Main Archive – Sippican Cottage

What It’s Like in Gorham New Hampshire

September 18, 2025 No Comments

We idled away an afternoon in Gorham, New Hampshire last weekend. Strictly for adventure.

Of course our idea of adventure might differ from yours. We weren’t scaling mountains on roller skates or whitewater rafting in dugout canoes or hunting bears with knapped flint knives or anything extreeeem! enough to get RedBull to sponsor us. We plain forgot to take a vertically oriented cellphone image of my wife leading me by the hand into the third ice cream shop photo op of the day, so our influencer cred is also at an all-time low. We simply went to Gorham because we were tired of going places we’ve already been, and we wanted to poke around somewhere newish. On a whim, we decided to erase the dotted line between Oxford County Maine and Coos County New Hampshire, and see what there was to see.

In some ways, not much. Gorham isn’t a big place. Just 2,700 souls. Except for 1980, when the census takers found 24 extra people hiding out in Gorham, the town has been slowly whittling itself down since Nixon was muttering to himself in the Oval Office. But despite sporting a meager quorum for lynch mobs or 10K runs, we found that Gorham really bustles. For comparison, the nearest “city” in Maine is Rumford, about 45 minutes drive northeast of Gorham. Rumford has twice as many people as Gorham, but about ten percent of the activity. And only about ten percent of that ten percent is salubrious activity. Both Gorham and Rumford share Route 2, and the Androscoggin River, but the resemblance more or less ends there.

There was lively traffic in Gorham, and lots of parents with children in the playground at the big park. Some women were inexpertly playing what I assume was pickleball at the tennis courts nearby. I have to assume they were playing pickleball, because I don’t know what pickleball is. The game has been described to me by several enthusiasts, but I still had trouble understanding it. Near as I can tell, it’s like playing ping pong outdoors while standing on the table, with the added attraction of making an unpleasant noise when striking the ball.

I may have just defamed the ladies, of course, by describing their exertions as “inexpert.” Since I’m so in the dark about the game itself, it’s possible that they were Olympic-class pickleball devotees. It could very well be that the game is supposed to be played in their sedate, but somehow spastic manner. I am beset by doubts on that score. But I quibble. I lived in the population desert of western Maine for close to fifteen years. It’s nice to see anyone doing anything.

That’s the town hall. It’s a glorious Federal style pile of bricks, ain’t it? We’ve lost the knack of making public building look important while still appearing friendly to humans. The average town hall in most towns in the US resemble either a trailer park model home or a Soviet abattoir.

Bricks are relatively cheap. We should still be able to build structures like this. but we can’t, or won’t, take your pick.

As is common in public buildings in small New England burgs, the town hall is doing double duty as a gathering place for the locals, even those not paying a water bill. Around the side, in the nether regions of the building, the Medallion Opera House is still going strong. Well, it’s going. The contra dance sounds like fun, and you don’t even have to go to Central America to participate. And Don Who? sounds a bit like a nursing home rec room entertainer, but in far flung places, you take your fun where you can find it.

Speaking of attractive public buildings, here’s the Gorham Public Library. To me, a library is (was, I mean) a temple to learning. I spent most of my childhood haunting the first public library in the United States, and I will always have a soft spot for one. Of course, there are comparatively no books in most any library anymore, and what they do have is dreadful, but at least this one doesn’t look like a strip mall clothing store, like nearly any new one does.

We would eat in Nonna’s Kitchen. You know, if was open, which it wasn’t. Like a lot of small town restaurants, they limit their hours and days to keep their staff costs down. There’s only so many times a small population can be counted on to patronize a restaurant on a regular basis. Their menu was a 250-yard drive right down the Italian fairway, and in the scheme of things, not very expensive. The building rambles back on the lot, in a nod to the little house-big house-back house-barn style common in northern New England. It was never a farm, to adhere closely to the description of the archetype at Wiki, but close enough. It used to be a barber shop. I loved the entrance to the “dooryard” out back:

Gorham is a jolly place, and fun to wander around.

It’s got a hardware store that apparently doesn’t carry enough paint or roofing shingles to spare for the local population, because they don’t have enough for themselves. They’re right out of window glass, too, by the looks of it. It’s a grand old Greek Revival place, but destined to burn to the ground, I’m afraid. Half-used buildings like this might as well be made of matchsticks.

They have a train station that isn’t anymore. The car killed most passenger traffic, and trucks killed freight, so lots of New England towns have leftover buildings like this one. In Gorham, they turned it into the historical society, and kept it up beautifully. To compare and contrast, we go to the nearby town of Gardiner, Maine, and they have a beautiful disused train station, and it’s a dope store. Maine is pretty much contiguous dope stores from lighthouse to mountain top at this point. New Hampshire has avoided that pitfall by having tax-free liquor stores all over the place instead.

Right next to the historical society, they’ve got some history on display. There’s a nifty train museum. The boxcars have some sort of miniature train running inside them, but we didn’t go in to see it. The doors were closed, with a sign that told us to go find a docent next door if we wanted in. It would have been impolitic to wake him, we decided, so we kept on trucking.

