Palin by Comparison

Forget about the experience question. Leave aside any concerns that the pick was a pander to far-right social conservatives and/or a cozen to women voters.

There are three things to know about Sarah Palin (the far right picture is her as Miss Congeniality Alska in 1984) that should instantly and automatically disqualify her from the vice presidency:

1. Palin didn't tell anyone she was pregnant with her latest child -- not even most of her family or staff or government colleagues -- until she was nearly to term.

2. Palin didn't tell her children that she had accepted the veep slot on the Republican ticket until mere hours before she took the podium in Dayton with John McCain last Friday morning.

3. Palin's latest child was born with serve disabilities related to Down syndrome, a condition that could not have been made better by Palin's obvious concerns with keeping her weight down during her preganacy or her insistence on delaying delivery for nearly a day after her water broke. She was back at work three days after the child was born, and now she is hitting the presidential campaign trail. (BTW: Mr. Palin, oil-field worker and commercial fisherman, is not a stay-at-home father.)

Children are often ignored -- or worse, exploited in the name of -- career and political advancement, but what Palin has been doing and continues to do constitutes negligence at best and abuse at worst. Who doesn't tell their children they're running for national office? What kind of mother who has the ability to do so doesn't take time off after giving birth to make sure her child is doing as well as possible?

This is not sexism. If Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine had been named the Democratic vice presidential candidate, I'd have the same concerns that he was looking after the best interest of his children. He appears to be doing so. And are the Obamas making sure their kids are doing okay? Aside from letting them stay up way too late each night last week and using them as props a couple times, I'd have to say they are.

For all of her pro-life bona fides, Palin's actions paint a picture of a person who is putting just about everything before her family, especially the welfare of her children. That makes her a hypocrite in extemis, and we already have enough of those in Washington.

Even if a voter could get past all the troubling antiparental behavior, he or she will then have to confront that fact that Palin has been active in Alska politics for the past 18 years and has never once called for the construction of a fence along the Canadian border. Palin is soft on Cannucks, which is something that simply cannot be allowed to go unpunished. How much longer must those 1,538 miles go unmilitarized before someone draws a line in snow?

Talkin' About a Dope-olution

Album: Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman, 1988

Best Track: "Across the Lines"

Lasting Memory: I had a fast car, fast enough to go 110 mph before I slowed down out of terror and concern about getting pulled over. I had to sell that 1972 Pontiac LeMans to raise money for college tuition for the spring semester of 1993. It was a tough but necessary choice I made to give up something then to make sure I could have better things in the future.

Life is like that, and adults understand this. Adults don't always act in accordance with that knowledge, but that is a the subject for another day.

What I'm about to start riffing on is how adults all too often go out of their way to pretend that they don't know that current pleasures and luxuries can be done without if there is more to be gained by forgoing them.

And, yes, I'm talking about elective politics.

As I've been watching the Democratic National Convention, I've found myself shaking my head at hearing over and over again, "We can fix all your problems if you put all your trust and resources into government." I know I will hear the same thing next week from the Republicans during their convention, with the slight variation of "... and we won't tax you to pay for any of it."

I ask you: Who I should I hold in more contempt, the politicians who can bring themselves to speak the lie or the delegate on the floor who force themselves to believe the lie? Like the ne'er-do-well vehicle owner and the delusional baby's mama of "Fast Car," both are are to blame for the mess in which they find themselves.

At least "Fast Car" ends with a glimmer of hope when the woman tells the guy to take his car and "keep on driving." The Democratic National Convention is sounding notes of hope, as well. The reasons those notes are sounding discordant to me, though, is that the hope being expressed is desperate.

We should all vote for "change" because no one is better off now than he or she was four ago. The podium speakers and the delegates are "Talkin' About a Revolution" without seeming to recognize that revolutions demand enormous and usually irredeemable costs. They fail to acknowledge that change can be for the worse as easily as it can be for the better. They can't seem to wrap their minds around the fact that 99 percent of people succeed or fail despite of what elected officials and bureaucrats do. They assume that literary everything is awful and that only having Democrats in charge can make the sun shine again, put food on people's plates, get rid of dogs' fleas.

Again, the Republicans will be hammering home the same messages next week, asking voters "Baby Can I Hold You"? and trying to make those same voters feel ashamed if they decline the offer.

