Alert NGIP reader Jennifer sent in a picture of her fainting goat, Gizmo, which was taken in Firth, Nebraska. Jennifer says, “Since everyone always asks if she is a meat or dairy goat, this is a definitive answer to the question! ”
LouLou La Poule from Hen’s Teeth showed NGIP this picture of a guy who’s part of a group of landscapers hired on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles.
I am lyrically challenged. You know, as in I don’t know the lyrics to songs. Even if you hum a few bars I can’t fake it. Also? I can’t name that tune in forty-three notes, let alone seven. Why is that? And am I alone in this?
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, my teenage ears were assaulted with ear candy aka disco. Lines like “Let’s whip it, baby. Let’s whip it right”, lacked a certain….depth. And songs with substance didn’t stand a chance with me. We didn’t have thousands of songs on iPods. All I had was the radio, so I couldn’t rewind a song a bunch of times until I finally figured out that Mick Jagger wasn’t singing , “I’ll never leave… your pizza burnin’.”
Today, I will start listening to a song with an attempt to comprehend its meaning, but something happens somewhere between ten and thirty seconds into the song. I miss a word and stop understanding what they’re talking about or I just forget to listen and the next thing you know, I’m catching myself thinking about what I need to get at the pet store for my ostrich, Sheila.
JD at I Do Things posts song lyrics at the beginning of all her posts and most of the time, no, pretty much all of the time, I have no idea which song they come from (unless it’s “Whip it, Baby”)
In this arena called musical prowess, I am shamed by my husband, Mr. MudPuppy, who could kick anybody’s ass in Rock & Roll Jeopardy because he knows EVERYTHING about music. He lives, eats, breathes, sheds and poops it. He can sit on the couch and just listen to music. Or watch the same concert DVD over and over.
I know! Who does that? I can’t even watch the same movie more than once.
I’ll come into the room and see Geddy Lee from Rush again or that dude from Iron Maiden telling the same story from that seat on their tour bus in that same documentary from a month ago, and I’ll say, “Haven’t you already seen this?” And you know what he says?
“Yeah?”
Like there’s an implied “What of it?” at the end. Like there’s nothing wrong with watching Megadeth’s Behind-The-Scenes thing, or that Steve Vai performance repeatedly. As if he GETS something out of it every time. Pffft!
So anyway, for him, music can be a primary activity. Like I said, he can just sit there and listen to it. That bores me to tears. I have to be DOING something else and music is allowed to play in the background while I’m busy doing that something else. Of course, if my mind is on that something else, I’m not really “listening” to the music, which of course prevents me from ever learning what a song is about.
And we listen to different music anyway, Mr MudPuppy and I. While he enjoys all sorts of music, he leans toward 80s Heavy Metal most of the time, while I’m more of a Scissor Sisters / Mika type of person. Frankly, I don’t know what he sees in me. Although we do both like Butch Walker. So there’s that.
I blame my mother. And my father. They were both cultural dodo birds when it came to music. I’m talking bottom-of-the-barrel tragically unhip. You grow up listening to what your parents listen to and that’s your musical library getting informed and molded for the rest of your life.
Most of you were lucky enough to hear original artists. You know what I spent my childhood getting exposed to? Homogenized cover tunes. That’s right – Muzak on a Stick. I grew up in an elevator, my friends. Does anybody in Sacramento remember KEWT? Some people called it “Easy Listening”. I called it crap. Well, now I do. I didn’t know any better back then that my musical taste was being forcibly extracted from me at such an early age.
Yes, KEWT. The home of pure unadulterated instrumental music, where songs were either stripped of their lyrics and dignity, or worse, sung by Lawrence Welk-like studio singers.
Enter Ray Conniff. My mother had an 8-track suitcase full of Ray Conniff albums in the car, so that’s what we listened to. All the time. So I do know all the words to those songs, but at seven years old they never meant anything to me.