Gorham hasn’t succumbed to the siren song of vinyl siding much. More than occasionally you encounter color combos that knock your eye out, like this juxtaposition of gray and scarlet. Very nice.

New Hampshire is very much into the internal combustion engine, in all its forms. The parking lot of the pizza joint we ate in was about fifty percent full of ATVs and motorcycles. People drive around Gorham in mud-spattered four-wheelers the way geriatrics in golf carts do in Florida. And I’m not sure how many people are still interested in hearing Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, played at 90 decibels at a stop light, but I discovered four people who are.

There’s a lot of nifty Victorian buildings in town. Here’s one, a bed and breakfast on the main drag. Sorry, if you’re interested in running the place, but there was a SOLD banner pasted over the realtor’s face on the sign out front. I’ve met a lot of realtors, and wanted to slap a sign like that over some of their faces in real life.

It’s a shame, but they were closing up the information booth right as we were passing. I did have some questions I would have liked answers for. For example, Moose Tours? How do you get the moose onto the tour bus? Don’t their antlers get hung up on the doorframes and luggage racks and so forth? And what exactly do you show the moose on these tours? Foliage? They eat that. I can’t imagine trying to beguile an alces alces by telling them to look out the window at leaves, and another moose. Alas, these questions will remain unanswered.

Speaking of foliage, it’s already getting busy in Gorham. I’m sure they get their share of leaf peepers. Maybe they can stop the bus and eat at Nonna’s, if they time it just right. But more likely, they’ll eat here:

Uh, yeah. You can totally put tables and chairs in the drive through lane to try to put us off the scent, but we know this used to be a bank, fellas. It’s an interesting transformation, for several reasons. For instance, if I was in a town with 2,700 people in it, and had a choice between robbing the bank, and robbing the sandwich shop, I’d choose the sandwich shop. There’s probably a lot more money in the till than they ever had at the bank.

If you’re wondering what it’s like in Gorham after the leaves commit their colorful suicide and plug up the storm drains, that sign should give you a clue. Mount Washington isn’t far from Gorham, and Mt. Washington weather is a stone cold beeatch in the winter.

They’ve got a baseball diamond appended to the big public park, and it’s in great shape, and still gets plenty of use. You know you’re in New Hampshire, because the dugouts are log cabins. Go you Huskies!

And there, tucked in a quiet spot behind the chain link fence at the diamond, I found this, a true indication of the kind of people who live in Gorham, New Hampshire:

John “Stretch” Ellis

An unselfish man who spent countless hours on the Gorham Common in the 1950s and 1960s, John was committed to developing character and baseball skills in teenage boys. John founded the Wildcat Baseball League and was the league’s only umpire, scorer, statistician, publicist, scheduler, coach, and fund raiser for bats and balls.

Those of us who played in the dust of this field gratefully acknowledge John’s gifts to us: Time together, dedication, community opportunity, and ball games.

We are no longer the boys of summer long ago. We are now men who hope to be remembered not for whether we won or lost, but how we played the game. John Ellis showed us how to play the game. We are forever thankful to him.

New Hampshire license plates have the motto: Live Free or Die embossed on them. I know it won’t fit, but Time Together, Dedication, Community Opportunity, and Ball Games would make a wonderful replacement.

The Best Short Stories I Ever Read

September 11, 2025 16 Comments

Well, I suppose the headline is a shorn sheep, and we need to fish through the bale of wool for a more accurate assessment of the list. These are the best short stories I ever read that I can remember off the top of my head. Since the top of my head is a barren wasteland, at least on the underside, I can’t answer for what’s growing in there from day to day. Tomorrow I might have put McElligot’s Pool on the list. I can’t be trusted.

So it might not be a good list, but by golly, it’s a list. But please, don’t read anything into the numbers. You can rank them if you want, but I didn’t. And remember, no wagering.

1. The Dead – James Joyce
Of course The Dead is the last story in Dubliners, a compendium of short stories. Any one could have made this list. It’s just the best, and he knew it. Not many people know that before he decided to show off, and molest the dictionary for 900 pages at a time, Joyce was a profoundly good short story writer. The story is a memento mori that beggars my ability to describe it. It explains being Irish, being married, being drunk, and being invited into a woman’s mind. Unlike Joyce’s other stuff, the meaning is very dense, but there’s no textual congeries to unravel.

2. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber – Ernest Hemingway
I’ve never even gotten the urge to read Hemingway’s big books, or watch the movies made from them. I respected the comma-starved style he invented, but that’s about it. His autobiographical book, A Moveable Feast, ended up getting thrown across my living room about halfway through it. Man, I thought I was a self-absorbed jerk, but that book taught me I’m just a piker. The Old Man and the Sea is terrific, though, but it’s technically a novella, not a novel or a short story, so I wouldn’t put it on this list. It sums up Hemingway’s whole shtick, “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I found out only fairly recently that Hemingway was a superb short story writer. Macomber illuminates the fight between heroism and cowardice in men, and how some women are either at your feet or at your throat, and how far they’ll go to get the last word.

