Eric Clapton is playing on the 'puter as I write this. First, it's the Derek & The Dominos version of Layla, and then the unplugged version of Layla, lather, rinse, repeat. I suspect most of us have Patti Boyds in our lives, and that's why Layla is thought to be such a great song by so many critics.

It doesn't hurt that Eric is one of the few guitarists that can make his guitar gently weep. Ain't hardly anyone that ever did a cover of that song, except Duane Allman, and it's not really a cover if you played on the original recording, is it?

D. C. al Coda

This would be the perfect spot, I suppose, to launch into a story about the one true love, truly unattainable, of my life, but I think I'll pass on that one tonight. I'm the guy who went to the manager of the Hallmark shop, asking if I could get a price break if I buy two dozen of the card that says, "To my one true love, ever and always, be my Valentine."

Most guys, I think, are. Men are romantics. Walk past us, and we're in love. If your perfume wafts our way, you can't walk past us; we follow you. Susie explained that much to me, one night in a dark corner, and then went on to explain that's why she never dates single men. She wants to rent, not own, and it's too hard to peel away clingy men. But some women are that way, too. When they asked Charlie Sheen why he paid women to have sex with him, he said he didn't pay them for that; he paid them to go away afterwards.

This Blonde Isn't

But I will talk about a dumb blonde, if it suits you. This one is so dumb, her hair has turned brunette. Her name is Jan Kirby, and with Tim Haas, she hosts "Southern Fresh", a cooking show on RFD-TV. I was going through the TiVO Suggestions and discovered an episode of theirs on container gardening. That's not planting seeds and producing a harvest of boxes and bags; instead, it's putting your seeds in containers of dirt instead of out in the garden.

Jan was telling us all about tomatoes. These things, she said, I call 'em suckers. No, ma'am, it's not that you call them suckers, that's what the name is for them. And she proceeded to tell us that we should get rid of the suckers because we want the plant to put all its energy into producing fruit.

Pelting Didn't Help

No matter how loudly I yelled, no matter how many socks and pairs of undershorts I threw at the TV, I couldn't get her attention. Suckers form roots. You want a good strong root system. In fact, when one transplants tomato starts into the garden, one should plant them neck-high in the dirt, not just waist high, because the stem will turn into root, and the stronger the root system, the stronger and healthier the plant.

What they didn't mention, but is especially important in container crops, is keeping the plant's roots moist but not wet. Containers tend to dry out quickly, and the plant's roots need to be able to draw moisture to replace that which transpires through the leaves. On the other hand, if a plant sits in standing water, the roots get eaten up by rot, and that's no good, either.

Vitamins, Not Food

You've heard people call fertilizer "plant food" but it's really plant vitamins. Tomato fruits are mostly made of carbon (from air), water (from water) and energy (from sunlight), with some minerals and vitamins from the soil. Trace minerals are especially important, as they greatly influence the flavor.

But God was feeling charitable on the day that he invented tomatoes. No matter how dumb you are, you can only fuck up a homegrown tomato a certain amount, and so most homegrown tomatoes are fairly good.

Then, they went inside, and Tim started talking about cooking. He mentioned that tomatoes were second only to garlic in cooking. I went up and gathered my socks and underwear, because I had run out of ammunition. Tim is one of those cooks that makes everything taste of garlic.

The Cruelest Allium

If I have the slightest bit of garlic, I immediately get a headache. My late first wife, Em, didn't believe me about that, and kept trying to sneak garlic powder into dishes, finally realizing that I wasn't kidding about it. Sometimes, I live with the headache anyway; I get the hankering, every so often, for garlic spears, and I grab swallow several ibuprofen as I fetch the jar from the refrigerator. But if you can't figure out how to make foods with a variety of tastes, instead of making everything garlicy, you ain't much of a cook.

And then they mentioned that you can freeze tomatoes when you have too many. If you are growing tomatoes in canisters, that doesn't seem too likely. But anyhow, they were talking about how you peel tomatoes for freezing.

