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i am speechless
permalink posted by cat 2:13 PM
the season's first black raspberriesI'm writing the dreaded grant proposal that has been ruining my life for the past 2 months. The good news is it's due on Tuesday by midnight so it'll be over. The bad news is, of course, I'm way behind schedule. Let us not discuss this heinous tragedy any further.
Listening to: windchimes Reading: census figures Weather: 78, breezy, sunny On to the groovy news: the black raspberries growing near the top of my driveway are starting to ripen! I picked my first ones two evenings ago when I got home from work, and have been picking and eating a dozen or so several times a day since. I grab my thorn shield - the lid for a large plastic tote - and don my jean jacket before venturing into the bramble. A couple scratches on the back of my hand or around my ankles, so worth it. So sweet and berrylicious.
And what a lovely day today to be out on my covered kitchen porch slaving over a hot tablet pc for work. I have a desk out there and my kitty is taking up about a third of it, all stretched out and lounging to remind me it's actually saturday.
OK, enough distraction, back at it.
permalink posted by cat 2:02 PM
ready for solstice?I'll be ridiculously happy when July rolls around, cuz come hell or higher water this life-sucking grant proposal will be uploaded and submitted by then. It has basically ruined the best 2 months of the year at my house, during which time my kid graduated from highschool, my 2 yr old grandson visited for 2 weeks, and a bunch of other cool things happened that I wish I'd had a braincell left to enjoy.
Listening to: computer hum Reading: Atheist Universe, David Mills Weather: 75, soupy, sun breaking out But I have a job, and I'm walking around on my own two legs, and I sleep like a baby most nights, so I should just be glad it was only 2 hideous months.
Lots of folks I know really look forward to the summer solstice. I, on the other hand, really prefer the winter solstice. Summer solstice's main meaning to me is the daylight starts getting shorter. I like the other end, personally, when the darkness starts to recede for the year. But it is especially nice to have a holiday (West Virginia Day) so close to the summer solstice each year, sometimes right on it. At least your holiday gets you damn near maximal daylight to groove on.
The fine city of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County PA host a bunch of free concerts all summer, and I really appreciate it. There are in a variety of groovy outdoor venues, including South Park, Hartwood Acres, and Station Square. The lineups last summer didn't really rock me, but this year includes a few tasty treats. I recommend Ricky Skaggs, Steve Earle, and Patty Smyth. No, not Patty Smith, Patty Smyth. Patty Smyth was the lead singer for one of your fave 80's pop bands, Scandal. Oh, don't tell me you didn't take your hands off the wheel to finger-point your way through the chorus of "The Warrior" ("shooting down the walls of heartache, bang, bang"). But their real jewel was "Goodbye to You." I believe my boyfriend's band was working up that one, but they had a dude lead singer, so I ran vocals on it with them few times during practice, in boyfriend's basement, of course. I didn't know all the words so I had my BFF Kevin Robinson, aka Nevkin, write them down for me. He ably did that, and after the last line wrote "and end with the splits."
Uh, no.
permalink posted by cat 12:47 PM
the most excellent seasonSpring in WV is a scrumptious reward for enduring winter in WV. This spring has been a particularly juicy one, in part because the winter was pretty rough this year at my casa. Between the glorious weather that keeps drawing me outdoors in my leisure time, several awesome visits from my leetle grandson Alan and family, my daughter's graduation from highschool, an amazing and weatherly-furious long weekend camping at DelFest, and a massive federal grant-writing project at work, my blog has been sadly neglected. Sorry, blog, It's not you, it's me. No, really.
Listening to: IGY, Donald Fagen Reading: Atheist Universe, David Mills Weather: 60, luscious I've posted several videos from DelFest09 on my YouTube channel. My favorite is the erection of the teepee. Stop snickering, you perv. It's an actual Shawnee teepee, and it's actually getting erected in the vid. Here ya go http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pXgMXIRqWg. There was a hella microburst that decimated the campground at DelFest. It just wouldn't quit, hailed and blew and rained like a true bitch for over 40 minutes, I've never encountered anything like it. And it's quite a trip to be outdoors in such a thing. Here's one blogger's account of it, and it rings pretty true to my experience, so I'll let him tell you more about it http://www.youareatree.com/?p=174. Suffice it to say I ended up in a beer truck after all the EZups and vendor tents around me got blown away one by one. With little bruises all over my legs from hail.
