I am my Father’s son. In more ways than I like to admit sometimes. I have a temper, have been known to blister the air with words not said in church and can be “difficult” to deal with on occasion.
Love you, Floyd. Even though you are gone all these years sometimes it’s like you are still standing beside me. Yelling at me to get the crescent wrench, Gawd dammit! What the f is a crescent wrench anyway?
But the area in which we are most alike is in our total inability to recognize that we are incapable of fixing anything around the house.
Two cases in point. The false ceiling in the studio was sagging badly the other day. There is five feet of insulation on top of it and many many empty boxes so it needed to be fixed before the ceiling met the floor.
I hate false ceilings. I have never been able to remove one of those blocks without breaking it. This case was not an exception. That I only broke a corner off one and a few gouges out of another was a miracle. In a hail of insulation and pieces of false ceiling I fixed the problem. And got something, insulation most likely, in my eye which is still bothering me a day later.
I went back in the house to tell the long suffering wife about my success and the broken parts. She said “When do you ever fix anything without breaking something else?” My Father’s son.
The other example? Along with the anti-home handyman gene I also posses the “Macgyver” gene. For those unfamiliar with Macgyer he was a TV character who could fix anything with anything, make a bomb out of chewing gum, bailing wire and spit. In my case the “Macgyver” gene is of course horribly mutated and only allows me to think I can fix something while actually making it worse. Usually.
The walk behind mower has an electric start. You plug it in, charge up the battery and then when you turn the key it runs.
Unless you forget to charge it up all winter.
Of course it also has old pull on the handle start. The handle broke sometime ago. Who needs it when you just turn the key? Riiiight.
My “Macgyver” mission was to fix the hand starter since funds for a new battery are non-existent.
My brainstorm? Fashion a new handle out of a piece of PVC pipe I found in the garage. Hmmm. What to cut it with? I have handsaws back in the house. But there must be something here, somewhere.
I rummaged thru an old tool kit that was prepared by my Dad years ago. He was meticulous about such things, stocking it with the most amazing array of tools and medical supplies you can imagine. And some you can’t. M.A.S.H. units are less equipped than one of my Dad’s tool kits. This one I had stashed intact in the trunk of my MG. As I hunted thru it I found this pocket knife.
I have no idea how old “Floyd” was when he put his mark on this. I find it very typical that the “D” didn’t make it, either thru lack of planning or…well who knows.
I wish could say the story ends with me hacking through the PVC pipe with the “Floy” knife. But I had to go back in the house for a hacksaw.
My “Macgyver” lawn mower starter shown here. It works! For now.

AEIOU and Sometimes Y.

I live down the road from the Lands at Hillside Farms Dairy store. It’s a squeaky clean Disney sort of place. They don’t sell cigarettes or even lottery tickets. With flowers everywhere and four big draft horseys that are as gentle as kittens and a pair of lovable donkeys it’s just the most perfect place to spend a little time on a sunny afternoon. Don’t forget about the ice cream. By the way in my opinion Ice cream is sort of like sex. It’s all good. Some is better than others but it all of it is better than none. Except for sugar-free fat-free which is from the devil and is an abomination that should be eradicated. But I have had your Ben and Jerry’s (I grew up in Vermont) and your Häagen-Dazs. I still think a scoop of Hillside Farms puts them all to shame. So the other bright beautiful day the long suffering wife and I enjoyed some. Ice cream that is. As I said before the dairy store is fresh, clean and nice. A place where you can bring the kids and grandkids without any fear. Until last Saturday that is.
Now I am not easily offended. I have spent time in places where, let us say, morals and dress codes are, well, loose. The infield at a Pocono 500 comes to mind. The French Quarter in New Orleans would be another. But there is a time and place for everything. I think that’s in the bible. And the T-shirt the large woman was wearing was not from any biblical text.
Now I am sure she found it amusing. I am certain when she got up that morning and put it on and checked herself out in the mirror that she thought “Lookin’ gooood, sweetheart!” Possibly she does not own a mirror, an idea that often occurs to me when I observe how other humans dress for the day.
I am not sure where the time and place to wear this t-shirt would be. I can’t see her wearing it to church or at a wedding. That it seemed wildly inappropriate in the context of the dairy store is true.
I wanted to ask her about it but I demurred for two reasons. First off the wife thought it unwise. And secondly this woman was bigger than me and could have hurt me.
The T-shirt which was black with white letters was laid out in type set to look like the wheel of fortune board. It said “G_ F_CK Y__RSELF. Want to buy a vowel?”
I guess in the final analysis no one was killed or hurt. The ice cream and milk didn’t curdle. By the way isn’t “Y” a vowel? Just asking.