3. The Devil’s in the Cows – Sippican Cottage
Speaking of self-absorbed writers, how about this guy? I’ll recuse myself from talking about it, at least. According to Chad, it’s a “stark, poetic reflection on rural labor, generational duty, and quiet sacrifice. Told through a father’s aching address to his son, the piece captures the brutal rhythms of farm life with lyrical grit. At once tender and unflinching, it evokes the weight of inheritance and the ghosts that come with it.”

4. Esmé – Saki
Ah, another pen name. H.H. Munro died pretty young in a shell crater during World War I, so his output is fairly small. In many ways, he was the prototype for comic writers like P.G. Wodehouse and Noel Coward. Esmé is a wild tale of two aristocratic ladies who more or less adopt a hyena while out foxhunting. It’s a wonderfully camp skewering of the upper class, with witty asides.

5. The Kiss – Anton Chekhov
An impressionable young man gets a kiss meant for someone else in a darkened room, and his mind runs wild afterwards. Men are, after all, the hopeless romantics in this world. Like lots of Russian stories, it’s straightforward and inscrutable at the same time.

6. The Man Who Would Be King – Rudyard Kipling
Lots of people encounter this tale via the superb 1975 film adaptation directed by John Huston with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. It’s a revelation to read the story afterward, and see how short it is. Hubris meets nemesis in one of the greatest tales of adventure ever written.

7. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
I was always staggered by Conrad’s ability to write in English. He was a Pole, and didn’t learn to speak English fluently until his twenties. His descriptive ability is unmatched by his peers, while he’s able to subtly weave in subtext that many overlook. Many writers can’t do either thing. A look at what happens to men unmoored from civilization and abstract morality.

8. The Gift of the Magi – O. Henry
O. Henry was a pseudonym. I love those. William Sydney Porter was about as prolific a short story writer as you could name. He wrote more than 400 of them, none better than the Gift of the Magi. The story can seem a little trite to modern folks, but then again, many people think Shakespeare’s stuff is full of hackneyed phrases, because they don’t know he invented them all. The lesson that generosity doesn’t require a bankroll is rather lost on people nowadays.

Sometimes prolific short story and novel writers have pretty unsophisticated vocabulary, but O. Henry was a lively stylist as well as a gifted storyteller. Porter’s life story might be even more interesting than his stories. Accused of embezzling from a bank he worked at, he escaped to Honduras. His best friend there was a train robber. Porter wrote Cabbages and Kings, a collection of loosely related short stories about Central America, in which he coined the term “banana republic.” He eventually returned to the US to care for his sick wife, did a stretch in prison where he became the pharmacist, was let out early, and resolutely drank himself to death over a period of nine years. People still leave $1.87 in change on his grave.

9. To Build a Fire – Jack London
A man faces death in the wilderness. He learns the hard way that nature has no opinion. It’s the kind of story that intellectuals try to write, and fail miserably at, because they’ve never been outside during daylight. Jack was the man for the job.

10. Harrison Bergeron – Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut was always a loopy writer, which made a lot of his output interesting for its own sake. Harrison Bergeron plowed the same fields as other dystopian stories like 1984, but had Vonnegut’s usual entertaining tics in it. It’s the best disquisition on the inequality of forced equality ever written. And if you’ve been paying attention to events recently, perhaps more prescient than any other dystopian scenario.

The “Not Quite a Short Story” Hall of Fame:

I’d be remiss if I didn’t include the greatest writer who ever lived, maybe save one. Mark Twain is famous for his short stories, but honestly, the ones he’s famous for aren’t his best work. For instance, The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County made his name, but it’s a minor work. The best Twain short stories are from his books like The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. Most of his output was serialized in newspapers as he wrote it, and then collected, so they’re basically short stories stitched together. And the fact that they’re supposedly factual doesn’t make them any less of a story. As Twain once wrote, get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please.

You can pluck out any number of vignettes in Innocents that are the funniest things ever written, like his butting heads with a gondolier in Venice, or trips to barbarous barbers, or being fumigated in Naples. But his rundown of the wonders of the Turkish bath in theory, and its repellent nature in fact, is one of his finest. Read it here, at the tail end of Chapter 34.

You can argue with me in the comments if you like. But not about Twain.

Another Day at the Office

September 9, 2025 4 Comments

That’s Stevland Hardaway Morris on the Dick Cavett Show back in 1970, I think. It’s a stone groove, as they say. Made it to #3 on the Billboard charts. Got beat out for the Grammy by the execrable Patches song, sung by Clarence Carter, who is also blind, an interesting footnote.

Both Stevie’s mother and wife are listed as co-songwriters on that track, which makes them eligible for a split of the royalties. One wonders if Stevie knew exactly what he was signing all the time. I’m not sure I can identify everyone on the stage there. The singers might be Lynda Tucker Laurence , Syreeta Wright, and Venetta Fields. They’re listed as the singers on the record. Lynda eventually became a Supreme, and Syreeta eventually became the ex-Mrs. Wonder. But studio people didn’t usually tour. It’s more likely Shirley Brewer, Lani Groves, and Delores Harvin.