I also posted to my Flickr the photos Lar and I took, here's the set http://www.flickr.com/photos/justpeace/sets/72157618732710185/. Many of the friends we made at DelFest08 came back, and some we have stayed in touch with all year. TP and Jeremie even made the scene for Liv's graduation shindig and hootenanny. I love those guys! And Ob, too! I wish we could camp together every weekend. And check it out, Jim Morrison bummed a beer from us at DelFest.
Work is hellish. I'm putting together a giant project with a million partners for some fat fed cash. When I'm in the throes of it and getting creative with the groovy partners it's actually kinda fun, but it's a bit of an overwhelming bitch since I already had a more than fulltime job running this agency and serving clients. I am damn glad to have a job, however, so enough whining.
Alan loves the horses in my meadow. About 30 times a day he says "uppy, uppy! let's go see white stripe! let's go see brownie!" Uppy means please pick me up. And he has named the horses brownie, white stripe, and paint. Actually I suspect Pappy gave them those names. The horses' owners have other names for them, of course. I wonder if the horses have names for themselves? Or each other? The two younger ones frequently chase off the older one and don't let her come see us at the fence. Maybe they call her Skank or something.
Time to hang out laundry and head out to work. Looking forward to another lovely spring weekend already and it's only Wednesday.
permalink posted by cat 7:21 AM
overheard on last.fmI really like last.fm. I have totally traded radioio70's for picking my own various streams on last.fm. I find that it really delivers up a mix I can enjoy if I pick an artist I really like. Streams just enough of my well-worn classic stuff from the artist and similar artists, but also peppers in just the right amount of artists and tracks that are totally heretofore unknown to me but that I instantly dig. It has broadened my horizons backward, if you will. I never knew I liked Big Star or Love or Gentle Giant until recently, and those guys are no johnny-come-latelys.
Listening to: Georgia, Boz Scaggs Reading: a boring Program Announcement Weather: 60ish, sunny There's lots of groovy social networking technology behind last.fm, too. The streams are composed of collections of tunes built on algorithms applied to users' libraries and listening habits. If you are signed in and have listened to some tunes already (whether straight through their online player or through your scrobbled itunes or windows media player, more on this later), it instantly compares your musical compatibility with any other user whose page you visit. Sweet. Of course the longer you've been on, the more accurate it will become.
Althought there's a bit of a problem arising for me. It doesn't scrobble all your listening in this universe, just what you let it scrobble. Scrobbling is their term for aggregating info on the artists and tracks you have chosen to listen to. You can choose to embed a little chunk of software that keeps track of the songs you play on your ipod and computer via itunes or windows media player even when you aren't online. Then later when you're online, or after you've synced your ipod, it sucks that data up into the big database in the cloud and crunches some numbers for you and the userbase at large.
Of course there's lots of music listening in my world away from screens. I listen to tunes in the car a lot, not via ipod since I don't own one, but via my pda or radio or CDs or liv's ipod. I listen to lots o'CDs on my home stereo. None of that gets scrobbled. No biggie, except that of course I'm listening to stuff I own on those devices and media, so if I own it it's probably among my faves. So I tend to stretch out a little farther when I stream, since I can listen to stuff I don't already own. This results in my last.fm library being a little skewed away from my real core of favorite stuff, and will continue to skew farther the longer I perpetuate this approach. My compatibility comparisons will be increasingly less accurate.
So who gives a shit. It's not that big of a deal, just one of those minor annoyances. The app is still pretty darn groovy, but not as groovy as it appeared it would be at first.