I had a boss once, who previously worked for Campbell Soup. He was so thrilled that I couldn't guess how Campbell's peeled tomatoes. They put the maters in a vessel, and hit them with live steam, he said, and the skin explodes off the tomatoes. Oh, yeah? Jan told us that you make a cross-nick in the bottom of the tomatoes, and drop them into scalding water, and they'd slip right off.

Teaching Granny To Suck Eggs

You wouldn't want to be peeling the skins off the tomatoes with a paring knife like your grandmother, Jan crows. Except I don't know where Jan came up with her addle-pated grandmother. Where I come from, every grandmother knows to scald tomatoes to skin them. It's in the Ball Blue Book, in the Keer Red Book, in the instructions your county extension agent gives out for canning tomatoes, and it's how they peeled tomatoes at the ketchup factory back home.

Like I said, blonde, except for the hair color. They've got a good concept with the Southern Fresh cooking show, if only they'd come up with someone who knows something about gardening and cooking.

It was during a lull in the pelting of the television show that Blondie asked me if I'd like a salad for supper. It seems like we've been eating salad every day for the past two weeks, usually two times a day, and while I like salad, and while Blondie makes exceptionally good salads, I said no.

Whassamatta Salad?

Don't I like salad any more? Sure, I like salad, but I'm saladed out. Steak, she asks? Sure.

But when I come down, it turns out that she didn't have any, so I get a preformed hamburger overcooked into a piece of shoe leather, and some steamed vegetables.

I like steamed veggies, but the people that produced that bag had a bunch of carrots formed into sticks of various thicknesses and lengths, whole English peas, and large chunks of broccoli stem and crown, again of varying size. There were also some other things, hard to identify, but I suspect they included red peppers.

They say one eats with his eyes, so an attractive presentation is important. What's more important is that size be uniform, or else you end up with small pieces that are mushy moosh and large pieces that are crunchy undercooked. It seemed a shame, because these weren't bad vegetables before they were cut up, they were appropriately ripe.

Blondie, The Cut-Up

We'd bought some strawberries at Giant a couple of days ago. I cut them up, Blondie said, and they're in the refrigerator. I went to get them, and was disappointed.

Normally, when you hull the berries, you put them in a bowl, and cover them with a half cup or so of sugar, so that the berries get soft and you end up with a lot of juice. Instead, the sliced berries were crisp, and piled in a colander.

Meanwhile, Blondie got out a pound cake, and put a couple of slices on paper plates. No, honey, I told her, bowls. Otherwise, the milk ends up all over the floor.

I Got A Bowl

I got out a bowl, poured the strawberries into it, and added some sugar. It takes time for the sugar to work, so when I was ready for the dessert, the strawberries weren't. I ended up putting a few spoonfuls on the cake anyway, and adding some milk atop.

I don't ask Blondie to bake anything. She says she can't, and I will take her at her word. If you're not suffering from vascular dementia, though, you probably can make good shortcakes; they're awfully easy. Basically, it's just a sweet biscuit.

Mix 2 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 1/4 teaspoon salt, 3/8 cups of sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg, then cut in 4 tablespoons of lard. That should give you a really "crumby" mix. Mix 2 eggs in 1/2 cup of milk (I actually use a smidge more) and then add this to the dry ingredients and just barely mix together, then drop onto a cookie sheet (I use a sheet cake pan). You can brush the biscuits with melted butter, and sprinkle with sugar if you like. Bake until brown. It takes about 10 minutes at 400F.

So Much Better

Real shortcakes are so much better than the sponge cakes or pound cakes they sell in the produce department. Mamma always used to cut them in half along the waistline of the biscuit, but they tend to fall apart. I don't even bother to try cutting; I just crumble them into large fragments.

The strawberries were really huge, the ones that Blondie got, and I should have known better, but I was disappointed anyway. There's always the hope that huge strawberries will have a huge taste. 'Member me saying something about trace minerals? If you have really huge strawberries, that means (among other things) that there's a lot of water in them. The trace minerals and the natural sugars are diluted, and there's neither much flavor nor much sweetness. Small strawberries are so much better.

