You've Been Euphemized

Oh Joy!

Oh Bliss!

Hunger has been eradicated in the United States!

Oh, wait. Maybe not.

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."

Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.

Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is "not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey." Nord, a USDA sociologist, said, "We don't have a measure of that condition."

The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group.

The United States has set a goal of reducing the proportion of food-insecure households to 6 percent or less by 2010, or half the 1995 level, but it is proving difficult. The number of hungriest Americans has risen over the past five years. Last year, the total share of food-insecure households stood at 11 percent.

Well. *I* for one am relieved. Wouldn't want anyone in the richest nation on earth to go HUNGRY.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/15/AR2006111501621.html

A glimpse of leather

Saw a bat as I was getting ready to let Rufus out to do his thing. I hadn't opened the door yet. A large flying insect was beating it's wings around the front porch light, and from behind the sliding glass doors in the kitchen I saw a sudden blur of flapping leathery wings. The bat half circled the light , then snatched it's prey and vanished into the dark up in the palm trees just as I opened the door.

Startling, but very cool.

Suffocation

I try to imagine not being able to breathe, reaching that point where the lungs will burst, your head explode, your vision narrowed to a pinpoint, and still the air doesn't come. I've been at the bottom of the pool longer than I should have, knowing that I could hold out for one more painful second then push off and find sweet air above the surface.

In my mother's case, the surface is a very long way away. A lifetime smoker, she was eventually diagnosed with Emphysema, and then C.O.P.D. The latter is a death sentence, a matter of when and not if, the rate of degeneracy the determinant. Then, not to my surprise, she was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor in her right lung. One type of surgery seemed viable, so she signed up for it and played it up to us as being relatively safe, as major operations involving lung removal possibly can be.

A month later and she remains in the ICU, unable to breathe on her own, fighting a host of smaller, nagging problems that have utterly inhibited her ability to begin recovery. After a lesser procedure we are told things are "improving", presumably relative to where things stood the week prior. The respirator tube has been moved from her mouth to a tracheotomy to kill off an infection in her throat and to render intubation a little less painful. She is also on light dialysis to speed up her kidney function, which had fallen way off when her system was unable to process enough waste. We are told the dialysis is nothing to worry about.

We shall see.

The hope is that in the next week or so she will be deemed strong enough to have the respirator turned off and begin breathing on her own, something that should have happened weeks ago. If it does come to pass, she may well be on her way to a long, but successful recovery. If she cannot, then she is at the bottom of the pool, staring up at the surface without the strength to launch herself toward air, fresh air.

Academia or Advocacy?

A very decent op-edpiece in The New York Times differentiating between professors advocating a particular political or religious point of view and teaching students about those subjects. This is a rare bit of clarity in the shoutfest the Righties have started up in their quest to purge from universities an invented liberal bias that does not exist. What the Righties want is to eradicate any truths but their own.

Shaken to death

My cousin Susan died a week or so ago.

She was discovered dead in the bathtub in her apartment by her mother, who had come to see if anything was wrong after a number of unreturned phone calls. From what I'm told some time had passed between her death and the discovery of her body, adding an additional layer to her mother's profound grief in the form of the beginning stages of decomposition.

No autopsy will be performed. The proximate cause of death appears to be drowning, likely brought on by the after effects of an epileptic seizure. Cousin Susie was prone to seizures, had been since she was born, her life imbued by her struggle to control those seizures and live a normalized life. The speculation is that she fell asleep while relaxing in the bath, then seized as she began to awaken, apparently a common part of her seizure pattern. Her seizures sometimes lasted as long as several minutes, and she tended to roll to one side and assume the fetal position as the seizure came to a close. For many epileptics the end of the seizures is followed immediately by a period of unconsciousness. Somewhere between the ending of the seizure and unconsciousness, Susie drowned.

