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Hickory Shampoo and Other Discontents. WHOOOO!

August 20, 2025 4 Comments

Of course this video has been pawed over, analyzed, and generally chewed like a behavioral studies cud by so many ruminant internet animals that offering my input would be superfluous. But, in the parlance of our times: Do you know who I am? I’m Sippican Cottage! Superfluity is my métier!

I don’t really care too much about these two proto-sea hags in particular. Everyone else has pretty much covered the waterfront [The management cannot endorse this pun, and disavows any responsibility for it] about their sense of entitlement and so forth. Salt water is wet, y’all. But I’d like to bring something new to the table. Add some seasoning to the stew, and stir the pot, too. Share the benefit of my vast experience. So here goes: Just how obnoxious do you have to be to get the heave-ho from Clarke’s bar?

I’ll head the achshually crowd off at the pass and testify that I’m fully aware that the name of the establishment is the Clarke Cooke House. No one ever calls it anything but Clarke’s bar in my experience, which while somewhat out of date, is voluminous. You see, the minute I espied the screen cap on those videos I knew exactly where these two strumpets were getting their comeuppance. The quarterboard that reads Wine Bistro Spirits. The host’s standup desk thingie. The striped awning. I’ve been in Clarke’s lots of time. That’s Bannister’s Wharf in Newport, Rhode Island. I know it inside and out, and since trolling by it on Gargoyle Earth shows that most everything there is unchanged from the way I remember it, I’ll assume what goes on around there hasn’t changed much either.

Bannister’s Wharf is attached to Bowen’s Wharf right next to it, too, another place I know intimately. I performed in bands dozens of times in that general vicinity, and been drunk dozens of additional times, usually not at the same time. They set up a big tent at the end of one of those wharves, I forget which, and we performed there. There was a restaurant across from Clarke’s with a function room over it, and we’d played for another musician’s wedding reception there, and to give you some idea of the way people act at that locale, the groom jumped out of the second story window halfway through the reception. If you manage to cross America’s Cup Ave. without getting run over, you’ll be standing on Thames Street in front of One Pelham East. I performed there several times, and still have PTSD from it. I played in the nearby Newport Bay Club, too, and used to go across the street on our breaks to pound a quick beer with the jazz band that played in the Red Parrot.

You see, Newport has always been THE location for white bread girls like the two imbeciles in the video to let it all hang out. And by let it all hang out, I really mean yelling Whoo! a lot, and asking you to play Brown Eyed Girl for the third time that evening. Did I mention, WHOOH? Of course back in the day the WHOOOOH was accompanied by five drunk girls making ducklips while one drunk girl took an out of focus picture of the other drunk girls with an Instamatic. Now it’s resting bitch face straight into your Instagram cesspit, but the result must be the same. WHOOOOOOH!

Oh man. I’m having flashbacks. Salve Regina night at the One Pelham East. Yikes. Catholic college girls let loose for the evening, packed in like bullets in a box, yelling WHOOOOOH and climbing up on the stage to paw at us and yell whooo into your microphone, which transmogrified it into WHOOOOOOOO! The stage was several feet higher than the floor, thank god, or I wouldn’t be here to call myself Ishmael and finish the story. A WHOOOH! girl once called me to the edge of the stage in the middle of a song and motioned to me to bend down where she was. When I did, figuring all she wanted was to yell Brown Eyed Girl in my ear for the fourth time, she grabbed a fistful of my shirt, trying to kiss me, and pulled me head first off the stage onto the floor below. That certainly made everyone (but me) yell WHOOOOOOOOOH! Later, on my break, I was walking to the men’s room, and the girl’s room door opened, and there she was, with a gaggle of her friends, and they dragged me in there. I eventually escaped with my life, a torn shirt, and more lipstick on me than a maiden aunt, but I still have tinnitus from the WHOOOOOOOOOOH! they let loose in such close quarters.

And Clarke’s? I’ll ask it again. What in tarnation would a girl have to do to get bounced from Clarke’s? If you shot someone in there, they’d probably ask you to put on a silencer before you shot anyone else, but they wouldn’t bounce you. Clarke’s? Really? Oh, how we abused that place. My friend Mark knew someone who worked in the kitchen. He took me and my buddies to the little wooden gate that hides the alley between the buildings, and we entered through the kitchen, made our way through the rugby scrum of sunburned drunken hedge fund managers and dental hygienists in the bar, and came out at that bouncer lectern you see there in the video. Mark would tell the guy we just went in for a minute to see if someone we knew was there, and he wasn’t, so could we have our $10 cover charge back? He gave each of us ten of someone else’s bucks and we’d go right across the alley for oysters and pitchers of beer. That was pretty obnoxious of us, but we were just trying to fit in around there. So I’ll repeat myself: Just how obnoxious do you have to be to get bounced from Clarke’s?

Please understand that I’m talking about how hard it would be for female humans to get bounced from any nightspot around there. If you’re not of the distaff set, you could get bounced, literally and figuratively, by the local constabulary, sometimes at the drop of a hat. This was also a known fact. But girls? Never.

