RAM Rhymin',  Brooks Bashin', Occam Opinin', Kennedy Killin' and Conrad Contemplatin'.

A colleague asked me to post the patter poem below.   I always knew these IT guys were smart and funny and ever so helpful whenever my computer mutinied and threatened to toss all my files overboard, but I never knew that among them was the W. S. Gilbert of the Digital Domain. 

                           
   If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port

And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort

And the address of the RAM makes your floppy disk abort

Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash

And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash

And your data is corrupted ‘cause the index doesn’t hash

Then your situation’s hopeless, and your system’s gonna crash!

You can’t say this?  What a shame sir!  We’ll find you another game sir.

If the label on the cable on the table at your house

Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse

But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol

That’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss

So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse

Then you may as well reboot and just go out with a bang,

‘Cause as sure as I’m a poet, the screwy sucker’s gonna hang.

When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk

And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk

Then you have to flash your memory, and don't forget to ram your ROM

Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!

In earlier post I referred to David Brooks as the putz/pundit. So I should explain.  Like Ellen (my wife) says: We always hurt the one we love…and though I can’t quite admit to loving Brooks, I do have an affection for him by dint of his  willingness to keep an open mind and let his wide eyed curiosity take precedence over the temptation (and perhaps perceived professional obligation?) to pass easy judgment.  But when that curiosity leads him to believe in things he doesn’t understand …and then you suffer…Superstition---thank you Stevie Wonder.   Case in point: an earlier article by Brooks about Jeremy Lin and his strong religious beliefs. You can look it up, but in short, Brooks was addressing what he thought was a conundrum—that Jeremy Lin was both athletically gifted and deeply devout. And this was to Brooks, a mystery.  Brooks went on to reveal that he thinks athletic excellence is a product of extreme self-involvement and egotism.  To Brooks, the successful athlete is a vain and entitled Peacock strutting his/her physical gifts fueled by the attention/envy/admiration of the entranced and idol worshipping spectator.  As someone once said:  “ That’s so not right, it’s not even wrong.”   

Reminds me of George Will who wrote a similarly wrongheaded essay when Jerry Garcia died.  Will questioned why anyone would pay attention or care about a musician who entertained masses of drugged hippies and social outcasts and blah, blah blah.  No clue as to the facts concerning  the man’s history or his music.  No appreciation of the years of practice, study and development of a unique and highly personal style of expression and technique. No acknowledgement of the spiritual paths of exploration and deep dedication to tradition.  Garcia was no saint, but he wasn't a rock star phony either.
He was a musician of the highest rank and Will couldn't see (or hear) the value of that because he probably never listened to a single note of it. 

When asked his credentials for being The New Yorker food critic, Calvin Trillin answered : “ I know how to eat”.  At least he was honest.  And funny.

Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor) is the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

…and therein lies one of the challenges for the “Red Bred" or "Pink Diaper" baby boomer.  It took about 20 minutes of working in the Ad. Biz to confirm my suspicion that most of the evils in the world are a lot simpler to understand than Marx, Engels and their hermetic scribblings would suggest.  Applying Occam’s razor in the most general way to the most general of circumstances almost always reduces down to something akin to the advice that Deep Throat gave to Bob Woodward about the Watergate affair.  “Follow the money”.  

SO with apologies to Father William of Ockham, I have cobbled together Drifter’s Razor,which I define as follows:

Given the choice between an explanation that presumes:

a. A coordinated, pre-arranged plan requiring unanimous agreement among many parties as well as air-tight secrecy and covert cooperation to maintain exclusive control of all information ...

or

b.  Energetic, self-interest motivated and ambitious person(s) doing, taking, getting what they can, when they can and however they can…

the answer is going to be b.