I'm 40, and best I can recall Susie was a year or two younger than I, making her 38-39 at the time of her death, an age in our society considered relatively young for such an end. Her passing has given me some pause, but not as you might think - a fellow epileptic with the inside knowledge wondering at my own behavior, potential risks to be avoided, the wisdom of taking a bath when home alone. No, her death gives me pause because she and I have not been close in many years. My seizures didn't begin until I was 20 years old, and we've pursued very different treatment paths. We both wanted the same things - a modicum of "normality", a way to live that resembled the lives of those around us.

Susie had a 20 year jump on me when it came to living with seizures, the familial strains it can cause, the tremendous side effects of the powerful medications used to exert some control over the frequency and severity of seizures, and the personality distortions they contribute to. When I had my first seizure, I was conscious during the entire thing as initially my feet, then progressively the rest of my body locked up so tightly I could no longer call for help. Fortunately I had chosen my dorm hall steps as the venue for my epileptic debut, so a number of people who had heard came running. My room mate at the time, Neil, was trained as a paramedic, and he tried to take control of what was happening, but I was so deep into the seizure, and the outside world was disappearing at such a fantastic rate that all I had to time to think before that last pinhole of light was swallowed by complete darkness was" Don't worry, Neil, I'm only dying."

I awoke trying to punch out an Air Force paramedic. He retaliated by giving me a hefty injection of Valium. We reconciled.

This is my personal perspective about my misbehaving brain. I've stepped back from the threshold of the intense surgical route my cousin chose, instead attempting to find my own way to live with them, around them, whatever.

Susie and I had not been close in many years, but I feel the loss of her as my cousin, as a human being, and as someone who had great courage and will to render herself "normal".

All about me

I've rambled and ranted about guitar players recently, perhaps as the initial sign of an impending middle age crisis. If that is the case, please shoot me before I start wearing Lycra shorts and leasing a Porsche. So far I don't feel the yearning for ice cream suits and shiny blue shirts with overly wide collars, so I think I'm safe, for the moment anyway.

Doesn't mean my self indulgence need end here. In fact, that is the core essence of blogging - self indulgence, an ode to the self, myself, me. Regardless of topic, extent of outside sources and links, blogging is at its heart a pursuit inherently All About Me. I don't mean to disparage anyone who engages in the practice but I also lend little weight to the notion that blogging is itself akin to responsible journalism. Note the use of the word "responsible", a term not entirely applicable to many major newspapers, and especially news developed for television, be it the nightly half hour of Death TV or the round the clock breathlessness of CableSpews. In the mix of all this the "blogosphere" (gag me with a laptop) is said to beat the major news outlets to the story. This all sounds like ideal citizen journalism, but most of it isn't anything more than energy for a feedback loop repeating poorly or completely unsourced stories, which then bounce in and out of the major media.

In the old days of named sources, the days when no self-respecting reporter would use the term "reportedly" in order to introduce speculations or utter fabrications to the construct of an actual news story, none of this drivel would see the light of the day. The blogosphere's sole redeeming quality has been its willingness to continue the pursuit of the details of a story even after it falls out of the bare minority of news organizations that have earned the moniker "responsible". This carries its own difficulties as many of these stories are already done to death, and the pursuit comes full circle as the hunt for clarity descends once again into a morass of rumor and allegation without evidence.

But hey, what do I know? The threshold of evidence required to get a story on the front page of a major news daily is remarkably low. Astonishingly so.

The good news is that Led Zeppelin II is still one hell of a record, put together in bits and pieces as the band toured the U.S. for the first time. What were once simple blues riffs were given an accelerant and a match, and an amp turned up to 11. Sure, you have "Ramble On", a juvenile lyric fill of Tolkienisms, but the music backing those pathetic lyrics is straightforward. Driving drums, inspired guitar lines.

Heartbreaker stands out on this record for me because again it highlights Jimmy Page's use of multi-tracked guitar to achieve a useful musical end. If you listen closely to the track you may discover that the best guitar lines in that song are not necessarily the blistering solos.