Mostly the grey part

I teach at Luzerne County Community College. Been doing it for ten years this fall. Time flies when you’re having fun. My specialty is music recording. LCCC has some great equipment and its great fun to teach this. One of the reasons its fun is that the people who take these classes really WANT to learn. They are in the class because they want to become well versed in the techniques either because they are musicians who want to understand what goes on in the studio or they are geeks like me who want to turn the knobs.
Over the past ten years I have taught a number of folks who have gone to become semi famous band members of semi famous bands which I won’t name drop here. I have to believe that my efforts helped them in some way shape or form.
Once a year LCCC busses in a load of high school kids for a “media day.” They invite in DJ’s and TV people and newspaper folks and a couple of recording studio guys like me. Brett Alexander of Saturation Acres did it last year. Name drop off.
This year was pretty typical. High school kids, for all their bravado and bluster are generally pretty shy and tough to draw out at first. I know this and though the first time I was little disconcerted I go with the flow now.
This bunch got excited when I took them in one of the studios and showed them around. I played them the old “Hesitation blues” that we have recorded on an 8 track ADAT. It fascinated them to see that I could solo out a track and they could hear just the piano or whatever. Then I showed them some effects. That really fired them up for some reason. They wanted to hear themselves thru the box so I put up a mike in tracking room and asked for a volunteer. They shoved one of their number in the room but he got terminal stage fright.
Mr. Rising to the rescue. One of the guys in the group is actually taking my class. Pretty bright kid. Told him to ride gain because I would get loud at the end. Went in and gave them a full blown version of the Morrison intro to the “Soft Parade.” When I got to “you can NOT petition the LORD thru PRAY YUH!” I backed off and belted it out of the park.
When I went back to the control room they all applauded.
I want to be known as the “grey haired far out teacher.” I have achieved some of this lofty goal.

What a day for a daydream

Well, little darling, with all apologies to George Harrison it has been a long cold lonely winter and it seems like it has always been here. But here comes the spring. At one point this last winter I turned to my long suffering wife and asked “Why do we live here?” I think it was 1 degree that day. For much of the last half of the winter passed, our driveway at the Rising ranch had more ice than a luge run. To make walking possible we coated the driveway this winter with a metric ton of sand. Now that the ice has gone all we need are camels and a few pyramids to start our own desert. But spring is here. The silly daffodils, the crocuses so short-lived, the forsythia so fluorescently bright you wonder if they are solar powered all conspire to drive away my thoughts of moving someplace where you can actually walk to your car all 12 months of the year without it being an Olympic event. That first time out the door without the winter coat feels like it must when they remove the ball and chain from a convict. The small critters that made themselves scarce all during the cold weather have come back. The little bunnies have reappeared. Where do they spend the winter? The Canada geese have returned to the pond down the road and it can’t be long before the impossibly cute little goslings will be tottering behind them. The robins and chickadees and their other feathered friends rush around carrying nesting materials in their little beaks. Even the prospect of the dread yard work, the hours with mowers and rakes and string trimmers seem like a vacation compared to another day trapped inside. Maybe this year is the one that I will try my hand at outdoor landscaping. Most likely that feeling will pass. The outdoor events return, the flea markets and yard sales and picnics and rides with the top down. The other day the wife and I had a disagreement about whether jackets were needed for our day’s adventures. At a stop light a girl in a skimpy sundress floated by and proved me right. I am pretty sure her feet never touched the ground. I have a friend who chides me when I write without my usual venom. I know this piece will drive him crazy. By way of apology all I can say is spring is a finite commodity. I think that when you run out of enthusiasm for spring, you have run out of what the French call “joie de vivre” the joy of living. I’ll be back to my nasty self next week. Right now I’m going to fall on my face on someone’s new-mown lawn.

Wrote in 2005-Never saw anything else about it.

The conspiracy theories are all true.
Cars that run on water. Magic pills that cure disease. Diets that let you eat all you want of everything and lose weight.
Area 51 is crawling with aliens. The pyramids were built by aliens. Aliens are running the world.
It’s all true. All of it. All of the so called crackpot theories all of the paranoid fantasies that we all thought were just a bunch of crack pots are all true. All of them.
Why do I say that? Because I just found out that the powers that be have been keeping us from a safer cigarette.
This much I know to be true. And I know this why? Because I read it in the New York Times.
Seems there is this new filter that was developed by scientists that will do what a filter was supposed to do all along-get rid of the cancer causing stuff in butts and let only the nicotine through. The smokes supposedly taste the same, give you nicotine buzz like others but cut down on harmful stuff to a degree that might save bunches of lives.
Still not safe, but safer.
The problem. The moral dilemma for the scientists is if they advertise this breakthrough will people smoke more? Will people who quit start again? Will people who never smoked start cuz it’s safer?
One solution they have considered is to offer the filter free of charge to all cigarette makers…as long as they don’t advertise the fact.
But here is the kicker- this technology was first developed in 1971. How many lives could have been saved? Who Knows? We never will.
See how convoluted and crazy this becomes? You might start to see tons of controversy about this, pro or con. I say might because the whole deal may just be swept under the rug. Along with the water engine, the magic diet pills and the aliens.