Shari's Berries

On the Dan Patrick show, they were advertising Shari's Berries. Dan warned the Danettes that if someone helped himself to the box before he did, that someone would be fired. He opened the box on the air, and they were OK. In fact, they were pretty hard to figure out. They were the size of a medium small potato, and because they were covered with chocolate and then further decorated, it was hard to decide what they were. I had to go to their website

Mother's Day is Sunday. If you click on the microphone on the Shari's Berries website, and type in "Patrick", you can get a half-dozen berries - 2 dark chocolate dipped, 2 milk, 2 white, all of them decorated - for $19.98. On the other hand, I just told you that huge strawberries just aren't all that good. This would be a good gift if you can't be there in person, and you're more concerned about boggling her eyes than with pleasing her palate. If you can be there in person, some strawberry shortcake over your own homemade shortcakes would be nice.

Operator? Person-To-Ghost, Please.

Me, I'd like to call Mamma on the phone, but she's been gone a couple of decades. "What'll you do when you get lonely And nobody's waiting by your side?" I guess you could always play Layla on the computer. I'm not sure which version I like better.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Ball Blue Book - blonde - brunette - Campbell Soup - Charlie Sheen - container gardening - Dan Patrick - Derek & The Dominos - Duane Allman - Eric Clapton - garlic - Hallmark - Jan Kirby - Keer Red Book - Layla - milk - pound cake - prostitutes - salad - Shari's Berries - shortcake - Southern Fresh - sponge cake - strawberries - suckers - Tim Haas - tomatoes - Valentine - vascular dementia

One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Pennsylvania is that there are no meat markets, aka butcher shops.

Back home, in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin, etc., there are a lot of small independent businesses that sell beef, pork and chicken. That isn't all they sell; many of them are small groceries as well.

Bruce Weitz played grimy undercover cop Sgt. Michael "Mick" Belker in the 1980s television Hill Street Blues, which didn't really state what city it was situated in, but which appeared to be Chicago. In one episode, he's working the meat case at local butcher shop. A matronly woman comes in and asks if their chicken is fresh. Yes, it is, Mick assures her.

Let me smell it, she demands. He hands her a chicken, and she holds it up to her nose, and tries to inhale the scent from within the body cavity of the chicken. She gives a harumph of disapproval, and Weitz says, "Do you think you could pass that test, lady?" That's the kind of meat market I'm talking about.

Shopping In Cube

I used to stop at Love's Meat Market in Cuba, several times a week. I'd tell Walt Love that I wanted 3 round steaks, about 3/4" thick, and he would pull a leg out of the cooler, put it on the band saw, and cut the steaks while I waited, then put the leg back in the cooler. Cuba's such a small community that when when Walt retired about 20 years ago, the business district consisted of a coin-operated ice vending machine for Amish wanting to buy blocks of ice.

Or I'd go to Sanderson's. Like virtually all the meat markets, they sold a lot of meat by the quarter or by the half, for people wanting to fill their freezer, and they had a nice trade in butchering deer for hunters. Sanderson's, though, made a really interesting homemade baloney. People would drive over to Sanderson's just for the baloney, and they'd get a half-dozen hunks that they could pop into the freezer, defrosting one hunk at a time as they needed it.

Market Forces

In the midwest, supermarkets carry a large variety of cold cuts, from a number of different meat processors. While a huge supermarket in Lancaster may have one or two 30" sections of the refrigerator case displaying lunch meats, a fairly small supermarket back home might have three or four sections. They make up the difference in weiners. Here in Lancaster, there is an immense array of weiners, but back home, there's not much choice, as nobody over the age of 10 eats hot dogs.

I'm not sure how I happened to think about it, but Sanderson's has been on my mind lately. I rarely went there, myself, but I ate a lot of their baloney over the years. That, and Pride of Lima. I'm not sure why they called it Pride of Lima, because nobody seemed particularly proud of eating their baloney, nor for that matter, proud of anything associated with Lima, but their baloney was fairly good.