And to close the show is a clearly stolen blues riff over which Robert Plant uses a harmonica sparingly, backed by lots of good old analog reverb. I'm not completely enamored if his imitation of the sound of some of the great black blues singers, but that is washed away as soon as the electric guitar riff injects the song with a bit of intravenous amphetamine. Page again demonstrates why he is arguably one of the greatest riff-writers in all of rock history, and includes a bit of counterpoint to set it all into context.

There is only one thing wrong with this album. Zeppelin wound up in a court battle with Willie Dixon over whether or not "Whole Lotta Love" was too close for comfort to one of his own tunes. Instead of fighting a real blues player in court, the Zepp should have been more gracious about it and found a way to settle. Something a lot of people forget is that while white boys on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were borrowing, imitating and outright stealing their American bluesmens' work, their idols and inspirations, those who made their brand of rock even possible had mostly been screwed financially by the music industry. It would have been a small thing for Zepp to part with a slice of their many millions and acknowledge outright that those who came before were worthy of recognition and recompense.

My new friend

Seems I've made a friend here in Florida already.:)

Fire in the legs

I've got these little bites all over my right leg. Well, not so little bites that are taking days to heal.

They're nasty.

They're from fire ants.

Welcome to Florida.

Startling as the vampire like holes in my leg were the over-sized flying cockroaches. Fat flitting roaches. How fucking unfair is that? Nature cursed us with roaches to begin with, then gave them wings that are certainly not vestigial and asks us to be kind to her? Fuck that. I'm giving up my green ways until She rethinks this monstrosity. There is also a sub-tropical variety that isn't repelled by light as most roaches are. Quite the opposite. In yet another slap to the human face, nature has decided that the relative safety bright light provides from these insidious home invaders no longer applies. In fact, this particular sub species is attracted to light.

Next time you hear that bump in the night and go to investigate with your thirty pound baseball Maglite, reconsider. Those noises you hear, the clumsy stumbling over the garbage can, a whispered curse, are not produced by a potential burglar. They are the genesis of a trap, designed to get you to open the door and turn on that overpowered flashlight, sealing your doom.

So fuck nature. Screw recycling. I'm sick of rinsing cans and sicker of the mess left at the bottom of the container when I fail to do it. Fire ants and dive bombing roaches the size of a golf ball. I'm gonna go out and fill my tank with Super Duper Unleaded Environment Murdering Gasoline, and see how She likes that. Fucking bitch. I'll get you for those horror show bugs.

Well I'm off to the beach. Not a cloud in the sky, light breeze in off the Atlantic, temperatures slightly higher than I'd like, but pleasant nonetheless.

Gone Gamma

Flickr , the self-described coolest photo sharing site in all of creation has declared itself now in Gamma , status. This follows a period that saw many site functionality improvements, a Yahoo buy in, and an explosion of users. The developers have wisely kept themselves out of a numbers game in the face of the proliferation of photo sharing sites, some of a flavor distinctly different from Flickr, any others pathetic rip offs, devoid of useful features and any sign of community.

Not to say Flickr is perfect. One need only examine the rapidly lengthening threads in various forums to read of much dissent from the recent site changes. This happens every time the Flickrati decide to alter anything. I take it in stride - the entire project is still very much in development, and can do an amazing number and variation of things no other site centered around photography can do. I've found a place to extend my interest in photography, not only through uploading my own, but perusing the works of others by swinging my way through the endless vines attached to the infinite number of trees in the Flickr forest. It is possible to begin in one place and wind up many place otherwise not found except by choosing to peruse those photos "favorited" by a contact, or randomly entering phrases into the Tag search boxes and seeing what is returned.

I use a lot of the online offerings from Google , despite the cries of data mining and world information domination. Google is attempting to develop ever changing ways to deal with rapidly growing amounts and types of digital information (and analog too, if you consider the book projects), and most importantly, the relationships between bits of data indexed.