Lyrics like:
♫♪Who’s in the Strawberry Patch with Sally, Who’s making love to her tonight? ♫♪
and
♫♪Happiness Is, Happiness Is, Happiness Is, Happiness is Happiness Is, Happiness Is….different things for diff-er-rent people…that’s what happiness is. ♫♪
♫♪Leave me alone, won’t you leave me alone, Please leave me alone, now leave me alone. Leave me alone, please leave me alone, yes leave me. ♫♪
So while I may have these frickin’ songs memorized, even to this day, I don’t know what any of the songs are about. Except the one where they sing “Photograph” over and over about 63 bazillion times. I think that one is about a photograph.
If I had to recall four specific 8-tracks that I spent an inordinate amount of time being exposed to it would be these:
Ray Conniff – The Way We Were (which includes all of the songs whose lyrics I sang for you above)
Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass – The Sexy Whipped Cream Album Inappropriate for 7-year-olds
Soundtrack from The Sound of Music (My mom had a “thing” for Christopher Plummer)
Soundtrack from Fiddler on the Roof (My mom had a “thing” for Tevya/Topol)
Now you might be saying, “Well, that’s not so bad. Those last three are pretty good.” And that would be true if it stopped there, but there was only one album of the last three listed above, whereas the rest of the suitcase contained 147 Ray Conniff 8-tracks.
Why couldn’t my parents be cool and listen to The Beatles or Elvis or Frank Sinatra? Something culturally relevant for Pete’s sake? For MY sake. My parents missed out something fierce. And in turn, so did I.
If I were a rich man, I’d yidle-deedle-didle-deedle back to my childhood and buy some real music for my mother for birthdays and Christmas, rather than hearing over and over again that a doe is a deer. A female deer. And then I would grow up listening to music that meant something. Music that didn’t have all the flavor sucked out of it before I had a chance to hear it.
It’s not that I don’t like music. I do. I’m even moved by it at times. I just don’t know the words. And I don’t want to hear music that has been “cleansed” to within an inch of its life.
Once every ten years or so, I do pay attention to the lyrics of a song and this one, called Walk You Home, by Passenger, I fell in love with the first time I heard it. The video for it below is curiously shot, and the song is funny, clever, and a bunch of other adjectives I can’t list without spoiling it.
Alert NGIP reader Anna snapped this shot near her home in Arusha in Northern Tanzania.
According to Anna, who’s originally from the UK, “there are lots of goats here and it’s not unusual to find them riding in buses, on top of buses, on motorbikes, taxis, or just taking a casual stroll down a busy shopping street!”
Thank you, Anna!
And no Goat Thing of the Day would be complete without showing a video of a goat acting like a jerk.
Poor Sacramento. It shoots itself in the foot and wonders why nobody comes to visit it in the hospital. Sacramento is not a “destination city” and never will be as long as the City Council has anything to do with it.
We don’t know what tourists even look like. We don’t get visitors, except for the obligatory 4th grade field trip to Sutter’s Fort the schools keep insisting on.
Did you know famous food guy Anthony Bourdain is coming here Sept 17th? He was asked if he’d ever been to Sacramento before, which is kind of like asking if this pillow padded tutu makes me my butt look fat.
Have you been to Sacramento? Have you spent much time here?
I haven’t spent much time, unfortunately. I’ve been through for one night, and didn’t get a chance to see anything.
Look how sorry he feels for us. “Unfortunately”, indeed. But what he says epitomizes this town. People don’t come here, they just pass through on their way to San Francisco or Lake Tahoe. If we’re lucky, we’re a pit stop. Which means local entrepreneurs should go into the bathroom business.
“Sacramento: Come for the Capitol. Stay for the toilets.”
I was in Manhattan recently and was awed by this Halal street cart across the street from our hotel, thinking how much Sacramento could SO use this kind of thing. But no. We have city ordinances preventing any kind of street cart to truly thrive. Rules like, you can’t operate for more than 30 minutes on any day that ends in “Y”.
The Sacramento Bee recently published an article with the headline: “Sacramento Says No to Hot New Food Trend“. Of course they said no. It’s got four bad words in it.