But here's a little tidbit that enhanced its groove factor this morning. You can leave comments on users' profiles, artist profiles, albums, tracks. On the track Long Train Runnin by the Doobs, here was left this comment from a user named latostfm: "without love, rather than humans there would be some asexual species dominating planet earth." If you don't know the song, if you go listen to it you'll not only get to enjoy a great rock and roll song but you'll get more of a chuckle from this quote.
Happy sunday, earthlings.
permalink posted by cat 8:53 AM
lo how a lilac e'er bloomingThere's so much water around here I saw a pair of geese swimming in my meadow yesterday morning. There was about a two acre pond around the creek bottom. It has largely receded as of this morning, but another inch of rain is expected so maybe I'll get a great blue heron tomorrow.
Listening to: TWiT Reading: a boring Program Announcement Weather: 54, still raining And my RSS reader keeps backing up. Not in the tech sense, in the clogged sink sense. And it's becoming a vicious cycle, since whenever I open it and see 1000+ unread posts it makes me want to shut it rather than dive in. The curmudgeonly Steve Gillmor just posted a rant about the death of RSS on Techcrunch. I don't want to link it because I don't think it's worthy of any extra juice, but there is a little truth buried in there. I do think the river is flooding a bit, but it's not near dead. One thing that Gillmor seems to leave out is that RSS is underneath a lot of the things he says are replacing it (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed). Lots of people use RSS in conjunction with those apps to filter, direct, and mashup those flows. Lots of what he sees however he uses those includes an RSS feed at some point before it gets to him.
Had a lovely weekend with my grandkids Alan and Jurni. I don't mind changing diapers one bit. Alan is short for diapers, he is happily singing "pee pee in the potty" a lot, and giving it a try whenever it's convenient. His other favorite song to sing? Poker Poker Face. I'm not sure what to say about that.
Time ta make the donuts. But first, downloading Brokedown Palace to my pda.
permalink posted by cat 7:28 AM
Glen Creed is deadAnother of my friends is gone. Glen was my buddy for, I don't know, 10 or 15 years or something. We had lots of mutual friends, something we discovered after a few years knowing each other. He was from Barbour County, actually born in Michigan I think but came to WV in his elementary school days. I lived in Barbour for a while in the late 80's, early 90's, in Arden. Met lots of people who liked to do drugs at the party rock on the Tygart and hang around Betty's bar near there. Many of those people were Glen's friends, too.
Listening to: Wild Night, Van Morrison Reading: various crap about a disbarred lawyer Weather: 56, overcast Glen never graduated from highschool. But he read like a fiend, and loved to talk about politics and justice. His politics were interesting: lots of leftist, peacenik, hippie tendencies like pro-drug legalization, anti-war, pro-healthcare for all, pro-alternative energy. But also the occasional conservative anti-government rant would come out, since he spent lots of his life working for his parents in the residential rental business and also in his dad's small independent gas stations.
He was an alcoholic successfully in recovery for the entire time I knew him. He liked to do drugs a lot but was off everything for most of that time, too, even cigarettes, for shit's sake. How many former addicts do you know who can give up the cigs? Uh, none. Amazing. But fairly recently he hooked up with a girl who was a crack whore (his words, not mine). And he started smoking crack, according to him to try to figure out what kind of hold it could have on this poor girl he wanted to save. All the shit that goes with that starting coming into his life, sketchy nefarious dudes coming around, scrounging for money, using bad judgment, getting Viagra, going into more debt, taking guitars to the pawn shop, etc.
He called me last week. We were phone buddies. We could talk for hours. Or more accurately he could talk for hours. He had some mental illness, some kind of Axis II stuff, borderline personality disorder, perhaps? Anyhoo, he never picked up on any of the normal social signals you give when you are ready to end a conversation. You know your voice starts doing this up and down inflections, you start sentences with "well. . ." and you start trying to close ideas by throwing out stupid trite shit like "well. . .that's how it is, man," or "well. . . you can't fight city hall." That was entirely lost on Glen, he didn't even take a breath and just kept on going. Then you actually eventually would have to say, "OK, dude, I have to go pick my kid up, gotta go." No recognition, he just kept talking, or more likely ranting by this point, about how pot should be illegal or how corporate greed is ruining this country or how healthcare should be available to everyone.