I’m mystified (not really) by the assistant D.A., who not only doesn’t know the law that forbids turning off a cop’s camera under those circumstances, she’s also unaware that the Newport police department has never been in the business of handing out hugs. Everyone always said the were pretty enthusiastic about applying the hickory shampoo to your scalp. I got stopped by the cops while going home over the Newport Bridge once, going about 40 MPH. It was really late (early), and the bridge was deserted. The cops said the limit was 25, because of “construction,” here’s your ticket. I mentioned it wasn’t posted, and there was no construction. He asked me if I’d like to come down to the station and “discuss it.” I demurred, because I’ve never wanted a second chance for my fontanel to fuse up. With cop-worn cameras, that approach seems to have morphed into a hair trigger, no compunction about telling you to STFU and move along, and a quick trip to the hoosegow if you put up a fuss. The STFU part is the same as it ever was, though.

So I know something the assistant D.A. doesn’t seem to. First, the Newport police ask you. Then they tell you. Then they make you. There’s no other steps, and they’re always in the same order. But to even the score, she knows something I’ll never know: How in the hell do you get bounced from Clarke’s bar?

I’ve Caught Bud Jamison Disease

August 16, 2025 9 Comments

By all accounts, Bud Jamison was an affable sort of guy. He certainly had a genial face. He used to play cops and tough guys, too, but it’s his big smile I remember most. He appeared in 450 movies and “shorts” in 30 years. With that sort of resume, he must have played every sort of person at one time or another. Except for a skinny person, of course.

Most of the movies were silent. It’s almost beside the point to describe many of those. Bud tries to punch Charlie Chaplin in The Champion, which is great fun. He’s “That Guy” in a lot of ancient stuff. However, I don’t know about you, but I’m not clamoring for a re-release of John Barrymore’s rendition of Ahab in 1930’s version of Moby Dick, even if I can see Bud play an uncredited shipping agent in it. So it will be Bud’s curse or blessing to be remembered forevermore by almost everyone who recognizes him at all as the guy who suffers along while the Three Stooges do their thing near him or to him. He made 38 shorts with the Stooges, including the very first one.

My mother hated the Three Stooges. We were forbidden from watching them. Back in the day, there wasn’t much on television after school. The Stooges were run on a nearly endless loop on the off-brand teevee stations that couldn’t afford to show anything but re-runs of ancient entertainments. So you can imagine how well the interdiction about watching them went. Mom played pretty good defense when it was man-to-man, but faltered a bit when she had to switch to zone.

She testified that she was certain that if we watched the Stooges, I’d eventually hit my little brother in the head with an ax. That was just another of the endless series of moral panics that has gripped the American female zeitgeist down through the ages. Of course I would have liked to hit my little brother in the head with an ax from time to time, but I didn’t need the Stooges to urge me on. Who hasn’t wanted to hit their little brother with an ax, or drag a crosscut saw across their fontanel, or grab their nose with a pliers? But like most moral panics, there was no real danger of stuff like that happening. We didn’t own an ax.

In a broad sort of a way, there were only two camps in the recycled vaudeville teevee audiences. The Three Stooges, and the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers made full length movies, and the Stooges made shorts, but they were essentially weird doppelgangers of each other. It’s easy to say the Stooges were more lowbrow, because the Marx Brothers relied more on wit. But I’m not so sure that’s fair. The Stooges, like Bud, were genial. I like snark as much as the next guy, so I can enjoy the Marx Brothers movies, but in its heart it’s a bit nasty.

America has become a very snarky place. The teevee got really snarky after a while, when all the gentle humor was expunged and replaced with nothing but situational cutting remarks, doled out by the half hour. The Stooges hit each other, and made fools of themselves, but they didn’t ever exhibit a truly mean bone in their body, except by compound fracture, of course. Groucho was funny, but he helped adumbrate the proto-bile we’re all drowning in. They were both sets of Everyman, with posh operators, authority figures, and criminals taking whacks at them. The Stooges were better at taking haughty people down a peg when you get right down to it, just by being themselves, really. Like they did to Bud, when it was required:

“Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years.” There it is. That’s Bud Jamison disease, and I’ve got it bad.

You see, I’m on the sidelines now, as far as doing anything practical in the real world. At one time or another, I’ve done all sorts of manual labor that results in the world being physically altered by the end of the day. Besides the stuff I built or repaired out in the landscape, at any time in the last thirty years or so I’ve been able to go downstairs and return with whatever was required at the time, everything from a dining room table to a patched bicycle tire. Now I live in an apartment, and my tools fit in a shoe box, and I get to see people doing practical things, and think, Gosh, I’d sure like to help.

So I saw this video about mimicking oak woodgraining by a man who appears to paint scenery for lord knows what.

He’s disabled, so we have to make allowances. By disabled, I mean he’s English or British or something. He’s required by the Magnum Cortex or whatever they use for laws over there to talk with that funny accent, and call everything by its wrong name. He’s required to call shellac “button polish,” and starts blabbering about PVA, which stands for poly-vinyl-acetate. The poor sod is forced to talk in acronyms instead of saying Elmer’s Glue and being done with it. Then he’s probably got a gun to his head, and they force him to call latex paint “emulsion paint.” Just because it’s a British gun and will probably hang fire, doesn’t mean the threat won’t feel real. They really treat folks unfairly over there.

