I got home from work today about the usual time (around 2:45 pm). As usual, I went out on my deck after tuning into my Lee "Scratch" Perry radio on Pandora dot com, (If you're not into Pandora, check it out.) to have a beer and a smoke. In a fully lethargic state after a full day of bustin' my as for the school district since 6 am. And what to my wondering ears should appear, but a pine siskin (or maybe a chickadee; I didn't have my binocs handy) going off on a full 90 second riff. I mean a nonstop tweettweettweetcheepcheepwhistlecheeptweetwhistle... you get the idea.
Now, I'm no expert on orinthology, but I do know that most birds that live in my part of the world have a geneticly implanted song to sing. That song is part of what identifies them as a species. As a first class porch sitter and general layabout who has lived in the higher elevations (above 7,500 ft) of Colorado nearly all my adult life, I am quite familiar with the birds hereabouts and can name nearly all of them from their customary tune. Once in a while, though, you can hear one go off like this; just yammerin' away to beat the band. I remember sitting on my deck about five years ago watching a pair of house finches perched on the wire than ran electric out to our barn light. There was a male and a female; the female was making such a racket that the male would hop a few feet along the wire to escape the noise. (At least thats my take on his motive) The female hopped along right behind, going full bore. It was quite something to see.
Anyways, this bird I heard this afternoon got me to wondering... Is there maybe some primordial jazz gene that makes some individuals go way beyond the norm of acceptable expression? I have known dogs that go off on quite a vocal binge upon hearing a ceyote, siren, or Ornette Coleman solo. Spike the wondercat used to do it too, for no appearant reason. Just go on and on until you'd think he must have three sets of lungs. Just something to think about when you're really bored.
Since you asked dept: The Oxford comma is the one after the penultimate word in a list and before the word "and".
Today's Music: To Bird With Love: Live at the Blue Note by Dizzy Gillespie
Quote of the day:
" What is the essential nature of these phenomena we call makyo? They are temporary mental states which arise during zazen when our ability to concentrate has developed to a certain point and our practice is beginning to ripen. When the thought-waves which wax and wane on the surface of the sixth class of consciousness are partially calmed, residual elements of past experiences "lodged" in the seventh and eighth classes of consciousness bob up sporadically to the surface of the mind, conveying the feeling of a greater or expanded reality. Makyo, accordingly, are a mixture of the real and unreal, not unlike ordinary dreams. Just as dreams do not appear to a person in deep sleep but only when he is half asleep and half awake, so makyo do not come to those in deep concentration or samadhi. Never be tempted into thinking that these phenomena are real or that the visions themselves have any meaning. To se a beautiful vision of a Bodhisattva does not mean that you are any nearer to becoming one yourself, any more than a dream of being a millionaire means that you are any richer when you awake.
Yasutani - Roshi
A follow-up on my post about the public option: Go to Salon.com and click the opinion button at the top of the home page, scroll down to "Memo To President Obama" Read it!
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Solstice
I don't celebrate Father's day. I am not a father myself and my own father has been in the earth for more than ten years. I do, however celebrate the Summer Solstice. Unlike the Winter Solstice, which signals the rebirth of light in the dead of winter, This Day marks the beginning of high summer, the magical death and rebirth of the Barley King, and the first harvesting of the Bounty of Ceres (the Goddess of grain crops, whence the word cereal) if you doubt it, go someplace where alfalfa is grown; the farmers in my neighborhood are just now doing their first cutting of fodder.
This is a magical time - the light lasts long, nights are cool but short, and even those among us who have next to nothing are more comfortable. Long live summer!!
Quote of the day with a preface:
Durango (the third,not fourth) has a Father's Day event on Main Street this day called Who's Your Daddy. The Quote is from a bartender friend of mine: "Just what I need on Father's Day; a big reminder that I don't know who my father is!"
Here's to Miles Davis the father of cool. Birth of the Cool is today's music pick.
Enjoy the hell out of this summer 'cuz ya just never know...
Sorry this post is so short, but thanks for stopping in.
This is a magical time - the light lasts long, nights are cool but short, and even those among us who have next to nothing are more comfortable. Long live summer!!
Quote of the day with a preface:
Durango (the third,not fourth) has a Father's Day event on Main Street this day called Who's Your Daddy. The Quote is from a bartender friend of mine: "Just what I need on Father's Day; a big reminder that I don't know who my father is!"
Here's to Miles Davis the father of cool. Birth of the Cool is today's music pick.
Enjoy the hell out of this summer 'cuz ya just never know...
