by moochers and deadbeats on every side, but Mitt Romney is riding to our rescue. Mitt Romney knows who his real friends are, and they’re right here in New Jersey, in New York, in California and Connecticut.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next president of the United States, Mitt Romney!

Related: The Revolution This Time

Oak & Acorn 4: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Posted on September 14, 2012 by Harry Ramble

This summer, I looked at my daughter’s face and saw, for the first time, that she will leave us.

You know this all along in a practical, commonsense way, but you don’t really know it when your daughter is standing before a tiny Playskool Kitchen Set, making frying noises with her mouth, and then bringing you a plastic hamburger on a plastic bun. You don’t know it in your heart when you walk out to center stage with your daughter during the 2nd-grade daddy/daughter dance recital, take a bow, return to your spot in the line, and then realize that your daughter is still center stage, curtseying and waving to the crowd, listening to the applause build as she gleefully refuses to cede the spotlight to the next daddy and daughter.

You know it, but you don’t know it. And then you see it and you have to look away quickly at the sunstruck horizon, at the little single-prop planes hauling long banners across a cloudless sky. This year, Abby didn’t go in the ocean once. Swimming in the ocean, we are told, “is for babies.” She stopped playing in the sand with Owen, too. This perplexed Owen for a while and then he came to accept it. Maybe he sees it, too.

“Look at that, Owen,” I say, pointing up at one of the banners. “Free body wax. We should do that. Get a free body wax.”

“I don’t want a free body wax,” Owen says. “I don’t have any body hair.”

It’s true. He’s nine years old, lean as a greyhound, without a body hair on him. He lets most of my nonsensical statements go unchallenged these days, only correcting the really outrageous whoppers and forays into foolishness.

When he was younger, he would correct everything, every deviation from the truth as he knew it. It was how he ordered the world around him. I would turn his bib around so it hung behind him and swing him in the air, simulating superhero flight. “Whoa, Superbaby!” I would say. When I set him back down, Owen would right his bib with his chubby little fists and look up at me with a serious expression on his face. “No,” he would say, “I’m just Owen.”

Abby sits in her beach chair and looks out at the ocean. There’s a book in her lap and a Triscuit in her hand. She’s twelve and lost in her own thoughts and one day she will leave us. She is suddenly taller this summer, her limbs longer, and even the shape of her face has changed. Every morning, she stands before the bathroom mirror and brushes her almost-waist-length hair with long, vigorous, determined strokes.

Earlier in the year, back in May, I had the kids for a weekday and I took them out to Sandy Hook for a bike ride and a walk on the beach. It was a cool, windy day. Sweatshirt weather. I had an idea for a YouTube skit that involved Abby as co-actor and Owen as iPhone cameraman, but it didn’t work out. The idea was that I would be standing at the shoreline, looking out to sea, and Abby would enter the frame and peer out in the same direction. Then she would say,”Whatcha looking for, Dad?” and I would say, “My vanished youth.” We would look out to sea some more, and then Abby would say, “If you give me five bucks, I’ll go look for it at the snack stand.” We’d look at each other for a bit, and then I would reluctantly reach into my pocket and hand her a five. She would sprint out of the frame. “Cut!” Owen would yell. It was a goofy thing, in the same spirit as the pool scene from my 49th birthday post, and intended for the top of my 50th birthday post.

We tried it many times, but Owen had to stand too far behind us to keep us both in the frame with the sea, and the whipping wind kept carrying our voices away. Abby indulged me for a while, but grew weary of all the takes and re-takes. She felt that other people were staring at us, that we were making a spectacle of ourselves. She is very conscious of looking foolish. She’s twelve. So I let it go.

My own father could never carry off any bit of foolishness. He just never created a space in our lives where that kind of thing would fly. He was often silent; he could be moody and distant. He had a temper. He did not communicate things, though he may have wanted to. His attempts at levity, rare as they were, had no context to spring from. They made me uncomfortable.