Everyone in the good ol’ USA calls every kind of paint you can wash out of your brushes (and your nose hairs, if you’re like most housepainters) using only water. Of course latex and acrylic paint (emulsion) are two different things, but no American can keep two things in their head at the same time, alongside all that freedom we keep in there. And man, did my eye twitch when he called a roller cover a “rag roller.” English, do you speak it? I’m pretty sure I do. Fairly sure. Whatever.

At any rate, videos like this turn me right into Bud Jamison. I’m sure if I told David Rowse, the pleasant and talented fellow who made the video, that Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years, he might be tempted to tell me to go mix up a batch of spotted paint. Fair enough. But in addition to being a busybody, I’d be the worst kind of busybody extant: I wouldn’t offer to help. I’d offer advice. That’s miles worse.

Of course my method is what we fellows in the painting trade used to call “quick and dirty.” You know, like having sex with a car mechanic.

Anyone can review my technique in an old couple of posts here: Graining a door.

And please remember my braggart’s motto: I can do it better than anyone who can do it faster, and I can do it faster than anyone who can do it better.

Playing Office

August 11, 2025 12 Comments

All thanks to Leslie the watercolorist for this portrait.

My younger son had a wish come true.

Maybe wish is the wrong word. No, definitely the wrong word. Wishing is done on an industrial scale these days. I never liked anything to do with Harry Potter, for instance, because at its heart, it’s just wishing that things were different, and by wishing, it happens. A steady diet of that rots the mind, and the soul.

No, not a wish. He had an ambition? I guess. I seriously don’t know what to call it.

He was really young. Maybe eight or nine years old. We didn’t have any money to speak of, so the kids had to amuse themselves a lot with whatever’s handy. He’d make Rube Goldberg machines with his marbles and various bric a brac from his toy box. Stuff like that. Then his ambition, if that’s what it was, showed up.

It was immensely charming, and quite offbeat. It was all his idea. He put on a suit jacket and a clip-on tie. He wore eyeglasses with no lenses in them. He carried a leatherette backgammon board that looked vaguely like an attache case. He set up an office in his room. He didn’t have a computer or anything for his office workstation, so he made one. He found an old monitor and set it on the desk. He got a printed image of a spreadsheet, and taped it to the monitor. He found an old IBM keyboard in the electronic junk box we keep, the kind that goes clickety clack real loud, and put it in front of the faux spreadsheet. He found a recording of office noise somewhere or another, and played it in the background. And best of all, he’d commute down the hall, and sit down and pretend to work.

Later on, he started to crush on Mavis Beacon. We had a CD with her lessons on it, and he loved her voice, and I guess the typing lessons, although I can’t remember when he couldn’t type. Eventually, he composed a vaporwave tribute to playing office called, get this, Playing Office, and sampled the little burble of notes that used to play when Mavis turned on.

His mother taught him at home in his grammar school days, dutifully slipping one worksheet after another under his nose as he sat at an antique school desk we got at a flea market. When he got to high school age, we enrolled him at a statewide charter school. We lived in a rural place, and the schools were uniformly awful, so it seemed like the way to go. He was co-valedictorian of his school, which since it’s a statewide thing, that technically makes him a valedictorian of the whole state, I guess. It was entirely online. When it was time to attend college, I’m sure he was smart enough for fancy schools, but he likes Maine, and we couldn’t afford to send him anywhere else, anyway. He went to UMaine, and graduated in three years, summa cum laude, with a B.S. in Computer Security. He got an A-minus once, to avoid being boring.

Everyone goes into debt to go to college these days. They select the most expensive one they can find, and then they treat it like a four year Carnival cruise, or early retirement or something. Our boy stayed in Maine, because that’s where he grew up, and he has a loyalty, or affection or something similar for it. Practical, too. He did the whole thing online, same as high school. He got every manner of scholarship they had, including one that we never did figure out the reason it was awarded. After the tuition was paid, there was money left over for living expenses, but he lived at home the whole time. He had enough to buy a car, and graduated with the leftover ten grand in his bank account.

We love the picture of him they took with his cap and gown and diploma. He’s smiling so broadly you can’t see his eyes. It really meant something to him. It certainly meant a lot to my wife and I when we sat in the big auditorium and watched him get his sheepskin. You couldn’t see our eyes, either, because we were wiping them.

He wanted a job, but they’re hard to come by, no matter what the BLS says. He limited himself to Maine jobs, for the same reasons that he stuck with it for his education. He was willing to start out for short money for any job even remotely associated with his credentials. I couldn’t believe anyone would turn him down, but they did. If they had a brain in their head, they would have driven to his house and kidnapped him as soon as he applied. But the process for filling jobs is supremely dysfunctional nowadays. I really shouldn’t have been surprised.

He hung in there, and didn’t complain. Eventually, it was all for the best, and a useful company, run by nice people, with an office in a posh town in Maine, decided that maybe they could use someone like him in their office. You know, the best of the best this state has to offer.

His car was in the shop for repairs, so we gave him a lift home after work the other day. A mundane thing, perhaps, a quotidian chore at the end of an almost endless series of everyday tasks, strung out on the calendars in the rear-view mirror since the day the doctor slapped him, instead of me as I deserved.