Sorry this post is so short, but thanks for stopping in.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
The Public Option
So I'm not going to talk much about the financial reform today, except to say that anybody reading this should go to whitehouse.gov and listen to today's Presidential radio address. If the Pres really means what he says this part of the plan makes sense. I think that protection for the not so well off from the rich, greedy, and unscrupulous is worth fighting for and I hope Obama is up to the task.
Another thing that is worth fighting for is including a "robust" public option in any health care reform plan. A good idea of what this public option should entail can be found at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Web Site http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/ . Click on the health care box on the right side of the page and then select "Principles for a Public Health care Option". Now, I am not so foolish as to think that this type of plan has a snowball's chance in hell of passing through congress, but it is what we need. Those who are currently uninsured or under insured will never be able to afford decent health care without it.
The Heath insurance industry will cry foul; but remember this: the key word is option. Everyone will still be able to buy health insurance from private insurers at insanely high prices if they so choose and thus make insurance company executives even richer still. For all their bogus blather about the free market what these guys really fear is competition. They can't abide the idea of competing with a well run,well financed institution that would provide the same products they do at reasonable cost. They fear having their immense profits dwindle as people choose the public option in a free market.
Doctors' organizations will cry foul; claiming a huge burden of paperwork and the pain of dealing with another bureaucracy. Hogwash. It can't be any worse than dealing with a big insurance company. Anyone who has had health problems and had to deal with an insurance company can tell you bureaucratic horror stories.
The aging buffoons of the right wing will holler "CREEPING COMMUNISM", "EUROSOCIALISM", and worse. Let 'em. This is an idea whose time has come and we better get on with it.
AND NOWW....on to the truely trivial
For today's music I have chosen a couple of albums that will appeal to those among you who were caught up in the rock 'n' roll revolution of the early '50s.
(a little personnal aside here: When I was about 8 or 9 years old, say 1955, I had a bad case of measles. Our family had no TV yet so while I was staying indoors my main entertainment was the radio. I listened all day to the radio. The top 40 station in Denver at that time was KIMN. I remember that the artists I liked most were Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. I was also a big fan of Jackie Wilson and Little Richard. These guys were the be-all and end-all of music as far as I was concerned. I didn't know what anti-establishment meant back then but they were sure it. They inform my musical tastes to this day, though not exclusively obviously.)
The first selection is by a cat that my older siblings were more familiar with than I. Although not a rock and roller or rock-a-billy rebel, he laid some strong foundations. The second selection is by a man who carries on the rock-a-billy tradition to this day (unless he died recently).
Today's Music
Are You Hep To The Jive by Cab Calloway
The Best of Joe Ely by Joe Ely
Today's Fiction
Tereza Batista -Home From The Wars by Jorge Amado
Another great novel of Brazil by the author of Dona Flor and her Two Husbands
Today's Nonfiction
The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil
A thoughtful treatise on drugs and the human mind.
Quote:
I sat my monkey on a log
and ordered him to do the dog.
He wagged his tail and shook his head
and then he did the cat instead.
He's a weird monkey.
-Bob Dylan
Another thing that is worth fighting for is including a "robust" public option in any health care reform plan. A good idea of what this public option should entail can be found at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Web Site http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/ . Click on the health care box on the right side of the page and then select "Principles for a Public Health care Option". Now, I am not so foolish as to think that this type of plan has a snowball's chance in hell of passing through congress, but it is what we need. Those who are currently uninsured or under insured will never be able to afford decent health care without it.
The Heath insurance industry will cry foul; but remember this: the key word is option. Everyone will still be able to buy health insurance from private insurers at insanely high prices if they so choose and thus make insurance company executives even richer still. For all their bogus blather about the free market what these guys really fear is competition. They can't abide the idea of competing with a well run,well financed institution that would provide the same products they do at reasonable cost. They fear having their immense profits dwindle as people choose the public option in a free market.
Doctors' organizations will cry foul; claiming a huge burden of paperwork and the pain of dealing with another bureaucracy. Hogwash. It can't be any worse than dealing with a big insurance company. Anyone who has had health problems and had to deal with an insurance company can tell you bureaucratic horror stories.
The aging buffoons of the right wing will holler "CREEPING COMMUNISM", "EUROSOCIALISM", and worse. Let 'em. This is an idea whose time has come and we better get on with it.
AND NOWW....on to the truely trivial
For today's music I have chosen a couple of albums that will appeal to those among you who were caught up in the rock 'n' roll revolution of the early '50s.
