She and I spent the entire holiday break together. It was one of the best breaks I’ve ever had.

We got to hang out with most of our loved ones, and made good plans for getting together soon with other members of our extended and far-flung tribe. Dinner with my sister and her boyfriend, an evening at Becca and John’s, time with Martha and Troyce and Megan. And so on. Lots of long days just being together.

But. She’d promised me that she’d complete a certain task for me, and it all came to a head the night before last. She spent a lot of time on it, but I was almost impossible to please.

Every time she thought she was done, I made her do it over, until it was just the way I wanted it to be. She was graceful about it, but it went late into the evening.

I thought she would put behind her any feelings she might have had about the process. But I was wrong.

We drove into Austin yesterday afternoon, and she cajoled me into going with her to her workplace. It should only take forty-five minutes, she said.

As soon as I entered the shop, I was surrounded by her co-workers. I knew that I couldn’t leave.

Within minutes, I was flat on my back and Rachael was bending over me with an implement that was sharp indeed.

I was brave. I didn’t cry or scream, or even flinch much. But it went on and on. For over two hours. I bled copiously. It’s entirely possible that I’ll be marked for life by this experience.
Read More »

Jody Rosen at Slate has a great article on the force of nature that was James Brown.

The obituaries that have appeared in the wake of Brown’s death yesterday at the age of 73 have sketched the milestones and curiosities of his life: his hardscrabble childhood in Georgia, where he was raised by an aunt who ran a brothel; his rise through the chitlin’ circuit; his marriages and arrests; his big hits, black pride anthems, and strange fondness for Richard Nixon. And his nicknames: “the Godfather of Soul,” “Soul Brother No. 1,” “Minister of Super Heavy Funk,” “the Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” “Mr. Dynamite.” No one who ever saw Brown in concert could doubt that he earned those titles. Even in his dotage, he led a band as tight as any in the world and executed his signature shimmies, slides, and splits in dance shoes buffed to a high gloss.

He was obviously a complicated person, and who knows? Maybe even an asshole. I don’t know. But I surely love what he did for American music. You can’t ask for a better legacy than that.

PS 2007 is almost upon us. Happy New Year, y’all!

(image via Slate)

Okay, if anybody is reading this has lots of snow experience, ya gotta understand that I was raised largely in Southeast Asia and Hawaii. Except for a stint in Germany and Indiana, I didn’t get much snow as a kid. Monsoons, yes. This is the most snow I’ve experienced at my own home since I’ve been an adult. Certainly the most we’ve gotten in Albuquerque since I’ve lived here. And yesterday, for the day of the year, it was a record. Period.

(My inlaws used to live at 8,000 feet in southern Colorado so I do know what “real” snow is like.)

The view from my Office
Read More »

I have a confession to make. I am stupidly fond of my country. Oh, not the way we usually are: arrogant, self-congratulatory, willfully dumb, and xenophobic. I love us in those rare moments when actually rise to the promise of our country. I guess the best example of that was during WWII, but even then we managed to incarcerate Japanese/American citizens and we ignored that pesky Concentration Camp problem until after the war. So my fondness is a mixed bag.

But there is one thing that I just can’t tolerate any more. I just can’t take singers adding extra notes to the national anthem. Honestly, I don’t give a tinker’s damn if you can sing like Maria Callas, stop adding freaking notes.

The Star Spangled Banner is a notoriously difficult piece to sing well. It covers an octave-and-a-half range. It jumps over that range with the wild abandon of the drinking song the melody was taken from. The lyrics are arcane and singers so regularly muff them that pre-recording the anthem at major sporting events is commonplace.

It’s a real act of ego to treat the national anthem like your personal tryout for “Cats.” It’s now de rigueur for anyone who performs the national anthem to act like it’s an opportunity to display their vocal chops. No, dude/dudette, you’re the three minute annoyance before the baseball game begins.

There has been only one singer to do justice to our National Anthem since this whole national-anthem-as-orgiastic-divafication scenario began. That’s Huey Lewis’ rendition from Superbowl XXXIX. He sang the living crap out of it – and with no extra notes. (Okay, Jimi Hendrix did do a bitching version that included some non-standard variations, but, he WASN’T SINGING. And his intent wasn’t exactly to display the beauty of the song.)