 ...and that's essentially why I don't believe that  Oswald killed JFK.  It's not because another explanation seems more likely to conform to what would seem a more carefully planned and precisely orchestrated plot.  On the contrary, I don’t think Oswald killed him because it requires too much presumption of a carefully planned and precisely orchestrated plot.  It seems more likely to me that someone(s) wanted to kill him for whatever reasons, and went to the grassy knoll with a high powered rifle(s) and a belief in a reasonably good chance (or maybe it wasn't only chance) of getting away—and simply aimed, fired some bullets and fled.  Was it the Mob? The Cuban exiles?  Jimmy Hoffa’s boys?  A Vegas Gambling Cabal? A guy with a crush on Jackie? Lyndon Johnson? …that's all up for grabs, but whoever it was and however they did it, they did it and got away with it and Oswald was the fall guy.  The story of how Oswald may have done it just requires too many variables all working together in a way that necessitates an acceptance of too many lucky breaks and extraordinary coincidental improbabilities--not to mention sequences occurring in impossible time frames and events that defy the laws of physics.   And just about every other scenario proposed simply seems more likely than the one that the Warren Commission needed 888 pages to support.

Contrary to popular belief, the Warren Commission didn't have the final say when it came to analyzing the JFK assassination. Amid great public uproar concerning the accuracy and candor of the Warren Commission, in 1976 the US House of Representatives established the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to re-examine the facts behind the assassinations of President JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Committee's results, while public record, were never widely publicized. Interestingly, the Committee officially stated that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone, and that yes, there were additional shots fired by an unknown person located at the infamous "grassy knoll." The Committee stated that there WAS, indeed, a 4th shot, as shown by accoustical evidence analysis put forth by the National Academy of Sciences.  

  

Was reading The Rescue by Joseph Conrad (because I found a first edition on the shelves at the Mercantile Library and couldn't resist) but two-thirds through I lost the will to continue.  However, I was curious to know more about Conrad because his language and sentence structure is so unusual. A strange amalgam of drawing room formality, Biblical grandiosity and tavern colloquial.   Now that I've learned that  English was his 3^rd language (and he wasn’t fluent till in his twenties) after Polish and French;  he was born into cultured Polish nobility (whose fortunes changed rapidly and  left Conrad orphaned by age of 11);  then lived in exile before going off to France and England to begin a life of seafaring exploits among salty salt of the earth-ers --I can see how it all contributed to his one of a kind voice. 

 Civics

Last month, I got called up for Jury Duty for the first time in over 10 years.  I’m sure that for those who work in and around our criminal justice system, (and I know a few)  none of the following will come as much of a shock or surprise—but for someone like me who assumes that it’s only in show business and used car sales that you encounter this level of  incompetence and inept “wool over the eyes” pulling, it is something of an eye-opener.

First I receive a summons in the mail telling me to report on a particular date about a month hence.  A week later I receive another summons requiring that I report on a different date.  Is it the same summons with two dates? Two different summons for separate dates? Which do I heed?  Call to find out answer.  Call resolves nothing cause system only has record of one summons, but that doesn’t automatically void the other.  I'm instructed to show up for earlier date and resolve on premise.  

Martin Luther King Jr. Statue outside
Westchester County Courthouse

On appointed day I arrive and join 100 some odd others in a large auditorium in White Plains Westchester County Courthouse.  We listen to instructions and during the break I approach someone with my multiple summons query.  She sends me upstairs. Upstairs I sit in room with a woman who checks the system and can’t find the corresponding record.  She gives me a form to fill out and submit to someone on a different floor.  I fill it out, proceed to next floor and wait in waiting room.  I enquire as to the consequences of being absent from the group in the auditorium downstairs.  No clear instruction other than…”you can join them when you’re done up here.”  Finally it's my turn, and I’m excused from second summons without learning how it came to be sent in the first place.  I return to auditorium downstairs.  It’s empty.  Find someone in the hall who tells me to go to the second floor.  

On second floor I’m directed to a small room (much like a school classroom) where about a dozen other would be jurors are sitting awaiting next steps and all facing a desk and a podium that are currently unoccupied.  We sit in silence for about 10 minutes and on a hunch, I decide to go find someone who can tell me if I'm waiting in the correct place.  I find out that I'm not.  I locate the proper room and join this other group, much like the last. 