So anyway, he called me last week and I knew something was up. Because after he told me his tale of woe, a minor variation of the age-old tale of woe he had been experiencing for decades, he asked me if I wanted to buy this Lowe's giftcard he had from returning some stuff there. When I concluded that I was not up for that, he said, "OK, I gotta go." Clearly something was wrong. He had NEVER, and I mean absolutely not one single time had ever ended a conversation with me willingly. I figured he must be strung out, and pretty desperate for $50 for a rock. Sad.
He was a longhaired hippie musician at heart, not a crackhead. He loved electric blues, rock and roll, classic British invasion stuff. Long gray hair and long gray beard, he was in his late 50's. He played guitar and bass but was primarily a keyboard player. We had hours of conversation about the nuance and groovy changes of some old Al Kooper cover, or Eric Clapton song, or Leon Russell tune. He burned me copies of about every Led Zeppelin album. He was always bumming that he couldn't find the right musicians to keep a good working band together. I sat in with his bands a few gigs when he was between bassplayers, but he knew I could never take the steady diet of blues he was working toward.
He never refused when I asked him to provide all the sound gear and run sound all day for a multi-band benefit concert for this or that. He ran sound for me when I did some solo gigs, and when I got paid he got paid, and when I did it for free for a benefit he worked for free, too. He was good soundman, good ear for vocals and guitar.
He was always pretty smiley with the chick who took our orders at Yama for lunch. He was pretty smiley generally if you could avoid getting him riled up about something that pissed him off, which you'd quickly regret. He was quick with the compliments and genuine, too. Sweet guy. Happy to help out, he came over and powersawed through rusty bolts to help me fix my leaky toilet. He lent me mics and other gear whenever I needed it. He played some sweet acoustic guitar stuff when I'd come over to visit.
I'll miss him. There were many times he drove me crazy. A few times I didn't answer the phone when I saw it was him on the caller ID. But mostly I think he was a good-hearted old hippie addict, just trying to make a better way for himself and the people around him.
permalink posted by cat 6:28 PM
: 3:25 PMhow to upgrade the firmware on your Tascam DR-1I got this sexy little solidstate digital field recorder for xmas from my mom, the Tascam DR-1. It's about the size of a pack of cigarettes, has great battery life (about 5 hours), good built-in stereo condenser mics, stereo 1/4" input, stereo 1/8" line-in and mic inputs, nice little wheel navigation (easier and quieter than multiple button clicks), and overall nice warm .wav and .mp3 format recording. I've had no probs with it, though I've only used it a few times. I did, however, want to upgrade the firmware in order to increase the recognizable SD card size from 2g to 32g.
Listening to: not tellin Reading: Arizona v. Gant Weather: 75, sunny
First, I had to figure out how to get my computer to recognize the little bugger. I haven't had to USB her up because it's been easy enough to just pop out the SD card to move files between device and computers or other devices. When I first plugged her in the screen on the device said it was USB connected, but the computer showed no recognition. And this machine I'm on runs Vista Ultimate, which I'm not too experienced on, so I had a little trouble finding how to manually recognize hardware. No instructions or drivers on the damn Tascam site, nice.
Anyhoo, here's the step-by-step for my configuration:
1. Download the latest firmware for the DR-1 to your computer from http://www.tascam.com/products/dr-1;9,12,3594,19.html (the tab is called Resources).
2. It's a crazy .tgz file. This means it's a tarball zipped. Whateveh. My Vista config had no clue, so I tried a couple of different zip programs, and the one that worked was 7-zip File Manager which I found here http://www.7-zip.org/
3. Install 7-zip or your tarball unzipping program of choice, then unzip (extract) the .tgz firmware file.
4. Plug your miniusb into device and computer, THEN turn device on. Hopefully your computer will recognize and auto download driver. If not, good frickin luck finding the stupid driver. I just did the old plug/unplug a few times after boot and reboot and eventually it worked.