So, here’s the deal. You manage to sing the anthem straight — no trills, no runs, no cutesy verbal gymnastics at all — and maybe . . . maybe, we’ll let you get creative at some later date.
Read More »

Here’s a great website I just came across: Indexed, for “think[ing] a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math.”I picked the global warming graphic, since I just did a big hairy post on it, but there are lots there. Fun! And some with clever barbs buried in them.  Recommended.

… along with the rest of us.

To those of us paying attention to the science of global warming, this ominous announcement from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body of the world’s foremost scientists who study the various aspects of global warming, has been coming for a long time.

It isn’t official yet — and there is no doubt that the report writers will come under intense political pressure to water down their findings when they release it, early next year — but they are saying in their draft report that scientists are no longer confident that they have a handle on how bad the worst case scenario will be.

A draft version of the next report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is published, to worldwide consternation. It reveals that scientists are no longer able to put reliable upper limits on man-made heating of the atmosphere. Global warming – driven by industrial carbon emissions – could end up being far worse than previously predicted.

Read More »

Meteorologists are predicting seven inches for Albuquerque and perhaps fourteen or more for Santa Fe.

It was a 24-hour roadside diner. They’re still out there. Some of them are chain restaurants, but that doesn’t diminish their 24-hour-dinerness. It may even enhance it, since you can walk into any one of them anywhere at any time and find yourself a member of the same motley crew. Scruffy but lovable Regulars. Truck drivers, of course. Cowboys. Assorted random travelers.

All of them hungry. Not always for food. But hungry just the same.

Late at night, the day after Christmas, we pulled off the highway and stopped at a diner with a sign in the window that said “OPEN NOW.” The sign seemed to imply that the place was brand-new, but it wasn’t. Or, if it was, it got rode hard and put up wet within a week of being built.

Inside the windows-all-around building, the dining area was a single narrow, L-shaped room. This made the designated “Smoking” and “Non-Smoking” sections one and the same. The yellow-gray air was uniform across the joint. But we followed protocol and sat in a booth in the “Non-Smoking” section, which was one booth away from the restrooms and right across the counter from the coffee station. The laminated menu promised protein, sugar, and grease in equal proportions. Just what we were in the mood for.
Read More »

Senator Tim Johnson, Democrat from South Dakota, is and was in the news as he recovers (hopefully) from surgery to correct a bleeding arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in his brain. And I received a new iPod (to replace the one that just died) for Christmas.

Okay, you’re wondering where the hell I’m going with this.

One of the things I’ve discovered how to do (which I didn’t do with my old iPod) is subscribe to podcasts. Didn’t mean I didn’t listen to them on my iPod, it just meant I downloaded specific mp3s and added them to my itunes library manually. But this, it turns out, is a lot more work than required. If I subscribe to a podcast, it a)automatically downloads the mp3 when it becomes available, b)puts it on my iPod when I sync, and c)after I’ve listened to it, it removes it from my iPod after the next sync. This is pretty cool and I feel like a total idiot for not knowing this earlier.

So, I’m now subscribed to a bunch of podcasts. From NPR I listen to Story of the Day, Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, Science Friday, and This American Life. I listen to BoingBoingBoing (the podcast from the editors of–well, guess), Lessons From a Geek Fu Master, Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing, Coffee Break Spanish, Moldawer in the Morning, National Geographic’s Atmosphere, Cory Doctorow’s Craphound, and then a bunch more science ‘casts: The Naked Scientists Naked Science Radio Show, Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, and a show from Australia Radio National called All in the Mind.

It’s this last thing that brings the two together.
Read More »

Imagine a world in which you’ve decided to become an accountant. It’s a great job, and further more, you know you were meant to work with numbers.

So you go to school and you get a degree in business with your concentration being accountancy. When you get out of school you take any odd job you have to, but your dream is to someday be an accountant. So you practice accountancy any way you can. You meet with other people who want to be accountants, too and you submit accounts to each other for critique. Or maybe you take classes and workshops in accounting techniques. You know people who break in through doing other people’s taxes. You know people who build up a clientelle of local businesses. And while you admire these people, you want the top, the dream. So you keep working and working and eventually your submissions impress some of the minor national firms and you get a couple of contract jobs from them until one day, you break through, and get work with Deloitte. And they pay you $40,000 a year. But by God, you’re an accountant.