I read my book for next 20 minutes until five men of disparate age, skin color and body type--all in identical dark suits-- stride in.  Looks at first glance that it’s two sets of lawyer/client and a court official. Court official tells us the story of the case.  We learn that the foursome is really made up of lawyer/lawyer and lawyer/lawyer.  One lawyer is suing another for fees (allegedly) owed due to…well, it’s a long and not very compelling tale, the gist of which is that one lawyer hired a  lawyer and then fired him and hired another and the two lawyers (and their lawyers)  are bickering over who owes who and how much.  The two lawyers for the lawyers take turns going round the room and asking each of us a few questions about our attitudes and/or preconceived notions re: lawyers, lawyer’s fees, people who sue other people or hire lawyers to sue other people and people who fire people they hire to sue other people.  All of us in the room are yawning almost in unison. One of the lawyers is almost a cartoon caricature of a manipulative and patronizing legal lizard.  As he poses questions to each individual prospective juror, he couches his queries in tones one often hears in adults who speak to children as if the child has the vocabulary of a Parrot and not the faintest idea about the relationship between causes and effects. 


Someone (Mort Sahl?)  during the Bush/Gore campaign said :  “Bush speaks English like it’s his second language and Gore speaks it like it's ours.”


This obsequious inelegant examiner asks each of us identical questions, but rephrases them each time to fit his notion of who he is addressing.  He's using a combination of racial profiling and class conscious assumptions and, to me at least, it's transparent, disrespectful,  and worst of all, time consuming.   

As much of his probing seems to consist of eliciting our opinions and attitudes about lawyers in general, it occurs to me that this particular lawyer is single handedly doing a good job of confirming the prejudices of those of us who have prejudices and providing a good reason for those among us who don’t to begin cultivating a few. 

After about an hour of this from both sides, we are left alone again for a while until a functionary enters the room and reads off a half dozen names.  They’re the ones who have to stay.  The rest of us are excused, and we’re each handed a document confirming our service and releasing us back into the wild.  I always expect to be excused since I work in the entertainment business which I believe is generally perceived by my interrogators as closely related to what they do--which is basically storytelling, and more specifically, creating the illusion of truth through the art of subjective narrative . They see me as someone who's wise to their tricks and the last thing a magician wants in his audience is another magician.  I walk out with a woman who tells me as we head to the elevators that had she been chosen, she would have told them that she couldn’t serve because she would've been inclined to vote in favor of anything or anyone on the opposing side of that particularly pompous lawyer.  I laughed and said I might have been inclined to do the same.  We also found it sad and amusing to note that those retained for service seemed to be those most easily swayed and manipulated by that guy.  Kinda sad…not to mention scary when you think about the decisions and outcomes that are the consequences of this all too human and flawed process.

I should’ve seen it coming... 

the moment …

…I saw John Edwards primping, and primping and primping with his hair before a TV interview

…I drove that nail into the wood thinking “ This won’t split it.”

…I heard Dick Cheney say that he didn’t feel obligated to disclose the nature/extent of his ties to Haliburton or reveal the content of discussions/decision in Dept. of Energy.  How he got away with that I'll (and we'll) never know.    

…I read that Jonathan Franzen said "Reading The Art of Fielding is like watching a hugely gifted young shortstop: you keep waiting for the errors, but there are no errors."...that the book would be full of them. 

I read that Greece was going to increase the number of civil servants to be suspended (again); cut monthly pensions of people under the age of 55 (again); lower the the tax-free limit on annual income (again) and impose a new real-estate tax…(again).

A fun site with a great tagline: If you can't see it below, it reads:


FIGHTING IGNORANCE SINCE 1973 (IT'S TAKING LONGER THAN WE THOUGHT) 

In my never ending quest to come to terms with my mission here, and having recently resolved to maintain a lighter tone in keeping with my "bathroom reading" definition of The Blogger's Purpose--I will continue to do my literary equivalent of singing in the shower and hope that anyone passing by the ensuing steams of consciousness may find some amusement in the digital vapors. 

Mentioned Andy Borowitz (who I know mostly by way of his New Yorker parodies) and his anthology of American Humorists--so I visited his blog--The Borowitz Report. And I can report that it's a solid Onion-esque place.  And anyone with Posts that carry headlines like:


Obama’s Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy;
Romney Pays Surprise Visit to his Money in the Caymans; 
and...
Fox News Wins Pulitzer for Fiction 
...is ok with me. 