I’m a little sketchy on the power trio members. Fo sho that’s Michael Henderson on the bass. He played on the first few Miles Davis fusion records, plus with a bunch of Motown acts. He was terrific. The drummer looks like Ollie Brown. Cool as a cucumber. No idea about the guitar player. Ray Parker Jr. used to play guitar with Stevie, but that ain’t him. Well, whoever they are, they’re tighter than a cow’s tuchus at fly-time.

Way back when, I used to sing and play the bass on this song in a cover band. This is long overdue, but I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Wonder. I promise I won’t do it any more.

Praxiteles, or How Famous Can You Get?

September 6, 2025 2 Comments

Andy Warhol was famous for saying that in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes. It’s interesting that he’s famous for saying that, but he didn’t say it. Fame is like that sometimes. Fame is like barnacles you pick up on your hull as you pass through the shallow waters of notoriety, into the lakes of celebrity, and finally make it to the sea of fame. It’s unimportant if you “deserve” it. It just is.

Some people transcend their fifteen minutes and turn it into years, decades, and even centuries. How far back can the average person go, and do more than recognize a few names? Go back to 350 BC, and you could trot out Alexander the Great, and be pretty sure of your ground knowing that he wasn’t a haberdasher or a groundskeeper or something. Who else do you know from back then? In general, every century you go back is like drinking six more beers, and then taking the SATs over and over. It gets sketchy, fast:

So ancient Greece is still a thing for some folks, and they can probably at least name Aristotle and Plato, even if they couldn’t pick them out of a police lineup. Demosthenes perhaps, if you mumble or stutter, or if you’re well read. You know Pythagoras, if you’re acute [The management cannot vouch for this pun, and disavows any responsibility for it]. But one name that really gets overlooked is Praxiteles. But he’s got the kind of fame that seems larger than any emperor, really, even if you don’t know his name off the top of your head.

Praxiteles wasn’t a king, a general, or even a philosopher with a toga full of theories. He was a sculptor. Small beer, you might say. Yet his name has outlived empires. Why? Because he dared to do something nobody had done before: he carved a goddess naked. The world gasped, gossiped, and lined up to see it. The statue is gone, but the scandal — and the fame — never wore off. That’s the funny thing about immortality: sometimes it’s built on marble, sometimes on whispers.

The Romans knew who Praxiteles was, and made copies of his statues, so we know what it looked like. Here’s Aphrodite of Knidos, the world’s first static OnlyFans account:

Alas, we’ll never know if she was a butterface, or suffered from man hands, but I suspect not. You see, unlike the Romans, who treated stuff like this like garden gnomes, the reason this was groundbreaking was that while it was a naked chick, it was still supposed to be an object of veneration. It didn’t stop there. The pose is contrapposto. It’s a relaxed, naturalistic pose with one leg bearing weight, with the body twisting slightly. The anatomy is spot on, too. The copies we see are pitted from exposure, but the original was smooth, white marble, and would have looked astounding to a contemporary Mediterranean.

So this approach was kinda lost for a very long time. After Rome fell, the Middle Ages favored more symbolic and less natural-looking cigar store Indians. The Renaissance expanded on the techniques, but was based on an explicit revival of Praxiteles’ approach. Even the painters mimicked the pose:

Not just another girl with big feet. Venus is the Roman version of the goddess Aphrodite. To the modern person, The Birth of Venus (1480s) is ancient, but the statue of Aphrodite is about 1800 years older than that.

Fame has never been fair. It doesn’t reward the good or the wise so much as the strivers and the plain bastards. Alexander the Great ran roughshod over half the world, and entered the pantheon of nearly universal notoriety where guys like Elvis and Hitler live. Warhol painted soup cans and made the art world adapt itself to him, instead of the other way around. Social media virality puts afterburners on the fifteen minutes of fame, and usually boils it down to about fifteen seconds on TikTok.

Lots of people these days forgo the only real kind of intergenerational notoriety available to regular humans: having children. We’re all the latest in a line of ancestors who struggled and fought and worked to keep body and soul alive long enough to have a descendant or two. Throwing away that kind of effort for a “career” is absurd. There are only a few thousand people in any generation who have anything like a true career, i.e., a constantly growing necessity for the rest of the human race. What almost everyone has is a mundane job. Admit it, you can’t name Grover Cleveland’s cabinet members, and they were big wheels.

The Irish say that you never die, as long as there’s someone left in the world that speaks your name. As of this date, my father and Praxiteles are still immortal. I doubt I’ll have the staying power of either of them. Then again, I’m OK with that, when I remember that everyone knows who Hitler is.

And When It Rains, the Rain Falls Down

September 1, 2025 4 Comments

We re-watched Dog Day Afternoon the other day. I don’t want to talk about the movie. I want to talk about the opening credits.

The movie came out in 1975. It’s depicting a real robbery that happened in 1972. The opening credits use an Elton John song released in 1970. If it’s not the most effective use of music in opening credits in a movie, it’s got to be close to the top. I’ll explain.

