MISS EIGHT'S SUNDAY DINNER SUGGESTIONS

Poor MissEight. She just loves to cook and she's stuck with a mom whose idea of gourmet fare is putting lemon pepper on a opened tin of tuna. Sigh. In any case, she's hard at work on a cookbook, and these two items are her recommendations for a fine Sunday family dinner:

"Mo Mo Sandwich!"

1 Cups of tomato's.
1 Cups of onion's.
1 Cup's of Avacodo's.


Then poor it in a Bowl and mix it up. and then put in White Bread! And gua Laa! You have it!


p.s. you could abb letus and cheese!

"gouy ice cream Blah Blah Yum Yum"

1 ice cream


Then sture


Done


Tee-hee

My contribution was finding this piece of pasta on the kitchen floor. We agreed that it looks like a seahorse.

If we ever invite you over to dinner here, believe me, we'll understand if you decline.

Read More

SATURDAY, TUCSON

This land is your land, this land is my land

From California to the New York island;

From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and me.

The Casas Adobes Safeway in Tucson where six people were shot dead and 13 others wounded is re-opening today. There will be live news reports, gawkers, people who will step in to buy a $8.99 bouquet of flowers just to leave them at the entrance, someone who just wants to buy paper towels and a pound of hamburger and get the hell out again.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,

I saw above me that endless skyway:

I saw below me that golden valley:

This land was made for you and me.

The Big Box Retailer will be selling gun ammo today, as usual. The guys behind the counter look a little harder at their customers, but ring them all up. One man puts in for a transfer request to work in Electronics. “I ain’t gonna get sued, no way.”

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps

To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;

And all around me a voice was sounding:

This land was made for you and me.

About five miles past Pima Community College, a family worries that their 20-year-old daughter didn’t come home again. Her behavior over the last year has been getting increasingly strange. She dropped out of school, lost her job at the garden center, stopped going out with friends, and the friends stopped calling for her. Her conversations are peppered with rambling talk about government spies and radiation poisoning, yet she eats at the table, showers, functions. Every phone call her mother makes ends like this: “There’s nothing we can do unless there is documented proof that she is a danger to herself or others.” Her father prepares to go out and look for her in Central, again.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,

And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,

As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:

This land was made for you and me.

Two middle-aged men eat a hearty breakfast at a chain restaurant near the Tucson Mall, as they do every Saturday. One pats his jacket pocket; a smooth charcoal-black Glock rests there, unseen. “First thing I did, was buy this baby and some clips before goddamn Obama takes that away from us over this.” His friend nods in affirmation. The men get a third free refill of coffee, and discuss how they would’ve handled the Safeway shooter. “Gabby’s got a Glock, you know. She said so herself.”

As I went walking I saw a sign there

And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."

But on the other side it didn't say nothing,

That side was made for you and me.

The calls in the media for less vitriolic political rhetoric and blind blame begin to become…vitriolic. The electrician working at the Westin La Paloma today switches his portable radio from the all-talk station – “Tucson’s Jolt” – to “Cool 1450 AM…Good Times, Great Oldies.”

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

Registration begins for Spring Little League teams at a pretty, winding park in Catalina Foothills in North Tucson. Two attractive tanned mothers in workout gear hold Starbucks cups and make small talk as they stand in the line as their boys run around in the grass. There are no girls registering for the teams this season.

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

Strong sunlight filters in through the church windows, the building quiet except for the hum of traffic from Interstate19. The congregation’s secretary, an older woman with short gray hair and a Cardinals sweatshirt, is cleaning the coffeemaker in the small church kitchen, readying for tomorrow’s service. Her arms shake slightly as she pulls the giant can of Folgers from an upper cabinet, and she rests her hands on the lid as she sets the can on the counter. She stands still for a moment, and another wave of deep sadness washes over her. With no one else there, she moves to sit on a wooden chair and weeps for her dearest friend, lost to madness.  


Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land"

Read More

YELLING

Life can be very frustrating at times, and by "life" I mean "jerky friggin' people whom you'd love to throttle like Homer Simpson does to Bart ACK ACK ACKKKKK." Yet throttling is a crime in most states, provinces, protectorates, and Lord-doms. So what can we do, other than throttle or become pathetic red-faced stroke casualties?

Why, we can watch yelling YouTubes, is what! I know I feel better already.

Let us start with a classic, the one that started it all!



This, my favorite Grickle video, updates "Network" nicely. You should really should go watch more Grickle films here.



I totally approve of Japanese men yelling out words of affection in public.