5. Once you're device is recognized, open the file explorer and drag the unzipped firmware file (the one currently is DR-1_29.200) to the Utility folder on your device.
6. Right-click the Safely Remove Hardware icon in your system tray on your computer, find your device, double click it, and your computer will tell you it's safe to remove your hardware.
7. Unplug the usb cable from both device and computer.
8. Turn off device. Now, while holding both Menu and Play/Pause button in the center of the nav wheel, turn your device back on.
9. You'll get a screen that says Program Update at the top and shows your upgrade file below that. Using your nav wheel highlight the file and click the Play button, confirm you really want to upgrade by hitting Play again, and
10. Ya did it! Files update themselves and you restart and you're upgraded.Now you can apparently use massive SD cards to record hours of stuff. I recorded 45 minutes straight of the gig I played on Saturday night at the lowest .wav compression and it only took about a gig. Without an A/C adapter (which those cheap bastards make you buy separately) you could conceivably record 5 hours on a fully-charged battery with a 5g SD (which of course doesn't exist, probably next bigger size from 4g is 8g).
permalink posted by cat 10:55 AM
this video choked me up. cheers to the holy trinity: barley, hops, malt
I Am A Craft Brewer from I Am A Craft Brewer on Vimeo.
permalink posted by cat 8:09 PM
Maude has left the buildingIt's suddenly summer. It snowed 4 inches two weeks ago, and it was in the mid 80's yesterday. Wardrobe confusion.
Listening to: Doc Searls, Reframing the Net Reading: some short stuff Weather: 60, sunny, climbing fast Bea Arthur died yesterday. That has some significance for me cuz I was a TV kid of the 70's. I probably saw most episodes of Maude, as I did the show it spun off of All in the Family. We had TV's in every room in the house I grew up in. OK, not the bathroom. But definitely the kitchen. TV was what's for dinner. And all those sitcom characters were slightly more than just fiction for me, some were people I thought about almost like cousins you don't see very often. I'm an only child, so is my dad, and my mom has one brother, so my family tree's a little thin. Vinnie Barbarino and Ritchie Cunningham were sorta like interesting older kids that went to a different school than me.
Bea Arthur, according to her Wikipedia entry, was actually born with the name Bernice Frankel. Really? She ditched Bernice for Beatrice? Girlfriend, please. Wish I had one more question she could answer, but, alas, too late now. Anyhoo, I loved the show Maude. I loved her character in that show. That attitude. As if she were always surrounded by idiots, and her gliding around wearing those crazy long open jacket thingies all the time, riding roughshod over the mousy mustachioed husband. Her gravelly voice and that never-crack-a-smile affect, I loved that shit. That show had some content, too. That part I didn't realize till later, but she had an abortion in one episode of that show, holy shit. Nobody even touches that shit now on TV, in 2 thousand freakin 9.
Bea Arthur is dead. But Maude lives forever, I suppose, in TVLand and here in networld. [roll that awesome Dave Grusin theme music. . . ]
permalink posted by cat 8:23 AM
on the tyranny and glory of 1's and 0'sDang internets. The web has been fucking with me all week in a variety of ways. I got my first blue screen of death error on an XP machine at work. WTF? And the various social networks I am (and probably you are) plugged in to kept wonking me out.
Listening to: Throne of Blood, a samurai MacBeth from 1957 Reading: lil o'this, lil o'that Weather: 43, overcast But I got a couple of interesting and welcome webby surprises, too. One was a really groovy shoutout through FB from a highschool classmate of mine. I have probably blogged about my bizarre highschool amnesia before, so I'll keep that long story short, but this classmate is one who I not only remember very well but also thought was really a cool person. We didn't actually hang out much, but we had some close mutual friends, and had boyfriends who were in the same circle of friends. I though she had a groovy strong personal style and was smart and interesting. We found each other on FB and she sent me a wonderful message telling me a bit about her life (which has really lived up to that highschool girl's promise) and an incredibly sweet assessment of the coolness she saw in me back in the day. This is one of those things that just makes your day, and probably would not have ever happened in the pre-web age.
