Well, here is this fellow, Joseph Zbukvic, doing the impossible, and letting you watch him do it. He’s painting in watercolors and ending up with something other than a mess. John Singer Sargent could do it, but he was a magician, not really an artist.
You can’t really be sure you’re getting over with an audience until they make you play the same song twice.
That’s the Newport Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1960. They wanted a taste of that pure Chicago blues sound, and man, they got it. Muddy Waters was at the height of his power just then. That’s a great band. Otis Spann on piyanee. James Cotton on the mouth organ. Francis Clay is the sinister drummer, and he’s percolating.
Otis Spann was an interesting person. He’s more or less the greatest Blues piano player ever. He was born, amusingly if you’re a Donald Fagen fan, at the foot of Mount Belzoni. Otis’ father was a piano player named Friday Ford, a blues name the equal of which I couldn’t possibly come up with if you chained me to a Royal typewriter for a hundred years. His mother played guitar, and his stepfather, who gave him his last name, was either a preacher who played music, or a musician who preached. Otis died young, in 1970, and slept in an unmarked grave in Illinois for nearly thirty years. Ain’t that the blues, right there? Some fans got some money together and plopped some granite in the cemetery in 1999, but ain’t no grave gonna hold that body down anyway.
It’s interesting, but Otis’ replacement, Pinetop Perkins, was from Belzoni, too. I performed once with Pinetop, in a cathouse. That puts me in very select company. Since Pinetop lived for 97 years, and did two shows a day for nearly every damn one of them, I estimate that only 73% of the adult population of the United States ever performed with him. I drank more Johnny Walker Red with him than all of them combined, though. It’s been more than thirty years since that night, and the headache is finally starting to fade.
Wikipedia says Pinetop at first played the guitar, but got stabbed by a chorus girl, and the tendon damage made it impossible to fret the chords properly, so he switched to piano. Pinetop told me it was the chorus girl’s boyfriend. You decide which is the better story, and go with it. Pinetop did.
We had to import a guy from Scotland to make a decent lobster sandwich, apparently. The fellow knows his business. Both of them.
Maine has a love/hate relationship with lobsters. Lobstermen call them “bugs,” and many won’t eat them. They prefer to sell them, and eat hamburgers on the grill. Lobsters are their stock in trade, and you’re not supposed to get high on your own supply, dude. It’s the same in many walks of life, I assume. What’s a treat for others is the same old thing if you see it every day.
Like most traditional dishes that are considered delicacies, lobsters used to be poor person food. Back when New England was first settled, you could simply collect them from the shoreline. They were so cheap that in colonial times, they served them to prisoners every day, or at least until they rioted and demanded real food. But lobsters eventually got scarcer, and people began to associate them with upper crust folks, who were descended from the people who originally pestered the Indians away from the shoreline and kept all the bugs for themselves.
No one tell Gordon, but in Maine, lobster is almost always served as a lobster roll: diced up, overcooked lobster, buried in mayonnaise, and served on a flaccid hot dog roll. It’s usually accompanied with a plastic tub of runny cole slaw, in case you haven’t got enough mayonnaise in you yet. If Gordon finds out, he might disparage Maine, and I’d be forced to publish a recipe for haggis to fight back.
I admit I’m cheating a little bit. I’m so old I went to high school with Nostradamus. He used to cheat off me in astrology class. In any case, foretelling the future is old hat to me. And I can teach you how to do it, if you’d like.
Now, I’m not promising you can go to the racetrack and pick a winner based on my method. Of course your current method of selecting only 50-to-1 shots so the payoffs are bigger probably isn’t doing so hot, either. Horses with polio rarely win sweepstakes races, my friends.
The kind of prognostication I’m talking about is of a more general, but ultimately more useful nature. Admit it, even if that 50-to-1 race bet paid off, you’d just stop at a convenience store on the way home and buy losing scratch tickets with all the money you won, plus all the toll change in the center console. Then you’d curse yourself because you know in your heart you should have done something worthwhile with the money, like buying an iron lung for the horse, or paying your rent.
So you want to know how to see the future? It’s easy. Become totally uninformed.
No, really. That’s all there is to it. In the words of that famous philosopher, Professor Gaye, “Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear.” Simply stop listening to experts, and to persons who spend four hours a day combing their hair before reading off a teleprompter. Forget all media in general. Pay attention to what’s going on around you, and base your opinions and decisions on what you actually know. It will look like clairvoyance to everyone else.
I’m going to give you an example of the method. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, car insurance rates went up 17% nationwide in the last year.
I knew that would happen, in advance, because I was in a car accident last year. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming the entire price rise on my accident. One car accident in Maine doesn’t make a BLS report, just as one swallow doesn’t make a summer. But going through the entire process was enlightening. I knew all sorts of things, in detail, things that no one learns by reading the newspaper.
Firstly, we were immediately adjudged not at fault for the accident. In Maine, that matters, because if you’re at fault, your insurance policy is on the hook for the costs. The policeman who came had an easy time deciding who was at fault. I told him what happened. The driver who hit us had no idea what happened, so whatever jive he tried on the patrolman found no purchase. We were on a busy road. There was some high-speed jinking in front of us, performed by a blousy woman yammering into a cellphone and speeding. Another car had stopped in front of us to make an illegal left turn across two lanes of oncoming traffic, and we slowed down, while cars passed us on the right going about twenty miles an hour over the speed limit. We didn’t stop, just slowed down a lot. Then a big Audi SuburbRangerCrossfitX49WagonShootingBrake Utility Vehicle behind us wondered if it would fit in our trunk. Some of it did.