I'm not naive or a Bush apologist or someone prone to saying what G.K. Chesterton considered to be the greatest abdication of patriotism and rationality, "My country, right or wrong." But I do know that not everything in the United States is shot to hell. I know that I AM better off than I was four years ago because I took chances to change my job and my living situation that paid off. I know that if I had failed, I wouldn't have blamed the government.

I know that the Patriot Act needs to be abolished, and I know that narcotics need to be legalized. I know that the Democrats can't keep people who take bad loans under false pretenses from losing their houses. I know that the Republicans can't rid the streets of crime, even if they do succeed in throwing more than a few women in jail for crimes they confess to "For My Lover."

I know that politicians are lying because their lips are moving. I don't know "Why." I just know that neither Obama nor McCain will be do much to change any of it. I just hope that whoever wins November's election doesn't make things worse.

Up Next: The Kinks, Live at Kelvin Hall, 1983 (Spanish cassette reissue of the 1967 album)

A Mainstream Contrarian Thought

Barack Obama finally picked his vice presidential running mate. Joe Biden shores up Obama's foreign policy bona fides and also gives the Obama coterie a sorely needed old-time Washington hand and insider.

Missed by most, but not all, reporters and commentaters over the long weeks of guessing about who would be Obama's veep is that what Biden brings to the 2008 democratic ticket is exactly what Dick Cheney brought to the 2000 Republican ticket.

The similarities between Biden and Cheney are much more than superficial. They both come from small-delegation states that no one ever thinks much about. They both have very definite views on what the world order should be. They are both significantly older and more influential among decision makers than their presidents. They both have odd, even off-putting, smiles.

I'm willing to give Biden the benefit of the doubt on not being pure evil like Cheney is, but that's only because Biden is a Catholic. As a coreligionist, I can't admit that any Catholic has ever done anything wrong ever. That's one of the oaths the Vatican makes us all swear in Latin.

Still, for all you future Obama voters -- a group that may include me when push comes to shoving that key card into the voting machine on November 4 -- know that a vote for Obama as president is very likely to be a vote for Biden as vizier.

Start doing your homework now. (Yes, I read the link. Mostly just to spite anyone who would bring that up. I refused to actually learn anything useful. So there.)

Dreaming of Future Nostalgia

Album: The Kinks, Greatest Hits, 1968

Best Track: "A Dedicated Follower of Fashion"

Lasting Memory: By my best recollection, I recorded my cassette copy of this 1968 Kinks greatest hits collection off my mother's copy of the album pictured at left during the summer of 1985.

Looking back, it's kind of remarkable that my Mom owned this album. It would have come out when she was raising two 2-year-old girls and pregnant with two more girls. Also, my Dad would have been on deployment with the Navy for most of the year. She had more important things to do 40 years ago than run out to the record store. Maybe she received the album as a gift.

However she got it, she still had the Kinks Greatest Hits when I was ready to hear it and fall in love with it in the mid-1980s. She had probably 300 other records, too, ranging from the original cast recordings of Man of La Mancha and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum ... to an autographed copy of Meet the Beatles and a sealed copy of Charlie Parker's One Night in Birdland.

My siblings and I never got around to appreciating most of those disks, a majority of which Mom picked up while working at Capitol Records in New York City. The ones we did play, we routinely destroyed. (What would that Beatles album sleeve be worth now? Damn.)

A handful of the records, we had the foresight to preserve on cassette, like I did with this Kinks compilation.

I hadn't listened to my tape for probably 20 years. What would be the point, since classic rock and oldies radio stations still have the Kinks in heavy rotation?

Here's the point: The Kinks kick ass. They kick so much ass, my neighbor is probably rubbing her butt right now. You're probably sore in the hindquarters just from reading about the Kinks, they kick so much ass.

And what is truly amazing to me is that "You Really Got Me" was recorded in 1964. 1964! Did anything on the radio -- or anywhere in the world, for that matter -- sound like the riff to "You Really Got Me" in 1964? Where did that come from, and what must it have been like to hear the song for the first time in 1964 or 1965?