I am prey to all these things, too. Mood swings, withdrawal, anger. But I’ve also tried to make a point of saying whatever fool thing comes into my head. I try not to censor myself. Sometimes I get a little tiresome with it, I know. (Ask my wife.) But saying weird, nonsensical things creates an environment where you can say anything, even the important things. You’re never fenced off from that. For my father, even saying something as simple as I love you would have been the equivalent of a cracking open of the heavens, an extraterrestrial attack; it was inconceivable. There would have been no perspeective in which to place such a thing.

You don’t have long to say the things that have to be said. If I could tell Abby anything (and I have said this to her), I would say don’t surrender your right to look like a fool. Be brave enough to look foolish. Seek those opportunities out. Stretch the canvas of your emotional life broadly enough to encompass anything you need to say. Don’t hold anything back. Time slips away.

For years, when I’ve dropped Abby off at school or said good night to her at bedtime, she’s said “I love you, Daddy,” and I’ve said “I love you, too, sweetheart.” Note the pronouns. None of that Love you! bullshit. We don’t say it as much anymore, but having said it in the past, having established that precedent, we could say it again. Anytime we want. Same thing with Owen.

On the beach, I set my book aside. “It’s getting late,” I say. I look over at Owen. “Gather up some of these seagulls, Owen. It’s time to leave.”

“The gulls stay on the beach, Dad.”

My wife gives me the look she gives me when I’m egging Owen on. Everyone has a role in our family life. I bring the foolishness and talk to myself a lot. My wife is the rock we frolic around in fair weather and the rock we hang onto in white-knuckled desperation when the flood waters rise.

“No, we’ll stash a few in the car,” I say. “It’s like bringing shells home.”

“The gulls stay on the beach, Dad.”

Related: Oak & Acorn

Live Blogging the 1st International Gathering of Terry Jacks Fan Clubs

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Harry Ramble

1:17 pm: Whew! Never done this before, so bare with me! (Bear? Doesn’t seem right, does it? But let’s keep our clothes on! LOL!) Anyway, bumpy road ahead!

1:42 pm: Long time readers here at Suzy’s You Go, Girl! know that I always have a song in my heart. I live the music and the music lives in me! So you can imagine how excited I was to hear about this 1st International Gathering of Terry Jacks Fan Clubs. My little TJFC (Terry Jacks Fan Club) has always been a labor of love. As many of you know, it’s strictly an online thing, because our members hail from all corners of the globe! Including the Phillipines and Chile! So, to actually meet fellow fans of one of the great under-rated Canadian musicians of all time, in the flesh, is quite something, let me tell you. Hats off to Lorri Steinbach and her husband Phil for making this dream a reality!

1:48 pm: Your reporter isn’t exactly a world traveler, so excuse me if I ask When did they stop serving snacks on airplanes? Is this a recent thing? Is it too much to ask for a little morning muffin or a little box of Cheerios and some milk? Yes, I know it’s a short flight (Pittsburgh to Charlotte) but really. And then $2 for a bottle of water? Really? $215 roundtrip and you can’t even get a banana.

2:15 pm: Quick Fact! How many of you knew that Terry Jacks is a noted environmentalist? It’s true! He is the founder of Environmental Watch of British Columbia and has crusaded against the pollution dumped into BC waterways by Canadian pulp and paper mills. He also directed, wrote, scored, and narrated the environmental documentary The Warmth Of Love: The Four Seasons of Sophie Thomas.

2:37 pm: Okay! Picked up my nametag here at the Hilton Garden Inn and Convention Center. Very excited. Ballroom they rented seems a bit small.

3:15 pm: No one here yet. (I know! I’m such an eager beaver! It doesn’t even start until 5 o’clock!) Time for another Quick Fact! Terry got his start in a band called The Chessmen when he was 18 years old. Obscure little bar band? Au contraire! The Chessmen had FOUR Top 10 hits in Vancouver between 1964 and 1966!

3:31 pm: Met a very nice Episcopal minister in the hotel lobby. Talked about getting tax exempt status for my Terry Jacks Fan Club chapter. He wasn’t optimistic.

3:52 pm: Lorri’s here! With a whole van load of South Florida “Jacks Maniacs”! Oh, they seem like a fun crowd! Time to get our Jacks on!