Robert Moog

This is an obit I did for my radio show. I played a bunch of songs that featured the Moog synthesizer. Probably one of the reasons why I no longer have a radio show.
Robert Moog has left the planet.
Not many people get to leave a legacy like his. The name Moog is almost as common in musician circles as Fender. The Moog synthesizer was a brilliant invention and it weaves its saw tooth melodies through and through our musical history.
Starting from 1968 there were a large string of albums played with Moog synthesizers in the mix. Walter Carlos' Switched-On Bach started it. Pretty soon the Moog entered rock music. Simon & Garfunkle recorded "Save the Life of my Child" which featured the Moog. The Beatles gave us Abbey Road in which several songs used the Moog. Then Emerson, Lake & Palmer really got serious with the Moog by going way overboard with Keith Emerson’s use. But before that, some guy named Dick Hyman, released this album: Moog: The Electric Eclectics of Dick Hyman in 1969
I remember the first time I heard It and the song called the “Minotaur” That was Dick Hyman (Keep your jokes to yourself please) working with an early model. I thought it was the coolest sounds ever recorded. The song actually got to number 38 in 1969.
Walter Carlos was the person (or so it is said) that urged Robert Moog to develop the instrument into a musician friendly machine that had a keyboard. To that point the Moog was a collection of patch cords and oscillators. At the time it was monophonic-it could only play one note a time so the music you are hearing had to be constructed meticulously one line at a time. It was probably that experience that led Walter to change his name and his sex to Wendy in later years but that’s another story.
Robert Moog had an inoperable brain tumor and passed on at 71.
But every time you hear George Harrison’s “Here comes the sun” you hear a part of his legacy.
I poked around you tube and found a bunch of interviews with Moog, who was a genuine person and modest about his accomplishments. This is a good one in spite of the host who said “Very cool” about six thousand times.

Radio tails part 1.

One morning I stumbled into the radio station, late as usual, to do the morning airshift. To get into the station you had to walk through the lobby, usually dark and empty at this time of the day.
As I hurried through the room I felt something wrong. Just one of those intuitions you get that something was amiss. I passed by the lobby’s comfy leather couches and noticed a guy sleeping on the sofa. Sound asleep, snoring in fact. It was dark and I didn’t get that good a look at him but I figured it must be a boyfriend of the overnight jock, Jennifer, who was on the air, waiting for me to show up. I sprinted up the stairs and burst into the control room, yelling: “I don’t want your boyfriends in here while you are on the air. How many times do I have to tell you?”
Jennifer looked at me wide-eyed and said “What are you talking about?”. “The guy passed out on the couch in the lobby!”. I yelled.
“I don’t know anything about any guy”. She said.
“Oh” I cleverly responded at a much lower volume. “Then who the hell is it?”
As it turned out the door had been left unlocked and a bum had found our couch and the warm lobby a great place to sleep off his mad dog 2020.
With the age that comes with wisdom and the slowly increasing amount of compassion I have for our fellow man I would now have called 911 and have the guy taken to the hospital or jail for his own sake. At the tender age I was at, somewhere in my late twenties, I just threw him out into the street. And in my true young and cocksure style I went back and yelled at poor Jennifer for not knowing she had an overnight guest. Fair? No! But don’t forget I was large…and in charge.

Lecture 101

I hate public speaking.
This may seem odd to you since all my professional life I have been speaking on the air.
Let me tell you it's a big difference to me from cracking a mic on a 50,000 watt radio station heard in six states to standing up in a room with 20 people staring at me.
I get tongue tied, mu blood pressure skyrockets, I get the old "Flop sweat" running down my spine. My face turns red, my ears glow like Rudolph's nose and I stammer my way through it.
I have never gotten used to it.
It's very odd because I have NO problem teaching. In fact I love getting up in front of a classroom.
But put me in a room where I have to try and talk to strangers and I am a basket case.
Which makes this Wednesday a very uncomfortable day for me.
In this new "Carrer" I have embakred upon I will have to do some public speaking gigs. As a matter of fact that is a BIG part of what I will do to make my living from now on.
This Wednesday night is the acid test. I am speaking before a group that knows a lot more about my subject matter than I do. Except that I will be challenging some of their knowlegde with anecdotal knowledge and the research done by a M.D. who is somewhat of a heretic. Or he would be considered one if he was still alive.
And the man who has taught me all I know about this stuff. He's an over the road truck driver.
Boy! Am I nuts or what?

Hail Victory

Here is what the updated post will look like as published next week in the "Weekender."