Beyond their stated mission, Google has wisely allowed individual employees and teams considerable leeway when it comes to project concepts, trial testing and sometimes, a public release. The latter often infuriates computer "experts" and avid participants of computer forums all across the Web. The complaint is that Google is basically releasing unfinished software and allowing the world to beta test it for them.

True.

This is compared by critics to Microsoft's sorry track record when it comes to developing and releasing newer versions of its' Windows Operating System. True, MS does usually release the latest Windows version knowing a billion bugs would pop up, other software would break and it would take the company months and even years to make major fixes in the form of Service Packs, which carry their own built in fuck ups.

I find the comparison between software written by a for profit company but released for free and not required in order for your computer to function to an entire operating system that is released as a finished product for a fat fee when it is clearly still quite broken absurd, and reeking of a particularly foul strand of sour grapes. Google responds over time to the millions of suggestions made about each of it's software offerings, improving and experimenting with new features, some of which don't stick if user feedback is overwhelmingly negative. The chronic state of "beta-ness" allows for this.

By contrast, Flickr offered limited free user account next to pair annual user accounts which offered considerably more storage and other features. Buying a pro account back then was a bit of a gamble - none of us had any clear idea if the site would still be around three months down the road or if our money and uploaded pictures would all be gone one morning. Flickr survived, was bought by Yahoo, and is still cool, a small miracle considering who bought it.


Not sure what the point of any of this ramble is except to say to those who obsess over every Gmail detail or an entire site re-rendering at Flickr - remain calm. A few days down the line and you'll have adjusted to the alterations, incorporated those you have use for into your routine and discarded those that prove personally worthless. In some cases, new features that totally suck will die a quiet death, and a very brief moment of reflection will have you wondering why you were so wound up in the first place. :)

More Dinosaurs

OK, so last time I was extolling the virtues of Jeff Beck as guitarist extraordinaire, and mentioned only in passing a contemporary who is also a favorite of mine,Jimmy Page. He haunted the same London music scene Beck and Clapton did, but honed his skills doing more studio work than either of the other two. He eventually joined the Yardbirds in their final incarnation, initially as bass player, then lead guitarist when Beck left the group. It was in the midst of attempting to form the New Yardbirds followed on that Led Zeppelin formed.

I've been listening to the Zep catalog recently, and doing so out of order to avoid babbling about the chronology of the band, blah blah blah. All of that is readily accessible all over the Web. I just wanted to delve back into the music in a manner that escapes the tiny Classic Rock Radio box the band has been stuffed in since the format was invented 20 years ago. For anyone who cares, it was known as Album Oriented Rock prior to the all-the-same shite radio we have across the nation, and the playlist was still very much in the hands of the individual DJs. Of course hot records got more play, but they had a lot of leeway, so tracks other than the "hits" got decent exposure, as did bands then defunct or not selling in large numbers. In those days you could still call up and make requests, and if a song were already playing, get the DJ himself on the line.

But no more. Classic Rock Radio killed all of that, which is why the only DJs who become semi-famous in any radio market are a small number of live club DJs, and those numbnuts idiots that have turned your morning and afternoon commute into a low brow, vulgar shout fest. Gag me with a wet T shirt.

I digress. Please excuse.

So I'm listening to the original Zepp records out of order, letting the music wash over me, move me, drive me, entertain me all while I reconsider it in the context of the 25 years that have passed since I bought my first record. Zeppelin did release singles like most bands, but did little to push individual songs, relying instead on the full body of the music to carry a particular album, then backing it up with epic tour marathons. Unlike many bands in the very end of the sixties and into the seventies, Led Zeppelin did not travel with an opening act. They were the entire show, and still sold staggering numbers of tickets, setting attendance records all across the US.

