Click images for desktop size: "Velocity" by Jan Vic The weekend.
My friend got out of of seminar so she got an extra day off. We had fun. We cooked mee krob together.
If you don't know mee krob involves deep frying rice noodles and stuff. All the oil made me sort of sick but it was still enjoyable as was the whole day. Sometimes its nice to have a day where very little is accomplished and all there is is peace.
She got to play some on her resuscitated Powerbook. Mucho disappointment over all that was lost. Tempered with the vague thrill of, "Now I'll set this thing up right!"
One thing she's doing that I like is turning all of her dock and folder icons into "Pooch Cafe" icons. Poncho is tres cool. For Safari (Mac's web browser) she even found a surfing Poncho!
Even though the Powerbook doesn't have enough juice to run Leopard, Tiger (OSX 10.4.11 - I love goonie numbers) is still very rock solid and robust.
She's having some fun.
I also spent the day doing storm recovery work. This basically was picking up dog feces and throwing things at trees to knock the fallen branches free so they don't fall and whack a dog in its noggin.
I had the iPod on and realized I'm out of new music. That's not a bad thing at all. It means that I get to listen to a whole lot of my favorites, songs I neglected in my fear of missing the next great tune.
I like pop. I like bubblegum a lot. Bubblegum was a 60's kind of music dedicated to making the little girls scream and shout. Its the same energy the Pice Girls tried to callously and shallowly politicize with their bogus "Girl Power" trip.
The Ramones did a few klazzik bubble gum covers! Did them well too.
No one has ever covered the 1910 Fruitgum Company's "The Train". I like the track a lot. Alongside The Rare Breed's "Beg Borrow And Steal" you get a decent image of bubblegum and an interesting view of how the 60's viewed women in the throes of the dawn of feminism. Meaning they ignored it so well they made sure it was inevitable.

Click images for desktop size: "Women's Figure" Of course any "movement" in music had its follower's who barely had a clue of what the sound was all about. The nice thing about bubble gum was that the genre is itself was so vacuous that even its most vapid practitioners could produce cool, catchy little bouncy numbers, like Daddy Dewdrop's "Chick A Boom" and The Buchanan Brothers "Medicine Man". Songs that had no pretensions other than to make people dance about and earn a few dollars are always welcome in my book.
Part of bubble gum's appeal is how nuts it made the hippies with its crass commercialism and how furious it made the "serious" players who were envious of the genre's wide play and popularity. Most of those serious musicians I knew were into playing authentic blues . . . singing about their life picking cotton in the LA River Delta . . . I guess.
Its fun seeing someone dead serious get spluttery and red faced about something that is by its own definition totally insubstantial.
And there's always surf music. Paul Johnson's DuoTones project is still awesome. Johnson was one of the originals. His "Mr Moto" is an awesome klazzik tune. But what he does with the old surf standard "Baja" is a tour de force.
I've known a lot of good guitarists who couldn't get the sync between right and left hand playing and palm muting working on this tune. I've even seen a couple of guitarists rig a mute out of a handkerchief to avoid having to contend with this trickiness and this was on ELECTRIC guitars with skinny necks, low action and slinky strings! That Johnson does it on an acoustic steel string is a frightening testament to virtuosity.
Today I predict a good day. Rotten weather but a good day.
I got some coupons in the mail. Big sales at THREE different pet stores!! Okay, I think shopping for dog toys is valid and IMPORTANT FUN!
Then my friends parents invited us to dinner! FREE FOOD justifies spending money on puppy toys!
Then there's that coupon for half off "Glow In The Dark" miniature golf . . .