Although American guys have a little different flair.  (WARNING: so very NSFW or ANYWHERE)



In other countries, Doris would be detained by authorities for the public welfare. In Illinios, Doris wins a prize.



And in other countries, people put camels in cars and camels don't like it at all.



Ahhhhh.

Read More

IT'S A GAS

This story was "passed on" to me today by one of my friends, a lovely mother of two excellent children and a fine overall citizen, and how I love her for it.

I was in the restaurant yesterday when I suddenly realized I desperately needed to pass gas.

The music was really, really loud, so I timed my gas with the beat of the music.

After a couple of songs, I started to feel better.

I finished my coffee and noticed that everybody was staring at me.

Then I suddenly remembered that I was listening to my iPod.

 Mr. Methane, "Britain's Got Talent"

 

Alfred E. Newman, "It's A Gas"

Read More

MY FAVORITE FAN AT JAZZ ALLEY

On Monday night, me n' the fam headed out to Seattle's Jazz Alley to see blues harpist Sugar Blue -- "me" was on assignment for Back Beat Seattle, "the fam" sucked up Cokes and dessert in a comfy booth while enjoying the show and watching Mommy and her big ass... lens shoot away. We had a great evening, and you can read about it at Back Beat Seattle here, and/or see the photo set here.

The next morning as I was processing the photos, I was looking at a run that didn't work and a particular man in the audience caught my eye. I laughed quite loudly. I have isolated him for you here. He may be my favorite fan of all of 2011, you never know.

Read More

I'VE MADE A CARTOON FOR YOU

Read More

DOUBLE NUMBERS, WHAT DOES IT MEEEEEAAAN?

Look at the date, then the tax and total:

OMG. Should I go gambling or something now? OMG!

Read More

WIN FOR ED

When Mick Jagger sings "This doesn't happen to me everyday, oh my," in "Let's Spend The Night Together," does anyone else think, "Well, sure it does. You're Mick Jagger."

Let us now once again enjoy Ed Sullivan and the CBS censors owning the Rolling Stones. Mick delivers his best Jack Benny rolleyes, to no avail.

The Rolling Stones, "Let's Spend Some Time Together," Ed Sullivan Show, 1967.

Read More

VIDEO: THE SHAGGS "MY PAL FOOT FOOT"

Oh, how I wish I had made this.

I love you, The Shaggs.

"My Pal Foot Foot"

Read More

ASHES

Every so often someone will ask you: what’s the first thing you can remember from your childhood? Here is what I see in my mind: my mother’s lit cigarette balanced on the edge of the kitchen table, the ashes growing longer and longer, and me waiting for them to finally spill to the floor. This was a peculiar habit of Mom’s, leaving her cigarettes in odd places. Despite my dad buying stacks of ashtrays and putting them all over the house, there were still little brown and yellow burn marks everywhere: the kitchen counter, the coffee table, the ping-pong table in the basement, even the edge of the bathtub. He would try to scrub them out or repair them, with little success. He would scold her then, but with no real anger, just frustration. It was a dangerous thing to do, she knew it, always apologized profusely and sincerely, and never changed.

The memory is fleshed out by other images, hazier as the years pass. The yellow-and-white fleck of the Formica. My legs kicking back and forth while I sat in the chair, feet not touching the floor yet; my shoes, Red Ball Jets. My brown lunch sack on the counter with “MARK” written in big red marker letters. My mother, holding my baby brother Michael in one arm, talking on the wall phone with the long, long curly cord. The wooden sign above the kitchen door that read, “The Millers.” My dad passing by in his dark blue jumpsuit, smelling like oil and metal, and him rustling my hair, although I can never picture his face. Perhaps it is because I was watching the ashes so intently, fascinated.

We Millers grew from a family of four to a family of six a few years later with the arrival of twins, Melissa and Melinda. My memories are more distinct from this time, cut with a gloomy anxiety and loneliness. My dad – this time I can see his face, tired – telling Michael and I that “the girls came too soon,” and they would be staying at the hospital for some time, and for us to pray for them. These were the years before many premature infants were saved; little was done other than to wait, and pray. My Aunt Ruth came to stay with us, and she was the one to get us up for school, make the breakfasts, and the lunch bags that read “MARK” and “MIKEY.” My dad seemed to only pass through the house to change clothes; he was either at Rick’s Standard at his job as a mechanic, or at the hospital. I don’t remember seeing my mother at all. If you ask Michael now what his first memory is, it is of he and I at this time, sitting together at the kitchen table eating peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches that I made for us.