No one goes to the movies anymore, really. People still did in 1975, and the movies were still being produced to be seen by crowds of people in a darkened theater on a large screen. You had to stand in line, and buy tickets, have them torn in half fourteen feet later by a nonagenarian usher for some reason, and then fight for seats in the middle rows, halfway back. The lights would dim, the movie would play, and the opening music would produce a mood, transporting the audience from a tattered seat and a sticky floor to the time and place where the story begins. If it were done properly, which wasn’t a given, it became a shared, out of body experience.

Movies aren’t like that anymore. Movies were real competition for teevee back then. Now they’re indistinguishable milieus. Netflix makes movies, and shows them on your home screen. It’s like hiring the projectionist to direct the movies, because he’s watched so many. What the hell does Netflix know about making movies?

Sidney Lumet directed this movie. He made lots of movies, many of them really good, in addition to the various demands made by being P.J. O’Rourke’s father-in-law. He never won an Oscar for direction, but they gave him an honorary one for hanging around so long and putting so much money in the till over the years. Here are some:

12 Angry Men
The Pawnbroker
Fail Safe
Serpico
Dog Day Afternoon
Network
Prince of the City
The Verdict

One thing I’ve noticed about good directors. They don’t look gift horses in the mouth. Some guys are loosey-goosey anyway, and let things happen all the time. Others are pretty strict about sticking to the script. But all good ones of both kinds know when they’ve stepped in something good, instead of that stuff you see on the sidewalk in those opening credits.

There’s a lot of these happy accidents, as it were, in Dog Day Afternoon. The reply to the question of where Sal wants to go when they escape was left blank on the script. Cazale ad-libbed “Wyoming,” and Lumet had to clamp his hand over his mouth to keep from laughing and ruining the shot. The “Attica” speech by Sonny (Pacino) was entirely ad-libbed, after the assistant director whispered the topic to Al as he was about to exit the bank to address the crowd. They hired hundreds of extras for the crowd scenes, but passersby started joining the crowd, and after a while, the whole bunch of them starting acting on cue like professionals. Lumet egged them on, and used all of it.

But maybe the happiest accident is the opening credits. Lumet was driven around New York in a station wagon, filming this and that, and it added up to a perfect encapsulation of the time and place that was New York in the seventies. Dirty, rundown, disintegrating, with people trying to live their lives in the disassembling city.

But that was just the visuals. It’s funny, but there is no music in Dog Day Afternoon, just random diegetic sounds, except the opening credits. Lumet originally didn’t intend to have any music score in the movie, but the editor was playing Amoreena by Elton John in the editing room, and Lumet decided to use it, soaring over the opening scenes of the city, eventually coming out of the getaway car’s radio to tie the whole thing together.

I don’t know why a strange song by a flamboyant London singer, who was trying and failing brilliantly to write his idea of American country songs, was the perfect fit to encapsulate that time and place, and set the scene for the audience, reminding them that they weren’t home on their couch anymore, but plunged into some nether world of Stockholm Syndrome and low IQ, fuddled robbers with an eclectic tastes in wives. But it was.

Peak Amusing Pixel Disagreement: The Top 25 Opening Riffs in Christendom

August 28, 2025 22 Comments

Well, I sorta put my foot in it on Tuesday. I called the opening bars of I’ll Be Around by the Spinners among the 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. This led to an internet argument. This is my favorite kind of argument. Internet arguments are so bitter because the stakes are so small. Someone named Hitler even showed up in the comments. When the brushy mustache guy is mentioned in any capacity, you know you’ve reached peak amusing pixel disagreement.

Now, I’ve mentioned Christendom here, which is a geographic term, really. This makes sense in my disordered mind. I’m really talking about American pop culture. Since American pop culture has entirely taken over what’s left of Christendom, except for the parts of France where it’s drowned out by the muezzins, let’s roll with it.

Now, people are going to mention the most recognizable intros to them. This is a bit of a category error. I’m looking for the opening stanzas of pop hits that would be recognized instantly by the largest slice of lowbrow humanity. I won’t be including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or anything numbered and opused and so forth. As a matter of fact, to simplify it, I’m going to specify the years from 1960 to 2000. Everything since 2000 has been churned out of an audio sausage machine, so it’s pointless to argue about it. Everything before 1960 is bound to be Greek to generations that don’t read cursive.

Now some ground rules. They’re mostly for myself. Everyone else can do as they please in the comments, but this is how I played it. First, no artist(s) gets more than one entry. The Beatles and the Stones, for instance, have beaucoup candidates for a list like this, so I chose one each. Secondly, the list is 25 entries. If you want to add something, it’s gotta bump something off. This lends an amusing knife-fight vibe to the proceedings, which I’ve always enjoyed. But remember: no wagering. And thirdly, this is not a list of songs I like. I once played in a band that held a little contest in the middle of our shows. We’d play just the opening bars of songs like these, stop, and ask the audience to identify it. We learned very quickly what songs everyone knew, and which songs had one guy way in the back who yelled Green Eyed Lady! while everyone else scratched their heads.

Also, certain songs are verboten to the list. These include any riff currently banned in musical instrument stores. There is no point in mentioning Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, Smoke on the Water, Freebird, or something by Kansas. The opening riff should make the largest number of people yell, “Hell, yeah,” not groan. I’m also leaving Layla off the list. The opening riff might qualify, but Martin Scorsese only used the piano outro, and we will too. It’s music to see bodies tumbling out of a trash truck now, not whining about George Harrison’s first wife any longer.

