Thursday, October 28, 2004

Did a quick scan of some of the pics from my trip to TN with Mom and played around with my web editor program a little bit (I use Namo WebEditor 5.5) to figure out the photo album options. The results are here. I scanned these at a relatively low dpi and didn't really do any digital cleanup - they're just holiday snaps, but hope you enjoy! My only regret is that I didn't get any pictures of the Gager Lime Company - what a cool-looking place!

Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Giblets has 'em...

"Hey Giblets," says me. "Where'd we get all the high explosives in the basement?"
"What, you mean the high explosives by the washer an dryer?" says Giblets puttin some explosives in his soup.
"No, the high explosives by the sump pump," says me stirrin some explosives into my cocoa.
"Got em at the store," says Giblets dunkin some explosives into the explosive dip. "The high explosives store."
"Did you go to Explosives-R-Us or Explodeytown?" says me.
"Nah, I just went to Wal-Mart," says Giblets blowin up the TV. "This is stuff you can buy anywhere.

A couple of months ago I suggested that despite Kerry's then-flagging poll numbers, I thought it was likely that the election wouldn't be all that close (and would be in Kerry's favor, of course). I know it's late in the game, but I'm still of that opinion and predicted today in an e-mail to Dad and to my Bush-lovin' cousin that the electoral college vote will be Kerry 315, Bush 223. Certainly not a landslide historically, but a pretty convincing victory for THIS race. My cousin has offered to buy me a steak dinner if Kerry gets more than 300 (I'm sure he's forgotten that I'm a vegetarian) - his prediction is Bush by 10 to 20 EVs. Feel free to use the comments to post your own predictions, but I want electoral vote counts, not some wishy-washy "it'll be close" crap! :-)

We voted already - will you please just turn off all the damn TV ads and go home now?!?!

Joking aside, I do wonder who the ads are for now.  JennySlash pointed out that well over 100,000 people have already voted in Wake/Durham/Orange counties.  Dad said when he voted in the last couple of days 2,000 people had already voted in Yancey County (what's that - a fifth of the total number that voted last election?).  mapgirl's already voted in Nashville, so it's not just an NC thing.  Knowing how my work day gets, it was important to me to be able to go ahead and take care of voting on Saturday, like I do the rest of the things I can't make time for during the week - it just makes sense.  Go do it!

Monday, October 25, 2004

Finished Mark Kemp's Dixie Lullaby last week. I'll have lots to say later about some of the thinking that it's prompted, but let me talk about the book itself here first.

For starters, it's very good. A combination of reminiscing, soul-searching and music history - well-researched and well-documented - that has a really nice flow to it. I think it has appeal to people who aren't me or Lex or PC - white, middle-aged Southern boys - but I'm anxious to hear from people outside that demographic. I got a real kick out of reading his descriptions of shows that we both attended and bands that we saw at the same stage of their development.  Certainly the U2 show in Kenan Stadium in the rain at the start of their War tour left its mark on all of us who were there and his bit on it was dead on (note that everybody refers to it as "the U2 show" - hard to remember that Todd Rundgren was the headliner). On a deeper level, he's one of the first people of my generation I've ever heard broach the subject of the harm racism has done to Southern white males. I'm sure that may seem horribly trite to most people, but it is worthy of discussion and Kemp does it in a way that doesn't attempt to turn my demographic into another victim class.

Many of the reviews have been of the "me, too" variety, but for me, one of the real benefits of the book was to prompt some thinking on where I have differences with the author and how they shaped at the very least my musical taste. While we were born in the South the same year, growing up in Nashville rather than a small NC mill town, starting school at a majority black school instead of an all-white school, moving around as a kid instead of growing up around the same people, even having a younger sister instead of an older one - all of those variables create some seemingly major differences, but in the end I suspect those differences aren't all that great. Uh, for those that don't know, I'm on the front end of each of those differences above...

Interesting note - I read through the lengthy acknowledgements figuring I'd see people that I was familiar with, like the musicians he'd talked about and other area writers like Parke Puterbaugh, Fred Mills and Godfrey Cheshire. And of course I did. What I didn't expect was to see the name of a guy I work with that lives in Charlotte and has an unusual enough name that I was pretty sure it wasn't just a coincident. Sure enough, my co-worker is a close friend and was having dinner with Kemp the day I asked him about it, so I asked him to pass on my praise of the book. I also asked him to ask Kemp if he ever made it to the Rhythm Alley while we ran the place - I'll let you know what I hear back.