I remember distinctly the last time I carried my two sons in from the car after a long road trip, and up the stairs to bed. One on my back, and one in my arms. Such ghosts appear unwonted from time to time. The finality of things sometimes cements them in your head. So I’ll remember dropping him off for the rest of my days, watching him walking up the driveway to his house, his empty lunch pail under his arm, a man in full. When things shift like that, you notice. He’s not playing office any more.

Ginger vs. Mary Ann? Please

August 8, 2025 11 Comments

Ginger or Mary Ann comparisons are so over. The Bailey Quarters vs. Jennifer Marlowe contest isn’t much better. C’mon, Wilma Flintstone vs. Betty Rubble is more interesting than those two. You can have your Beatles vs. Stones arguments all day long for all I care. There’s only one, real, true way for me to get judgey about your judgment:

Perez Prado vs. Esquivel!

Perez didn’t write the first tune in that medley, Guaglione. It’s a Neapolitan song with music by someone named Giuseppe Fanciulli. I’ve heard Italian names before, that one about takes the cannoli. The song has words, too, by Nicola Salerno, a name that sounds like a guy with bodies in his trunk. Anyway, it got covered by everyone from Claudio Villa to Dean Martin, but it wasn’t until Perez Prado put some mambo afterburners on it that it really took off.

So there’s contestant Numero Uno. A mambo king. But in this corner, weighing in at 97 pounds (if he has rolls of quarters in his pocket), we have Esquivel!

Cher and Madonna and Elvis think they’re so cool because they only need one name, but Esquivel! puts them all in the shade. Those other pretenders don’t have an exclamation point in their names. Case closed.

So now we’re really getting down to it. Prado’s Mambo King act, vs. Esquivel! and his Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Fight!

Of course truly major decisions like this one require careful assessments of the essential differences. So let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. You’re going to have to choose between Prado’s pencil-thin moustache and Esquivel!’s gamma-ray-resistant eyeglasses.

Perez has made this decision even tougher by occasionally sporting both the pencil-thin moustaches and uber-cool sunglasses.

I know, tough choice, huh? Esquivel! was a visionary, of course, and not just for music. He correctly surmised that his taste in eyewear would become so universally accepted as cool that even plagiarizing presidents of Ivy League colleges would be wearing them eventually. So he tried to steal a march on history, and perhaps on Perez, by upping the ante and barging into the seventies with a wispy Van Dyke beard, suitable for a modestly dangerous villain on the old Star Trek.

Ah, the Engelbert Humperdinck “polyester lasagna” shirt, the Vitalis hair, the bow tie suitable for manned flight, the doughy Abba-looking chicks. Esquivel! truly had it going on.

You’re going to have to decide if Mucha Muchacha or Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (the latter half of the first video) is the happiest song ever recorded. This may be impossible, because they basically both are in some sort of Heisenberg dead cat/live cat in the box situation. They both can’t be Numero Uno, but they are. Maybe you’ll just have to decide if you like The Big Lebowski or Office Space better than the other. But that invites a temptation to settle the challenge by dragging in Henry Mancini from Jackie Treehorn’s house, and “third man in” is considered bad taste in street fights like this one.

The first person that says, “Neither. Xavier Cugat,” I’m coming looking for you. And not with binoculars, either.

She’s Got That Kind of Loving

August 5, 2025 6 Comments

Both Jean and Bob Moffett mentioned Patsy Cline in the comments after an earlier post about George Jones. I found this video of Patsy performing Lovesick Blues on Community Jamboree in 1960, with a charming Ferlin Husky introduction.

I made the same mistake most everyone must make when they hear that tune sung by anybody. You figure it’s a Hank Williams song. Well, it ain’t.

It was written by Tin Pan Alley composers named Cliff Friend and Irving Mills, way back in 1922. It was recorded a bunch of times after that, including by a minstrel show singer named Emmet Miller and a country singer named Rex Griffin. Hank must have heard on the radio and liked it, and he performed it on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1948. The audience loved it, so Hank recorded it in 1949, and it spent 16 weeks at Number One on the Billboard Top Country and Western singles chart. People forget the minstrel show versions of things right quick when you have a smash like that.

The name Cliff Friend probably doesn’t ring a bell for you, but maybe it should. He’s one of those anonymous guys whose name you used to see going round and round on the label in small print on the center of a 45 record. But Cliff never really got much public acknowledgement for his most popular tune, one that makes Lovesick Blues pale in comparison. He co-wrote The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down.

What the hell is The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down? You can be forgiven for asking, but trust me, you know it:

Maybe you prefer the later versions:

By the way, to go even further down this rathole, the wild lap steel Hye-Wye-En glissando that opens up the later versions of the Looney Tunes song was played by Freddie Tavares. Besides being a crack lap steel player, he was a lead designer of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. You can see him at work alongside Leo Fender in 1959 in an earlier blogpost, Minor Seventh Heaven.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, let’s get back to Patsy Cline singing Lovesick Blues on teevee. It’s fantastic.

