December 2010 Blizzard Timelapse from Michael Black on Vimeo.
This particular blizzard is in New Jersey, but it’s a lot more fun to see it from here. I’ll do my best to make a video the next time it snows in Phoenix — if I live that long.
Category: Casual Friday (page 6 of 25)
I’m very grateful to have y’all in my life, the folks who read and comment here, and especially the people who write at BloodhoundBlog. Here’s wishing every hard-working dog a Merry Christmas and a healthy, happy and very productive New Year!
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Luigi!” The beautiful blonde girlchild tore her way across the packed airport corridor.
“Oh,” said her mother, a beautiful blonde womanchild. “Great…”
There is only one Christmas, isn’t there? Holly and mistletoe. A golden retriever by the fire. Mom bastes the bird while dad carols with the choir. Icicles cling to the branches of birch trees and fat, wet snowflakes tumble down, lit by the yellow glow of gaslights. Horses nicker and children giggle and lovers nestle and sigh. We’re all dreaming of a white Christmas — and we’re all dreaming.
And why not? Over the ghetto and through the industrial park doesn’t sound like a very nice way to get to Grandmother’s house, even though the highway really does go that way. There are no trails of tail-lights at Christmas, glinting and glowing in the drops of muddy drizzle on the windshield. The snow is white and windblown into drifts, not plow-piled and gray with soot. The children don’t squabble, the drunkards don’t wobble and the lovers don’t quarrel or cry.
Even at the airport there is only one Christmas, the Christmas-card Christmas of a world without airports.
Luigi was sitting across from me and he leapt up to meet the little girl as she crashed into him. She was seven or maybe eight, really too old to be picked up, but he picked her up anyway. She hugged him tightly and they both had a sudden wetness in their eyes.
He set the girl down as her mother approached. She nodded to him in a way that might have been curt, except the honey gold ringlets of her hair fell forward and robbed her of her haughtiness. She said, simply, “Brendan.”
He answered with a smile that was good-humored at the mouth and mocking in the eyes. “Best of the season to you, Chloe.”
The little girl shook her head furiously, her own white gold ringlets redeeming her mother’s haughtiness with an imperiousness of her own devising. “He’s not Brendan, he’s Luigi. And she’s not Chloe, she’s Princess Daisy. And I’m not Jennifer, I’m — ”
Luigi said, “This announcement wants herald trumpets, I Read more
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Salve, caudex,” the big little boy said to his father.
“Salve, caudex,” the father replied.
The boy turned to me, a stranger, and said, “Salve, caudex.” I smiled at him and he confided, “That means, ‘Hello, blockhead’.”
We were sharing a bench at the mall, as one must at Christmas. When I had sat down it was just the father and me at opposite ends of the bench. But then the big little boy — too young to be big, too tall to be little — had come bounding out of the toy store across the way.
He was his father in miniature, seven or eight years old but very tall, very lean. His hair was brown and a little shaggy and his eyes were gray and very bright. He had his father’s large hands and long fingers, and it won’t be long before he has his father’s prominent proboscis. He walked fast and talked fast and he moved his body with a blinding abruptness.
“You like it, don’t you?” his father asked.
“Boy, do I! I think that’s the best video game system ever! That’s what I want for Christmas!”
“How interesting.”
The boy spun to me and said, “That means, ‘I don’t care’.”
I said: “I’m sorry?”
“When he says ‘how interesting’, it means he doesn’t care.”
“What it means,” said the father, including me, I think, because he felt he had to, “is that you have said nothing to motivate me to act. You haven’t asked for anything, and you haven’t given me any reason why I should honor your request in any case.”
“It means he doesn’t care.”
“Attend me, sir,” the father said.
“That means, ‘Listen up’.”
“Attend me, sir. I think you’re right. I think it is the best video game system ever. At least the best so far. Have I told you lately how much I despise video games?”
“He hates video games,” the boy confessed.
“I hate video games,” the father confirmed — to the boy, not to me. “And yet you love them. And a Christmas gift should be what you love, not what I love — what you love, even if I hate it. Read more
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Okay, so one day we’re driving, and we’re just about to get on the freeway, and I look up and the sign says, ‘Squaw Peak Freeway.'”
The Kid said that. Maybe eleven years old, tall and thin. Tousled brown hair and the most beautiful gray eyes I’ve ever seen. He was talking to the Mom, mid-forties, fair and tall. She had long brown hair and eyes of a gentle, laughing green.
She said, “That’s what the sign says.”
“But my whole life I thought it was called the Pipsqueak Freeway. That’s what Dad always called it. That’s what he still calls it.”
The Mom was laughing silently, trying very hard not to laugh out loud.
“It’s not funny! I asked him why he called it that and he said he named it after the mayor.”
The Mom was still trying not to laugh.
