Death of a blog

Change is good, so I'm starting fresh. If you want to keep following the great adventure of my life, turn yourself to the Davestown Gazette for a cracking good time!

No fooling: something everyday in April

In an effort to write more, I am going to post something every day this fine month of April. While I will attempt to be as fresh and original as possible, I cannot rule out that some blog memes will step in as filler material.

Since Oliver had his own feature a few weeks ago, here's a little piece on my other cat, Emma. Three years ago, we said goodbye to our old cat, Ivan. I insisted on a "period of mourning" before getting the next cat. Three months later, we found a little calico kitten hiding in the rose bushes behind the house. It turns out she was a full-grown cat in dire need of food and flea medicine. As far as we can tell, she is probably eight years old now, just one less than Oliver. Every night she insists on sleeping right against my chest, which is cute, but not exactly comforting during those warm summer nights. Probably the cutest thing she does is "squeak" when you pick her up, hence her nickname "Squeakers". Right now she is sleeping, after what seemed like hours of banging on the closet door (there's nothing in there) or rubbing her face on sharp corners. It's really distracting when you're trying to do your homework.

Emma is painfully camera shy (she goes into hysterics when she hears the zooming of the lens), but I managed to get this one on my cell phone:

Fun fact: All of our cats' names start with vowels. At first this was a coincidence, but as of Emma, it has been intentional. Who's next? Alvin? Ursula? Yentl?

Garfield minus Garfield strikes again!

I have nothing original to say right now, so I turn it over to the fine folks at Garfield Minus Garfield. Who knew that cutting the main character out of his own comic strip would produce an entirely new phenomenon that works on a completely different level?

You just have to be library-tough to work in my field.

Ten years later

Today I can indulge in a person milestone of ten solid years of work. I did experience one scary month of unemployment following a relocation, but I prefer to think of that as a hiccup rather than a full disruption. Ten years ago I was twenty-two and starting my first day of work at Kepler's Books and Magazines in Menlo Park. I'm so jaded now it is hard to image being excited about working a cash register forty hours per week, but it was a place I wanted to work and the thrill of having a real full-time job, no matter how low-paying, was almost tangible. We have all scattered to the wind for the most part. I wonder where most of them are now. Some are still there, one is no longer of this world and the rest...I might have a stray e-mail address lying around if I feel like dropping them a line. I don't think that ten years ago I would have

In other anniversary news, the Obama administration turns fifty days old this month. So how is Obama doing with all of those promises from the campaign trail? Here's his scorecard, as reported by PolitiFact. 19-2-2 is a score any sports team could be proud of, and politics is certainly one of the nastier sports out there. I agree with Cory Booker (the mayor of Newark, NJ) when he said on the Bill Maher show last Friday that we have the best president we could possibly ask for right now. Of course, I'm a shameless partisan. Sin embargo, it is good to keep this kind of news in mind when faced with the neverending chants of "no we can't."

The unkindest irony

People need libraries more than ever:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/28/recession.libraries/index.html

Local governments are bleeding their libraries dry:

http://www.tribstar.com/local/local_story_047233527.html
http://thebulletin.us/articles/2009/02/13/news/local_state/doc499502dceeefb016143206.txt

I respectfully disagree with the sentiment in the CNN article that this recession is a "boon" for libraries. This is a disaster for libraries. I have nothing against more patrons, but to cut library services knowing that people are relying more on their libraries to help them is simply irresponsible.

This represents misconceptions at their most painful:

• You don't cut police because they protect the citizenry from the bad guys.
• Firefighters are heros so they can't be cut, either.
• Librarians shush people and read books all day at taxpayer expense - CUT!

Along with slashing education, shuttering libraries is one the great components in the Dumbing Down of America. Cutting libraries and education may provide some immediate budget relief, but you also get the collateral damage of a dumber population causing a scarcity of ideas that could be used to save money without bloodshed down the road. Don't get me wrong: we need police and we need firefighters to protect us from the worst elements of society. But don't destroy the libraries and schools, and in doing so deny yourself the best elements of society in your community.

I live in an area that is well known for classic conservative thinking. The newspaper believes that their should be equity in pay between the private and public sector, and that public sector employees are overpaid. Again, librarians are a favorite target. We get lumped with bookstore clerks as "similar jobs" between the sectors. Having worked both sides, I can tell you this is a total joke. Bookstore clerks get hired based on the question "Can you work nights and weekends?" Librarians have to get a Masters degree in the field. Bookstore employees work with the collection their are given from some central brain elsewhere in the nation. Librarians need to assess the needs of their community and develop a collection that supports these needs. Bookstores want your money. I cannot imagine a community that reduces their libraries to the status of bookstores, or, even better, they close the libraries and let the bookstores provide. They are tearing out their own souls to save money. If your local library is no more than a Borders or Barnes & Noble, then your community has forfeited its cultural heart.

Attila reconsidered

RAWR! We are ***ATTILA***!!!

Monday marked my latest (and first for 2009) music acquisition, the suppressed, self-titled and only album by the band Attila from 1970. Most people have no idea what makes the lone Attila album so interesting, so I will clue you in: the notorious personnel. On drums: Jon Small, formerly of the Hassles. On everything else: William Martin Joel, also of the Hassles and prefers to be called "Billy". Yep, Attila was Billy Joel's "heavy metal" band.