Arthur Krystal --whose books of essays I've previously praised here--has a nice piece in this week's New Yorker about "guilty pleasure" books and writers.  Arthur writes about writing about as well as anyone I know...and though he doesn't come right out and say it, he seems to be making the point that I've always thought cuts right to the chase about all art--which is that something is either a pleasure or it's not--and guilt is just a byproduct of snobbery.  

Ellen and I are contemplating a trip to Vietnam.  We contemplate lots of trips that we never take, so no reason to believe at this point that we're going anywhere any time soon.  But just in case,  I spent a little time wandering the web looking for travel related stuff and as usual found all the digital detours and hyper-linked side streets too intriguing to resist and found myself reading about the Susan Sontag piece called Trip to Hanoi—from her 1969 book Styles of Radical Will.   I  read it in college cause it was required by my poli-sci professor (who was particularly enamored of it …and her) and I recall being alternately compelled and repelled by it. Maybe I'll go back and re-read and see if I can relocate the cause of my ambivalence.  But in the middle of this piece is a self critical quote from Sontag:  “A problem: the thinness of my writing. It is meager, sentence by sentence. Too architectural, too discursive."
And I'm thinking, yeah, she's right, and kind of impressed she was aware of it...and then wondering if I know what is meant by 'discursive' .  So looking it up I discover that it means:

a : moving from topic to topic without order : rambling

b : proceeding coherently from topic to topic

Hmmm, so which is it?

...then the Sontag piece leads me to other Vietnam War era readings from which a few things written during that period stood out as both profound and prescient:

From Daniel Ellsberg: "The lesson which can be drawn here is one that the rest of the world, I am sure, has drawn more quickly than Americans have -- that, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, bombing is as American as cherry pie. If you invite us in to do your hard fighting for you, then you get bombing along with our troops."

Stanley Hoffmann, professor of government at Harvard: "The ethics of foreign policy must be an ethics of self-restraint. The saddest aspect of the Vietnam tragedy is that it combines moral aberration and intellectual scandal."

Sir Robert Thompson, former Secretary for Defense in Malaya: "The prospect of going in as a political reformer frightens me more than anything else. I would not touch political reform in these territories with a barge pole -- and I certainly would not touch it with an American political scientist."

Edwin Reischauer, former Ambassador to Japan: "Vietnam has shown the limited ability of the United States to control at a reasonable cost the course of events in a nationally aroused, less developed nation.... I believe we are moving away from the application to Asia of the 'balance of power' and 'power vacuum' concepts of the cold war."

.... and moving them to the middle east? 

What the Puck...?

I'm watching NY Rangers Playoff Hockey games.  In fact I've been watching since the middle of the Ottowa series.  I've never watched Hockey this closely before. In fact, not even sure I've ever watched (on TV) an entire game before--and that includes the historic Olympic Games drama with the Russians.  So why now?  Hmmm.  Could be:

Boy oh boy, these guys can skate!  Back in the mid 90's I worked in an office building in White Plains that was 4 blocks from a public skating rink...so I skipped lunch and went skating instead.  Really got into it.  Learned some technique and took a few lessons and had a blast...good workout too.  And now appreciate even more the skills these guys have.

Boy oh boy, these guys are working hard.  Way harder than the NBA guys who often look to me like they're just goofing around till the last 5 minutes...and that's only in the playoffs--during the regular season, they often look like they're hoping to avoid having to take a post game shower. 

Boy oh boy, my High Definition TV looks great.  I can see the puck now!  Remember when they experimented with the blue tail thing?  And if you don't, never mind...but it sure is better when you can see that Ring Ding they're all trying to get their sticks on. 

Exhaustion from a five month immersion in fat books.  My Melville obsession was followed by a G.K. Chesterton binge was followed by Voltaire and most recently Joseph Conrad...who had me transfixed briefly before I threw in the towel halfway through "The Rescue".   Inevitable that all those weighty thoughts would start clogging the brain at some point and some swift and slippery action on ice seemed to be just the thing to cool down and just relish some action. 