When Eckrich was still headquartered in Fort Wayne, they and Oscar Meyer were the #1 and #2 baloney in the country, and the #1 and #1 hot dog as well (note the reverse order), which the folks at Eckrich were extremely proud of, since they weren't even nationally-available, as Oscar Meyer was. I wasn't particularly impressed by either product from either company; Pride of Lima had a bit more flavor, when it came to baloney, and Dinner Bell (Eckert Packing, now owned by Morrell) had better hot dogs. Both Eckrich and Oscar Meyer were OK, but they were too soft, having too high a water content.

Fried Baloney

But as I was saying, I'd been thinking about Sanderson's lately, and about their baloney in particular. I've been jonesing for a fried-baloney sandwich. And with no meat market around, at least that I could find, where was I going to find some frying baloney?

Finally, I ended up asking for thick-sliced baloney at Giant, and they cut some for me. Mind you, they didn't cut it the way I wanted it. The pre-packaged stuff comes in two thicknesses - about 3/32" thick, and about 3/16" thick. I asked the clerk for 8 slices about 3/8" thick. Well, it could be worse. She managed to cut it about 1/4" thick.

The Wrong Size

Baloney ought to be about 5" diameter, and nearly red in color. Theirs was about 3.5" in diameter, and was nearly white in color. Ugh! But it was better than what I'd had before. I asked for a 2" hunk of cheese, too, and she cut me off a hunk that was about 1 1/4" thick. If the owner was in the store, as would happen in an independent meat market, he'd never tolerate that. Why are you trying to convince this customer to buy less? He'd straighten her out in three days, that you give the customer all that he asks for, and not a bit less.

But that didn't completely solve the problem. Day after day after day, Blondie would ask me what I wanted for lunch. Fried baloney sandwich. She'd make something else instead. What do I want for supper? Fried baloney sandwich. She'd make something else instead. She asked me if I wanted salad for supper. I'd say, no, I want fried baloney sandwich. Do I want fried baloney on my salad? No, I don't want sandwiches on my salad.

If You Want Something Done

And finally, when she called me to supper tonight, I went into the kitchen, and fried myself up a baloney sandwich. I'm used to bulk baloney having a fairly strong casing on it, and this had no casing. I slitted the meat at 3 o'clock, 6, 9, and 12, about 5/8" in from the edge, and when the meat started to get hot, it turned into an Iron Cross, as one would expect. There must be a lot of sugar in baloney, because this meat quickly gained a rather deep brown on each side. Because it was so small in diameter, and because it was so thin, I put two slices between my bread, and added the requisite Miracle Whip.

I'd say "pretty good" except that it's been more than a decade between fried baloney sandwiches, and this really hit the spot. And although this was Giant's own brand of baloney, it was pretty good flavor meat. I ended up frying another two slices and having a second sandwich.

She Sniffed

Blondie sniffed at my sandwich. "You microwave that?" No, ma'am, I don't generally fry stuff in the microwave. I fry stuff in the skillet. She was half-insulted that I wasn't eating the chicken she'd fixed. "Everyone else seems to think I'm a pretty good cook," she bitched, and I pointed out that I hadn't complained about how she fried baloney, only about the fact that she hadn't fried it at all.

She'd made baked potatoes, broccoli, and skinless chicken breasts covered with some sort of stewed tomatoes or something like that. I ate half a potato, and all the broccoli. They were good, but I really didn't have room for the chicken after I'd eaten my fried baloney sandwiches. "I just never would have thought of frying baloney for supper." I told her that I would have been happy to have it for lunch. "Or lunch" I told her that it's a little unusual, but it'd have been OK for breakfast. "For breakfast? Are you kidding? Baloney's not a breakfast meat."

Yes, ma'am. In this house, baloney hardly exists at all.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
baloney - beef - broccoli - Bruce Weitz - butcher - chicken - Cuba - Dinner Bell - Eckrich - Giant - Hill Street Blues - meat market - Oscar Meyer - Pride of Lima

If you missed the kerfuffle, and you're trying to figure it out, you'll have trouble. They deleted the post. You can't even get it from the Google cache at this point.

Fortunately, I had it in my cache.

The Real Story

OK, here's the story. On Monday, satirist Jack Steuf posted a piece to Wonkette about Trig Palin's 2nd birthday.