And the other webby surprise was a comment apparently from Josh Fosbrink to one of my posts about a year ago where I ragged on him rather harshly for doing a pretty sorry job of impersonating a local weatherman. You see the weather is not merely small talk here in rural Preston County WV. And he is clearly not someone who has actually studied meteorology. If he had he would know that zooming in on and naming various little towns where it is currently raining this morning is actually completely useless to every single person watching the local news. We are already looking out our own windows to see whether it is currently raining (which, BTW is a form of PRECIPITATION, a clever and meaningful weather word which Mr. F has only used about twice in his tenure at channel 12). What we need to know from a weather forecast is WHAT changes in the weather will occur today and this week, and WHEN will they occur. For example, showing the predictor model blast through the next 12 hours in a fraction of a second, and then prognosticating that it will snow later today is pretty close to useless. Try this, instead: tell us WHEN it is likely to start snowing. Knowing, for example, that it is likely to start snowing around 6pm could help us choose to get right home after work today rather than stopping at the grocery store where there all bread and milk will suddenly become more sought after than a hit of black tar heroine on Holland Avenue. But if it is not likely to start snowing until after midnight a stop at the store for eggs might be in order since a 2 hour delay means actual breakfast in my house. And this is just one tiny glimpse into why accurate and thoughtful local weather forecasting actually matters around here. Don't get me started on there's rarely a mention of the weather systems forming in the west or north that are heading our way and how predictable their impacts are likely to be here. Suffice it to say glib chatter with the morning anchors is no substitute for actual cogent analysis of the upcoming weather. Sometimes I get more useful weather info from Don's offhand segue comment, seriously.
I know, you're thinking, ouch, what's with dissing the poor schlub who probably doesn't make squat for money and is probably a nice enough guy? Cuz of the times I've been completely schneidered by a completely bogus forecast that caused me frozen pipes or a hellish drive home or whatever. Don't worry, I've learned my lesson, I get my weather forecasts from the web now when it counts. Local weather is mostly just fodder for watercooler jokes now.
The saturday morning samurai movie has ended on IFC and now American Splendor is on. I love this movie!! Paul Giamatti was born for this role, yo.
permalink posted by cat 9:46 AM
are my social networks trying to tell me something? Batting 1000 today, I just got a fail whale on Twitter and some similar brokedown message on Facebook. Do I need a breathmint or something?
permalink posted by cat 1:10 PM
back to Dan SealsI was a huge Dan Seals fan before I knew he was Dan Seals. In the early- and mid-1970's I had my transistor radio on WPGC, a pop station in the DC metro area. I was all about vocal pop and rock, the one-hit wonders, the enduring stuff, Beatles, BeeGees, Bad Company, Journey, ya know. "Really Love to See You Tonight" was an instant favorite with me, as was "Love Is the Answer." Interestingly neither Dan nor his partner at that time John Ford Coley wrote either of those hits. Todd Rundgren wrote Love is the Answer, BTW.
Listening to: TWiT Reading: some stuff Weather: 65, sweet So la la la, a few years go by and I'm in college in 1984. I went home for the summer after my freshman year, and that really sucked. Ya can't go home again, people, but that's a whole 'nother Oprah. So the following summer I was pretty desperate to find an excuse to stay in my apartment in Morgantown and not go home. I saw an ad on the bulletin board at the CAC for a singing bassplayer for a country band. Oy. I didn't play bass. I hated country. But desperate times call for desperate auditions, and I borrowed a bass and figured how hard could thump, a-thump, thump, thumpthumpthump be? Three chords, right? One note at a time. I was arrogantly ready to bullshit my way through.