Elimination of Center line in Two line pass rule in 2005 has made Hockey more exciting.  I kinda miss the old rule cause it required more coordinated positioning and skating, but it also created a lot more mucking about in the neutral zone and cut down on breakaway chances. 

Saw a game a while back where player got slashed above the eye, then got seventeen stitches in the locker room and came back the same period to skate his regular shift. Between stuff like that and the fighting, it's hard to relate to the game as a "sporting" competition.  On the other hand, there's something to be said for the level of dedication these guys have.  

Fed, Nole, and Rafa are only on TV during the majors...or on the Tennis Channel, and I refuse to pay additional fee to Cablevision. 

I sit on the couch and practice guitar scales and progressions--and Hockey is just fine to watch without the sound.  Not a good or smart or particularly productive habit for a serious musician, but I'm not all that serious a musician.

And not to get too heady about it, but I think there's a beauty to the "geometry" of the sport.   Call it situational awareness or spatial intelligence or pattern recognition--but good players (and great one's like Gretsky--who had this one great mental advantage, and no physical one) can see and anticipate the flow of the action and put themselves in position to arrive at (or pass to) the right place at just the right time.  Watching great players skating,  passing and shooting with precision within the framework of established and carefully designed plays is a thing of beauty.  You see it often in Basketball (but not much in the NBA) with great teams, but in Hockey it's a constant part of the flow.  It's similar to soccer --where it's at it's highest level and to me, the most beautiful--but in Hockey it's happening so much faster its often more difficult to discern.  


And Eastern Conference finals series with Devils (cross river rivals) is tied 2-2.  Game 5 tonite.  Eli flew in this morning and hope we can watch together.  He's primarily a soccer guy (and back in action playing in pick-up games as the only 'Americano' on the field in Latin area of LA) but I'm hoping he'll indulge his old man and keep me company. 

And I leave you with this "smile music", as my son once called it,  courtesy of friend Dave S. who has been playing this and other wonderful  Jacob do Bandolim Choro compositions recently and with whom I've shared many a musical joy...

Just Toolin around...
Been making various simple things out of wood for a few years and though I've added electric power to my toolkit, I still prefer going acoustic and working with traditional hand tools.  It's slow going, but it's more instructive and challenging (assuming time is not of the essence) and ultimately satisfying when you stay with (what I call) The Whittler's Way.  

I've always liked whittling, and I think that started when I went to summer camp as a kid and I was shown how to use small carving tools on a piece of soft pine or balsa.  I liked the physical nature of the work and the idea of creating different shapes out of this material that was soft enough to cut and trim, but hard enough to end up being something of substance and permanence.  No, that's not one of mine on right...just put it there for illustration.  All the tools we used were hand tools and throughout the summer I always had a couple of bandaids on my fingers where my eager enthusiasm and inexperience had left their marks.

And more recently while visiting Woody and Karen ( who together constitute 1/3 of the Drifters) in Maine, I came across a book in Karen's father's library.  It was  A Reverence for Wood by Eric Sloane.  I mentioned it in a very early post I wrote about my fascination with Wood, and it was an inspiration.  The book is both a history and a how-to manual that tells the story of how early American settlers tamed the forests and built their world from its bounty.  And it goes into detailed descriptions of the tools and processes they used (and invented) for home building, furniture, transportation, and just about everything else they needed.

I like tools that are no more complicated than the average bicycle.   Functional, mechanically efficient, but simple enough to be understood and used without much technical knowledge or training.  And when it's all right there to see--nothing hidden, nothing very intricate and nothing inaccessible, one can usually repair them, sharpen them, and maintain them easily.

They're also quieter...which I know Ellen and my neighbors appreciate most. Though the price for all that silence is time.  I still carve some things entirely by simple hand tools, but I'm increasingly more likely to power up for some parts of the job, and just recently bought an angle grinder with a wood carving attachment to hollow out bowls and other items that require removing large amounts of wood.  For an idea of how slow the process can be with just hand power alone..here's someone working on a bowl twice the size of anything I've tackled to date...and I can only assume he doesn't  put in a 50 hour week doing something else from Monday to Friday. You can jump to the end to see finished product.