The first question's answer is part of rock 'n' roll histo-mythology: Dave Davies got mad at his brother Ray, got drunk, and carved up his guitar amp with a straight razor. The fuzztone was born. Marry that to the power chord, which surf guitarist had appropriated from Chicago bluesmen about a decade earlier, and you've got the perfect two-plus minutes of rock nirvana that is "You Really Got Me."

The second question's answer is probably, "It felt like hearing a good song for the first time." History doesn't happen in the moment. By definition, and with a deeper truth than any tautology should have, history is made by time. And, boy, have the singles the Kinks released between 1964 and 1968 stood the test of time and proved themselves to be historically significant.

I have a theory that every great rock band has wanted to be the Kinks. I'll expand on that a couple of posts from now. For the time being, just take a look at the track list on the cover of the album picture above. For the second time in this mini essay, permit me to type, damn (Read: Da-DAMN!).

Also, to amuse yourself, click on the following links and start building your own band genealogies that start with the Kinks at the root of the tree:

"A Well Respected Man"

"A Dedicated Follower of Fashion"

"Something Better Beginning"

"All Day and All of the Night"

Up Next: Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman, 1988 (missed this one earlier)

You Call This Progress(ive)?

Album: Jethro Tull, M.U.--The Best of Jethro Tull, 1972-1975 (cassette reissue)

Best Track: "Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)"; but really all of side 2, especially "A Passion Play Edit"


Lasting Memory: I need add nothing to this

Don't want to be a fat man
People would think that I was
Just good fun.

Would rather be a thin man
I am so glad to go on being one.

Too much to carry around with you,
No chance of finding a woman who
Will love you in the morning and all the night time too.

Don't want to be a fat man,
Have not the patience to ignore all that.
Hate to admit to myself half of my problems
Came from being fat.

Wont waste my time feeling sorry for him,
I seen the other side to being thin.
Roll us both down a mountain
And I'm sure the fat man would win.

Ian Anderson is the not-at-all mad genius behind the band Jethro Tull. His weight has yo-yoed over the decades, but as the above lyrics make clear, he never really minded being heavy. He even saw the important upside of a little extra poundage.

That pragmatic view -- making suet out of trimmings -- informed all of Jethro Tull's music. Walking the broad lines between English music hall, traditional Scottish folk, and 1970s prog rock, Anderson's Tull decided fun trumped all. Even an extremely dark song like "Aqualung" mostly took the piss rather than dwell on the horrors of pedophilia. And that's not easy to do.

Another difficult thing Anderson and his revolving cast of bandmates was adept at doing was making lyrics that were so deep they're meaningless meaningful again. For me, the best example of this unique skill came in the form of "Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)."

Check out these lyrics:

Meanwhile back in the year one
When you belonged to no-one
You didn’t stand a chance son
If your pants were undone.

‘Cause you were
Bred for humanity and sold to society
One day you’ll wake up in the present day
A million generations removed from expectations
Of being who you really want to be.

Skating away
Skating away
Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

So as you push off from the shore,
Won't you turn your head once more
And make your peace with everyone?
For those who choose to stay,
Will live just one more day
To do the things they should have done.

And as you cross the wilderness, spinning in your emptiness:
You feel you have to pray.
Looking for a sign
That the universal mind
Has written you into the passion play.

Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

And as you cross the circle line
The ice-wall creaks behind
You’re a rabbit on the run.
And the silver splinters fly in the corner of your eye
Shining in the setting sun.

Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story’s
Too damn real and in the present tense?
Or that everybody’s on the stage
And it seems like
You’re the only person sitting in the audience?

Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

These are the kinds of things 15-year-old high school sophomores say after they had their third beer for the first time. These lyrics boil down to "So what if we're all, like, just living on an electron in an atom inside some bigger animal, man?"

And you know what, I still think they're cool as hell.

Up Next: The Kinks, Greatest Hits, 1968

P.S. Because I know it's as tough for you to say goodbye to Jethro Tull as it is for me, here's one last link.

Beer in the Soda Machine

Preface: My previous two posts have drawn objections from my sister, Clair. This can mean only one thing: I'm not being offensive enough. I mean, c'mon! I've flatly stated that some relatives of mine couldn't be photographed because they had outstanding warrants. I've all but stated that all female singers of the past century have been less talented than all male singers. What do I have to do get a rise out of the rest of you people!? It's like I'm just typing for my own amusement, here, and no one else's.