A kid that's 2 years old deserves respect. Even if he has Down Syndrome. Jack thinks so, I think so. Everybody agrees that it's despicable to make fun of a retard. Whups. Calling a kid retarded is disrespectful.

Never mind the fact that the term was originally "Educable Mentally Retarded", and it was a term intended to be respectful of the children so classified. Never mind the fact that Trig's almost brother-in-law, Levi Johnston, famously was referring to Trig as her retarded baby, something that scandalized the left-leaning jaybirds of the web in times past. And even if you are making fun of a mother who is hardly worthy of the term parent, one who uses her children instead of protecting their privacy and respect, you shouldn't be using that term.

Jack Screwed Up

But Jack screwed up. And when he posted this piece of satire, making fun of Sarah Palin pimping out her children, the shit started falling out of the sky. The Sarah Palin Robot Skeleton Army, calling themselves #TrigScrew, started tweeting and started threatening advertisers on the Wonkette site, most of whom were unaware that they were advertising on the Wonkette site. Papa John's, Huggies, Holland America Lines, a whole slew of advertisers blocked their Google advertising from appearing on the popular Wonkette site.

Wonkette did the only thing reasonable. They yanked the post.

That's something you just don't do. What you do is to leave the post up, so others can judge for themselves, and to precede it with a big notice offering an apology. But they couldn't afford to lose the advertisers. When the Palin/Beck robotronic loons attack, you need to be made of sterner stuff than Tippi Hedron to survive.

What WAS The Post

Meanwhile, you may have been wondering what the kerfuffle was all about. Since we're not advertising-supported, and we're starting off with an explanation that we think Trig deserve better and since we've had it up to --> here <-- with all the crap from Sarah Palin's Mindless horde, we decided to port the original Wonkette article.

If you recall, we suggested the Sarah Palin candidacy in a April 2008 post - which was before McCain or any of the political wonks had the slightest clue who she was. We even suggested that perhaps the ticket ought to be Palin/McCain, instead of McCain/Palin.

Who's Sorry Now?

Yeah, well, we're sorry about that. She's shown herself to be a clown as a politician - and much worse as a parent. I have no use for an adult who selfishly pimps out a kids for selfish purposes. A controversial basketball coach I used to respect said that in recruiting his team, he first weeded on the basis of whether a potential player was a good human being, and then he looked at the athletic and scholastic abilities. I think that's a good rule for voters to use, as well.

In any case, here's the post that started the kerfuffle.

---

That strange man yelling unintelligibly at Sarah Palin? He’s merely a lowly shepherd proclaiming the birth of our savior. Today is the day we come together to celebrate the snowbilly grifter’s magical journey from Texas to Alaska to deliver to the America the great gentleman scholar Trig Palin. Is Palin his true mother? Or was Bristol? (And why is it that nobody questions who the father is? Because, either way, Todd definitely did it.) It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are privileged to live in a time when we can witness the greatest prop in world political history.

This morning, Team Sarah posted a happy-birthday message at the exact time of his birth. This is a poem “Lynda” wrote for Trig:

Sweet Angel Boy…

Oh, little boy what are you dreaming about
Candy canes and mom’s sweet hugs

Oh, sweet baby boy what are you dreaming about
Play cars…trains…planes and a daddy’s strong hands as he lifts you high and makes you laugh…oh, how safe you feel in those hands

Oh, little boy what are dreaming about
Sisters who play with you…and teach you new words

Oh, as you sleep little boy what are you dreaming about
A big bother that carries you on his shoulders…as he shows you the blue sky

Oh, little boy what are you dreaming about
A mother’s soft lullaby…the soft touch of her hand…the soft sound of her voice as she says “I Love You”
Dream on little boy as the Angels stand guard

What’s he dreaming about? Nothing. He’s retarded.