People often think they’d like to be singers or other forms of famous musicians. If you’ve never had a curtain rise in front of you and been confronted by 2,000 eyeballs, or 1,999 if Peter Falk is in the audience, you might not understand how unnerving it might be. To take it up a notch, Patsy has to stare into the cold, dead eye of the TV camera, and somehow connect with anonymous people in a virtual audience as if they’re in front of her. She makes it look easy. It ain’t, or we’d all be doing it.

I was going to commend Jean and Robert for their enthusiasm for Patsy, but I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve literally never met any human being who doesn’t think Patsy Cline is excellent. Stoner, greaser, big band devotee, punker, jazz aficionado, blues singer in a porkpie hat, hip hop breakdancer, it doesn’t matter. Everyone loves Patsy Cline.

So I guess I can only thank Jean and Robert for reminding me to post a video of her. It’s the least I can do, and I always do the least I can do.

What Did We Learn, Palmer?

August 4, 2025 2 Comments

I don’t think the people who are building LLMs (Large Language Models) are all that smart.

I’ll start off by noticing that they have no idea what to even call the things. As usual. I’ve been using Chat GPT for a while now. I just call it Chad, because you have to call it something less goofy than Chat GPT, or any of the other attempts to label the things. LLMs? Generative AI? Neural Language Model? Ugh. But everything in the internet age is named by the same sorts of people, and badly. Is there an uglier and less informative possible word for this essay than a blog? But we’re stuck with it because a bunch of people who attend marriage ceremonies held in Klingon said so.

So around the Cottage we call it Chad because it’s close enough to Chat, and it’s very like Brad Pitt’s character in Burn After Reading. It’s amusing in a child-like way, helpful in mostly unhelpful ways, energetic and somewhat obsequious. It can also get you shot in a closet or killed with an ax in the middle of the street if you listen to people who listen to it uncritically: (Some swearing)

That’s a minor quibble, of course. I use Chad often for a lot of things, although I gather from seeing what my nieces use it for on their phones that my Chad workload is a solid minority, as usual. I’ve never described my cat to Chad, and had it turn it into a person, for instance.

So it’s great for silly business. Fine. I find it’s superb for reading the internet for me, and vomiting what I’m actually looking for instead of having to wade through oceans of Search Engine Optimized drivel to find the part number on a washing machine or something similar. It’s not the birth of artificial intelligence, but it is the death of Google, so there’s that.

But back to the point, if I have one. I’ve always suspected that the wrong people are working on all the various versions of Chad, and that’s why its such a muddle trying to figure out where it’s going. These companies have hired anyone who’s good at math, statistics, and computer languages to work on the things. These people aren’t smart. They’re like the IT Crowd version of Chad Feldheimer. Being good at heavy lifting and running in place doesn’t make you smart when you’re looking at “…names and shit and these other files are just, like numbers arrayed. Numbers and dates, and numbers and numbers, and dates and numbers, and I think that’s the shit, man. The raw intelligence!”

Internet math geeks are like plumbers. They’re not dumb, but they have a very narrow worldview. If you ask a plumber to design a house, it will have two bedrooms and fourteen bathrooms. It’s human nature. Ask math geeks what to call a collection of essays, and they’ll call it a weblog. Ask them how to make a machine intelligent, and you get numbers and dates, and numbers and numbers, and dates and numbers, and I think that’s the shit, man.

Now back when I was in high school, and Noah was still looking for his bevel square, they used to acknowledge that verbal skills were more important for high-level thinking than math skills. That’s right, you’d take the SAT, and your final score was your verbal score X 2, plus your math score. It was how a stoner who skipped the better part of the last three years of high school classes became a National Merit scholar while the kids who got an 800 on math grumbled and wondered. The math wizards are the same people who became computer programmers, and claim on Reddit that speling doesn’t matter. Of course, a spelling error in their computer program occasionally destroys an entire company in an afternoon, but C’est la vie! They’ll say it’s all part of their “journey” on their next job application.

So the founders of these companies are ardent bullshitters and sophists, but that’s not the same as being verbally brilliant. Shamelessness is more useful when you’re pitching some vaporware to angel investors. And the glorified statisticians they eventually hire are always busy looking at the digital world as one big spreadsheet.

Now on top of what little I know about the truly technical matters involved, I heard an interrumor that at this point, the people that built the LLMs no longer understand how it works. This attracted my attention, because it made perfect sense to me why that would happen. To stretch my simile, you don’t hire plumbers to pick out your curtains, either, because the catalogs don’t have any porcelain drapes in them. And the math wizards are looking for mathematical drapes in Chad’s output.

So, who to ask about my suspicions? Why not Chad hisself?

Uh huh.

So there you go. We asked Chad some questions about how Chad works, and got some Chad answers. So let’s sum it all up, roll up the ball of wax, and survey the whole megillah:

The Rolls-Royce of Country Music

August 1, 2025 11 Comments

Well, I’m informed that they did call George Jones the Rolls-Royce of Country Music, but I’m not sure it fits. A Rolls is posh. A Rolls isn’t for driving, it’s for being driven in. And a Rolls is British, and that’s way out of bounds for George. I understand the sentiment. Pretty much every country singer wanted to sing like George Jones. Calling him a Cadillac might seem like faint praise.