1. Hot
2. New
3. Food
and
4. Trend
Check out this line at 2am at 56th and 3rd in Manhattan on any given day of the week including Mondays.
If you ever go to Manhattan, make sure you go to the street cart with the line.
It’s at 53rd and 6th Ave. and there’s a line for a reason.
This is the gyro plate a mix of chicken and lamb and it was yummy! And….are you ready for this? It was SIX BUCKS!
You wouldn’t know that “street meat” was an OK item to eat. It just sounds bad. And maybe some of it is. But you should try this stuff and see the long lines, which is what SOME people in Sacramento need to see before they “pooh-pooh” it with ridiculous city ordinances designed to clearly prevent such businesses from operating.
I could totally open one of these “street meat” carts and I’d put it right across the street from the Hyatt Hotel on a large sidewalk area near the Capitol. And I’d blast my boom box and be singin’ all:
♫♪ “My street cart brings all the boys to the lawn….” ♫♪
In other words, my street meat would draw a crowd. And nothing draws a crowd better than a crowd. Because people are so nosy and curious and want to know what all the hubbub is about. It’s like those spontaneous outdoor public entertainment events, where somebody covered in chrome is doing backflips while juggling guppy-filled fishbowls and an audience forms and people start clapping.
Other people walking by stop to see what all the commotion is about and other people, say that one random tourist that Sacramento does get, whips out his camera and then someone else whips out their camera and all kinds of people are taking pictures with their iPhones and sending photos off to Facebook and Twitter and Whrrl so that now, people all over the country are seeing this really cool thing happening in Sacramento, and is that the Capitol in the background? This of course, leads to more people showing up and strangers on the sidewalk start talking to one another because they are sharing something so awesome and now you’ve got yourself a local cultural phenomenon, not to mention a sense of community. I mean, you always get that one long-haired lady in the rainbow-colored tie-dyed muumuu and finger symbals who dances to everything in front of everybody even when it’s inappropriate, but it’s all part of the charm, right?
I’m not the only one who sees such obvious neglected potential. The Sacramento Bee article quotes Randall Selland of the Selland Family of Restaurants, which operates gourmet eateries Ella Dining Room & Bar and The Kitchen who’s interest in starting a street cart is on hold because of the city’s tight restrictions: “It’s such a cool thing, but it just goes back to Sacramento being so backwards.” Amen, my brother.
Do I even need to say this out loud? We need street carts, dag nabbit! And when the city finally relents and gives in to the people (and common sense), they’d better not blow it right out of the gate. Whoever opens one should take a lesson from the Halal cart on 53rd and 6th in Manhattan, which, by the way, is open until 4am and has a constant line. And do you want to know what the secret is to that street cart’s reputed $10,000 per day income? It’s the simplest trick, yet the most difficult to achieve….are you writing this down, you future entrepreneurs?
Make food that tastes good.
If you want to read about the ordinance and leave a comment in support of allowing street carts to operate more reasonably in the city, check out the post at Yum Tacos called “Save Sacramento’s Taco Trucks“.
Have you ever walked behind a person, let’s say it’s a chick, and she’s got some distracting element about her and your mind is now occupied with nothing but the pesky needling of that distraction for the whole three or four blocks you’re stuck following her, which is helpful in some ways because it does pass the time in this sweltering humidity.
And then you take a picture of her because you figure hey, you have a blog, you can tell everyone else about this THING you saw and you can even feel better about yourself because you’ve been staring at and judging this person for a good five minutes, but your readers will validate you. Or vilify you; their choice, I suppose.
So anyway, I was walking down the street the other day (Fifth Avenue in New York City near the NY Public Library, if you must know) and I get stuck walking behind this:
In public. On a pedestrian-laden sidewalk.
And I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing I did, which was…
Where in the holy heck did she get pink headphones?? Right?
So I’m at this blogging conference in New York a couple weeks ago and I end up at this party hosted by some chick and her friends at some bar on Columbus Circle, although why we continue to egregiously celebrate Wrong Way Roger by erecting statues in the middle of the roadway around which people must drive is beyond me, but I digress.
