Music Friday: "Only Time Will Tell," "Save Your Money For the Weekend," & "Some Eternal Spark"

I've written about Glossary numerous times over the years. In fact, I've featured "Save Your Money For the Weekend" before.

Unfortunately, as I discovered recently, they made stops in St. Louis and Normal, IL, and I missed them. I probably could have gone to one of those shows if I would have been paying attention.

Damn it.

So for a feeble attempt to make up for missed opportunities, I offer a trio of the band's songs.

Random Notes from a Crank

Today marks 100 days until the start of college football season.

For the past couple of days, I've been binging on watching the first season of Game of Thrones. I recently started watching episodes of the second season on Sunday nights. After being frustrated and having a fit of cursing at HBO's website because of their overly complicated process of being able to watch past episodes online, I finally started watching the first season via my laptop last night. I'm really enjoying the show, which is a surprise because I'm not really much of fantasy/otherly-world fiction kind of guy. In fact, the last time I think I read a fantasy novel was when I was back in junior high school -- that was Tolkien's Return of the King, the final book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. To give you an idea of the episode-watching binge I've been on, today is Tuesday. Like I said, I started watching the first season last night. This afternoon I finished episode 7. And now I've gone and ordered the first book because, as far as I can tell so far from the HBO series and what I quickly learned about the books on the Web, the story doesn't sound like it has any of goofy pathos and bathos of fantasy fiction.

I do have a complaint about the Game of Thrones series and other films of the fantasy variety though. Why do the characters in these films almost always have British accents? Why? What up with that?

As much as I agree with argument made in May's "Science Agenda" editorial in Scientific American, I'm not optimistic about smart, substantive changes to the farm bill. I hope I'm wrong.

Although it's not a humorous article, reading "The Science of Health" piece in the same issue reminded me of the sound advice my Uncle Raymond told me before I went to college: "Avoid the clap."

Posting Alone

I thought I'd pass along an article from The Atlantic that has probably gone viral. The title is misleading because the piece, at least to me, is more about loneliness than Facebook.

As a preview, here are some nuggets from "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" that might make you want to read the whole thing:

• "We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible."
• "Facebook arrived in the middle of a dramatic increase in the quantity and intensity of human loneliness, a rise that initially made the site's promise of greater connection seem deeply attractive."
• "We know intuitively that loneliness and being alone are not the same thing."
• "The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus."
• "We make our decisions about how we use our machines, not the other way around."
• "Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy. The beauty of Facebook, the source of its power, is that it enables us to be social while sparing us the embarrassing reality of society -- the accidental revelations we make at parties, the awkward pauses, the farting and the spilled drinks and the general gaucherie of face-to-face contact."
• "Among people older than 65, 3 percent reported symptoms [of narcissistic personality disorder]. Among people in their 20s, the proportion was nearly 10 percent."
• "What Facebook has revealed about human nature -- and this is not a minor revelation -- is that a connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity. Solitude used to be good for self-reflection and self-reinvention. But now we are left thinking about who we are all the time, without ever really thinking about who we are. Facebook denies us a pleasure whose profundity we had underestimated: the chance to forget about ourselves for a while, the chance to disconnect."

First Season (20 Strikeout Game) & The Last One

"In Final Outing, Wood Fans One, Then Retires"

Schlabach's Revision of the Pre-Season Top 25

Today ESPN writer Mark Schlabach updated his "Way-Too-Early Preseason Top 25."

Here are my initial thoughts in response to his rankings:

• LSU and USC being 1 and 2 respectively are good bets. Both are stacked with talent and have favorable schedules. 
• I wonder if this will finally be the season that Georgia goes to the BCS Championship game. Like LSU and Alabama over the past five years, Richt has recruited really well, outstanding in fact. But they never seem to capitalize on their opportunities.
• West Virginia in the Big 12, huh? They make sense as a fit for that offense-first, defense-challenged conference. I don't think they finish that high though.
• I think the Spartans win the Big 10.
• The Gators might be a top ten team at the end of the season. Their new offensive coordinator knows his stuff.

If you have thoughts on Schlabach's rankings, feel free to provide them in the comments section. 

Music Friday: "Unsatisfied," "Hold My Life," "Can't Hardly Wait," "Anywhere's Better Than Here," & "Happy Town"

I've been playing my iPod on shuffle quite a bit this week, and one band that keeps getting played is one of the innovators of "alternative music," The Replacements. They are one of my favorite bands. Of all time.

So for this Music Friday, I offer five songs from the five albums I had on cassettes back, as the kids say, "in the day."

First up is "Unsatisfied" from Let It Be (1984), a song Joey Kneiser of Glossary references in a recent interview.





Next is "Hold My Life" from the laconically titled album Tim (1985).





