Summer Olympic Games

I’ve been paying next to no attention to the Summer Olympic Games because almost every time I click over to NBC, they’re in the middle of a human interest story, in a commercial break, or teasing you (like network and local television stations do) with “Coming up…” preview snippets that don’t come up until the end of the broadcast.
When I want to see something I’ve heard or read about, I Google it (like this AP photo of Roqama Al-Gassra of Bahrain celebrating her victory in an early heat of the Womens 200 Meter competition).

I did watch the women’s marathon on the big screen in high definition, and not only was the race exciting, but there were terrific ground and aerial views of Beijing as the 26-mile course unwound.

It was astonishing to see from the air (even through the haze and smog) how much work had been done to scrub and polish the city, and to wall off its less attractive areas. The government buildings and grand boulevards were truly spectacular.

But it was kind of spooky that there were so few people along the course cheering the runners on. Marathoners (as much or more than other athletes) are lifted up by the encouragement of the crowd, and that seemed to be missing.

I was disappointed (and a little surprised) by the lack of candor on the part of the NBC hosts with regard to the age of the some of girls on the Chinese gymnastic team, and the logic of some of the judges’ scoring. It was refreshing to see guest commentator Bela Karolyi show a little outrage (when he wasn’t being cut off).

Redneck Indicators

The Halloween pumpkin on your porch has more teeth than your spouse.
You let your twelve-year-old daughter smoke at the dinner table (in front of her kids.)
You've been married three times and still have the same in-laws.
You think a woman who is "out of your league" bowls on a different night.
You wonder how service stations keep their restrooms so clean.
Anyone in your family ever died right after saying, "Hey watch this."
Your junior prom had a daycare.
You lit a match in the bathroom and your house exploded right off its wheels.
You have to go outside to get something from the fridge.
One of your kids was born on a pool table.
You need one more hole punched in your card to get a freebie at the House of Tattoos.
You can't get married to your sweetheart because there's a law against it.

Rainbows Have Nothing To Hide

I have a confession: I have always loved “The Rainbow Connection”

Written by Paul Williams and Kenny Ascher, and originally performed by Jim Henson (as Kermit the Frog) in “The Muppet Movie” in 1979, “The Rainbow Connection” has been covered by dozens of artists over the decades – ranging from Kenny Loggins, The Carpenters, and Debbie Harry to Willie Nelson, Sara McLachlan, and The Dixie Chicks. Even Johnny Mathis had a go at it.

But I stumbled across a version by Ashley Gramins on iTunes recently, and it was like hearing it for the first time all over again.

Check out a sample of Asley's version at iTunes, or on "Mama Rocks!" at http://www.ashleygramins.com/

Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what's on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
And rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we've been told and some choose to believe it
I know they're wrong, wait and see.
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me.
Who said that every wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it,
And look what it's done so far.
What's so amazing that keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see?
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.
All of us under its spell,
We know that it's probably magic...
Have you been half asleep?
And have you heard voices?
I've heard them calling my name.
Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same
I've heard it too many times to ignore it
It's something that I'm s'posed to be...
Someday we'll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.
Laa, da daa dee da daa daa,
La laa la la laa dee daa doo...

Finish

Bill Belichick's theme for the 2008 New England Patriots is "Finish."

Patriots fans for whom this photo generates dangerous levels of hypertension and nausea will understand.

Forget the regular season records and forget all that "Perfect Season" crap.

Finish this season with another NFL Championship.

Are you listening, offensive line?

No more pictures like this one.


Diamonds and Rust

I remember listening to Dick Summer’s show on WBZ radio in Boston when I was at Penn State and wishing that I could be part of the folk music scene he described at places like Club 47 and The Unicorn

I related more to the folk and “protest” songs from the singer/songwriters he played than I did to the stale pop songs that still dominated the music business at the time, extending the Fifties all the way into 1964

So a highlight one summer back then was seeing Joan Baez in concert at Rutgers, and then seeing her a year later in concert in Asbury Park – this time with Bob Dylan

We saw her at the Newport Folk Festival in 1967, but by that time the transition from acoustic music to rock and roll was beginning to pass her by

However, her commitment to peace and justice has never wavered over the years, and in fact she is right now in the middle of a world tour (click on the title for more information)

We’re going to see her in concert at The Berklee Performance Center in November, just a block or two from where The Unicorn used to be on Boylston Street


Gotham City


We saw "The Dark Knight" in IMAX, and one of the uncredited stars was Gotham City at night, a spectacular blend of Manhattan, Chicago and Los Angeles. As the camera para-glided over the glittering metropolis, I had the same wonderful sensation I get at "Soarin" at EPCOT. For me, Gotham was the highlight of what was a very good (not great) film, too bloated for my taste with noisy explosions and collisions. But I guess that's what generates buzz and revenue at the cinema complex these days, and in that regard it appeared to have been very well done.

I was: sad to see Rachel killed off, mesmerized by the The Joker, and wondering if that was a perfectly good Lamborghini they trashed or just CGI.





I Don't Want To Talk About It...

When Alexis Gorman, 26, wanted to tell a man she had been dating that the courtship was over, she felt sending a Dear John text message was too impersonal. But she worried that if she called the man, she would face an awkward conversation or a confrontation.
So she found a middle ground. She broke it off in a voice mail message, using new technology that allowed her to jump directly to the suitor’s voice mail, without ever having to talk to the man — or risk his actually answering the phone....(click on title for more)


A Wired Prayer

Having recently replaced my ailing laptop with a generic desktop, I have come full circle from a time not long ago when I thought I had to have a laptop in order to be fully mobile in this digital age.