I’m with Robyn of Robyn’s Online World and Connie of Brain Foggles and they decide to come with me and “crash” the party since they are not “on the list”. When we arrive, there are several young, large, muscular, black-T-shirted men who are asking questions at the door and I’ve already decided that I want to be a rebel and crash this party too. Even though I’m on the list.
As we approach the door, one of the black-shirted, clipboard-carrying, tanned robots turns his head away from us and we literally sidle along the wall and walk in and I feel like I’ve gotten away with a bank robbery. Even though I’m on the list. I got to experience the adrenaline rush of “crashing”. Man I never felt so alive!
Anyway, Gavin DeGraw is near the window overlooking Wrong Way Roger and the place is filled with writhing and screaming women. I know you don’t believe me when I say I just walked into a bar and there is Gavin DeGraw but I snapped this picture to prove it.
It totally looks like him, right? Maybe next time you won’t be all up on your high horse talking all, “Margaret is a big fat liar”.
Whaddya mean it doesn’t look like him? Is it the angle? It’s the angle, isn’t it. I figured this would happen because I can’t seem to figure out how to use a “point and shoot” despite the eponymous type of camera, so I invariably take twelve pictures of everything in the hopes that one might turn out OK. So how about this one?
Does this look like him? (The guy on the right, I mean.)
But who cares about celebrity sightings, right? You want to know how I became a supermodel. Well, so at this party, which was sponsored by some place that makes razors, they had these crazy skinny models who I think are in the Guinness Book of Records for the longest legs in the world.
These are the Schick Girls. More like Stick Girls, if you ask me.
So anyway, these Stick Chicks call out to me and ask if I want to be their leader and I say, No way! And they say Way! And I say No Way! And we go back and forth like that for about half an hour. So I cave and sign a lucrative multi-million dollar contract – well that’s redundant, isn’t it – I mean since when is a multi-million dollar contract not lucrative? I probably just should have said multi-million dollar, but then that’s semi-specific and not really any of your business, so maybe I just should have said lucrative, but then lucrative is a relative term and you might have thought that $10,000 was lucrative and I’d want you to know that it was multiples of millions. In fact, I don’t want you to minimize it and think it was only 2 or 3 million when it was more like $14.8 million.
And I suppose you want proof of that too, so here you go…
Not that that will satisfy you because there is no satisfying you people, I swear.
My point here is that until someone pays me multiples of millions for blogging, I’m stuck posing with sticks for a while.
I stumbled on a Sacramento Bee news story about a guy, practically a kid, who was recently arrested for shining a laser at a CHP airplane. Excuse me, he was arrested “on suspicion” of shining a laser. Last year, another guy was sentenced to prison for over three years for doing the same thing.
Personally, I think it’s kind of idiotic, no it’s definitely idiotic to play with the cops in this manner. Especially when you know what you’re doing is wrong (they found the laser thrown over the fence – a bit of an indicator)
But my question is, why should idiots like this take up valuable tax paid space in the pokey when there are violent criminals on the waiting list to get in? I say make the punishment fit the crime. I mean for God’s sake, make an example of him via non-jailed humiliation, not by giving him free lodging and three squares a day. He’s not so much a criminal as he is an idiot. I have a few ideas that I pulled out of my tukus just now for you, not that I have any idea what I’m talking about.
Six Ways to Properly Punish a Criminal
1. First, make him sit through several long and excruciating lectures given by a Ben Stein-like speaker and quiz him to within an inch of his life on the dangers of pointing lasers at airplane or helicopter pilots. Clockwork Orange him if necessary to make sure he’s “getting it”.
2. Confiscate the idiot’s laser pointer, citing his inability to use it responsibly, find out who the idiot’s arch nemesis is and make a loud big public deal presenting the laser pointer to his nemesis, preferably a guy named Meathead, making sure to tell him why he’s receiving such a cool toy. Make sure you tell Meathead to use it responsibly (i.e. do not point it at pilots in the air).