Batting third is the often covered "Can't Hardly Wait" from one of my favorite albums of all time, Pleased to Meet Me (1987).





"Anywhere's Better Than Here" from Don't Tell a Soul (1989) is full of angst and anger.





And to finally close out this festival of embedding, I offer "Happy Town" from All Shook Down (1990).





Have a good weekend, folks.

Random Notes from a Crank

At a meeting yesterday, I learned that the profile I had when I entered college -- a first-generation college student and an Undeclared major -- would make the higher ups, the muckity mucks, consider me an "at-risk student." I found being undeclared making one "at-risk" a little odd, but local and national statistics provide evidence that those folks don't stick around for their sophomore years as often as the others. I find that metric kind of sad because the whole point of college, for me at least, was exploring different subjects and trying to figure out what I liked and wanted to do.  Because I was interested in psychology, history, sociology/anthropology, philosophy, English, classics, and education, it would have been silly for me to declare a major. Now that I think about it some more, some people -- like Admissions counselors and high school teachers -- sometimes would act a little funny when I would tell them I was an undecided major. While I understand many people see higher education as an avenue toward a job and, sure, they deserve a return on their investment, it's also important to explore other subjects other than just what's in one's major, especially since people are likely to change jobs more than ever nowadays. Or maybe that's just my liberal arts mindset talking...

As I've probably written before, I love small college towns in the summer. When a substantial portion of the nine-month population heads back to their original territories, the town I live in becomes quiet. Sure, we have summer classes, but the character of the town is different. The weather is helping too. It's been gorgeous here in east central Illinois.

Mrs. Nasty was surprised yesterday when I told I'd watch The Hunger Games movie with her. I haven't read the novel, but she loved it. I'm no avid moviegoer, but it sounds like interesting dystopian fiction, which I don't mind. But as for dystopian reality, I don't like that. Now we just need to figure out a date night and arrange a kid sitter.

Speaking of Mrs. Nasty, she has an idea for our back patio area that once had cheap lattice adorning it. I had to tear it down because of wind damage. Since we took off the old shutters and replaced them with new black ones (see Stay Positive below), she wants to try using the old shutters where the lattice used to be. She's going to paint four of the old shutters, and then she wants to rig them up to hang in that area using a eye and hook system and cabling. I don't know if it will work (I think it will), so we'll see what happens. We already have a bottle tree in the front flower bed that I'm sure some people find weird, so a decorative shutter system will be a nice compliment in the back yard. Because of this nascent project, on Monday I got to do some demolition work on the framing that held up the lattice. Tearing up stuff is fun.

As much as I dislike it when people put down Southern states based on Yankee attitudes, I think the article in Mother Jones -- "'It's Just Not Right': The Failure of Alabama's Self-Deportation Experiment" -- is a case study of, as some Southerners say, "the dog catching the car." Be careful about what laws and policies your legislators pass. Hear that, nitwits in Springfield?

With my dog not freely running around and patrolling the backyard because she's rehabbing from surgery to repair a cranial cruciate ligament, the squirrels and birds are no longer vigilant because she would chase after anything that was in the yard. When she's back on her game, she's going to be beating some squirrel ass back there. Or more likely, the neighbors will return to hearing her bark a lot.

Stay Positive: Easy-to-Install Shutters, Water Balloons, & The Avengers

This afternoon Mrs. Nasty and I put some new shutters as you can see above. They were surprisingly easy to install.

For a long time, we just stayed with the burgundy shutters we inherited when we bought the house, but we made a change for the better.

I was not looking forward to putting up those things because of my past experiences with home improvement. I have Tim Taylor-like tendencies if you get the old pop culture reference.

On second thought, I guess there was the incident where I fell off the ladder, fell on my butt, and did something to my right knee, but other than that snafu, it was a sound success.

After that was all over and because the kids were good while we worked, we had a water balloon fight. Water was splattered liberally.

Tonight it's a viewing of The Avengers. I hope they don't screw up the plot line from the original comic book too much since the current cartoon is more true to the Marvel comic since the group started with Ant Man and Wasp.

Music Friday: "Gin, Smoke, Lies," "Southeastern Son," & "Old Blue Star"

Today I'm featuring songs from an album that came out Tuesday, Goodbye Normal Street by the Turnpike Troubadours.

This is a band I didn't know much about until this week. Here is how the outfit is described on Last.fm: "The Turnpike Troubadours, whose name is derived from the bumpy Oklahoma toll-roads and their hard lived folk singing heroes, are proof that isolation can be the mother of originality. Cutting their teeth in roadside dance halls and honky-tonks has made a serious impact on the band’s musical style, which walks the line between Woody Guthrie and Waylon Jennings. “Bossier City,” the band’s debut album, is testament to the small towns in which they were raised. It combines Folk, Country, Cajun, and Bluegrass with stories of longing, humor, tragedy, and general life in rural America."