4:10 pm: Two hours in to this Live Blog and I still haven’t said the “Seasons” word or the “Sun” word. (Oh, no, wait, I see I said Seasons.) Anyway, there’s SO much more to Terry Jacks than that one song. Did you know that Terry’s song “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” was #2 on the U.S. Billboard chart for Terry’s band the Poppy Family in 1970?

4:30 pm: Still a LOT of nametags on the greeting table in front of Ballroom C. Including the tags for Nnamdi, Alice and Alice from my own little TJFC. (I know! Two Alices! Weird!) Lorri has mentioned that we might be moving from Ballroom C to the Good Times Bar downstairs. Cozy!

4:49 pm: I know I’ve said this a million times, but the fact that Terry Jacks isn’t a world-acclaimed Canadian musician like Neil Young or Gordon Lightfoot is a TRAVESTY! “If You Go Away,” “Rock N’ Roll (I Gave You the Best Years of My Life),” and “Christina” all made the U.S. charts, and Terry was practically the Elton John of Canada in the 70s. You can look it up!

5:10 pm: I could give a goddamn (excuse me!) if it is the finish of the Brickyard 400. This is not a NASCAR fan club. It’s rude of the bartender to leave the TVs on when people are trying to talk. Threatened to move our Gathering back to Ballroom C, but Alfred from Tuscaloosa (saw Terry Jacks LIVE in concert in Phoenix in 1978!) wanted to see the race. NASCAR freaks! Boo!

5:20 pm: Beautiful little keynote speech from Lorri about Terry Jacks’s Place In The Musical Firmament. Very moving. Lorri revealed we were thisclose to having Terry’s ex-wife Susan Jacks appear at the Gathering. Or maybe drop in via video conference. Who is Susan Jacks? Hello! Only half of the Poppy Family and a fellow member, with Terry, of the British Columbia Entertainment Hall of Fame (inducted 2010)! Maybe next year, Susan!

5:43 pm: Steve from Albany started singing “Seasons In The Sun” but we shooshed him. Little early in the day to be half in the bag, I’d say. Alfred bought me a drink called a Purple Gator. Specialty of the house, he says. Exotic!

5:58 pm: Nnamdi, Alice and Alice could have at least texted if they weren’t going to show up. Pretty poor showing for the Pittsburgh area Terry Jacks Fan Club. I know you’re reading this, you guys! You’re missing out on a LOT of fun!

6:15 pm: Phil has connected these cute little speakers to his laptop, so it’s all Terry Jacks, all the time here at the Good Times Bar. Go Jacks Maniacs!

6:42 pm: Should really eat something. Quick Fact! Courtesy of Amanda from Allentown (Yay, PA!). Terry Jacks produced the monster hit album Riding High for Canadian rockers Chilliwack in 1974. Chilliwack are kind of like Bachman Turner Overdrive, Amanda says. Gotta check them out!

7:07 pm: Woo boy! The key to these Purple Gators, Alfred says, is the Grey Goose vodka. They don’t taste as smooth with off-the-shelf vodka, he says. No, wait. In the well, vodka? Not a big drinker here.

7:37 pm: Quick Jacks Fact: Terry Jacks is the Elton John of Canada! Alfred says, “You can call me Al,” and we both crack up. “You Can Call Me Al,” right? Paul Simon!

8:15 pm: Getting a little air. Alfred says maybe I should get something to eat. Excuse me, Al, I mean. He has this cute little Mustang convertible he got from Avis. My goodness! Puts my little Ford Focus to shame!

8:57 pm: Fucking fuck, excuse my language. What kind of rental car has no GPS in this day and age? I think we’re driving in circles. Fun Fact: Elton John is the Gordon Lightfoot of America!

9:15 pm: Everything was going just fine until Alfred said “I can’t even do that straight!” And then all these cops at this DWI checkpoint get on their high horses.