“Oh, sure. Very funny. Every day after school we used to stop at the Post Office, and I was seven or eight before I found out that it’s not really called the Edgar Allan Poe Stoffice. I didn’t even know who Edgar Allan Poe was.”
The Mom was stopped short by her laughter. She stood there behind her shopping cart trying to catch her breath.
“You think it’s funny. I think it’s funny sometimes, too. But I never know when he tells me the name of something if that’s the real name, or if it’s just something he made up.”
“You have a lot of room to talk,” said the Mom. “The other day I said I needed to get four quarters and you spent the rest of the day telling people that I want to put warts on forks.”
“The Fork Warters, semi-notorious villains from the nether reaches. Or maybe they’re just a really bad rock band.”
“You see? You sound just like him. Where is your father, anyway?”
“He took off. He said he had Santaclaustrophobia.”
The Mom said nothing, just smiled and pushed her cart along the aisle.
They were Christmas shopping at Costco, which used to be called The Price Club before some genius decided that made too much sense.
Do you know about Costco? It’s Read more
A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story
“Shame about the bike,” I said to the strained young black man at the bus stop. His head was down and he was staring hard at the ground.
He grunted, a sound that conveyed two ideas: “I heard you” and “I’m not listening.”
“Just as well, I guess. A bike like that…”
He looked up for a moment, piercing me with hard black eyes. “What about it?”
“Oh, you know. Wouldn’t last too long, now would it?”
He scoffed, and that was that. Or so he thought…
What happened was this: I saw a bike going in to Toys ‘R’ Us, about a week before Christmas, and that’s the kind of thing I just have to follow up on.
It was a girl’s bike — a girly bike. Sixteen inch white wheels. A white frame speckled with iridescent pink and purple flakes. An iridescent pink and purple flaked saddle. And matching pink and purple flaked streamers cascading out of the white handle-bar grips. It was the kind of bike Toys ‘R’ Us loves to sell: Thirty-five dollars worth of bike with three dollars worth of plastic ornaments is priced at sixty bucks. Ten dollars extra for professional assembly.
The bike had been dragged into the store by my companion at the bus stop — tall, thin, with an expression of anger etched into his face. Maybe twenty years old; certainly not twenty-five. He was wearing a Michael Jordan warm-up suit and Michael Jordan basketball shoes. That sounds very casual, but we’re talking three hundred dollars, maybe more. At first I thought he might be bringing the bike in for a minor repair, but something about the way he was dragging it — sideways by the saddle — made me think again.
I didn’t go into the store, but I stuck around to see what would happen. Sure enough, he came out bikeless and stalked over to wait for the bus. Three hundred dollars worth of Michael Jordan haberdashery but no car.
I said, “A little girl has a bike like that, she’s just bait on the hook. Doesn’t have a father around to stand up for her, Read more
Let’s begin by agreeing on the proposition saying those who try to live on sizzle, not steak, end up losing weight, till, in the end, they’re dead. Sizzle in many contexts can be fun, sexy, interesting, even impressive, but never substantive. In sports, sizzle is often lookin’ spectacular while seldom winning. The strikeout pitcher who barely wins more than he loses. The .300 hitter, 40 homer, 100+ RBI guy who hits below the Mendoza line with men in scoring position, with most of his homers and RBI coming when his team is eight runs ahead or hopelessly behind.
Sizzle ain’t results.
As a baseball purist and a lifetime member of the OldSchool in real estate, I appreciate sizzle, but get pretty damn agitated at those given more or less equal standing with big time producers, based upon a buncha glitter and multi-colored smoke.
As Exhibit A I offer Nolan Ryan
He’s a first ballot Hall of Famer. He threw the ball harder than Zeus threw lightning bolts. He struck out every third person on the planet earth. He threw eleventeen no-hitters. Then there were the stoopid number of 1-hitters. That’s what we purists call sizzle. I’ve done extensive research, and no-hitters still count as only one win. Strikeouts? Apparently they’re the same as all other outs. The winning team in any given game must get the other guys out 27 times in a nine inning game. The rules say an out’s an out. Go figure.
27 years in the major leagues, and he barely wins more games than he loses — 52.6%. He was the Dale Carnegie of pitchers, as he never met a hitter he didn’t walk. Try almost 5.25 every nine innings. If as a hitter you faced him more than five times, he walked you at least once.
His claim to fame from where I stand, is that his freak of nature body, combined with his superb work ethic and his luck with health and injuries, allowed him to pile up pretty much every stat but the one that mattered: Far more wins than losses.
Compare Ryan to Sandy Koufax. The Read more
We’ve been listening to Badlands Country, a rockin’ kind of outlaw alt.country internet radio station. You can get it through the link above, but it should be available from just about any internet radio client. I found it first on iTunes, if that helps, and I listen to in on my iPhone by way of ooTunes, which is totally worth having just by itself.