After what seemed to be a very, very long time the girls were allowed to come home from the hospital. Aunt Ruth spent three days scrubbing down every surface of our house with bleach water. I noticed her frowning and scrubbing extra hard on one of the burn marks. When my dad pulled up in the car, the second we heard the crunch on the gravel we ran to meet it. My mom was sitting in the passenger seat holding one of the babies, smiling wide at us, waving her cigarette from the window. When my dad went around to open the door for her, I saw her place the cigarette on the dashboard of the car, and could not help but love her for it.

Michael and I loved our baby sisters, but at the same time they seemed so…not Miller. My mother and dad and my brother and I all pretty much looked like each other: dark hair, ruddy complexion, sturdy. The girls remained slight and fragile-looking, with fine blonde hair, deeply-set blue eyes, and as pale as it would be possible for anyone to be. Angels, or aliens, or some combination of the two. The twins seemed utterly content with each other’s company, to the point of exclusion. They never really made any friends at school, never really interacted with me or Michael or Dad much, just Mom.

Miller Time rolled on. Dogs and cats and fish and gerbils were brought home, lived, and died. Homework at the kitchen table, holiday dinners, the scratchy plaid couch finally succumbing to overuse, a car trip to Florida. Michael’s baseball games, Barbie dolls on the bathroom floor, the fall leaves that would blow inside the kitchen door. I left for college, then Michael. Rick’s Standard closed and Dad got a Senior Mechanic job over at the Chevy dealership in Carroll, about 40 minutes away. The girls developed a crush on the singer Barry Manilow, started a fan club for him, and briefly considered changing their names to “Mandy and Mindy Miller-Manilow.”

My mother stoically went through breast cancer treatment, insisting that Michael and I not be told because it would “disrupt our studies.” She didn’t die of it; she died from a brain hemorrhage a year later, on the new couch. There wasn’t any predicting it. We could not have gotten there in time. There wasn’t anything that would have changed the outcome. I repeated these sentences to myself in the air, 35,000 feet up, coming home.

The last thing I remember about my family, when we changed from six to five, was the cab dropping me off at the funeral home. My two sisters stood huddled together in identical charcoal grey dresses, weeping and smoking. From a distance they looked like ashes, trembling, ready to fall.

Read More

MY VERY FIRST PUBLISHED ROCK REVIEW?

Holy crap! Thanks to my school pal (and self-described "pack rat") Jeanne, this saved issue of the Oconomowoc (WI.) Jr. High Bulldog Bulletin has come to my attention this morning, featuring a front page review of PETER FRAMPTON. This is what happens when you give free reign to a 14-year-old editor/writer. WHICH WAS ME. I believe I spent the bulk of my 9th grade year "editing" the Bulldog Bulletin, which meant squirreling myself away alone with a typewriter in the big closet used to store extra textbooks and bulk paper. I could play my radio, eat and drink, dance by myself, and generally completely screw off under the guise of compiling stories from correspondents, re-writing, doing the paste-up, and running the printer. If I felt really bold, I would sometimes light up a cigarette, only fearing discovery by the janitor, who kept a few extra supplies in there, too.

As a side note, I will tell you that the Frampton concert I mention also featured Gary Wright (the "Dreamweaver" guy who I would not see again until 2010 as a member of Ringo Starr's band -- TRY TO PREDICT THAT, HUH), and Cheap Trick. I was confused by Bun. E. Carlos; I thought he must've been someone's dad. GOOD TIMES.

Click to enlarge.

Peter Frampton, "Do You Feel Like We Do"

Read More

IPHONE PHOTO ROUND-UP 2

What can you do if you are stuck in bed for a week? Make vintage look even more vintage, is what. Dig, cats and kitties.

Read More

GUEST POST: TRUCKDANCE

(My good pal Dena sits in today for me, as I seem to have consumption, rickets, vertigo, shingles, gout, dropsy, halitosis, pertussis, lockjaw, pleurisy, and the hives. Thanks, D and MissS.)

When Marianne asked me to do a guest blog for her today, I was not sure how to respond. On the one hand I was a bit under the weather myself and had a meeting to attend downtown, not exactly the most auspicious conditions to pull off any major bouts of spontaneous creativity. On the other hand we all know Marianne is right up there with the most super of the troupers when it comes from pulling blog posts out of your wazoo in sickness and in health, etc., so she had to be feeling downright crappy to ask in the first place. Something had to be done, but what?