First up is the opening track of the new album--"Gin, Smoke, Lies."

The next two songs from the album provide narratives about veterans.

Thoughts on the Early Part of the MLB Season

I'm addicted to the MLB Network. It's not a problem yet, but, damn, they do a great job.

Because I've been doing this fantasybaseballer thing since '01, I think about MLB quite a bit. What follows are some of my so-called thoughts on what's gone down so far.

As much as I get annoyed by the St. Louis Cardinals, it's hard to deny that they're playing great right now.  Beltran and Furcal, if they stay healthy, have been strong acquisitions. The pitching is going well, and I'm wondering how Matheny would have done with managing past teams [Baiting Foz and his LaRussa-hatred here].

I've never seen a season where so many closers are losing their jobs and there's so much shifting in the closer position. The cliche is that the hardest outs in baseball are the last three, but c'mon this is getting ridiculous.

Although he blew a save in a spectacular fashion on Wednesday and in general I don't like the Yankees, I'm pulling for Robertson, a Crimson Tide alumnus, to do a good job. Roll Tide, sir.

I'm happy to see the Orioles doing well. I like that the franchise originally started as the St. Louis Browns. And Camden Yards is a great ball park. Although I like Sveum, I wish it would have worked out that the Cubs would have hired Buck Showalter.

To make me feel even older, I discovered that Scott Van Slyke, the son of Andy Van Slyke, had his major league debut on Wednesday.

Although there the Cubs have no shot at winning their division, I like the character of this team so far. There is some grit there. The LaHair gamble is paying off right now. He has strong plate discipline and seems to just have needed a chance in the majors. Once Rizzo gets called up, I suspect he'll get moved to the outfield, but he has saved many a throw at first base. While I understand the acquisition of starteresque arms, I sure wish we had Marshall and Cashner in the Cubs bullplen. My hope is that Soriano and Soto get hot as hell this season, so the organization can trade them for decent prospects. Marmol is the hard sell.

I listen to 670 The Score from time to time, and many of the pundits are rhetorically ravaging the White Sox about the Chris Sale situation. So, the dude has a tender elbow, and their answer is to make him the closer where he would pitch back-to-back days in high stress situations? I don't know what they're doing, but I find it strange that Ventura isn't talking much.

Chipper Jones will retire after this season. At present, his career OBP is .402. That is sick.

Conservatives' Cliches

Hours after I make a post about how I won't probably post about politics much, I read the syndicated op-ed column by Clarence Page in my local paper. In the JG-TC, it is titled "Taking Stock of Conservatives and Their Lists of Cliches," but on website of the Chicago Tribune, it is called "Cliches Conservatives Say."

Page is responding to a book by Jonah Goldberg titled The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

I find it interesting that Goldberg thinks that liberals and progressives cheat by using cliches because conservatives and libertarians use them too. We're human after all.

In addition, and I know Jay Heinrichs who wrote Thank You for Arguing and Word Hero would agree with me on this supposition, I would argue that conservatives and the GOP, on the whole, are typically better at rhetorically/linguistically framing issues than Democrats and liberals are.

A good example are the slogans of "pro-life" and "pro-choice." Sure, people like to have their choices, but "pro-life" is difficult linguistic trap to escape.

Damn reality and its "liberal bias."

Fully Labeled

Finally, I'm done.

It took a while, but this here blog is fully labeled or "tagged."

Going through this process was interesting because I got to see how PlannedOb has changed over the short lifespan it's been around. Since I started the blog at the height of the presidential primaries, it's not surprising that one of the top labels is "Politics."

But lately I haven't been writing as much about politics as I did when I first started this blog. It was one of the main subjects of my first blog that I started when I lived in St. Louis. Some readers may remember that one.

But election time is ramping up, so I suspect I might write a bit more about politics. Then again, maybe I won't. I don't know. It can be tiring and depressing. I need a more "Stay Positive" outlook because of my natural pessimism, and writing about Mitt Romney, the Tea Party, and attack ads is not going to help.

Regardless, if I do write about the upcoming election, here are some pertinent labels I might use for such posts:

• Frustration
• Anger
• Media
• Race
• Social Class
• Stupidity
• Deceit
• Nonsense
• Dark Messages
• Immigration
• Iraq

I added "stupidity" late in the process, so I'm sure there are some posts from the past couple of years that I could use that label for, but I don't think I want to back through all of those posts again.

And I need to add hokum to that list.  

Random Notes from a Crank

The plaque below comes from the carousel area near the Butterfly House in St. Louis County where the kids, Mrs. Nasty, and I spent the morning before my daughter's big dance competition at Kirkwood High School.