(a little personnal aside here: When I was about 8 or 9 years old, say 1955, I had a bad case of measles. Our family had no TV yet so while I was staying indoors my main entertainment was the radio. I listened all day to the radio. The top 40 station in Denver at that time was KIMN. I remember that the artists I liked most were Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. I was also a big fan of Jackie Wilson and Little Richard. These guys were the be-all and end-all of music as far as I was concerned. I didn't know what anti-establishment meant back then but they were sure it. They inform my musical tastes to this day, though not exclusively obviously.)
The first selection is by a cat that my older siblings were more familiar with than I. Although not a rock and roller or rock-a-billy rebel, he laid some strong foundations. The second selection is by a man who carries on the rock-a-billy tradition to this day (unless he died recently).
Today's Music
Are You Hep To The Jive by Cab Calloway
The Best of Joe Ely by Joe Ely
Today's Fiction
Tereza Batista -Home From The Wars by Jorge Amado
Another great novel of Brazil by the author of Dona Flor and her Two Husbands
Today's Nonfiction
The Natural Mind by Andrew Weil
A thoughtful treatise on drugs and the human mind.
Quote:
I sat my monkey on a log
and ordered him to do the dog.
He wagged his tail and shook his head
and then he did the cat instead.
He's a weird monkey.
-Bob Dylan
Friday, June 19, 2009
More Idle Ramblings
Last evening I spent some time at the White House web site. I watched the President's speech on reforming regulation in the financial industry. I also printed some pdfs from the site. One of these, titled "Requiring Strong Supervision And Regulation Of All Financial Firms", talks about creating a Financial Services Oversight Council. It would have eight members, with the Secretary of the Treasury serving as chair. Among the other members would be: the Chair of the FDIC, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, and the chair of the SEC. In other words, pretty much the same bunch who were asleep at the switch when this whole mess was being created by their greedy cronies. This council would, according to the document, "Have broad authority to gather information through the Chair from any financial firm to identify emerging risks to financial stability.", "Identify gaps in regulation and prepare an annual report to Congress...", "Recomend firms for indentificationas Tier 1 Financial Holding Companies...", "Provide consultation on material prudential standards...", "Provide a forum for discussion of cross-cutting issues...", and "Facilitate information sharing...". Does anyones else see a pattern here? What with all the gathering, identifying, recomending, and providing of forums they will probably be too tuckered out to make any real difference in the way regulations are enforced.
Another little gem from the same document:" The Federal Reserve currently holds regulatory responsibilities over bank holding companies and is best suited to take on authority and accountabilty for consolidated supervision of all Tier 1 FHCs." Great Idea! These guys did such a great job of overseeing the banks these past several years, they should oversee all the big (ie too big to be allowed to fail) financial firms. I am already sleeping better.
To be fair, there are some things in the document that make sense to me such as higher capital and liquidity requirements for "Tier 1 FHCs" and this: "Under the President's pla the SEC will have authoriy to require companies to allow shareholders to vote on executive-compasation packages to help ensure that compensation packagesare closely aligned with the interests of shareholders.' Sounds OK unless the guys getting those obscene amounts of unearned money can out vote the rest of the shareholders.
I'll have more to say about his later, but this one finger typing is so slow and I do want to move on to the truely trivial.
Why do all those right wing nut jobs on talk radio always whine about the liberal bias of the mainstream media? From my experience, trying to find liberal or even center-left opinion in mainstream media is like looking for gold in a dumpster. If you find some, you can bet it got there by accident. Those who gripe about liberal bias in media the obviously not reading, listening, or watching anything remotely "mainstream". More on this later as well.
Today's music recomendations:
Dvorak - Symphony #9
Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder
Sia - Some People Have Real Problems
Today's Fiction:
Let it Bleed by Ian Rankin
Todays Nonfiction:
The Year of Decision 1846 by Bernard deVoto
This excellent book has several threads, but two of them that I find most interesting are the selling of the Mexican-American War (President Polk could have been the prototype for George W the talking shrub) and the Donner party's trek to their fate in the high Sierras.
Another little gem from the same document:" The Federal Reserve currently holds regulatory responsibilities over bank holding companies and is best suited to take on authority and accountabilty for consolidated supervision of all Tier 1 FHCs." Great Idea! These guys did such a great job of overseeing the banks these past several years, they should oversee all the big (ie too big to be allowed to fail) financial firms. I am already sleeping better.
To be fair, there are some things in the document that make sense to me such as higher capital and liquidity requirements for "Tier 1 FHCs" and this: "Under the President's pla the SEC will have authoriy to require companies to allow shareholders to vote on executive-compasation packages to help ensure that compensation packagesare closely aligned with the interests of shareholders.' Sounds OK unless the guys getting those obscene amounts of unearned money can out vote the rest of the shareholders.