I hereby offer my wired prayer to the gods of Technology:

My BlackBerry and my iTouch iPod, they comfort me. And my Kindle provides unlimited reading material when I lie down in green pastures.

They restoreth my soul.

Amen

Weeds Season Four

I figured out how I finally got addicted to “Weeds.”

I had watched parts of several episodes from Season Three without a clue as to where the show was going and I just could not connect with any of the characters.

But then I got it – we’re not meant to like any of these people. “Weeds” is just like one of those classic Marx Brothers movies from the 1930s -- “Night At The Opera” or “Duck Soup” -- totally anarchic, with everybody and everything made fun of and nothing left standing at the end

Religions, ethnicities, sexual preferences, physical disabilities – “Weeds” protects none of them, which is certainly refreshing and invigorating in these hyper-PC times.

So now I’m totally into the new season, wishing that each week’s episode ran longer than thirty minutes. (Click on the title to get caught up)


Mad Men Season Two

Mad Men Season Two began last night on AMC (basic cable, free OnDemand from Comcast). Season One ended on Thanksgiving Eve 1960, a couple of weeks after JFK’s election, as Don Draper’s world imploded, with Don sitting alone in his house in Ossining, his wife and kids off to spend the holiday without him at her father’s house in New Jersey. As Bob Dylan sings “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” over the closing credits, we’re left wondering (like Don) what could possibly happen next.
Season Two picks up the story on Valentine’s Day 1962, and I’m looking forward to discovering over the next several weeks what happened (and is happening) to these people as the world around them changes from the Fifties to the Sixties.If you missed Season One and are interested, click the title to get caught up

Like a Train Wreck

We recently went to see Lucinda Williams and her excellent band Buick 6 at the Lowell Summer Music Series. It was a beautiful Saturday night in early July, outdoors in Boarding House Park against a backdrop of the restored buildings where the “Mill Girls” lived at the turn of the twentieth century. I’ve been listening to Lucinda’s songs for a long time, but Gail had never seen her before.
Couldn’t be nicer, right?
Wrong.
To start with, the concert was General Admission in an actual park – bring your own lawn chairs or blankets. We arrived when the gates opened at 6PM (for a 7:30PM concert) and were surprised to only find two cramped spots on the lawn for our camp chairs – apparently people can stake out their spots any time during the day, and a whole lot of them did. That made for some seriously pissed-off concertgoers, especially those who arrived after 7PM and ended up having to stand out on the street behind the park.
Also, the Series is a subscription event (you can buy single-show tickets too), so there were a lot of people there who weren’t familiar with her intense lyrics, which can get quite explicit, and many of those people brought little kids. “Learning How to Live” is not “Puff the Magic Dragon.”
I’ve seen Lucinda in concert before, and after a while she made it very clear that she didn’t want to be there, playing for that crowd.
I enjoyed the music, Gail not so much, but -- click on the title to check out what some of the other people who were there with us had to say

NFL Ticket Prices

A colleague at work is selling his season tickets to a few Patriots regular season games this season. His seats are in the corner of one of the end zones. He's asking $468 for a pair of tickets (face value for the pair: $234). Even if he were selling them for face value, who could afford to take a son or daughter (or even himself and a friend) to a game? Outdoors in New England on a late December Sunday night (game time 8:30PM), against the St. Louis Rams? After paying $35 for parking and God knows how much on food and drink? And why would you want to, if you could watch it at home on a 42" plasma high definition television, with all of the cool network camerawork and replays? I don't get it -- but then I never got tailgate parties and getting fall-down drunk, either. I'm just a fan who loves to watch the game.

Girls Like Us

As I read Sheila Weller's great new book "Girls Like Us" (weaving together the lives of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon into a Sixties tapestry) I recalled a concert Gail and I went to in late 1969, at an old theatre (long gone) between Kenmore Square and the Boston University campus. (Weller places it in Cambridge, but it was Boston.) Joni Mitchell was the headliner, known to us through covers of her songs by Judy Collins and Tom Rush. Her opening act (and, according to Weller, main squeeze) was a very young James Taylor, making his US debut after recording his first album in the UK for The Beatles' new Apple label. The buzz about him in Rolling Stone had been building for some time. It was something special -- two of the finest singer-songwriters ever in an intimate setting for about 500 people. They did separate sets, and a couple of duets; James really was the opening act. The vibe in that room was so powerful that you didn't need anything artificial to generate a high.

Great White Wonder

I bought my first bootleg LP, "Great White Wonder," almost forty years ago at a head shop on Mass Ave in Cambridge MA, halfway between Harvard and Central Squares. I paid $6 cash, which was a lot. (The head shop is now a store for gamers)
"Great White Wonder" was the first of what would be many Bob Dylan bootlegs to appear (and the first bootleg rock album), and we had all read about it in Rolling Stone -- our newspaper of record. The double LP (which I sold on eBay a few years ago for $125) was a collection of live performances and basement tape stuff with The Band. I bought three copies -- one for myself and copies for two of my co-workers at a bookstore on Boylston Street in the Back Bay. The trip and purchase ate up my lunch hour and my lunch money for the week, but the album was selling out everywhere and we had to have it.
The sound quality was pretty good, and there was something exhilirating about the whole experience of acquiring it -- sort of like early Napster.
I was thinking about this the other day, while listening to my second bootleg recording -- "The Rolling Stones Big Bang Boston 08-21-05," which captures the entire opening night concert at Fenway Park, one of the best concerts I've ever attended. The recording is pretty good, considering that it was captured surreptitiously from somewhere in the audience that night.
I bought it on eBay for $9 with PayPal -- a process that was less exhilirating but a whole lot more convenient.