iPod

I got a Nano iPOD the other day. What a pain getting it to work. It hardly comes with any instructions. All you get is "good luck getting it to work." I got the music on to the iPod with no problem. Once it was on there, I couldn't find it. There's no instruction telling you how to work the wheel. It took me over a half hour to find where the music was on the iPod. So, I find the music. Now I want to make a playlist. It already comes with a playlist. I couldn't get the music into the playlist that came with the iPod. Even dragging the songs didn't work. So I called up my friend. She told me to hit the "plus" sign on the bottom left of the screen, that will make a playlist. How was I suppose to know that. All there is a "plus" sign, doesn't say, "playlist" under it. Finally I make a "Bob Dylan" playlist and drag the songs to it. After about an hour, I'm getting the basics down. Now I want to find the volume. I can't figure out how to make it louder. This was another twenty minutes. After about an hour and a half, I got it working.

When you download iTunes, it also downloads Quicktime to you computer. I didn't want Quicktime, cause I didn't need it. I don't like to have stuff on the computer if I don't need it. I uninstall it. Then I go to hit the iTunes icon on the computer and it says I need Quicktime to make it work. It tells me to uninstall iTunes, then reinstall it. Now I got it working. Then I got to work and my friend say it also has a camera to it. Don't they tell you this stuff when you buy it.

What the store should do is when you buy it, they should send over a seven year old to set it up for you. They could do it in seconds!

The Lady In The Wall

About a month ago I had my bathroom done. They ripped every thing out and started over. I was going to have one of those shower kits put up in the tub, but the guy who was doing the bathroom showed me some nice tile. I went with the tile and it looks a lot better. Couple of weeks ago I’m taking a shower and notice this tile. It got a face in it. It’s kind of funny taking a shower knowing that there’s a face looking at you.

Tattoos

Used to be when I was young, only tough guys had tattoos. Now everybody is getting them. I see a lot of girls wearing them. To me, it’s a turnoff. Whenever I see a girl with a tattoo, I think they would look a lot better without them.

A lot of people get them for attitude. They get them and they think they’re tough. They walk around, “look at me.” They’re gonna be in serious trouble when they find out the tattoos can’t fight (lol).

I was in Dunkin’ Donuts the other day. This lady walks in with a baby carriage and couple of small kids. She has the barbwire tattoo around her arm and some kind of tribal thing on her lower back. Now, this must have look cool when she was young, but when your yelling (in the store) “Bobby, don’t touch that, Nancy get over here, Tim put that down,” you don’t look so cool. Your starting to look like your mother, and that’s not cool. Who want’s to be like their parents (lol).

Antiquités

I was reading one of these upscale "Homes" magazines at work the other night. These houses are really nice and the rooms are unbelievable. One thing I don't understand about rich people. They fix up their homes really nice then put junk in it.

I saw this picture of a dining room. Looked great, only thing is they had this old table and chairs. They call it antiquities. I call it junk. The paint is peeling off the the table and chairs. I looked at that picture and the first thing I though was, "that table needs a good paint job."

Another picture I saw was of a kitchen. Marble floors, stainless steel stove and old beat up cabinets. I know, the cabinets are antiquities, with the paint hanging off them and the rusted handles.

If I had a lot of money and bought a new, big house, I'd want all new stuff in there, not something that needs a paint job.

Frank Zappa - "Lather"

Frank Zappa got really mad at what the record company did to his album. Good thing he's not around to see what I did to the album cover.
BTW, that's a cow if you couldn't tell.

Lebron James

No class. All that money and he's a low life. Didn't even have the consideration to tell The Cavs that he's not going to sign with them. It's all about me, I'm gonna let everybody hang.

ESPN was showing a video the other night of people in Cleveland crying when King James made his decision. Let me tell you something, they guy was there for seven years and didn't win a ring. Not only that but he gave up in the playoffs. The Cavs are going to be better off without him and have more team play.

It's So Hard

First let me say Mike Douglas was a cool kind of guy. He would have all these Rock musicians on his show and treat them with respect. He had Frank Zappa on the show and was asking him stuff like "What type of Classical Music do you listen to."

I remember Miles Davis on his show. This was back in the early 1970's, I come home from High School, turn on the Mike Douglas Show and there's the strangest music I ever heard play. It was really awful. It was so bad I had to watch the whole thing cause it was fasternating.

Mike Douglas had John and Yoko as Guest Host for a week. One day they had Chuck Berry and John Lennon do a Berry song together. This video is a song off the "Imagine" album. He has the New York band, "Elephants Memory" backing him. Deep down, Lennon was always a Rocker.

Concerts

Why would somebody go to a concert in a football stadium and sit in the very last row? You can't see nothing, maybe they'll have monitors if your lucky. Hopefully the sound will be decent. So why do they go? Because they're young and stupid.

