Author: tim

I Gots Me The Blues

Ever since the wife and I cancelled our cable and TiVo subscriptions, we’ve been watching a lot of PBS. Damn if that’s not a kick ass station.

Currently, we are addicted to The Blues, the seven part series produced by Martin Scorsese that is showing this week. The other night we watched The Soul of a Man, Wim Wenders’ look at the lives of Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, and J. B. Lenoir. I was amazed by the stories of these men and how they lived and died playing the music they loved. Each story is one of sacrifice, hardship and suffering, but you knew that; it is the blues after all.

Blind Willie got that way after his mother threw lye in his eyes after a fight with his father. Skip James wrote and recorded for a record label that paid him $40 for his first session and then he drifted back into obscurity and became a preacher. He never heard those recordings. J. B. Lenoir died in a car accident when he was 38. He received poor treatment at the hospital and later died at his home of internal bleeding. He was a dishwasher at the time.

It truly was amazing to watch and listen to these men play. The blues is definitely made up of a simple structure, but to listen to these three different interpretations of the form is amazing. Skip James’ ethereal, high-pitched singing, Blind Willie Johnson’s powerful voice and J. B. Lenoir’s effortless guitar playing and playful personality each brought something different to the form. Each song and approach was so unique; I went out the next day and bought me some blues records.

The Complete Blind Willie Johnson

The Complete Early Recordings of Skip James

Mojo Boogie by J. B. Lenoir

Impeccable Timing

I guess the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

Last Saturday, a drunk man “began slamming doors, tossing boxes and throwing dishes in the sink after the Crimson Tide lost its football game to Arkansas, 34-31 in double overtime.” As he was doing this, his son walked up to him and asked for a new car.

The man took out his 9mm pistol, held it to his son’s head and threatened to shoot. Luckily for the son, he moved his head just as his dad (accidentally) pulled the trigger. Thankfully, the kid wasn’t struck by the bullet. His dad “surrendered to police … and was charged with attempted murder and domestic violence”.

Now, who’s the bigger idiot here? Obviously the father, but the son definitely has some piss poor judgement.

Read the article here.

Aargh

Happiness is NOT the following:

Spending all day trying to track down a CSS error, only to realize your page isn’t rendering correctly in NS6 because of the following character: _

Isn’t this always the way, my internet coding brothers and sisters? Can I get an amen? How come out of all the pages and pages and pages of CSS Web sites that I visited today didn’t one person decide to put at the top of the page (in an H1 tag of course): Hey, idiots! Only use alphanumeric characters in your .css files!

I want my day back.

Know it, love it:

In CSS2, identifiers (including element names, classes, and IDs in selectors) can contain only the characters [A-Za-z0-9] and ISO 10646 characters 161 and higher, plus the hyphen (-); they cannot start with a hyphen or a digit.

Poor Linda

Does anyone else feel sorry for Linda?

Poor little tropical depression Linda. As older sister Isabel gets ready for her big day, Linda aimlessly wanders the Eastern Pacific with her dainty 40 mph winds, feeling sorry for herself.

Don’t worry, Linda. I notice you. One day you’ll grow up and everyone will pay attention to you, but until then know that you are special too and that your time will come.

Either that or you’ll just slowly break up over the Pacific and turn into a mere low pressure system.

Confused Psychic

Sent to me by my friend, Bart:

I think that I am a confused psychic. The first thing that I asked Melissa this morning upon waking up is whether she had heard that John Travolta had died or not. I found this odd that I remembered from my dream but then was aghast to find that Cash and Ritter had died: BOTH JOHNS!

Pretty funny. But, seriously, this is a sad day for Country music. And I’m going to trip over a rake today in honor of Mr. Ritter.

Godspeed, Johns!

Emo Kids

This is a direct quote from an e-mail my teacher friend received from one of his high school spanish students re: whether or not she is emo:

“…anyways emo is not something u want to be u just are and u hate it but u cant not be emo if u already r…”

You cannot argue with that logic.

You’re Reading

Here’s a good sign that your reputation for ever reading a book (instead of, say, watching reality television, mindlessly clicking random html pages on the “inter-web”, biting your fingernails, staring vacantly off into space or practically anyfuckingthing else) is severely lacking:

The other night I was laying in bed reading a book when my wife turned to me and pointed a mocking finger as she said, “huh huh, you’re reading,” and then turned back to her own book.