First, some perspective: by “heavy metal” I don’t mean the opening act for Metallica, Slayer or Napalm Death. In 1970, the heaviest sounds around (that most people were aware of anyway) were coming from Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Jimi Hendrix. Attila was the natural progression from the garage and psychedelic output of the Hassles and many bands were moving into a much heavier direction. Joel pretty much does the work of three musicians with the kind of distorted Hammond sound he developed for the album. The discordant grinding sound at the beginning of "California Flash" is particularly good and the wash of static that slams into "Rollin' Home" is pretty cool, too. Small pulls off a few nice tempo switch-ups throughout the album, so his contributions should not be overlooked. The lyrics are pretty silly throughout, but I don't care; they are on par with a lot of other stuff being released at the time. Vocal delivery varies throughout, but I have to admit to this sick thrill I get hearing Billy Joel scream out "Jesus Christ!" (the exclamation, not the prayer) in "Wonder Woman". Really, though, look at the cover of this album and tell me that Joel and Small were out to a create a deadly serious piece of work. The whole thing is meant to be fun and relatively mindless, a point some people completely miss.

Critics hate this album. They hate it passionately and with a vengeance. Get a load of this review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine. I think much of this has to do with some kind of embarrassment that the "Piano Man" not behaving like the sensitive singer-songwriter we’ve come to know and love. Critics seem to be allergic to the different and uncharacteristic of the artist. Diehard Billy Joel fans probably don’t care for this kind of music, but for somebody who is indifferent to most of his output since 1971, listening to Attila gives me a new and more open-minded perspective of the man. (Oddly enough, allmusic.com stamped the album an "AMG Pick".)

Billy Joel HATES this album. He calls it "psychedelic bullshit" and has suppressed every track save an edit of "Amplifier Fire" that appears on the Billy Joel box set. Trying to dismiss the album, to me, feels like denying you pegged your pants in the 1980's and burning any pictures of yourself wearing eighties clothes, or refusing to admit that you said some dumb things to strangers when you were a little kid. Like physical growth, musical development is a series of phases and not all of them give us warm, fuzzy memories.

My take? If you want to find this album guilty of something, then press inconsistency charges. When I see a title like "Amplifier Fire Pt. 1: Godzilla" I expect a heavy slab of monster-grade hard rock, not a Jimmy Smith inspired instrumental. And yet "Amplifier Fire Pt. 2: March of the Huns" is exactly what "Godzilla" was not. It's either Jimmy Smith style music ("Brain Invasion") or hard-hitting drums and keys ("Rollin' Home", "Wonder Woman") and the two styles lead a somewhat uncomfortable coexistence.

I classify Attila with three other unusual listening experiences: (1) the self-titled album by Armageddon, which was ex-Yardbird Keith Relf’s final and heaviest hurrah, (2) Sam Gopal’s Dream, featuring Lemmy Kilmister, later just "Lemmy" of Motörhead, and any of the singles by Ronnie and the Prophets, the band fronted by Ronald Padovana, aka Ronnie James Dio, of Rainbow-Sabbath-Dio fame. I guess I'm a sucker for those "before/after they were famous" moments that put the entire musical output of an artist in a whole new light.

Oliver

Yesterday Oliver decided to brawl with something (cat, possum or other wild animal) and was hurt pretty bad. Frances found him yesterday evening curled up in his basket in an almost comatose state with big bite marks under his front arms. We decided not to chance it and Frances drove him to the emergency clinic. They gave her an eye-popping estimate of over $1000, which included blood work, x-rays, surgery etc. Egad! We decided to endure a painful night of confining a scared and confused animal with an "elizabethan" collar and have our own vet check him out in the morning. Let me tell you, this cat does not wear the collar well. Every time the collar brushed into something, he jumped, causing the collar to hit other things and scare him even more. I equate it to throwing a ping-pong ball into a room filled with mousetraps. Frances held him virtually the entire night, while I kept Emma, our other cat, away from him (the collar scared her too, and she wouldn't stop hissing). The next morning she took him to the vet and she learned, to our relief, that the wounds were not as serious as previously thought. Best of all, the collar came off. Now the fun part is keeping Oliver inside.

Oliver has always been a bit odd. Frances adopted him back in the summer of 2000 when he was a few weeks old. He was still in the last days of kittenhood when I first met him the following February. We aren't sure what kind of breeds he resembles; I say Balinese, Frances says Ragdoll. We started calling him "Boo" as a shortcut for "boo-boo" and now I think we use that name more than Oliver. He has had some housebreaking issues that might drive some to sell him on eBay, but we just can't resist his playfulness, expressiveness (he's a talker) and affection toward us. Therefore, we let him go between indoors and outdoors, which, unfortunately has led to some injuries, including what happened yesterday.

Our big question now is what to do going forward. We have tried to confine him in the past, but he either (1) breaks out of the room or (2) yowls until we can't stand it anymore. I could wall off the hole under the house where he most likely had his encounter, but I'm a little worried about trapping other animals under the house that could die and stink up the house. Any advice on how to curb an the freedom impulse of beloved pet with minimal agony? Please share!

Finally, I want to thank Frances for being such a great kitty-mom and our vet for not trying to scare us and soak us for a thousand dollars we don't have. Time like this make me realize how much we love our cats, even if they misbehave frequently. Now go read my friends' comic strip, Monsieur Chat and have a laugh.