The list is in no particular order, but that absolute winner is listed last:

I Can See Clearly Now — Johnny Nash
I Want You Back — Jackson 5
Long Cool Woman — The Hollies
Brown Eyed Girl — Van Morrison
Go All the Way — The Raspberries
My Girl — The Temptations
Sweet Home Alabama — Lynyrd Skynyrd
Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine
The Beatles – Day Tripper
Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
It Don’t Come Easy — Ringo Starr
Stayin’ Alive — Bee Gees
Green Onions – Booker T. & the MG’s
Doobie Brothers – Listen To The Music
Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival
Brown Sugar — Rolling Stones
Surfin’ U.S.A. — Beach Boys
La Grange — ZZ Top
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) — Sly & The Family Stone
Rikki Don’t Lose That Number — Steely Dan
Super Freak — Rick James
Come And Get Your Love — Redbone
That Lady, Pts. 1 & 2 –The Isley Brothers
Blister In The Sun — Violent Femmes

And the absolute Number One slot on our top 25?

Whiter Shade of Pale — Procol Harum

I’ll tell you why you’ll never be able to bump this from the top spot. Opening riffs? There can be only one. The fellow playing the original organ melody, Matthew Fisher, didn’t write the song. Gary Brooker and Keith Reid did. So forty years or so later, Fisher sued, and said the song wasn’t nothing without his organ riff, and he wanted the credit. He wanted 50% of the songwriting royalties. He won the case, but they only gave him 40%. Brooker appealed, and Fisher kinda lost that one. The 40% held, but not retroactively. Then the House of Lords took it up, and said he should have his 40%, and retroactively too.

When your selection for intro riff is adjudicated by the House of Lords, you can bump A Whiter Shade of Pale off the top spot, but not before.

Upside Down Soul

August 26, 2025 10 Comments

I’d rank the guitar intro in the top 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. Maybe higher. That’s the antipodean Hindley Street Country Club taking a crack at it. I guess they’re just a cover band, but up several notches from the usual.

I was tempted to paste the Detroit Spinners original here. It was a million-seller in 1972. All the vids of the Spinners on Soul Train and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and similar shows are all lip synched. The band does their steps, and generally look genial, but I’d have preferred something fresh.

It’s understandable. Back then, the audiences just wanted to hear their favorite songs without waiting for the top of the hour over and over on the Top 40 stations. They might revolt if it didn’t sound just like the record. People are more interested in different versions of things these days, I think. It comes from having pretty much all forms of entertainment at your fingertips at all times. Something new sticks out.

The framework of the song lends itself to various permutations of it. This is my favorite bent version of it:

The original song was used to great effect as the outro for the movie Roman J. Israel, Esq., a very underrated movie:

I’ll be skippin’ and a-jumpin’, indeed.

Chad Is Smarter Than Your Average Internaut

August 25, 2025 3 Comments

By “Chad,” I’m refering to Chat GPT, or any of the other goofy AI apps available from every digital so-and-so on the planet these days.

Sippican Cottage is not a heavily traveled website in the scheme of things. My niche is being pleasant, more or less, and the audience for that is vanishingly small on the intertunnel, and getting smaller all the time. Que sera sera.

This website if very popular with bots, however. I block many of them, but it’s essentially impossible to get them all without blocking lots of regular people in the dragnet. And boy, do the bots misbehave. They occasionally hit the server so frequently that they amount to a Denial of Service attack. I have lots of bandwidth, but it’s an annoyance. The only bot from any of the big search engines that actually behaves itself is Yandex, which is a Russian bot. I have no idea why that’s so.

But the preponderance of bad bots these days are AI bots. There are many, many of them, and not just the ones you’ve heard of. Lots of mid-tier companies are assembling their own slopbots, I gather. They scrape the intertunnels willy-nilly, because they can. I thought you’d like to see what the end result of their scraping and reassembling the internet looks like, from someone who notices such things. Let’s start here:

I saw the following on somebody’s Fumblr page. I didn’t save the link, but it really doesn’t matter. Fumblr is Lord of the Flies for copyright anyway. Besides, I’m pretty certain the image isn’t copyrightable. Why? I’d bet folding money Chad made it. Viz.:

Most social media feeds like Fumblr and Instahole are aspirational.

Aspirational, sure. They are of course also full of merde. People are trying to project an image of a lifestyle or a vibe that they’ll never achieve, mostly because they’re not really trying to attain it in the first place. Their aspirations are strictly of the Potemkin variety. For example, Americana+ is always showing pictures of posh island getaways, top-shelf arm candy, and mixed drinks (mixed by someone else, natch). The website is harmless, I’m not bagging on them. In their mind they’re only posting pleasant things, which is rare enough on the intertunnel. But I always picture the proprietors living in a trailer park somewhere with a lot of skewed Live Laugh Love signs on the wall over their particle board kitchen table, with scads of Olive Garden coupons scattered around, and empty Natty Ice cans lined up on the windowsills.

