Blogs

And I went down to the demonstration
To get my fair share of abuse
Singing, "We're gonna vent our frustration
If we don't we're gonna blow a 50-amp fuse"
Sing it to me now...

In the waiting room while Blondie got her brain scan, CNN was giving me a brain scan of another sort. To start off, they're having mass demonstrations in Egypt.

It's been a long time since the Weathermen held their "days of rage" in Chicago. That would have been a little over 41 years ago. Maybe that's what the Rolling Stones were talking about, or maybe it was a different demonstration. The time was right, but there were a lot of demonstrations back then, and the Stones were more likely to be participating in England than in Illinois.

Breaking Barriers

Jim inherited the property. A tired old rarm in Tennessee. He'd never seen it, and he had no semtimental attachment to it. And he needed some cash. He sold the land to Joe, the guy whose shop was next door to his for $100,000.

One month later, he goes to Joe, says he really misses being a landowner, and buys the property back for $110,000. A month after that, he sells the land to Joe again, for $120,000. A month later, he buys the land for $130,000, and a month later sells it again for $140,000.

On and on again, once a month, the property changes hands, and always at a price $10,000 higher than the previous month. The price was somewhere in the $350,000 range when one day Jim rushes into Joe's shop and says, "You'll never believe what happened. Someone down in Tennessee noticed that the land keeps getting sold, and the price keeps going up. He figured there must be oil under the land or something, and he just paid me a million dollars for the property.

Joe Was Unhappy

Why There Isn't A Sarah Palin Day

"Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation." - Sarah Palin, GOP candidate for vice-president, 2008

You'd Have Thought Martin Luther King Was A Republican

"I have not said to my people: 'Get rid of your discontent.'

"Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist.

It was a rainy night, not a "dark and stormy night" but one with a light and glad rain.

I'd been out and about, mostly selling, all day. My wife, Em, was at home, in one of the periods when she wasn't doing very well, with my son Jasper. Lupus comes and goes, and it didn't have her in the hospital, but part of it was her iron will. Must. Not. Go. Hospital. Hospitals are bad places to be when you're sick, she'd tell me. People get sick and die there. She should know. She'd spent enough years working in the Intensive Care Nursery.

Typically, I'd sell as hard as I could all morning long. Sales is a terribly draining job. You're putting yourself on the line, asking people to buy your product, but they buy your product because they trust you, so when they say no, it erodes your soul. If they say yes, of course, you sell them some more, or something else. "Never quit a winner" means you always leave a loser, no matter if you leave with a big wad of cash in your pockets, or merely a bit of lint.

It's a Coco Wheats morning.

The thermometer on the Windows sidebar says it's 18 degrees, and looking out the window, everything is calm. If a fly were to land on a branch of the tree out back, the branch would snap off, fall to ground and shatter into a million toothpicks.

Jon Anderson is singing to me on the television to my back, or perhaps it's Benolt David, It looks like Anderson, but I don't know what David looks like. David is the guy who replaced him on the Yes tour in 2008; if it's David, he's damn good at imitating Jon Anderson's voice. And as I write this, they finish All Good People, and begin singing Roundabout.

The Problem With 101

The problem with Channel 101 is that there isn't much program information available anywhere, so I don't know when this concert was filmed On the other hand, it's rapidly becoming my favorite channel. There are just so many concerts by musicians I care about, and shows that you can't get anywhere else.