Seeing “Hitler was right” and a swastika spray painted on various downtown Wilkes-Barre buildings including a synagogue is discouraging. You have to wonder about the mindset of those individuals who did this. Did they get up in the morning and say “Today I will deface something in a way that no one can agree with?” Or did they think at all?
Some noise has been made over the years that the “Holocaust” of Nazi Germany never happened. That it was all staged later by who knows who?
The piles of bodies, the tattooed numbers on arms all were just our imagination. But when you think about the hatred that must be in the hearts of those who took spray paint can in hand and did this deed I don’t think that you can doubt that the “Holcaast” happened. The only real question is not will but when it will happen again and what ethnic group will it prey upon this time. Possibly white dumb girls.
The spray painters are white dumb girls. They would do well to remember that the white supremacy that they celebrate with their obscene scrawling is really just a shining artifact of the past. White is no longer the majority in the US. In the future it will be even less so. It might not be the strongest position to take being a member of the Aryan sisterhood when the boys in the “Hood” are in charge. “Sieg Heil” means Hail Victory, girls. See how that plays in prison.
Just a side note about the swastika these cretins are painting on walls. The history of this symbol stretches back over 3000 years and was, up until the Nazis adopted it, a symbol meaning love, good luck and fertility.
Then the short rein of the “Reich” put bad Karma on it.
The World Wide Web is a wild and wooly place. On it you can find way too much information (and misinformation) about everything, including several websites devoted to reestablishing the swastika to what it was for 3000 years before the Germans sullied and tarnished it.
Good luck with that.
The hate messages will be covered up and erased. Life will go on.
The question is what was Hitler right about? The extermination in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka of more than 3 million Jews? The war that crippled his country and caused the death of more than 3,250,000 German soldiers and 5,600,000 civilians? If this is right, what must it be to be wrong?
I know the people who sprayed the words. I have met them too many times to count, in bars and church alike. The real question is, when will we ever learn?

Sieg Heil!

Seeing “Hitler was right” and a swastika spray painted on various downtown Wilkes-Barre buildings including a synagogue is discouraging. You have to wonder about the mindset of those individuals who did this. Did they get up in the morning and say “Today I will deface something in a way that no one can agree with?” Or did they think at all?
Some noise has been made over the years that the “Holocaust” of Nazi Germany never happened. That it was all staged later by who knows who?
The piles of bodies, the tattooed numbers on arms all were just our imagination. But when you think about the hatred that must be in the hearts of those who took spray paint can in hand and did this deed I don’t think that you doubt that it happened. The only real question is not will but when it will happen again and what ethnic group will it prey upon this time.
The spray painters are without a doubt white. They would do well to remember that the white supremacy that they celebrate with their obscene scrawling is really just a shining artifact of the past. White is no longer the majority in the US. In the future it will be even less so. It might not be the strongest position to take being a member of the Aryan brotherhood when the boys in the “Hood” are in charge.
Just a side note about the swastika these cretins are painting on walls. The history of this symbol stretches back over 3000 years and was, up until the Nazis adopted it, a symbol meaning love, good luck and fertility.
Then the short rein of the “Reich” put bad Karma on it.
The world wide web is a wild and wooly place. On it you can find way too much information (and misinformation) about everything.
Including several websites devoted to reestablishing the swastika as what it was for 3000 years before the Germans sullied and tarnished it.
Good luck with that.
The hate messages will be covered up and erased. Life will go on. It’s doubtful that anyone will be caught or punished for this foul deed.
The question is what was Hitler right about? The extermination in the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka of more than 3 million Jews? The war that crippled his country and caused the death of more than 3,250,000 German soldiers and 5,600,000 civilians? If this is right, what must it be to be wrong?
I know the people who sprayed the words. I have met them too many times to count, in bars and church alike. The real question is, when will we ever learn?

Have a HAPPY Day...or else!

Sometimes the best intentions will get you nothing, or worse.
It seemed like an innocent enough little promotion on the radio station I worked for 30 or so years ago. You would say the name of some one, usually drawn from a phone book at random and wish them a happy day. The intent was that they or their friends would hear it and would get a bunch of well wishes from the radio stations listeners. It would make the happy day person feel good and it would spread word of mouth about how great the radio station was. And it worked like a charm. Until that one fateful day.
I had just announced the happy day name for the second or third time. The studio phone lit up and I answered in my best radio voice. You never knew when it might be a groupie! “Is this that station that wished so and so a happy day just now?” the voice on the other end wanted to know. “Yes it is!” I replied, confident I was about to be thanked profusely. “Well so and so can’t really have a happy day.” The voice said. “Why is that?” I wanted to know. “Because he’s been dead for ten years now.” Was my answer.
It seems that whoever was in charge of finding the names was using a OLD phone book.
I think we continued to do the happy day deal for a while but we were sure the verify life first.