I once saw a picture on their Fumblr page of a river scene, taken in autumn, with the leaves scattering their golden and scarlet casualties on the water. Quite scenic. Aspirational image, I guess. The problem with that sort of aspiration is that more information can ruin it. I recognized the exact spot. The picture was taken almost directly behind my ramshackle house, in my (former) walking-on-its-uppers town, within shouting distance of a reeking paper mill. If you aspired to live there, you certainly could have. That house cost the same as a used Kia. But reality doesn’t intrude much on these here aspirational intertunnels.

Back to our image. I instantly recognized the image when I saw it. That’s not to say it’s simply cut and pasted from elsewhere. It is a shade, a doppelganger of something familiar. It was recognizable, like a message being shouted underwater. I knew it was made by some form of Chad, and from what materials.

Here’s a picture I took and posted here of a real, live Mexican cantina, back in March:

One of the reasons Chad likes Sippican Cottage so much is that despite my loopy writing style and generous sprinkling of fart jokes, there’s rather a lot of information on the pages. You certainly can find a lot more pictures of the places we visited in Mexico on other people’s feeds, but I’ll bet no one has more descriptive text.

So I put the first image into Tineye, to see if I could find where it came from, but it had only one hit. Now it will have two, I guess. I think someone put “Draw me an illustration of a Mexican Cantina” into Chad, and got that back. Let’s look at them side by each, as they say in Woonsocket:

C’mon, man. The proportions of the doorframes, the height of the rusticated plinths, gray in one, red in the other, but the same proportions. Never mind that. Look at the sign that reads “CANTINA” over the door. Same font, same kerning. They’re both on a block background. The left-hand leg of the A and the right-hand leg of the N align with the outside edges of the doorframes perfectly. Even the angle of the wall itself is the same. I took the picture while standing in the street, and the building is raised on a sidewalk base, making it seem to lean back in the snapshot. They both do.

So that’s what Chad does. It learns things. It knows what a cantina doorway looks like, because people like me told him (it) what it looks like. It throws up a different set of swinging doors, but the swinging doors are at the same height. It knows that red and gold is a very popular color scheme down there, so it tosses it in. You can see the hinge-butt edge of the doors in my photo, so Chad shows them closed, and found the right sort of door to display. It’s a good representation of the thing, without being the thing.

I also figure that Chad did it, because Tineye hasn’t referenced my image yet, but all the various Chads have crawled it lots of times already:

So what’s it all mean? Well, let me put it like this: People almost unanimously reject the “intelligence” part of “artificial intelligence” when it’s mentioned. Everyone says that all the various Chads are dumb, because they’re able to ask it dumb questions, and get dumb answers in return. All I know is that Chad is intelligent enough to trust what I publish on the internet. It trusts it enough to transmogrify it into something similar, a dispositive image of a thing,while very few real people are intelligent enough to even look at it in the first place. Case closed. Chad might be dumb, but it’s smarter than an average person on the internet.

Ya Can’t Have Too Many Mooses. Mooseses. Meece. Whatever

August 23, 2025 5 Comments

I posted this about fifteen years ago. So sue me. I think that moose are pretty interesting animals. They ain’t pretty, but they are pretty interesting. I don’t know why, but I remember their scientific name: alces alces. A moose is just the biggest kind of deer, when you get right down to it. And by big, I mean 1,500 pounds big, occasionally. Tall, too. Sometimes 7 foot at the shoulder. That’s why you don’t want to run into a moose on the highway. It’s lethal to the moose, but it’s a suicide pact with anyone in the front seats, too. The vehicle hits their legs, and the moose’s big ol’ body flops right in through the windshield. It’s about the same as having a Harley thrown at you.

Like most of the more intelligent animals, they eventually figure out that the weird pink creatures mean them no harm, and let them poke at them without taking too much umbrage. Some animals can even remember a kindness done to them. Your house cat, can, for instance. It doesn’t cut any ice with them, but they do remember it.

A Modest Proposal on Immigration

August 22, 2025 4 Comments

I think we should let any Mexican who wishes to come to the United States and live here to do so. I like Mexicans a lot, and wouldn’t mind more of them here in the US. And I don’t think they should have to swim the Rio Grande and then hide in the shadows, or at least the shadows cast by the Home Depot. I think all they should have to do is fulfill the same requirements that Americans do if they want to move to Mexico. Fair is fair.

So I looked them up. Here they are, the requirements to obtain a Temporary Residency Permit in Mexico (good for one year). As we go along, I’ll be reversing these requirements to see what would be involved if you want to come to the US from Mexico, and converting them from Mexican weights and measures (futbol) to American (football), so that there’s a fair playing field:

Valid Passport

You’re going to have to show both the original, and supply a copy. It’s got to be valid for at least 6 more months. You’ll need additional recent passport-sized photos, too, in color, front view, with a white background, and no glasses.