9:51 pm: It’s strange how you can live your whole life and never really walk along the side of a highway. I mean, I realize I’ve never really seen a highway roadside up close before. The cars really go whooshing by! There isn’t as much litter as you’d think, either. Litter was kind of a 70s thing, I think. Like Terry Jacks. I think I mentioned that Terry Jacks is an environmentalist. Poor Alfred!

10:17 pm: Turns out we WERE driving in circles. I think I can see the Garden Inn up ahead. Boy, that was THIS girl’s exercise for the week.

10:39 pm: Freaking Courtyard by Marriott. What would Terry Jacks do in this situation? Feet are killing me. Took somebody’s cab.

10:50 pm: Where the heck IS everybody? I flew from Pittsburgh for THIS?

11:11 pm: You know what? You know what? Fuck you people.

11:17 pm: Going to bed.

I’ll Never Be A Real Dentist

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Harry Ramble

Oh, dear reader, look how far we’ve come. Time gets away. That’s the worst-kept secret there is, and still we’re caught by surprise at the lateness of the hour, every time.

It’s said that every choice we make removes a multitude of other options from the board. Here, on the eve of my 50th birthday, is the last in a series, the things I’ll never do.

1. I’ll never grow out of this difficult phase.

2. I’ll never twist again, like we did last summer.

3. I’ll never get to the bottom of this 5-gallon jar of pickles I bought at WalMart for just $2.98.

4. I’ll never write The Great American Novel. Or even a serviceable Bolivian one.

5. I’ll never escape these ghosts of 3am.

6. I’ll never be a real dentist.

7. I never was — and I surely never will be again — as irresistible to women as I was during the twelve months I was engaged to my wife. Women in laundromats, women in Arctic rescue expeditions, women handcuffed in the backs of police cars, you name it, they were drawn to me like moths to a porchlight. You can’t tell me women don’t have a radar for men in commitment mode. They sense it immediately and THEY MUST HAVE IT.

8. “… eight, EIGHT, I forget what eight was for, but, nine, nine, NINE …”

9. I’ll never have a sidekick or a minion.

10. I’ll never run a full marathon before my 50th birthday. (Unless I run one later today.) I got in some halfs, and I still have a few left in me. Time is not on my side for a full 26.2 miles, though.

11. I’ll never find any solace in moderation.

12. I’ll never gather all the likely suspects in the drawing room of a grand mansion, fix each in turn with a penetrating look as I light my pipe, letting the silence draw out to unbearable length before revealing the perpetrator of this dastardly deed.

13. Or a perfect foil. (See item #9.)

14. I’ll never buy another Archers Of Loaf CD.

15. I’m never going to watch all the episodes of Weeds or The Wonder Years I have in my Netflix Instant Streaming queue. (Though I will read all four of John Updike’s Rabbit novels for a fourth and last time.)

16. It appears that I’ll never have another terrifying outbreak of acne. (My dermatologist was right! I DID grow out of it! It just took thirty years.)

17. I’ll never live it up. Or live that down.

18. I’ll never get over the peculiar joy of tuning in some low-wattage college radio station in the small hours of a summer night, just to hear what the heck they’re up to.

19. I’m never going to get a haircut any different from the one I’m wearing right now. (Brushed straight back, off the ears, off the collar.)

20. I’ll never know what readers want.

21. I’ll never turn on, tune in, and drop out. Or even attend Burning Man.

22. I’ll never get over how quickly kids grow up. I have a picture of my daughter and one of her friends from daycare. Abby and her friend Jordan. They’re two years old and they’re holding hands and grinning like baby fools because they’ve shown up at school wearing the same outfit (a stretchy two-piece thing, pants and top, probably from Kohls or Target) in the same color. I can remember that picture being taken. It seems like just a short while ago. Today, I drove those same two girls to summer camp. They’re twelve now and they’re sitting in the back seat talking about boys and pedicures and what clothes are cool and what foods are fattening and which aren’t so much, and I look at them in the rearview mirror and I see that they’re young women now. How did that happen?

23. I’ll never talk about what I’m writing before I’ve written it. Or after.

24. I’ll never retire.

25. I’ll never get tired of making these stupid lists.

Harry Ramble's E-Z Epiphany Dispenser

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