felixwas

Just bought two tickets for Jeff Beck next summer at the Rochester Jazz Fest. I'll take my guitar-slinging nephew.

I can't wait.

My wife thought I was joking last night when I told her I was going to go to the iTunes store and buy "Disco Inferno" by The Trammps.

A little over a week ago I posted about discovering a video excerpt of Jeff Beck performing with Imogen Heap.

Thanks to penshark, here is a link to the entire video of the song:
(seeing is believing)

And, again thanks to penshark, here is a link to a free download of the song:
(ear candy)

The TV newsguy just said a driver in a collision "told deputies the sun blocked his view" while he was making a turn.

So the Buffalo television news guy just provided an update on the shootings at Fort Hood. They gave the name, rank and position of one of the suspects, who was killed, adding, "He is believed to have been a Muslim."

Would they have reported his religion if he had been a Presbyterian? A Catholic? A Protestant?

Awful journalism. Just awful.

UPDATE: From The New York Times: "According to military personnel records obtained by the New York Times, Mr. Hasan was born in Virginia and was living in Kensington, Md. He was single, according to the records, and he listed no religious preference."

Autumn shrugged its shoulders,
Said, "Orange? Crimson? Not this year.
Here are golds and yellows,
Browns like mixed tobaccos,
Bronze, tarnished copper.
That's all I've got.
I gave you gaudy glory last year.
This year, you won't truly notice leaves
Until you notice they have fallen."

So the leaves hung long into October
For no visible purpose, until
Autumn turned fall. Rain and wind
Battered branches, plucking leaves in
Greedy handfuls and
Flinging them into the breeze, where they
Soared like silent crows.
Now the ground is carpeted brown,
And winter has made its reservations.

Halloween is over for another year, and once again, I seriously overestimated the number of trick-or-treaters who would visit.

That means I'm hearing voices from the kitchen as I write this: the seductive whisper of York Peppermint Patties. The hypnotic call of Swedish Fish. The tempting beckoning of Sour Patch Kids. There must be, and I am not kidding, 25,000 calories out there, each one of them summoning me.

This Is Not Good. Inasmuch as the most exercise I get each day involves tapping the computer keyboard space bar with my left or right thumb, I am heavier than I have ever been in my life. Usually I put weight on in the fall and winter and melt it off in the spring and summer. This summer, there was no meltdown. Exacerbating the problem is—well, let's put it this way: My wife, who is not one to use inelegant language, said to me yesterday, "Your diet sucks."

I took umbrage. I eat a balanced diet, I huffed. In fact, of the eight Tootsie Roll Pops I had eaten in the hour before her remark, I had eaten two orange, two grape, two watermelon and two cherry. A mere 480 calories, but I'll stop tomorrow. I swear I'll stop tomorrow. That was yesterday. Today I was able to limit myself to three. But the day isn't yet over. I love Peppermint Patties. I will eat so many Sour Patch Kids that my stomach aches. I will gulp down Swedish Fish until my teeth are almost welded together by the gummy residue. And Tootsie Roll Pops—well, I opened a box of a hundred of them three days ago, and there are probably about 40 left. If they were a drug, I would be addicted. In fact, I may be addicted to them anyway. I didn't hand them out to the costumed hordes at the door tonight, that's for sure. I've been sitting here drooling ever since the start of this paragraph. Just one more. Just one more. An orange one. No, a grape. Orange tastes nothing like oranges, grape tastes nothing like grapes, but I love artificial flavors, love that tart rush when the globe of colorful candy cracks between my desperate molars.

As I said, This Is Not Good. I used to take pride in how I dressed for work, but my girth is so pronounced that I haven't been able to wear any of my dress pants for the better part of two semesters. Each time I look into my closet and see all of those trousers taunting me, I swear I'll lose the 15 pounds it will take to wear them again. And several times over the past few months I've gotten to within seven or so pounds of my goal—and then I'll do something like gobble down a quart of ice cream, eat a dozen cookies or scarf down a whole bag of Doritos. Next thing I know, the bathroom scales are creaking like a submarine that has dived too deep.

But today was a good day. Just three Tootsie Roll Pops. And a few Sour Patch Kids from one of those 100-calorie snack bags, one of those bags my wife had the willpower to open and not finish. She left the half-finished bag on the counter, in plain sight. What was I supposed to do, let them sit there and spoil? And then, since there are only 100 calories per bag, I had a bag of my own. Still, that's all better than yesterday, when I probably ate at least a dozen Tootsie Roll Pops.

I think I'll be OK tonight. I'm going to post this now and go to bed. And when we get up in the morning, I am going to ask—no, implore—Sherry to hide that leftover candy where I'll never find it or, better yet, throw it away. Because if she hides it, I'll find it.

Tuesday in the Course Formerly Known As Editing, we were reviewing a quiz sentence that had the word "anchovies" in it. This led to my inevitable query about who in the class likes anchovies; no one ever does. The led me to riff about mojo (anchovies being, in my opinion, a mojo fish), which somehow led to a riff on the blues, which somehow led to my declaring that certainly no one in the class could name a T-Bone Walker song.