Here are a couple of excellent YouTube tributes to the magic intellectually disabled baby, presented by Glenn Beck:

Here’s Piper licking her hand and rubbing it all over Trig’s head for some reason:

Here’s Trig meeting another Down syndrome baby and immediately trying to lick it:

And finally, Louis C.K.’s verdict on the kid:

“Why just celebrate tax day today, April 18th? It’s also Trig Paxson Van Palin’s 3rd birthday. His mom went to a lot of trouble to leak amniotic fluid over 8 states to make sure that he arrived in this world somewhat alive,” writes Wonkette operative “Barbara_i,” reminding us of the occasion. “Sarah went to a whole lot of trouble to name him ‘Van Palin,’ a ‘Van Halen’ reference he will never get.” Indeed.

Enjoy yourself today, Trig. Have fun! Get drunk (on purpose this time)! We can hardly wait for 15 years from now, when you will finally be able to vote and will be sent off by your mother’s junta to fight the Union in the Great Alaska War.

I've never been a fan of Piss Christ.

Andres Serrano said he was making a statement about the misuse of religion when, in 1987, he submerged a crucifix in a a glass of his own urine and he photographed it.

I didn't think it was offensive to God. I thought it was offensive to art. Art is a form of communication - and this statement was lacking in any finesse whatsoever. You're not supposed to bash the viewer over the head; you're supposed to lead him someplace he wasn't expecting to go.

You may well have missed the news. That photo was on display, as well as another of a meditating nun, also by Serrano. After weeks of protests by Roman Catholic fundamentalists in the French town of Avignon, one of them slashed the two photographs on Palm Sunday.

And that, I suggest, is performance art. The demonstrators have said more about the misuse of religion in today's world than Serrano could. It doesn't quite rank up there with the assassination of Dr. George Tiller, but I'll give it an 88, Dick, it has a beat, you can dance to it.

God, please save us from those who claim to be your followers. Or perhaps it's time for the Second Coming. No need to smite all those dicks. Just sue their asses off for defamation, in calling themselves Christians, or Muslims, or whatever name they invoke as a codeword that says they are speshul and are thus justified to perform atrocities.

After all, everyone should know that is reserved for me.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Andres Serrano - Avignon - fundamentalists - Palm Sunday - performance art - Piss Christ - Roman Catholic - urine

She saw the ad on television, and she had to have it. Uh, huh, I said. I looked online, and the 25th anniversary concert for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was, holy shit, THAT much?

Of the concert itself, Entertainment Weekly said "The listed headliners alone were enough to justify outrageous ticket prices for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s first 25th anniversary concert at NYC’s Madison Square Garden last night." I suppose it's reasonable that the album of the music would be outrageous, too, although it's a 4-disk set, and I suppose a couple of double-sawbucks is actually quite reasonable. And when you realize it's from Time-Life (HBO originally broadcast the concerts), it's a wonder that it doesn't cost that much every month for the next 137 years.

And you have to wonder why the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a Cleveland institution, is holding its celebratory concerts in New York City.

When Blondie Stopped Working

When Blondie stopped working, that took a big chunk out of our income, and I'm sure she will eventually be getting social security, hopefully before the house gets foreclosed, but in the meanwhile, money is tight. Or maybe it isn't; maybe that's not a severe enough word. But there's no real point in trying to explain that to her. She understands, but within 3 minutes, she's forgotten.

Three times a day, though, she would ask me if I'd ordered the music. I suppose I could answer one of the many Capital One ads I get in the mail, and use the card to buy things I can't pay for, for a long time, but by the time you miss 4 payments, a $40 purchase plus interest, fees, and various gougings works out to $7,000. I figured that I could download the music online for now, and pay for it once Blondie's Social Security starts flowing.

The RIAA doesn't like you doing that, but it's supposedly pretty easy to do. Just download a torrent client and the music will download in the background while you're asleep. Apparently, the client to get for Windows is Vuze, or Azureus or something like that. With any luck, I'd be able to get the music without the RIAA noticing it.

It Said I Didn't Have Java

When I tried to install it, though, it said I needed to install Java. I thought I had Java, but I went out to get it, and then I tried to figure out whether I needed the 32-bit client or the 64-bit client.

When I got my last computer, I didn't want to be limited to 4 gigs of RAM, so I got the 64-bit version of Windows. It's caused all sorts of problems. For instance, we have a color laser printer, for which there is no 64-bit driver. If I want to print something in color, I have to print to a file, then copy the file to my wife's computer, and print it from her computer, which is a big pain.