In contrast to that quotation, here's the nugget of wisdom I got from my fortune cookie at P.F. Chang's in Chesterfield: "Enjoy life! It is better to be happy than wise." Really? Is that so? Let's do a close reading of this sentiment lurching toward an aphorism. First off, the first independent clause is in the imperative mode, giving an order to the reader, which is a risky syntactical maneuver. To compound that risk, the author implores the reader to follow a cliche, and it is one that is a heck of a lot harder to follow than you would think with the daily drudgery, politics, and emotional flotsam and jetsam you have to trudge through. And then to finish it with an exclamation point, the most worthless punctuation mark in existence, turns the advice into a statement like the ones you might find on your junior high school yearbooks. It's as genuine as "Have a great summer!" But the second sentence, "It is better to be happy than be wise," is a psychological/philosophical kick in the short-n-curlies. Really, happiness trumps wisdom? Has Confucius been replaced with Bozo the Clown, the sophomore who is rationalizing flunking out of college, or the drunk, creepy guy at the end of the bar who you had a conversation with once that ended with you having to make up how you forgot about having to meet someone. The core claim of that sentence is that happiness trumps wisdom. Ponder that a good while. Also, why a dichotomy? Why an implied either-or proposition here, happiness vs. wisdom? Wouldn't Buddha say that true wisdom is seeing that happiness is a construct we create, that we need to see through such constructs? Regardless, I think it's important to attempt to both be wise and happy and that maybe both are interconnected.

This whole rant has got me thinking about one of my favorite jokes:

• What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?
• "Make me one with everything." 

Also, the fortune cookie reminds me what Dean Wormer said to "Mr. Dorfman," aka Flounder, in Animal House.




I think P.F. Chang's should use some of my dark fortunes. That would make me happy and spread wisdom.

Because this Dance Moms show seems to be such a big hit, I'm thinking about pitching a spinoff called Dance Dads. What I envision is that it's a documentary of the competitive dance competition scene as seen through the inner monologues of the dance dads at home or at the events. It would be like a cross between Mystery Science Theater 3000 and reality TV. The show would present the interactions of characters, but there would be voice-overs of what dads are thinking at certain times. There could be some dark humor in such a show--probably would need to be on HBO. 

Music Friday: "Mystifies Me" & "Windfall"

My buddy Foz is getting hitched this Saturday. Because I'm sure Trace by Son Volt is one of his favorite (if not his favorite) Son Volt albums, these tunes go out to him and his bride, Sarah. Sorry I can't make the wedding/reception.





For a Son Volt song, "Mystifies Me" has some pretty romantic lyrics.

Here's the last stanza:
You look so fine, true.
No one mystifies me like you do.
You look so fine, true.
No one mystifies me like you do.

And "May the wind take your troubles away."

Post-Kirksville Thoughts

As some of the "regulars" of PlannedOb know, Mrs. Nasty and I went up and over (mostly over) to Kirksville, Missouri for my fraternity's 40th Anniversary celebration. We imported my mother-in-law from Florida to come up and watch the kids while we were away for the weekend festivities.

What follows are my so-called thoughts based on my experience in Kirksville this past weekend. If you also traveled to Kirksville for the same shindig, feel free to react or provide your own observations in the comments section.

• For a local fraternity to stay continuously active for forty years, hence never having issues that shut it down [knock on wood], that's pretty darn impressive. In fact, I'm told it's pretty rare. I'm sure there have been times, in fact I know of some, where the viability of the chapter has been sketchy, but forty years in a row is impressive. 
• I observed young people doing stupid stuff I once did. 
• Ronzas rule. Head-to-head, a ronza beats a calzone every time. Not even a competition.
• I was struck how my old haunts are gone, mainly The Flamingo and Bogie's. 
• Having a downtown Arts Center for Kirksville is a major deal, I think. But the lack of variety of dining establishments surely deadens that happy addition to Adair County.
• I had forgotten how bad roads are in that town. Yikes. 
• As for my local fraternity house, I just don't get it. There's a perfectly good basement for the actives and other people to have fun in, but they choose to ruin the upstairs foyer for their shenanigans. Using the main foyer as a party area has many ramifications on the smell, appearance, and viability of the house. If you extrapolate the causal chain for many years, the consequences are not good. Major complaint right there. 
• I hadn't been back to Kirksville for what probably is about seven years when Mrs. Nasty and I stopped by on our way traveling from Iowa to St. Louis. If I can make it, I hope to get together with other alumni and actives this summer for one of those work weekends. We'll see if the date works for me though. 
• The Dukum Inn, what was considered somewhat of a "townie bar" or an expensive bar during my time there, has changed impressively. It's tripled in size, and the drinks don't seem as expensive anymore. Or maybe I just have money now.
• Meeting my brothers from college days makes it clear that we don't change all that much. We just get older and perhaps somewhat wiser.
• Then again, I am impressed with the diverse professions and accomplishments of my brothers.