More to the point, George was a serious wildman. He stands stock-still, his lantern jaw moving in Clutch Cargo fashion, his hair laid out with a spirit level, so you might be forgiven for thinking that man in the Nudie suit must be a taciturn sort of fellow. But he was anything but. He was an ex-Marine, a famed hellraiser, a skirt chaser, and occasionally had to be put in a straitjacket and carted off to the hospital to dry out. He, ahem, liked to drink a bit. A bit of a still at a time.

No, his voice was clear and powerful, butter and a headbutt at the same time, so he’s no Rolls-Royce. We can do better than that, nickname-wise. Once, his wife tried to keep him from going out and getting drunk, and she hid all the car keys, and went to bed. When she woke up, George was missing. She drove eight miles on the highway to the next town, to the closest place he could conceivably get drunk at, and found George sitting at the bar. Their riding mower was parked out front.

The John Deere of Country Music. There, I fixed it.

El Ladron Has Got It Going On

July 30, 2025 1 Comment

That’s Sonia Lopez from 1964, sorta reinforcing my point that the first half of the 1960s had nothing to do with the second half, even in Mejico. And I can assure you that I don’t want to build a Time Masheen to go back to The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel in 1968. However, I’ll work day and night on my Century Transmogrifier to go to see Sonia’s nightclub show in ’64, even if it is in a movie.

El Ladron is Spanish for The Thief. I could translate the lyrics for you at length, and explain why Sonia seems so glad to see one in her dreams, but it’s easier to just show you how it works:

Remember Tom Brady’s rules for approaching women, kids:

Be handsome
Be attractive
Don’t be unattractive

Works in espanol, too.

I Won the 2025 Maine Ironman Race

July 28, 2025 1 Comment

It’s that time of year again. The snowbanks in Maine have receded to a distant memory instead of a salty spring puddle, and have long since released their pent up cargo of urban jellyfish (plastic bags from convenient stores) to drift on the sultry, room temperature breezes. That means it’s Ironman time!

Well, I guess that’s what it means. I’m new to the city of Ogguster, our state’s capital. I’m pretty new to cities, period. Apparently, they have this sort of Bataan Death March of Fun every year, and they have it in a lot of places. It attracts contestants from all over the world, but it’s a very American idea to my eye. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing” should be stamped on our currency and added to the National Anthem. The last three verses are really weird and you could slip it right in if you have a rhyming dictionary, and no one would notice.

I’m a stranger to Facebook, so I’m a stranger to most current happenings like these. It’s pointless to opine on such matters, but I shouldn’t have to have a Facebook account to look at a police department’s or any other government cabal’s information. But everyone assumes that’s where the squares go for their info, so that’s where they put said info. Oh well. But I honestly didn’t know that they held an Ironman competition in our city. Until I won it.

I’m so ill-informed about the topic that this morning I had to go to the Ironman website to verify exactly what the three portions of athletic misery technically consists of. Apparently, you’re supposed to swim for 1.2 miles in the Kennebec River, past a modest crop of signs that inform you of the wet weather sewer overflow discharge pipes that dot the shoreline. Then you’re required to haul your soggy bottom out of the river and plant it on a bicycle seat and pedal for 56 miles. After that thorough, but no doubt enjoyable chafing session, you’re supposed to trade your $10,000 carbon fiber streamlined bicycle for a wedge of orange to chew on and a cup of lukewarm water (about the same amount of water you still have in your shorts, I’ll bet). Then you run for 13.1 miles, which I noticed is exactly half the length of a marathon. I think they should totally call that a “half marathon.” I’m not on Facebook, so maybe they already do. In any case, I’m sure they all run the whole way while wondering if that guy they left their bike with actually had anything to do with event.

On a morning after basis, that sure sounds daunting. But in the heat of the moment, I just sort of got carried away with the zeitgeist and entered the contest without even trying. And get this, I did it in my pajamas, and my wife did it while naked. Of course this will require some explanation. Here goes:

You see, I don’t think it’s possible to “win” a contest that requires you to swim, bike, and run that far. Don’t get me wrong. In my younger days I was as foolish as the next guy, and ran around like a dog on the 4th of July, and biked like a Tour De France also-ran. Fitness freaks can’t just pull rank on me that easily. I came in 13th in a small town marathon once. I could average 20-25 miles per hour on a bike back in the day on a flat circuit. I’d be accused of cheating on the swimming portion, of course, because of the water wings. But other than that, pointless exertions like this event hold no terrors for me. I’m just not that interested.

Entering the event has many requirements I’m also not that interested in. First, it appears you have to buy all your garments at some kind of trapeze artist unitard store, and we don’t have one hereabouts. These Barnum and Bailey leotard onesies are covered with more slogans and logos than Don Draper’s desk, and I don’t know how exactly you’re supposed to get on that kind of gravy train. I think you have to drink Brawndo while skydiving with a GoPro on your helmet, then land in the bed of a vegan’s electric monster truck, or some other heroic deed, to catch the typical sponsor’s eye. I’m willing of course, but I can’t remember my YouTube login credentials, so the whole scheme would fall apart at the end there.