Fact is, with the right power tools, you could knock that bowl out in a couple of hours--and a pro could probably do it in one.  But for true Zen woodworking bliss, there's  nothing like (except for maybe practicing guitar scales and arpeggios) those long hours of repetitive  hacking and chipping away one little sliver at a time. You definitely get to know your piece of wood--for better or for worse.  You know where the knots are, where the grain is going, and where you might want to make adjustments or changes in your plan to accommodate or adjust to those findings.

Biggest problem with hand tools (especially axes and chisels) is the risk of making major errors. I was making a long serving spoon with a heart shaped bowl to give Ellen for Mother's day and I had it secured in a vise as I was working at shaping the V in the "heart" with a tool similar to one furthest left in photo here--and I dug too thick and deep and "Crack!"...next thing I knew I'm frantically searching online for a heart-shaped wooden spoon that could be delivered to make the Mom Day deadline.  I found a nice one for under 10 bucks... shipping and handling for overnight delivery was $20.

Proverbially Speaking.

Was paying a visit to the web site: 

...and enjoying a list of expressions (some idiomatic) in various languages--here are some plucked from a longer list-- with english equivalents.

Armenian 

(Klookhys mee artooger)

Stop ironing my head! = Stop annoying me! (when repetitively asking or talking about something)

Cheyenne
Mónésó'táhoenôtse kosa?
Are you still riding the goat? = separated from your spouse?

Énêhpoése ma'eno.
The turtle is shrouded = it's foggy.

Étaomêhótsenôhtóvenestse napâhpóneehéhame.
My tapeworm can almost talk by itself = my stomach is growling.

Chinese (Mandarin / Cantonese)
一鼻孔出气 (yī bíkǒng chūqì / yāt beihhúng chēuthei)--breathing through the same nostril = singing from the same hymn sheet

Czech

chodit kolem horké kašeto --walk around hot porridge = to beat about the bush

Estonian
Sääsest elevanti tegema--To make an elephant out of a gnat = to make a mountain out of a molehill

Puust ja punaseks ette tegemato-- make something out of wood and paint it red - to make something really clear

Finnish
tehdä kärpäsestä härkänen
to make a bull out of a fly = to make a mountain out of a molehill (Interesting that in Estonia and Finland the comparison is between small and large animals, and in English it's between small and large land forms)

French
J'ai d'autres chats à fouetter !I have other cats to whip! = I have other fish to fry! - I have other things to do.

pédaler dans la choucrouteto --pedal in the sauerkraut = to spin your wheels - to go nowhere

German
Ich werde dir die Daumen drücken / Ich drücke dir die Daumen
I'll squeeze my thumbs for you = I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you/I wish you luck

klar wie Kloßbrüheas --clear potato dumpling water = as clear as crystal - easy to understand
originally meant difficult to understand (as clear as mud)

Irish (Gaelic)
tá sí mar a bheadh cág i measc péacóg--she's like a jackdaw among peacocks = she's like a fish out of water

Italian 
mettere una pulce nell'orecchio
to put a flea in somebody's ear = to raise a doubt/suspicion

saltare la mosca al naso
a fly jumping on somebody's nose = to fly of the handle - to become abruptly annoyed, lose one's temper.

Japanese
猿も木から落ちる (Saru mo ki kara ochiru)--Even monkeys fall from trees = even experts get it wrong.

Korean
당근이지! (dang-geun i-ji)--it's a carrot = of course / it's obvious

Spanish
me estoy comiendo el coco--I'm eating the head = I'm trying to think

Tibetan 
chang.sa.rgyag--to put up a beer tent = to get married

Welsh 
Моя хата скраю (Mija chata skraju)--My cottage is at the edge = I don't know anything / It's not my business

This Fox has a longing for grapes:

He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.

So he goes away sour;

And, 'tis said, to this hour

Declares that he's no taste for grapes

                                              Aesop                                        

"They outspent me five to one to quote destroy Newt Gingrich?" Gingrich said in an interview on CNN’s "The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer." "You know, I think that doesn’t deserve congratulations. I think that’s reprehensible, I think it’s dishonest, and I think it’s shameful."