That's all right. It's a lot faster and quicker - not to mention cheaper - to print things on the black-and-white laser printer. It's a Samsung ML-4500 that I got at the QVC outlet store years ago for $99. When I moved to Windows XP, there wasn't a driver for that printer, but it turns out that the Lexmark 210 laser printer is the same printer with a different name tag on it, and there was a Windows XP driver for it.

A Poorly Ported 'Puter

But my new computer has no parallel port nor serial port on it, and you need one or the other to connect to the Samsung. I ended up hooking up Blondie's old PC to the network, and hooking the printer to the old PC, and then I print to the printer on that PC. I can't do that with the color printer on Blondie's PC, apparently because it's running Vista, but it works OK with the old PC running XP. Go figure.

So I never know whether to get 32-bit or 64-bit software. Sometimes, I just doesn't work together right. And Vista is pretty darned picky about what it allows to run. That's nice, in a way. I don't want to download something, and have it install itself without my agreeing to it. On the other hand, if I want to install something, I can't just click "install" and walk away. I may have to click two or three times on a "yes, I'm sure I want to run this program, fer criminey sake" screen.

But after downloading Java multiple times, and trying to install it several times, I don't know whether it was a 32-bit or 64-bit version that did the trick, but eventually, I got Vuze to install without giving me that damnable message telling me that I needed Java. Then I went out and got a torrent file for the music I wanted, and from there on, Vuze handled it, all by itself.

Queued. Or Maybe Not.

Or maybe it did. Every time I looked, for the next few days, it kept saying that music was "queued". Eventually, though, that message went away, and I couldn't figure out how to play the music. I would click on it, and nothing would happen. Had Vuze simply lost my request, or decided to delete it as being in the queue too long?

No. The problem was that I didn't know what to do. I eventually found a directory on my hard drive called Azureus Downloads (which doesn't make sense, since the software is now called Vuze) and it contained the 50 MP3 files that make up the music Blondie wanted. I moved the music out of that folder so that Vuze couldn't find it; if the RIAA came knocking on my door, I wanted to get nailed for the one copy I'd downloaded, not 15 million copies I'd uploaded to other people.

I started listening to the music, and the first few cuts I hit were pretty good. If you have a zillion headliners, you don't want a million different bands setting up and tearing down, so they had one band plsying for four or five different songs, typically the original artist doing the singing, and they tried to stay pretty close to the original recording. No wonder Blondie had wanted the music. There were a gazillion headliners there.

Blondie Thinks Twice - And So Do I

So this morning, when Blondie came into the office, I told her that I had the album she wanted, and she asked me to turn up the volume. After a while, she asked me to turn it down, and then she asked me if I liked the music. I had just been thinking the same thing. There had been a series of songs that were definitely second-rate covers.

Covers can be good. Eddie Murphy is not much of a singer, but when he sang "Roxanne" in "48 Hours", it was, if anything, an improvement on the original. The lyrics are plaintive, and Murphy's rendition of the song definitely gets across anguish. And Paul Simon's performance (with David Crosby and Graham Nash) of the Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" is magnificent. On the other hand, these are songs we all know by heart, and when they vary from the original, we feel violated. If you had never heard Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind", you might love the version delivered at this concert, but it's not the original and it doesn't feel like the original.

A Quandary. Which Way Out?

Which puts me in a quandary. When I get my next social security check, I should be buying a copy of this music. It's a commitment I made to myself, and those are the ones that really count. I think, though, that I'm going to listen to this music once or twice more, and serious consider whether I want to own the music or not. It wouldn't be honest to keep the music if I didn't pay for it, but there's nothing dishonest about returning an unsatisfactory purchase, is there? Deleting the bits saves wear and tear on the physical copy, saves shipping costs, and saves the retailer handling costs.

There are definitely some cuts that are gems. What I may do is to buy those particular MP3s from Amazon. If you go to Amazon, they allow you to preview each of the cuts in the 4-CD set. That's probably the smart way to go.

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