"We got nothing better to do today, so lets go and hangout with 70,000 other people that like "U2". It'll kill the day.

I'm not saying that to be young and stupid is a bad thing. It could be a lot of fun. Your only young once. Don't be stupid forever.

Grateful Dead

My friend’s brother took this pic. It was around the time of the “Blues For Allah” album. They did this one show at Golden Gate Park. After this show The Dead started touring again.

My friend gave this to another friend of mine and I traded her something for it.

You can tell that my friend’s brother developed the pic by the ragged border around the pic.

Farts

Couple of weeks ago I got transferred to a different store for a week. They were doing a big reset there and they took two people from each store to help out for a week. The first day nobody knows one another, so time is spent asking what store you come from and who’s the boss there.

The first day we’re all working and somebody would cut a fart. Nobody would admit to it. Then as we go to know each other during the week, whenever somebody would fart, they would take credit for it and be proud of it. The last day, everybody was taking credit for one fart.

It’s funny the way guys interact with one another. At first everybody was trying to be polite, then by the end of the week, everybody was taking credits for farts, insulting one another and having a good time.

The World Cup

I was watching some of the “World Cup” yesterday. I knew The Netherlands wasn’t gonna win. I’m not big on Soccer, but the game is like Hockey. It seem to me that The Netherlands was playing a trap (don’t know if that the official name). Keep the ball in their zone, catch Spain off guard and hope they get a break away and score. All they had to do is score one goal they try to play keep away the rest of the game. The Netherlands were lucky that Spain didn’t score, cause they had their chances. Anytime you keep the ball in your zone, all it takes is one mistake and it’s over.

Art and Music

I plan on painting all the album covers I have. I have a bout 1,000 CD's and albums combined. It's just a matter of how long can I live? I would hate to be 94 years old working on the last painting and croak right before I put the last letter of the album title on.

Pithecanthropus Erectus

From AMG:

Review

by Steve Huey

Pithecanthropus Erectus was Charles Mingus' breakthrough as a leader, the album where he established himself as a composer of boundless imagination and a fresh new voice that, despite his ambitiously modern concepts, was firmly grounded in jazz tradition. Mingus truly discovered himself after mastering the vocabularies of bop and swing, and with Pithecanthropus Erectus he began seeking new ways to increase the evocative power of the art form and challenge his musicians (who here include altoist Jackie McLean and pianist Mal Waldron) to work outside of convention. The title cut is one of his greatest masterpieces: a four-movement tone poem depicting man's evolution from pride and accomplishment to hubris and slavery and finally to ultimate destruction. The piece is held together by a haunting, repeated theme and broken up by frenetic, sound-effect-filled interludes that grow darker as man's spirit sinks lower. It can be a little hard to follow the story line, but the whole thing seethes with a brooding intensity that comes from the soloist's extraordinary focus on the mood, rather than simply flashing their chops. Mingus' playful side surfaces on "A Foggy Day (In San Francisco)," which crams numerous sound effects (all from actual instruments) into a highly visual portrait, complete with honking cars, ringing trolleys, sirens, police whistles, change clinking on the sidewalk, and more. This was the first album where Mingus tailored his arrangements to the personalities of his musicians, teaching the pieces by ear instead of writing everything out. Perhaps that's why Pithecanthropus Erectus resembles paintings in sound -- full of sumptuous tone colors learned through Duke Ellington, but also rich in sonic details that only could have come from an adventurous modernist. And Mingus plays with the sort of raw passion that comes with the first flush of mastery. Still one of his greatest.

Mind Games

From AMG:

After the hostile reaction to the politically charged Sometime in New York City, John Lennon moved away from explicit protest songs and returned to introspective songwriting with Mind Games. Lennon didn't leave politics behind -- he just tempered his opinions with humor on songs like "Bring on the Lucie (Freda Peeple)," which happened to undercut the intention of the song. It also indicated the confusion that lies at the heart of the album. Lennon doesn't know which way to go, so he tries everything. There are lovely ballads like "Out of the Blue" and "One Day (At a Time)," forced, ham-fisted rockers like "Meat City" and "Tight A$," sweeping Spectoresque pop on "Mind Games," and many mid-tempo, indistinguishable pop/rockers. While the best numbers are among Lennon's finest, there's only a handful of them, and the remainder of the record is simply pleasant. But compared to Sometime in New York City, as well as the subsequent Walls and Bridges, Mind Games sounded like a return to form.

4th Of July Fireworks

Every year that have the 4th Of July Fireworks on the Great South Bay. Every year the radio broadcast the fireworks. Am I missing something here? Doesn't it being on the radio kind of take away from the excitement of seeing it. Hearing a bunch of boom, boom booms is as exciting as hearing a drum solo.