Sounds like sour grapes, but it's pretty sweet compared to the good old days when Thomas Jefferson called John Adams a"hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."  To which Adams replied that Vice President Jefferson was "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." 

Jefferson:  " Fool!"

Adams:  "Weakling!"

Jefferson: "Hypocrite!"

Adams: " Atheist!"

Jefferson: "Criminal!"

Adams: "Libertine!"

Jefferson: " Tyrant!"

Adams: "Coward!"

and then on...

...March 4, 1801,  a balding, toothless cantankerous old John Adams, got in a carriage at 4:00 am and left Wash. DC for Massachusetts, only 8 hours before Chief Justice John Marshall swore in the new president, Thomas Jefferson.  In doing so he became the only living president to choose NOT to be there for the successor's inauguration.

But Adams lived long enough to see his son John Quincy become president in 1825...though he died before the next election cycle and missed all the fun of hearing Andrew Jackson calling his son "a pimp" and Jackson calling Adams' wife "a slut." 

but enough about entitled wig wearing whiners, I'd rather hang with those whose gripes are rooted in pain not of their own making...

Ain't got the change of a nickel

Ain't got no bounce in my shoes

Ain't got no fancy to tickle

I ain't got nothin, but the blues

Slaves calling out field hollers with coded messages to fool their masters; chants and work-songs to relieve the tedium and pain of backbreaking labor; hymns to invoke the presence of a merciful creator; revival shouts and reflective reveries to purge the poisons of an embittered spirit; spontaneous versifying; funeral dirges and marches; lyric, melodic and rhythmic repetition and syncopation to keep the heart beating in time to nature’s call to physical freedom, spiritual pride and sexual release, all built upon the simple foundation of a 12 bar progression with 3 chords and a five note scale called The Blues.


Ain't got no rest in my slumbers
Ain't got no winners to lose
Lost all my telephone numbers
I ain't got nothin, but the blues

“...I have sometimes thought that the mere hearing of those songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject could do"

 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

“The great man say that life is pain," Coydog had said over eighty-five years before. "That mean if you love life, then you love the hurt come along wit' it. Now, if that ain't the blues, I don't know what is.” 

― Walter Mosley, The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

Ain't got no coffee that's perkin'

Ain't got no feelin's to bruise

Ain't got a job that's workin

I ain't got nothin, but the blues.

"Blues means what milk does to a baby."
Alberta Hunter

Memphis Earlene Gray(aka Judith Podell)  wrote a long (with tongue placed firmly in cheek) list of Blues requirements…with help from Uncle Plunky, revisions by Little Blind Patti D. and Dr. Stevie Franklin)

Among them…

The Blues are not about choice. You stuck in a ditch, you stuck in a ditch.

Teenagers can't sing the Blues. They ain't fixin' to die yet. 

Blues can take place in New York City but not in Hawaii or any place in Canada-- Hard times in St. Paul or Tucson is just depression. 

You cannot have the blues in any place that don't get rain.

Guy with male pattern baldness ain't the blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is.

You can't have no Blues in an office or a shopping mall. The lighting is all wrong. 

It ain’t the Blues if you wear a suit, 'less you happen to be old  and you slept in it.

Blues is not a matter of color. Ugly luckless white people got a leg up on the blues.

The following are NOT Blues beverages:

 a. mixed drinks

 b. kosher wine

 c. Snapple

 d. sparkling water

Persons with names like Sierra, Auburn and Rainbow can't sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.

I don't care how tragic your life: if you own a computer, you cannot sing the blues.

Well, then I guess I better shut up about it...and just play somethin...


Now I know this isn't gonna please the purists, or those who think the singer should turn the mike over to someone with real pipes, or the many who prefer their blues raw, dirty and homegrown--but I love it cause  it's such a great marriage of a blues foundation with an overlay of interesting harmonic sophistication.  Ford is a bluesman through and through (he was Jimmy Witherspoon's guitar player for years), but he's also a knowledgeable musician who uses his technique (with a horn player's phrasing)  and extensive vocabulary to make the music more challenging to play and listen to.  Song by Duke Ellington and Don George