So each album is a thing unto itself. I started with Houses Of The Holy, whose cover always looked as though it had been photographed under a sodium lamp, all weird orange and purple, and whatnot. The opening track (Song Remains The Same) has an insistent, compelling riff that pushes you right into the rhythm of the song. Page was consumed by the possibilities of his guitar in a way unlike Hendrix, who was said to have been frustrated by the disconnect between the sounds in his head and those he could actually conjure from a guitar. Page wanted to create layers of guitar voices, each one different but complementary to the others. One voice might be popping out the rhythm that Bonham's drums would pick up while another would add in chords edging on discordance, and the whole thing would somehow fall into place when it was so utterly clear from the first few notes that it couldn't possibly work.

Several songs from Houses Of The Holy appear on "greatest" compilations and Classic Rock (Heretofore known as CR cause I'm a lazy bitch) and rightly so, but this time around I found myself really smiling and grooving to the closing, and simplest track of the record, The Ocean. The recording is stripped way down, the guitar is loud and clean, and the riff as perfect as most of Page's riffs are.

Next up was In Through The Out Door the final release from the band before drummer John Bonham died. His death was a shock to the band, its fans, and the music world generally. Zepp had released their first record in three years, played a huge festival show at Knebworth, and was in rehearsal for a US tour when Bonham died. I can recall even now, reading it on Page 3 of the Stars And Stripes newspaper while in Tokyo. The only word from the band was "we're done". Just started tenth grade at The American School in Japan which was proving a very difficult transition and music was all the refuge I had. In other words, I was fucked. The ground beneath my very feet had betrayed me several times that week in a series of medium strength of earthquakes, and now the mighty Zepp had fallen.

And in truth, I wasn't lovin' the final record. In Through The Out Door spawned three very popular radio hits, only one of which I could really stand at all - In The Evening, mostly because of the groaning, murky sludge that lays the foundation for the signature riff to follow. That record does have its moments, however, but to my ears the hits, while well crafted rock tunes, are not what stand out. Two tracks, "Carouselambra" and "I'm Gonna Crawl" appeal most to me following this "relistening" I've been doing. The first does rely on a somewhat cheesy synthesizer sound, but once it gets rolling it's gone, and you can tell the guitar was slung way low down over Pages' shoulder as he tears the chords out. The mix is really dark, but that adds to the appeal. The second track also has too much synth for my tastes, but it falls quickly into the background. It's basically a blues track without the raunch, but plenty of testifying by Plant. Stacked against the monster reputation of so many other Zepp tunes it isn't much, but it really does close out this album on a strong note.

That's it for tonight. Thought I'd do more, but listening to entire albums is not something I do often enough anymore. The popular music industry is in many ways coming full circle. In the fifties and sixties in particular, it thrived on singles. Good old 45RPM records with that one song everyone had to have and a flip side that may or may not have been any good. By the mid sixties record companies were combining those few hit singles with other tunes already recorded by a band an releasing it as an LP. To the execs it seemed a sure fire way to sell more vinyl - the hits were on these 12 inchers, the kids loved the hits, so they'd buy these to get all they could from their favorite bands. The execs were right.

A lot of other factors combined with this economic motive to turn LPs into organic musical beasts. Some of the bands making whole LPs were also still releasing singles, but many fans were bypassing the two song 45RPM for the whole 33 1/3 enchilada. Now, in the era of computers, downloads (legal and not), and televisions' ability to push a song the LP (now in the form of a CD) is falling by the wayside. Most bands still make them even if they are nothing more than an unrelated collection of songs, but those who buy the music are moving away from wanting the whole thing. Think of how many CDs or LPs you bought primarily to get one or two songs off it. If you rip your music to computer, it is likely those tunes that never interested you in the first place are not going to make it onto your hard drive. Illegal downloading of music often centers around a particular song from really popular acts.