Completed Application Form

You’ll be asked some uncomfortable questions. Have you ever been arrested? Bye bye. By the way, you have to have the form translated into Spanish if you’re entering Mexico, so turnabout is fair play. Our forms will be in English. The various consulates in the US where you apply for your permit to live in Mexico will be glad to supply you with a list of ~~brothers-in-law~~ translators who are qualified to perform this to their satisfaction. This approach is well known in US government offices in places like Boston, although their brothers in law are all Irish, but you get the idea.

Consular Interview

If you’re an American heading to Mexico, and the consulate likes all the paperwork you submitted, this interview is conducted at a Mexican consulate in the country where you currently live, i.e.: you cannot apply for this visa while you’re in Mexico. You can get it renewed inside Mexico, but not initially granted. So to keep it even, our southern neighbors will have to queue up at the US consulates in Mexico if they want to come to the US. There are nine in Mexico, so the lines to get into one should only stretch to Belize or so. At these interviews, you can be turned down for any reason, by the way, not only because your paperwork isn’t in order, so be sure to stock up on breath mints beforehand.

Proof of Financial Solvency

Now we’re going to have to do some international math, so bear with me. To qualify for a Temporary Resident Permit, which will allow you to live in Mexico legally for one year, you have to prove your financial solvency in one of two ways:

Monthly income. You have to show proof that you’ve earned 300 days of the Mexican daily wage every month for at least the last six months. For Americans, that would be about $4,000USD to $4,500USD a month.
Savings or investments. If you can’t qualify for the monthly wage requirement, you can show proof that you’ve held 5,000 days-worth of the Mexican daily wage for at least the last 12 months. It can’t be borrowed money. Retirement funds are OK. In USD, that would be around $70,000.

OK. The US shouldn’t be so fussy. Let’s just use the same numbers. I had to look it up, but the US national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. So that yields $58.00 per day for an 8-hour day. Let’s plug it in, and see what a Mexican would have to have burning a hole in their wallet to qualify to come to America under the same conditions:

Monthly income: 300 x $58.00 equals $17,400 USD per month, for at least the last six months.
Savings or investments: 5,000 x $58.00 equals $290,000 USD, held for at least the last twelve months.

Of course very few people earn the American national minimum wage. States set their own minimum wages, and they’re a lot higher. Since so many Mexicans would like to move to California, it might be fairer to use the Golden State’s minimum wage of $16.50 per hour as the base rate. So that gets us:

Monthly income: 300 days x $132.00 USD per day equals $39,600 USD per month.
Savings or investments: 5,000 days x $132 per day equals $660,000 USD.

You’ll have to keep in mind that Mexico demands that the monthly income of a USian has to stay the same after you move to Mexico. You’re not allowed to work in Mexico, or have customers there. So to keep it equal for Mexicans moving to the US, which ever way they were earning their $39,600 per month in Mexico, they’re going to have to make sure that someone keeps mailing it to them after they move. You can’t take a resident’s job to earn it in Mexico, so it should be the same for the US. Your Social Security payments can count towards your income. I suspect that Mexican social security payments are less than $17,400 USD per month, but I might be wrong. The government owns the oil company down there, so maybe they’re all getting fat checks from Tio Petróleo. I am beset by doubts on that score, however.

You can skip renewing your Temporary Residency Permit for Mexico by applying right away for a permanent one. If you’re American, you’ll need to prove you earn around $6,750 per month, or have $269,300 in savings or investments to qualify. I suppose the US could just use the same numbers for incoming Mexicans, but if we were to use their own formula based on days of minimum wage, you’d need around… around…

All this arithmetic is giving me a headache. I’ll let Chad do it for us:

Plenty of movie producers make $66,000 a month, so if you want to move to L.A., I don’t see why everyone shouldn’t be required to earn that. Hell, I don’t think you should be able to move to Los Angeles from anywhere else in the US unless you have at least $2.6 million in ready cash. How else could you hope to put down first, last, and the security deposit on your rental apartment, with enough money left over to fill your car’s gas tank to escape in case the city burns down again?

So let’s stop making Mexicans run the Rio Grande Triathlon to get into the country (running over the Sierra Madre mountains, swimming the Rio Grande, and riding in the back of a stake truck for two days). Just show up at one of our convenient consulates with $1,160,000, and you can stay indefinitely.

It’s true you can jump the line going into Mexico by marrying a Mexican citizen. I believe the reverse still applies. A Mexican man could marry an American woman to become a citizen, for example, but I can’t recommend it. I married the last sane American woman a while back, and the country is currently populated entirely with assistant district attorneys. I suggest you save your pennies and fly solo.

Sippican Cottage

What It’s Like in Gorham New Hampshire

The Best Short Stories I Ever Read

Another Day at the Office

Praxiteles, or How Famous Can You Get?

And When It Rains, the Rain Falls Down

Peak Amusing Pixel Disagreement: The Top 25 Opening Riffs in Christendom

Upside Down Soul

Chad Is Smarter Than Your Average Internaut

Ya Can’t Have Too Many Mooses. Mooseses. Meece. Whatever

A Modest Proposal on Immigration

sippicancottage

Archives

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Sippican Cottage

Contact Information

More From Sippican Cottage

sippicancottage

Archives

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Tags

Sippican Cottage

Contact Information

More From Sippican Cottage