The student next to me immediately said, "Stormy Monday." Bingo!

Thursday, before class started, I asked him how he knew that. From Duane Allman's introduction of the song on the Allmans' "Live at the Fillmore East," he replied. We immediately started talking about guitarists from that era, and I mentioned Jeff Beck. He replied that Beck is now working with a bassist who is 23, female and an incredible player. So last night I went online to Amazon.com to look for new Jeff Beck product.

Beck has a new live record out with an accompanying video, and Amazon offers about a four-minute excerpt from the video of a performance involving Beck and a singer named Imogen Heap. It is a cool, cool song—good enough that I'm tempted to buy the video just to have it.

Does anyone know anything about this singer? If I want to start listening to her, where do I start?

Back when I was in junior high school, I bought Jefferson Airplane's live album "Bless Its Pointed Little Head." At one point between songs, the band members are trying to urge workers to turn down some of the venue's lighting so that the band's light show would be more visible. "Turn down the lights please," says Grace Slick, after which Paul Kantner says something that sounded to my 14-year-old ears like "or we'll send the house lady to get you."

Well, last night I bought the mp3 version of the album, and when that segment of the album played again, I clearly heard what Kantner said and realized just how naive I was in 1968. What does he say?

"Or we'll send Owsley to get you."

“That guy handles the puck like a cow handles a gun."

Bill "The Big Whistle" Chadwick, the first American-born referee in the National Hockey league, died Friday at 94. Chadwick invented the gestures referees use to indicate penalties, and he was a longtime color man on WOR-TV's broadcasts of New York Rangers games when I was growing up.

I had never heard the above quotation, but it certainly sounds like a Chadwick-ism. One of my favorites was the time he said Terry O'Reilly, the Boston Bruins' pugnacious forward, was "playing like a demon possessed."

We have a new oven that I hadn't used until tonight. Sherry is out of town, so I figured I would bake a pizza.

New oven. I figured out how to preheat it. No problem. I figured out how to set the temperature higher after preheating. No problem. I set the timer for 21 minutes, put the pizza on the center rack, and then drifted into my home office to do some work until the timer sounded.

After a while I realized that it had been a long 21 minutes, so I stepped into the kitchen to check on just how much time was left.

It turned out I had set the timer for 21 hours.

The pizza? Don't ask.

At least this time—this time—I didn't set the smoke detector off.

And then there was the time I put a frozen pizza into the oven but forgot to remove the cardboard disc from the bottom of it ...

Used to be I’d
Write like this

Give up like this

Crumple the paper
Toss it on the floor.

Now it’s just
Close file
“Save changes?”
No
Why do you think I’m closing the file

All the crumpled paper
Said “tried"

But what does the
Screen saver say

... or maybe you can. Maybe someday this story will be exposed as a massive hoax. But until then:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8305759.stm

St. Bonaventure JMC grad Torre Catalano has a good take on being a Bills fan on his blog—and the picture that goes with the post is priceless. Here's the link:

http://ancientemptystreets.tumblr.com/

There are so many Buffalo Bills fans here in southwestern New York that for as long as I can remember, I've rooted against them. After all, when you've got a roomful of people sitting around watching a game on TV, it's a lot more fun if the allegiances are divided.

This year's version of the Bills is so bad, though, that it's no fun to wish for them to lose. I can't imagine how people feel this afternoon if they watched Buffalo lose to Cleveland, 6-3. I would think sitting through that one would make the fillings in your teeth ache. One fan commented online, "Most boring football game I have ever watched. Terrible. 3 hours of my life I will never get back."

Time to start looking forward to the draft — and a particularly long and dreary fall and winter here in Bills country.

I was fishing from a bridge, talking to a secretary when I said, “Hang on a minute. I’ve got a fish on the line,” and it felt like a big fish, but when I pulled it to the surface, it was a dog, a brown and white dog, like a St. Bernard, so I eased off the line and the dog swam away. I did not want to catch a dog.

“There must be fish in this stream,” I said to the secretary, because upstream, at the next bridge, the water was full of dead salmon that had swum inland from the great lake, spawned, and perished, eyes now gaping sockets, bodies in tatters, heads chopped from their bodies.

So I walked upstream to the next bridge, but when I got there the water was wide, deep, muddy green, almost overlapping banks thick with underbrush, unfishable. Just then a man in a suit like one James Bond would wear crossed the bridge. He said, “I know who you are.” It was the Gauze Man. “How did you recognize me?” I asked. I was wearing a hat; my head was bald. I looked so much older and different. Why hadn't he aged? And why was he on the bridge anyway? What happened to the Gauze Man?

The water flowed toward the lake, but time was running backward. Before seeing the Gauze Man and the dog under water, I was giving a tour and pointing out a bench where, in 1977, I sat in the spring sun one Saturday with Hoople, Sharon, and Nat E. Dread, breaking a law nobody seemed to care about before we crossed the street and played along the creek. Somebody had moved the bench—I could barely see it for the overhanging trees—but it still sat in sunshine.

"Funk No. 49," James Gang. A little nostalgia for the old folks.