I would also apparently be required to purchase very elaborate running shoes in electrifying pink or lime green neon colors I haven’t seen since Cyndi Lauper stopped recording. I probably can’t afford those. Everyone was wearing those Randy Savage sunglasses, too, that looked like you could weld with them, or run through gamma rays or something. Maybe it was to protect you from going blind from the radioactive pink sneakers. I dunno. But while I used to own a welding helmet, I don’t remember where I put it. That’s another investment I don’t need to make, and I don’t think getting a beef jerky sponsorship logo on my unitard would impress the other contestants anyway.

I also noticed that some of the female runners had a male trailing them on a bicycle, exhorting them to keep going, with encouragements like, “You can do it!” and, “Keep up the pace!”, and “You got this!”, mostly to women who manifestly couldn’t do it, couldn’t keep up, and didn’t got this, so to speak. I imagined how many stab wounds I’d wake up with the next day if I tried this with my wife. Besides, as I mentioned, she was naked, and being naked, there would be no place to display any logos of energy drinks or energy bars or energy potions, so there would be no point in her competing.

So as I mentioned, I feel as though I’m the only real winner of the Augusta Ironman competition. It’s just that the events in my version of the race varied slightly from the swim, cycle, and the “sorta run, sorta walk fast” final leg. My version of the competition did have three amazing portions of exertions, and I nailed them:

Get woken up at 3:30 in the morning by the neighbor across the hall pounding on our door. The air conditioning unit for our apartment is on the fritz, so my wife was sleeping naked. She woke me up and sent me to the door in my jammies, (gym shorts and a t-shirt). Luckily for me, I used to be a professional musician, so I was used to naked girls hanging around while people hammered on my door telling me the cops had arrived. It’s part of the job description, I think. At any rate, the neighbor told me the cops were towing everybody’s cars out of the parking lot, mine included. That’s where the Ironman race was starting, and we were supposed to move our cars out of there. We had it on our Facebook page, I don’t know how you could have missed it.
The second leg was going down three flights of stairs. I did it in seventeen seconds. I’m sure that record will stand for a while.
The third leg was the most difficult, and I believe my performance was one for the record books. There were about a dozen policemen and about the same number of tow trucks in the parking lot. One wrecker was backed up to our car, and the driver was standing there holding the hook. And get this: I somehow convinced a tow truck driver and several policemen to move the tow truck and let me drive out of there instead of being towed. I talked ragtime faster than Joe Isuzu on meth. I’m still not sure how I managed it. As far as I know, it’s never even been attempted, never mind accomplished. Everyone else got towed, and a $350 bill to get their car back.

So we sat in our living room and watched the cyclists and the runners pass by our front windows, serene in the knowledge that no matter how you tote up the results, we won the Augusta Ironman competition, going away. And we got a spray of flowers to commemorate the victory.

We gave them to our neighbor, of course.

The Sixties Never Happened

July 25, 2025 4 Comments

Hear me out: The sixties never happened.

No, really. The idea that generational shifts happen in neat, tectonic fashion, bang-on the first day of each decade, is useless for encapsulating eras. So I’m gonna fix it. Well, at least the years between 1952 and 1982. Those thirty years were split into two parts, not three: The Fixties, and The Endless Bummer. The thing everyone calls The Sixties never happened.

The hinge point was 1966, or thereabouts. The no-mans land that opened up between the two eras was brought into stark relief in about 1965, when you could go to the cinema and see the last gasp of the Fixties, The Sound of Music, an honest to god musical, then go back in the evening and see the dawning of the Endless Bummer in Help!, an entertaining but disjointed and irreverent slapdash affair. When you went home to your split-level ranch in the suburbs, mom and dad put Sinatra’s It Was a Very Good Year on the living room credenza record player.

But now the days are short, I’m in the autumn of my years

Indeed. Meanwhile, the kids went down in the basement rumpus room and used the portable hi-fi to play the Rolling Stones doing Satisfaction.

When I’m driving in my car
And a man talks on the radio
He’s telling me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination

It was a baton pass, and the baton wasn’t just dropped, it was thrown into the shrubs. We went from everything’s Technicolor to everything sucks, and barely noticed the change. All of a sudden it’s the Endless Bummer, one that lasted until about 1982.

I wasn’t alive or anything interesting like that, but I have a library card and relatives: The Fixties were the greatest time in the history of the United States, so probably the greatest time in the history of the world. You can fight me on this if you’d like, but I’ll be showing up to the debate in a giant two-tone convertible with more horsepower than a B-25, spangled with enough chrome to reflect Telstar signals back into space, with Technicolor Marilyn Monroe on the bench seat next to me, and a trunk full of penicillin. That beats everything that came before, easily, and everything after, even if you do favor FM radio over AM.

The real Fifties didn’t start in 1950 anyway. Truman was still president in 1950, and I can’t think of a less Fifties-ish person than Harry. He was pure Roosevelt hangover. He looked and acted more like Woodrow Wilson’s haberdasher than a modern person. He stumbled into the Korean War because he missed World War II. It was all he knew. Harry had olive drab hemoglobin.