We were driving an elderly Toyota Camry. In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Sippican Cottage Ko-Fi fund for little wanderers, who wander to Maine and get in accidents. Memorial services will be held at a junkyard to be announced.
I knew exactly why the fellow who drove into our car had no idea what happened. He couldn’t have been looking out of the windshield. He was playing with his phone, I guarantee it. Pretty much no one is looking out of their windshield while driving anymore.
Our car is, oops, was a regular looking sedan, which is fairly low to the ground by today’s standards. His Audi thing sits up high and basically missed our bumper completely, just mangled the fiberglassy covering on it, which was dragging on the ground, and stove in our trunk. While the cop was listening to ragtime from the other fellow, and we were waiting for tow trucks to arrive, I tested all the directional signals and backup lights, which were still working by some miracle, so I got a bungee cord out of the back seat and pulled the bumper’s carapace back into place. I asked the cop if it was OK to drive the car, and he blessed the idea. So we left a very sad man, leaning on what we learned was his girlfriend’s wrecked car, still playing with his phone, and went home.
My education continued. The insurance company couldn’t possibly do enough for me. They treated me like a hemophiliac prince. They wanted me to go to a doctor, in case I might be injured, and want to sue someone. That someone would be someone not them, of course, but still, they actually sounded concerned. They rounded up a rental car for me immediately, even though they were as scarce as an honest congressman at the time. They arranged an appointment for me at a nearby body shop to have the damage to the car appraised.
I realized that the insurance company has two faces. There’s the friendly face, the money is no object face. They’d have put me in a wheelchair, covered with bandages, with an IV drip in my arm, and wheeled me in front of a judge if I’d have let them. I didn’t think it was an act, either. They were genuinely solicitous about us.
Then there’s the other face. It’s the BLS face you see in the chart. They don’t really care what anything costs, because they’re going to tack a profit on the end of it, and the bigger the first number, the bigger the second number, the one they keep, is going to be. They keep you from jumping to another insurer with the friendly face. All the BLS faces basically charge the same thing anyway, so being nice is all they have to keep you on the reservation.
I brought the car to a body shop in my town, which was a hoot. It was as neat and orderly as any body shop could be. It was run by a very stout woman. She greeted us, through a closed door, with a “I’ll be right out,” and then appeared with a glorious whoosh sound worthy of an Archie Bunker entrance. She was as nice as nice could be, but I got the impression that she could bench press more than me, and me, at the same time. She presided over three desks, while talking and texting on two cellphones, while listening to a police scanner and watching a television.
I tried to make small talk. “Boy, I remember that Bondo smell. The first job I ever had was working in a body shop when I was fifteen, and that smell is unmistakable.”
“Do you want a job? You can start today.”
“No, that was the 1970s. I’ve haven’t done any body work since then.”
“Doesn’t matter. No really, Do you want a job? You can start today.”
“Thanks, but I already have two jobs. But thanks for asking.”
“We can’t get any help.”
So there was another lesson in there, if you were willing to learn. Honest jobs that pay well go begging in our town. It’s a poor town, with lots of people out wandering around at one in the afternoon on weekdays, but no one wanted to be a panel beater. That’s not a recipe for a great price from a low bidder.
A man appeared in the office from the shop. He was the owner, and you could tell from his expression that he also swept the floor. He explained that our car was totaled. I found that curious, since I drove it in, and it really didn’t look that bad. He explained that the insurance company can’t afford any open-ended commitments. If he started banging out the fenders, and discovered that the frame was bent, or the airbag sensors were kaput, or anything else hidden, they’d have to charge more than the estimate. The insurance company just wants a number, and if there’s any doubt, they just declare the car a total loss.
That’s another education for me. A big number you can rely on is more important than a chance at a smaller number to an insurance company. They’re in the risk management business, and they manage all risks by assuming the worst, upfront, and ladling a fat profit on top of it. If they lose money one year, they just get it back the next.
The next revelation was what they offered me for the totaled value of the car. I was expecting them to tell me the car was worth about the same as a Vespa with a flat tire. It was old when we got it, and we’d been driving it for years. However, the car paid off like a slot machine. For some reason, used cars are now worth more than a horse at Bosworth Field. They offered me four times what I thought it was worth. It would take an atomic clock to measure the amount of time it took me to accept it. I used half the money to buy a seventeen-year-old tank of a Volvo, so I’d barely notice the next time an Audi plowed into me.
So everyone’s driving without looking, or obeying any traffic laws. Hardly anyone can be found to fix a car if it’s crashed. Insurance companies are enthusiastic about spending other people’s money. And used cars are really valuable, probably because no one has been able to afford a new car for so long that there aren’t any used cars. Forget all that. None of any of that could compare to the ultimate kernel of info I gleaned about impending auto insurance affordability degringolade. Another woman entered the office just then, and the owner greeted her with the friendly salutation, “Hey, it’s our best customer.”
The woman, who I gathered was getting her daughter’s car fixed for her, said, “The first three times weren’t her fault!”
Please note, that the woman specified the first three times. Yeah, I knew that car insurance rates would go up. I’m a regular Nostradamus.
Our old friend from Liverpool, Thud, and his loverly wife, are raising a batch of delightful children. A healthy helping of their kids call themselves Yee Loi, and can bash out a Ramones song with the best of them:
My Cantonese is a little rusty, but I think Yee Loi means “two girls.” I spy a little brother in there, too, so they might eventually have to change their name to 兩個女仔 and 弟弟. That shouldn’t be a problem, though. It’ll be another opportunity to sell merch.
The young ladies just signed their first record deal. I have a hunch it won’t be their last. Rock on, kids!
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