There may not be too many subjects I can speak on today with any great authority, but it occurs to me that you may be wondering what happens when you put an eight-year-old in an empty truck. Please note that the truck is STATIONARY. NEVER TAP-DANCE ON A MOVING VEHICLE OF ANY KIND, unless maybe it’s a parade float or a cruise ship. Definitely not a motorcycle or a Segway or a unicycle, although, okay, maybe that last one might work if you are in Cirque du Soleil. Please see me if you need any clarification regarding which types of conveyances are safe for tap-dancing and which are not. And please send your good thoughts to Marianne so she’ll get better, because all of this stuff is exhausting just to think about. 

The Truckdance

Read More

GET YOUR KIX

Apparently, I have been taken over by the Consumption Cough of 1902 so I didn't do a damn thing today but cough and rest and cough. Well, that's not completely true. I briefly wobbled my way downstairs to the kitchen, thinking I should maybe eat something. I opened the pantry doors. Meh. I'm not hungry. But I should eat something. Just a little something.

Hmm. OK, maybe some cereal. That will do. I spy the box of Kix to the right. Inoffensive enough, I think. I open the top, reach in way down and take about a half a handful out of the box, which is nearly empty, and pop the Kix in my mouth. Immediately, I frown. Stale. Bleah. I start chewing them up anyway. But then the stale Kix start to mutate into some kind of barnacle/Krazy Glue substance. They begin to attach themselves to all the surfaces of my mouth, sucking up all the saliva, becoming a kind of horrifying gritty stale paste that refuses to shift. It's the driest, stickiest thing ever. I am making bad faces, attempting to rally some meager spit to finish this stuff off with.

A fleck of Kix makes its way to my throat, setting off a minuscule itch which builds in intensity. Oh CRAP.


"CAAAAAAAAAA CAK CAK CAK CAK CAK CAK CAK CAK GHGHGHGHHH AAA KKKK!"

My well-honed and oversensitive cough reflex activates suddenly, violently spewing the gluey Kix out of my mouth. The projectile glop lands on the pantry door. It hangs there, unmoving and resolute, as I stare at it in embarrassed disgust and wonder. Despite its commercial potential as the finest binding agent ever, I get a paper towel and some 409 and clean it off, and return to bed.

I guess that's something.

Kix Commercial, 1953



Bobby Troup, "Route 66"

Read More

HOW TO LOOK YOUR GHASTLIEST: TEN TIPS

I’d think after working as a writer for a few years for any women’s fashion/beauty magazine, you’d get really bored. After all, it’s just a matter of recycling the same topics over and over, each fashion season, every year, on and on. Maybe they just spin a wheel with a bunch of news stories on it in the editor’s office…click click click…”Aaannnnd….there we are.  For Fall the theme is “American Gulf.” Let’s go with a shimmery deep teal eye, no blush, matte grey lips and nails. Hair is slicked back wet-style with heavy gel. Pencil skirts with over-the-knee boots to give a gasping fish wiggle. Chocolate brown patent leather for the oil-slick effect. Faaabulous!” The editors have to somehow keep coming up with some kind of fresh way to tell you how to look nice. I’m just going to cut right in and tell you ten things you can do to look just awful, with style.

1. Never get any sun. Cultivate a white-blue pallor that gives you that hot new “vampire look.” Think of it as truly being “fashion forward”…right to the grave.
2. Get way too much sun. Imagine a perfectly-cooked Thanksgiving turkey; emulate with baby oil and daily tanning bed/beach sessions until that crispy brown greasy goodness appears.
3. Never brush your teeth. The yellowed mule/Grateful Dead-follower smile says “relaxed about hygiene” like nothing else.
4. Flat greasy hair. Conserving water by not washing your hair makes you seem eco-noble and possibly an unheralded genius.
5. Wear clothes that are exactly ten years old. They will be too old to be in fashion, but not old enough to be retro cool, making you mysteriously between the times.
6. Smoke. It gives you those multiple delicate skin folds and creases as well as a lovely golden nicotine glow.
7. Get inadequate sleep. Makes for beautiful blue-grey orbital hollows with a vibrant and edgy bloodshot eye. Goes perfectly with #1.
8. Never exercise. If you have skin and fat that is easily movable in handfuls, you can move it about to fill out places you need a little help with. Duct tape helps.
9. Frown as much as possible. It makes you look powerful and important and gives you those nice deep ridges between your eyes, which you can use as pencil holders.
10. Make sure all your clothes are either way too loose or way too tight. Having no sense of your body and how things fit on it tells the world you are too deep to care about such things, or live in a mirrored funhouse.

For Spring/Summer ’11, I’m predicting the “’30s Dustbowl/Recession” look with delicate cotton print dresses distressed with small tears and hand-rubbed dirt stains, sensible black shoes, hair pulled back with a rubber band, no makeup. Keep your eye on Vogue or your local Job Center.

Read More