Oh, wait ...

Thanks for stopping by. Pull up a cursor. Can I get you a link? There'll be plenty.


Album: Indigo Girls, Nomads, Indians, Saints, 1990

Best Track: "1 2 3"

Lasting Memory: I have always associated the second best song on Nomads, Indians, Saints, "Hammer and a Nail," with the Muppets. This is a compliment, and I am not alone in making this mental link. Who doesn't like the Muppets? Commies, that's who. Commies like Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, who are the, um, Indigo Girls.

That's me being unfair, again. I'm sure the Indigo Girls like most of the Muppets and only really loathe Sam the Eagle because he is a God-fearing American.

NIM is a much more enjoyable, and a much more lyrically and sonically accomplished, collection
of songs than the Indigo Girls' debut. As proof of this, I offer "1 2 3." The womyn can't quite get away from their sophomoric self-seriousness, though, as "Pushing the Needle too Far" shows.

All in all, listening to NIM was quite a pleasant surprise. I even dug some of the slower, Sapphic rock stuff like "The Girl With the Weight of the World in Her Hands."

This, and the fact that the cassette for Social Distortion was the one that had been in the NIM box, is what prompted me to title this post with a lyric from a Ramones song:

Everybody was cranky
Even the maids were mean
We ran into a miracle
There was beer in the soda machine

So try every soda machine, metaphorically. It's what Sam would want you to do. It's The American Way.

Up Next: Jethro Tull, M.U.--The Best of Jethro Tull, 1972-1975 (cassette reissue)

Indigo Girls Sing Indigo Girls on "Indigo Girls" for Indigo Girl in All of Us ... Indigo Girls!

Album: Indigo Girls, Indigo Girls, 1989

Best Track: "Closer to Fine"

Fun Fact: The word "the" does not appear anywhere on the label of this album. Well done, womyn. In honor of your difficult achievement, I have omitted all the "thes" from the title to this post. Now, if you want a real challenge, try putting nothing but the word "the" on an album cover.

Lasting Memory: To share more of a personal failing than a lasting memory, I don't really care much for the female singing voice. With only a handful of exceptions who come immediately to mind, such Edith Piaf, early Aretha Franklin, Alison Krauss, and this one song by Brenda Holloway, I would almost always prefer to hear a male singer's interpretation of a song.

I don't have the education in audiology or music theory to explain my extremely strong preference for the male singing voice, but I can relate that one of the reasons I've taken so long to post about the Indigo Girls is that I just didn't feel like give Indigo Girls a close listen. Really listening to the album seemed like it would be a drag.

My concern was fully realized, I'm afraid. But the problem isn't so much the Indigo Girls' sound. Rather, much as later-period Melissa Etheridge, all of the lamentable career of Ani DiFranco, and too many other musicians to name -- I'm looking at you, Steve Earle, what with your Jerusalem and such -- the Indigo Girls let their concept take over from their execution.

I posted about gimmicks and their malcontents a little while ago when writing about House of Pain's debut album. A concept differs from a gimmick in that a concept should drive an artist to produce, and what is produced should be better as a result of being consciously created to convey the concept. A gimmick is an end in itself that by its very presence overwhelms any statement an artist may be trying to make beyond, "Hey, look at me and my gimmick."

What the Indigo Girls are selling is the concept of strong-minded, alternatively lifestyled, voice-of-a-generation's womyn who make pretty songs about hard subjects. That concept is HORRIBLE. Sure it moves units, but spend a little time thinking about anyone you personally know who is self-identified as strong-minded, alternatively lifestyled, voice-of-a-generation-y.

How long did it take you to get annoyed, crave a bloody steak and a shot of whiskey, and start listening to some Reverend Horton Heat? For me, it was probably about three-quarters of the way through the very first time I listened to Indigo Girls.

I don't even disagree with what the Indigo Girls have to say about how difficult it can be to make the final transition to adulthood ("Kid Fears") or how differences between people don't have to escalate to distrust and varying kinds of violence ("Tried to Be True"). I even do like their biggest hit, "Closer to Fine," when I can pretend it's just a folk-pop ditty with nothing more to say than that they kind of thought their college professors were pretentious. Where they lose me is when they have to force "Closer to Fine" into being about the very search for self.