Badlands has a pretty long playlist, most of it in-your-face rebel country — with zero Nashville pop pabulum.
The station is epoch-eclectic, to say the least, but one of the things I like about it is that they play a lot of classic country, the stuff you will never hear on broadcast stations.
Like this: When Johnny Cash was most enthralled by the music of Bob Dylan, he wrote an homage to Don’t think twice, it’s alright called Understand your man. The debt to Dylan is more than obvious, but the Man in Black wrote a song that is darker, funnier and much more true to the reality of a broken marriage:
I love songwriters as much as I love their songs, and Lacy J. Dalton recorded the absolute best song about songwriting in Sixteenth Avenue:
My pappy purely loves Tom T. Hall, one of the great Nashville songwriters, and I love it that there is still room for his music in the Badlands:
Is all that too old-timey for you? That whole Texas alt.country scene is well-represented, from Chris Knight to Reckless Kelly to James McMurtry. Here’s Fred Eaglesmith with I like trains:
And if you’re lookin’ for more of a back-beat, more of an urban rhythm, the Badlands has you covered, with tunes like this cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and juice from The Gourds (not safe for work, kids or your mom):
There’s always room for bebop in our lives — and especially in my car. But Badlands Country is a rockin’ way to deliver the goods in the office.
The Last Waltz, of course. Insider’s tip: Listen for Levon Helm to holler, “Don’t you know that I wish that I could yodle like Yoko!” Doesn’t stream, alas, so if you don’t have the DVD, you’ll have to wait for the postman to bring it to you.
This is probably a bit too swampy for the Valley of the Sun, but I really enjoy JJ’s backwater juke joint sound.
A Tribute to those who get the job done and refuse to die:
My shell is hard, my hooks like steel
My wings are fire and you cannot break my will
All these years you’ve tried to kill me
Boy you ain’t made a dentSee I’m a Georgia warhorse and I ain’t easy to kill
A bigger man than you he stepped on me
He put me under shoe, just to see…
What it’d do to me, but I always roll out aliveSee I’m a Georgia warhorse and I was built to survive
Owning your own business is brutal in this market, but it’s also the sweetest thing…
[Kicking this back to the top. Cathleen is trying to get the very willful Ophelia to walk to her heel, and that put me in mind of this song, which I wrote almost four years ago. –GSS]
So: This is a long way in…
First, Ophelia, our newly-adopted Redbone Coonhound, gets all over the nerves of Desdemona, our English Coonhound. A deafening racket ensues. Fortuitously, Odysseus the TV Spokemodel Bloodhound, who is in fact the loudest dog on Earth, doesn’t add much to the cacophony.
But: We were running out of seconds of silence in which to place hurried phone calls. This is not the ideal way to run a real estate business.
I try not to be one of those guys who pretends to have three testicles, but, nevertheless, it usually falls to me to be the bad guy. When there’s constabulary work to be done, the constable’s lot is a terrible one.
So this Monday just past, I decided more or less unilaterally that Desdemona was going to get a shock collar to control her barking. Cathy was all in favor of painless solutions, but we have tried all of these, at considerable expense. I knew that I was going to have to take the blame for inflicting pain on poor Desdemona, but we were all but entirely unable to communicate in our own home.
So: We got the collar. Desdemona moderated her behavior almost immediately. And, biggest surprise of all, my dear sweet tender-hearted Cathleen has become the world’s most vocal champion of pain compliance for dog training. She’s so happy with the results Desdemona is exhibiting that, yesterday, she bought a remote-control training collar for Ophelia.
All this is hugely funny to me, and it all seems to fit so well with with the rest of our insane lives, so I wrote a song about it — up-tempo and loud. And with all that as introduction, here are the lyrics:
Cathy’s into pain compliance
Don’t bark, don’t bite
Don’t growl at night
Don’t post anonymous tripe
Don’t sniff, don’t snivel
And spare us your drivel
You’re hardly the last word in gripes
Attorneys yearn to cluck defiance
But Cathy’s into pain complianceDon’t spout Read more
Everything you need to know about SEO.
Now have a great weekend.
I don’t have time for this, but I wanted to get my bet down on paper so I can bask in the glory — or ignominy — come Sunday night.
1. Don Draper is a coward. Whenever things don’t go his way, he tries to run away.
2. This season, he has played tentatively with the idea of making a real, adult commitment to his made-up life, but, even then, he has successfully run away, again and again, from his own redemption.
3. This most recent episode, “Blowing Smoke,” shows Don actually making a commitment — to the ad agency, to his relationship with Faye and to Peter Campbell.
4. All of this will fail.
5. When it does, Don will make the flying exit foretold episode after episode in the opening credits.
6. This will be the end of the series.
Tune in to AMC Sunday night to see if I’m right.