I'll have more to say about his later, but this one finger typing is so slow and I do want to move on to the truely trivial.
Why do all those right wing nut jobs on talk radio always whine about the liberal bias of the mainstream media? From my experience, trying to find liberal or even center-left opinion in mainstream media is like looking for gold in a dumpster. If you find some, you can bet it got there by accident. Those who gripe about liberal bias in media the obviously not reading, listening, or watching anything remotely "mainstream". More on this later as well.
Today's music recomendations:
Dvorak - Symphony #9
Lee Morgan - The Sidewinder
Sia - Some People Have Real Problems
Today's Fiction:
Let it Bleed by Ian Rankin
Todays Nonfiction:
The Year of Decision 1846 by Bernard deVoto
This excellent book has several threads, but two of them that I find most interesting are the selling of the Mexican-American War (President Polk could have been the prototype for George W the talking shrub) and the Donner party's trek to their fate in the high Sierras.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
My first post - Ending With a Rantrant
This is my first attempt at blogging so there may be misspellings, tangental ramblings, and lots of non sequitors.
You will find that I nearly always use the Oxford comma. This blog will talk about all sorts of things. Often, I will mention the music that I have been listening to lately. If I do, check it out (I have great taste in music - everybody says so). This time its Duke Ellington, Sia, Deacon Blue, Elmore James, and Fred Eaglesmith. I will also share a lot of my cranky ideas on politics and the state of society in general. You will find that I use the phrase "I blame it on the teevee" a lot. This is because I really do blame it on television. Television has made these United States a nation of intellectual zombies where reasoned argument has given way to shouting matches filled with accusations, lies, ad homenim logic faults, and preposterous nonsense which people put up with because they are offered nothing better and are too lazy to search out facts and make their own judgements. Teevee is easy and free (in a sense); just what Americans have come to want and deserve. You can find some brerbirch letters at salon.com.
In addition to Salon, I like Huffington Post. A great jazz radio station can be found at KUVO.org; I really enjoy the R&B Jukebox on Saturday nights. Check it out. I also check out The White House website (thewhitehouse.gov) just see what sort of nonsense our government is up to.
The weather here in the four corners (the area where CO, NM, AZ, and UT meet) has been too cool for mid-June. I'm ready for hot. Shorts and sandals weather is what I want.
Alvin Youngblood Hart: "When I Was a Cowboy" from Big Mama's Door. Check it out!
And now for a little rantrant in the form of Questions:
How come the media aren't pissed about the way Bush at al led us into war with Iraq with lies?
How come President Obama after swearing to uphold the Constitution of the USofA does not go after those who so blatantly violated it?
How come the crooks who willfully ruined our financial system solely for personal gain were given tons more money?
Why are so many right wing nutjobs so bellicose?
Why are so many left wing nutjobs so timid?
Is there any hope that people in general will ever behave rationally again?
You will find that I nearly always use the Oxford comma. This blog will talk about all sorts of things. Often, I will mention the music that I have been listening to lately. If I do, check it out (I have great taste in music - everybody says so). This time its Duke Ellington, Sia, Deacon Blue, Elmore James, and Fred Eaglesmith. I will also share a lot of my cranky ideas on politics and the state of society in general. You will find that I use the phrase "I blame it on the teevee" a lot. This is because I really do blame it on television. Television has made these United States a nation of intellectual zombies where reasoned argument has given way to shouting matches filled with accusations, lies, ad homenim logic faults, and preposterous nonsense which people put up with because they are offered nothing better and are too lazy to search out facts and make their own judgements. Teevee is easy and free (in a sense); just what Americans have come to want and deserve. You can find some brerbirch letters at salon.com.
In addition to Salon, I like Huffington Post. A great jazz radio station can be found at KUVO.org; I really enjoy the R&B Jukebox on Saturday nights. Check it out. I also check out The White House website (thewhitehouse.gov) just see what sort of nonsense our government is up to.
The weather here in the four corners (the area where CO, NM, AZ, and UT meet) has been too cool for mid-June. I'm ready for hot. Shorts and sandals weather is what I want.
Alvin Youngblood Hart: "When I Was a Cowboy" from Big Mama's Door. Check it out!
And now for a little rantrant in the form of Questions:
How come the media aren't pissed about the way Bush at al led us into war with Iraq with lies?
How come President Obama after swearing to uphold the Constitution of the USofA does not go after those who so blatantly violated it?
How come the crooks who willfully ruined our financial system solely for personal gain were given tons more money?
Why are so many right wing nutjobs so bellicose?
Why are so many left wing nutjobs so timid?
Is there any hope that people in general will ever behave rationally again?
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