In other words, the single is where it's at, all over again. I currently have 13,033 songs on my computer in six different formats. And I've yet to finish ripping my entire CD collection. I've left off songs from many of the CDs I've ripped. Since my computer has become my primary listening place (one of my stereo speakers was rendered unusable after a cat knocked it over and rode it down to safety as it crashed into the wall. Claws and woofer surrounds do not mix well) the way I deal with the music itself has changed. It's all just files now, so I can move them here and there, copy them, back them up, alter their formats, and play them in any order I want, or ferret them out using various parameters, or just load up a gigantic list in Winamp , hit "shuffle", and let it fly. Beats the fuck out of craptastic radio, and has the blessed benefit of "next" anytime what's playing is not moving me to the groove.

More dinosaur ruminations for you all next time around. I may even finish my half-ass Page tribute/analysis/baseless rant.

Fuck all that...

it's time to get on with this.

I originally started this spastic blog with politics, news, and my muted outrage in mind. Over time, I've discovered that while my rage is less muted my will to pore over the daily news and other pertinent articles, process them, then spew here has waned. The three people who might actually read this already know what is really happening, how fucked up our country has become, and don't need me to understand that. When I started writing three years ago, just as the war was getting underway I could have been part of the alleged "blogosphere" had I the persistence. I did not, so Andrew Sullivan gets to be on TV, not me. :)

Tonight I want to talk about Jeff Beck . I had occasion recently to see a live show of his taped in Tokyo in 1999. I had pretty much given up on anything from Beck since somewhere in the 1970's when he was making extraordinary music incorporating ground breaking guitar playing. The meld was far more than much of the musical masturbation that passes for guitar technique these days, but it seemed to me his best days were long behind him. Then I encounter this unreleased DVD of a one night show recorded in Tokyo, backed by musicians I have never even heard of.

And there's Jeff, same hair he's had for 30 years, wielding a white Stratocaster and no pick. I thought the only modern electric rock guitarist left to play without one was Mark Knopfler . Nice to be wrong. The electric guitar is a difficult beast to tame and for rhythmic purposes, a pick can be a powerful tool. Beck plays brilliantly during this show, well in control of the music and his instrument, not skipping a beat or missing a note as tears through each piece. While his tone is certainly somewhat processed it is recognizably a Strat, and one in the hands of a master. From one phrase to the next it can go from singing to screaming but remain connected. Not all of the pieces played during the show appealed to me but I felt compelled to watch the entire thing just to see what he would do next, to hear the barely possible sounds come out of his guitar.

Beck was one of the "big three" English guitarists of the 1960's, alongside Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. All three of them were in the Yardbirds at one time or another but took rather different paths afterward. Beck's was the most divergent. Whilst Page made the Gibson Les Paul famous and invented a hundred now famous and familiar riffs, and Clapton made it safe for white men to play the blues and be really good at it, Beck rapidly moved off into less popular territory. After a few albums with Rod Stewart (Truth and Beckola) as lead singer (what a wasted talent he wound up being) that included the wildest rendition of "Jailhouse Rock" ever recorded, Jeff Beck spun himself off into the nebulous realm where jazz and electric music meet. His forays were not as relentless as say, John McLaughlin, nor were they intended to be some sort of spiritual machinery, but instead were examinations of how the guitar can be stretched into new territory and still be recognizable as an instrument. Beck played on those albums from the mid seventies as if he could barely contain the instrument in his hands, as if it were going to careen out of control and literally explode.

Aw, fuck. What the hell do I know.

Beck never achieved the fame of Led Zeppelin nor the reverence that surrounds Eric Clapton these days. Page can't play a lot of his own stuff any longer, not with the precision and energy he once had, and Clapton, while likely more technically perfect than ever, is dull as dishwater in recent years. So it was refreshing to see that one of them can not only still play, but can do so with energy and joy, right on the edge of chaos while still coming off as precise.

Like I said, some of the compositions didn't really do it for me, but Beck was utterly in his element.

Get these two records if you have any interest in what I'm talking about.

Blow By Blow

Wired

Next time maybe I'll write about the many virtues of belly button fuzz.