Which just goes to show that being a writer or a painter or a musician or an actor is very weird. Substitute ‘writer’ or ‘painter’ for ‘accountant’ and ‘local galleries’ or ’second tier magazines’ for some of the details, and ‘New York galleries’ or ‘New York publishers’ for ‘Deloitte.’ And there you are. Our idea of a career path.

I have trouble with the word ‘artist’. It makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable when someone like Walt Whitman says things like “I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul…’ I used to think that my trouble with the word ‘artist’ was like my trouble with the word ‘doctor.’ Sure, a PhD can call themselves Dr. So-and-so but at cocktail parties, people will forever be asking them to look at this mole they have on their calf that looks kind of weird. When someone is introduced to us as a doctor, we think medical. When someone is introduced to us an artist, I think painter or sculptor, although I consider writing an art and think of myself as an artist in that sense. But that’s not my real unease. I don’t think that Whitman is “…the poet of the woman the same as the man.” I don’t believe that art is mystical, deep or meaningful. I don’t believe that the artist is more alive to the world or transcendent than everyone else. I don’t believe that the artist is special.
Read More »

I’m no musician (well, I play classical piano and Ragtime…but not in front of other people; count your blessings…) but other members of this blog are, and I’m betting some of our readers are, too. So here is a gem I came across — this excellent tribute to James Brown by Roy at alicublog.

JB’s music is full of hairpin turns and dead-stops — you better be on top of things if you’re playing it. But those tight boundaries just make the grooves groovier. The funk has got to be loose, but the turnarounds have got to be snare-head tight. It’s only when those rivets are snug that the pocket can get deep.

No one talks about JB as a songwriter. In a way, that’s unfair. Some of his songs are excellent on their own terms. Check out Eartha Kitt’s strangely compelling cover of “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” to get a taste of how far that supposedly macho lyric can be stretched. Or just look at it plain, especially at the end: “He’s lost, lost in the wilderness … he’s lost, lost in the loneliness…” That ain’t triumph. That ain’t even soul-man baby-please-don’t-go pleading with a promise in its pocket. That’s despair. She ain’t coming back. Ain’t no one coming back. That’s the end, the sad, stinking, canned-heat end of a ladies’ man who’s run out of game. It gives cold-water-flat chills.

But for the most part, JB was less a songwriter than a funkmeister. His joints are designed to wake joy and shake ass. He used modern songwriting techniques — verbal and musical riffs — to make that happen, but once he achieved launch velocity, he didn’t feel the need to elaborate. Stay on the scene, like a sex machine. I feel nice, like-a sugar and spice. I got soul, I’m super bad. Well, damn, what else do you need?

There’s also some revealing stuff about drummers (and a link to some eviiiil drummer jokes), which made me wonder if there’s a side of Brad some of us haven’t seen. Heh.

(Click on the picture above to go play some drumbeats.)

So, I talked to one of my sisters in Texas and will talk to my parents and other siblings later. My Albuquerque family (all my in-laws) gathered at our house for a Christmas breakfast and the one wanderer, Laura’s brother, called in from New Orleans. Everyone was healthy. Everyone was warm. Everyone was well fed.

But we are enjoined, usually, to think about those who aren’t, at this time of year. Besides the poor, the homeless, the sick, and the alone, I especially want to spare a thought for the over 160,000 American soldiers who can’t be with their families this holiday, and especially those who died today and whose families will never celerate a holiday with them again. Unfortunately, for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was a day like most others. They might have received gifts and exchanged gifts, but there was also a good chance that they exchanged fire as well.

God protect you and all those around you. May you come home safe. May you come home soon.

Photo by Tony Perry/Los Angeles Times

Santa didn’t come through? Make him pay.

This guy does a remarkably varied selection of your text parsed tasks. He’ll even strip for you.

(Thanks to Janice Gelb from Down Under for pointing it out.)