That's way before this opens "Love's Recovery":

During the time of which I speak it was hard to turn the other cheek
To the blows of insecurity
Feeding the cancer of my intellect the blood of love soon neglected
Lay dying in the strength of its impurity

[And .... Pause for drop-jawed incredulity.]

Four pages of comments under the linked YouTube video for "Love's Recovery" praise the song for its beauty, for how well it reflects real people's lives, and how great the lyrics are.

[And .... Pause for drop-jawed incredulity.]

What do I know? I do know that I own the Indigo Girls' second album. Maybe I'll find less on that cassette to annoy me. Wish me luck.

Up Next: Indigo Girls, Nomads, Indians, Saints, 1990

A Wedding Remembered

My brother got married last Saturday.

Just in time for James and Sara's one-week anniversay, I am pleased to be able to recreate the happy event in jaround 10,000 words.*

First things first: That's me on the right. The City of Virginia Beach, in all its beneficiance and wisdom, granted me a 24-hour, limited justice of the peace license. I figured it was incumbent upon me to dress the part of an incumbent.


To the left are James and Sara. Cute couple, no? And can you tell there was no theme for the wedding?


To get God's attention and make sure He was completely down with a wedding being performed by me in the special-events room of a beach-front bar, James' sister, Clair, began the ceremony with a reading from the Letter of Paul to the Colossians (3:12-19).


James and Sara also requested a special blessing that has been adapted from the Apache commitment ceremony. Sara's sister, Kara, who also stood as Sara's maid of honor, delivered that blessing. Several people in the room were crying by this point. James was not one of them. If "permagrin" were a word, then I would use that word to describe James' expression throughout the entire evening.

Sara, however, was on the verge of tears the entire time. Tears of joy, mind you, but stil ....



The rings were exchanged to the tune of the traditional Catholic vows, the kiss was kissed, I read the second half of the Irish Blessing, and then it was time for the toast given by James' father and best man.

The wedding was strictly a family affair, so here are the family pictures.

That is James and his lot above. For the first time ever in my recollection we were outnumbered by another family, namely the Smiddles and Cales. There were Lambs and other kin to James who attended the wedding but who aren't pictured here. Maybe the warrants against those folks will expire before the next wedding, and then we'll be able to get them in the photos.

Just in case that's not enough family, James also married himself into being a father-type person because Sara has two daughters, Gina (right) and Kristan.

In keeping with Lamb family tradition, the ceremony and reception were seamles and joy-filled only to be followed by minor difficulties. James woke up Sunday morning with his back gone out again, and I was pulled over on my drive home Saturday night. Try as he did, the cop who stopped me was unable to make a case against me for drunk driving because I hadn't really been drinking and my breathalyzer test returned a reading of 0.0. I had inadvertently switched my headlights off, but I didn't even get ticketed for that. Sheesh.

All in all, then, a grand time was had last Saturday by and for two grand people. James and Sara, may you have so many weekly anniversaries that you get tired of counting them.

* Readers will please bear in mind that each pictures equals 1,000 words.

Many thanks to my brother-in-law Scott for these pictures.

Sometimes, I Wonder if I've Been Into That Candy

I will resume regular posting either Friday or Saturday. The past two weeks have been conumed by work and a wedding. Congratulations, James & Sara! Somebody e-mail me some pictures, and I'll blog about that happy event, too.

For the time being, ponder this news item about lead-laced candy, as I have been doing since early this morning.

Mostly what I've been wondering is this: "If state and federal health officials succeed in getting all of the leaded candy off the market, won't kids have to start drinking STP to silence the knocking and pinging in their brains? Is this all just another conspiracy involving Big Oil?"

What's got you ruminating? Feel free to share your personal posers below. The more assinine your cosmic questions, the more likely I am to have a spittle-flecked, yet suprisingly plausible, answer.

(Shakes Head, Worries About Humankind)

These are an ctual headlines for actual news reports about actual medical studies:

Chronic Body-wide Pain Prevalent, Impacts Work

Asthmatic Kids Face Obstacles to Getting Fit

Should we just start watching Idiocracy as a documentary about the future?

I have wanted to keep this blog about me and my music collection, but stupidity of this magnitude must be inveighed against. So, "Veigh!", I say. And will, unfortunately, say again.