3. Fine his ass. Ten thousand dollars ought to do it. Garnish his wages because something tells me he’s not the type to pay bills on time.
4. Make sure his parents know about this fine mess he’s gotten himself into.
5. Community Service: As long as there is litter in the streets, there will be a need for people to pick it up. This task serves as a double message sender. Not only does it give him time to think about what he’s done, it also serves as a potential warning to him against littering. If people didn’t throw crap out of their windows, he wouldn’t have to be there picking it up. Maybe he’ll think twice about littering himself. He should also be made to wear a T-Shirt that tells everyone else working with him and people driving by why he’s there. On the front, it should say, “I’m an idiot” and on the back it should say, “I pointed a laser at an airplane pilot”.
6. Make him write 1000 times: I will never discharge a laser at another aircraft again. With a crayon. On a busy roadside billboard.
I ask you, how is this NOT better than sending him to the slammer?
Becky the Design Lady calls this little guy Billy Vanilly because he was busted once for lip-syncing to a goat rap video called Angora Management. OK, that’s not true, it’s because he like Vanilla Wafers. You can see Billy Vanilly (also known as Bob) going for a box over at Becky’s blog called Dream Believe Achieve in a post entitled, “My New Lawn Ornament“.
Have you seen the Diji Farm Maternity Ward? They’ve got a U-Stream video you can watch all day if you like.
Have you ever tried getting marmalade out of a malamute? I wouldn’t advise it, is all I’m saying.
But that’s not why I called this meeting. No, today’s meeting is about the dreaded wicker chair – no wait! – it’s about effective humor blogging.
More than once I’ve heard that self-deprecation is a good way to deliver the humor. It endears your audience to you. But the fact that people keep mentioning it is making me rethink my whole approach. Self-deprecation is now mainstream and conformist and … passé.
It’s also a cop out strategy that merely demonstrates your desire to “play it safe” and is why I’ve decided to give up on that whole concept.
That’s right – from now on, I am awesome and you can suck it. Which is going to be the chorus of my new song because it is lyrical and repeatable and it’s catchy and has a good beat and you can dance to it. I give it a 10 and did I mention that I am a ridiculously gifted songwriter? Oh yeah.
Also? I’m drop dead gorgeous.
See?
This is’t me, but I look almost exactly like this. Ask anybody who hasn’t seen me.
I’m also horribly philanthropic, way more than you. I make Mother Theresa look like Montgomery Burns.
So anyway I was at this party the other night, name-dropping with Elizabeth Taylor and Susan Sarandon when Susan mentioned this particular blog post of mine that she thought was hysterical.
“You’re a female Steve Martin is what you are, darling,” she said. “Except you look almost exactly like Gisele Bundchen.”
Which, of course, I already knew, but it’s still nice to hear now and again, right? I mean, if nothing else it makes more great blurbing on my best-selling books.
And while I’m on this self-deprecation hiatus, I should also point out that I am exceedingly rich. I have way more money than I know what to do with and quite frankly, it just won’t stop rolling in. My success never ceases to amaze me and all my friends on a daily basis. Why just yesterday, Bob (you might know him as Robert DeNiro, but his closest friends call him Bob) calls me and asks for some advice on motivation for a scene he was about to shoot where a beautiful young princess has to figure out how to choose which Prince Charming she will allow to propose marriage. “I mean, you know, since you can relate so well to this particular situation, Mags, who better to ask, in my humble opinion”. So I gave him some helpful tips, because I try to help where I can.
I have to admit, it’s quite liberating to release myself from the self-deprecating cliche and I just might be on the cutting edge of a new trend in blogging. In fact, I’m sure of it, because I usually am.
I know that sounds like something that belongs on Dog Thing of the Day over at Daddy Dogs in Diapers, but Steven from noSpacesnoSpecials sent in this Angora goat from Ditchling Common in West Sussex, England, where he WWOOFed.
This year, he’ll be WWOOFing at the Crooked End farm in Glouchestire, England. You can find out WTF I’m talking about at the WWOOF website.
Image source: NPR.org