Harry was so brain-dead that he offered to run as Eisenhower’s vice-president after the big war. It’s a testament to Ike’s probity that Harry had no idea he was a Republican, or even a normal human being. Ike was an American first, a concept that a machine politician like Truman couldn’t understand, never mind get behind. It suited the coming Fixties. It’s useful to remember that the political yings and yangs of Joseph McCarthy and JFK were both considered staunch anti-communists.

And JFK had nothing to do with the traditional take on the 1960s. Flower power would have no appeal for a lace-curtain Bostonian Irishman like him. Ike was an old general, but presided over a young, civilian boomtime. JFK was the hood ornament on Ike’s era. It hit a big pothole in Dealey Plaza, but the vibe allowed it to coast for a few years before Johnson was able to drive the car all the way into the fiscal, moral, and military ditch. Then it rolled downhill pretty fast, and right into the lake where Jimmy Carter was trying to beat a bunny to death with a paddle. So The Endless Bummer started out with the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, and ended up with another sort of Kool-Aid test in Guyana. They cheaped out and used Flavor Aid, of course, but they didn’t skimp on the cyanide.

Now, the Fixties are often maligned as a cultural wasteland, mostly by people with rings in their intellectual noses. Well, the Fixties gave us Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and the atypical Dave Brubeck’s Take Five in the same year. Wes Montgomery was inventing smooth jazz right in front of your eyes. There was the birth of bossa nova. Broadway theaters were heaving with musicals. And they didn’t call it the Golden Age of movies for nothing. The industry had to compete with the television all of a sudden, and managed it just fine by giving much more to look at. There was something for everybody, too. From ’52 on, you could sit with your feet stuck to the floor and your eyes glued to the screen in a big, gaudy movie house and see The Quiet Man, Shane, Roman Holiday, The Big Country, and watch the most exciting twenty minutes in movies, ever — the chariot race in Ben-Hur.

They made thoughtful movies about regular people back then. I mean regular regular people. How about Ernest Borgnine as Marty? David Lean reeled off the greatest string of movies ever: The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and Doctor Zhivago. You could even take a girl to that last one, and she’d like it. Frank Lloyd Wright was building Usonian houses while Royal Barry Wills held down the trad suburban fort with his elegant colonials and Capes in New England while Googie style spangled the west coast and Midcentury Modern filled in everywhere else. Women wore Dior and pencil dresses and pillbox hats.

In the late sixties, the studio system fell apart, and the Hollywood New Wave took over. For a while, Warner Brothers was owned by a casket manufacturer that had a sideline of parking lots. That had predictable results on the output. Eventually auteurs got the upper hand, and they made a bunch of popular movies that made big money. But do you notice anything about this list of the top ten American New Wave classics?

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
The Graduate (1967)
Easy Rider (1969)
Midnight Cowboy (1969)
Five Easy Pieces (1970)
The Last Picture Show (1971)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Chinatown (1974)
Nashville (1975)
Apocalypse Now (1979)

Yep. Great cinema. But. Uniformly bleak, ambiguous, cynical, mostly violent and nasty. It’s what happens when nihilism takes over from the sunny optimism of the Fixties. You get the Endless Bummer. Throw in The Godfather, and you’ve got the entire zeitgeist encapsulated: Why bother trying? Everything is crooked.

Let’s take a look at a tale of two cities, as it were: Anne Bancroft.

Anne seems pleasant enough, so I won’t be ragging on her personally, just using her to point out how the worm turned just from 1962 to 1967. First, she won an Oscar for The Miracle Worker. She played Anne Sullivan, who through dint of perseverance and affection teaches a deaf, dumb, and blind Helen Keller to interact with the world. It’s typical of movies from the Before Times. It’s based on real, important things, tough sledding emotionally, perhaps, but uplifting and inspirational in its final effect.

Then 1967 rolls around and Anne is Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. Whoah, there’s a tectonic shift. No one is going to help a disabled girl in that one. Benjamin Braddock is maybe the Ur-self-absorbed college grad. Dustin Hoffman played the shrimp that launched a thousand Lloyd Doblers, guys who don’t know what they’re for, only that they’re against everything on offer. Middle-aged Anne slept with her neighbor’s kid, and then turned into a bunny boiler when he started dating her daughter. It was supposed to be an evisceration of suburban life, but it’s closer to what people who rub elbows with Woody Allen think the suburbs is like. The heavy fog of disillusionment, generational enmity, unexplained ennui, and a full Peter Pan outlook on life was the Long March Through the Endless Bummer in a nutshell. The movie is funny in its satirical way, but for the life of me I’ve never understood the idea that it’s romantic. I guess I have to quote myself here:

Now, many people think Romeo and Juliet is a love story, instead of a cautionary tale about teen infatuation that ends up with everyone dead. These same people also think The Graduate is a sweet love story, and that it has a happy ending. Not hardly, if you’re paying attention. Here’s the final scene of the movie: Link to video. In the back of the bus, it finally dawns on Benjamin Braddock that he has no idea why he was trying to woo fair maid. It was forbidden, so he wanted it. He’s already ambivalent about her. She looks at him and maybe wonders what she saw in him in the first place.

“It was forbidden so he wanted it.” If there’s a better encapsulation of the imbecile impetus behind the Endless Bummer, and the death of the Fixties, I haven’t seen it. And I had to write it myself.

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