So I went to the audition, lied and said I'd been playing bass for years, and faked my way through a few very cheesy easy crappy country songs with the band. I did, however, find it a little difficult to sing backups to songs I didn't know while also playing basslines I didn't know. So they asked me to sing lead on something, and I said let me grab this keyboard for a sec. Ripped out the requested ubercheesefest of the day, The Rose. Badababing, I'm in the band, and forever known as their "female bassplayer." Whatthefuckever. There's so much more to this twisted little tale, but let's get back to Dan.
One of the ONLY songs I ever liked that we did in that band was The Bop, by Dan Seals. It was a crossover country hit. Little did I know that he was England Dan, who apparently followed me from pop to country. Do you remember that song? I wanna bop with you baby all night long. . .Such a nice little groove, some cool changes, a smooth melody, a modulation in the middle, just a perfect dance tune. And I just loved watching those older couples at the VFW's and Moose and Elks (and all the other animals) who had been dancing together for 40 years get their groove on with that song. Sometimes we had to play it a second time later in the 4th set, everybody just loved it.
I honestly didn't know he was England Dan til sometime later. Then I was reading about the Bahai faith during my seeker years and discovered that Dan Seals was not only England Dan, he was brother of Jim Seals, and both were Bahais. Who is Jimmy? He's the Seals of Seals and Crofts. Hell to the yes, you know you freakin LOVED it when Summer Breeze or Hummingbird or Diamond Girl, or Get Closer came on your car stereo. Well, he's also started his musical career playing drums for the Champs while they toured supporting their massive hit "Tequila" in the late 1950's.
After Dan's radio popularity waned he started playing the county fair circuit in the 90's. I joined a listserv and got the heads up whenever he'd be playing around here. I got to see him at the Taylor Co fair some years back, I think Dave Sweitzer and I hit that show, and I also saw him at the Mannington Fair in Marion Co. Outfreakinstanding shows, both. He played lots of acoustic, had a crack band of just two or 3 other guys with great three-part vocals and sweet well-played arrangements.
Great vocalist and player. And from what I've read a helluva guy in general. Sad that he only made it to 61. I owe a lot of good nights and tips to Dan for that song the Bop. And I owe him a few tips for Really Love To See You Tonight, which I play solo acoustic whenever I get the opportunity.
permalink posted by cat 2:47 PM
While Cat was hating country music and playing in a country band, I was hating country music and working at a country radio station (WKKW "Hit Kickin' Country"). I remember "Bop". Didn't it have a great sax part? I really enjoyed a hokie ballad called "My Old Yellow Car". I liked the tune because it reminded me of my first car: a '65 Olds that I sold to have money for college.
[An American boy with his hands on the wheel of a dream that was made of American steel
Though the seats had the smell of a nickel cigar I really was something in my old yellow car]
I also remember how humble he was when he won a CMA in about 1985.
He was a true talent.
And yes, that sax part is great! Dan actually pulled out an alto sax and played it at the Taylor County fair show.
I'll have to find that Yellow Car tune for my dad, he had a yellow Pontiac back in the day that he was crazy about.
: 7:17 PMand the nominees for absolute worst Chinese food in the us are...1. the one and only Chinese restaurant in Kingwood WV, 2. the Chinese restaurant in the plaza in Waynesburg PA and, 3. the Chinese joint in the Town Center Mall food court in Charleston WV.
Listening to: a speaker on civil justice for crime victims Reading: Magic Seeds Weather: stunning! but im stuck indoors Unless, of course, what you want is a scoop from one of four different vats of dark meat chicken swimming in a pool Of coagulated brown goo. And two yellow smushy pieces of broccoli. In that case, by all means, go to the mall for lunch.
permalink posted by cat 1:27 PM
: 11:19 AMRIP England Dan Seals Quick post on a break from work, I'm very sad to hear that Dan Seals got beat by cancer yesterday. Really sucks. More later on his awesomeness. And more prior on his awesomeness http://www.justpeace.net/2006/09/dan-seals-for-congress-barbour-county.html I miss ya, Dan.
permalink posted by cat 10:36 AM