Monthly Archives: December 2018

Radio is a sound salvation… and podcasting is the new radio.

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Back in the late 80s and early 90s, I worked at 97X, a small-but-mighty radio station in Oxford, Ohio.

My friend Dave worked there as well (that’s how we met and became friends). Now that Dave’s two sons and my four kids are a bit older, we have some spare time on our hands. So we decided to create a podcast about our adventures (and misadventures) at 97X.

I don’t think Marc Maron and the folks at My Favorite Murder or This American Life have to watch their backs, but if you listened to 97X before it went off the air, you’ll probably find the podcast semi-entertaining. Even if you never heard (or even heard of) the station, you might get a kick or three out of the podcast. Or not. But hey, it’s only 18 minutes of your day. You’ve probably got some time off for the holidays, right? It’s the perfect aural accompaniment to taking down the Christmas lights, trying to assemble kids toys and/or scrubbing congealed ham/turkey/goose fat out of the roasting pan.

Three episodes are posted here: https://woxy.podbean.com/

You can subscribe via that same link, so you’ll never have to miss a single scintillating episode. (And you won’t miss the boring ones either.)

You can also listen/download below.

Please don’t feel obligated to listen. Dave and I just have to call it “podcasting” because that sounds fancier (and more productive) than “hanging out in the basement and reminiscing about the good old days.”

Where art meets commerce

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On Thursday, a bunch of dudes met up for breakfast at a Panera in Newport, KY. It was the visual arts equivalent of the Algonquin Round Table… designers and illustrators and photographers, oh my. (They let a few writer types hang out too… including a hack named dubbatrubba.)

I was fortunate enough to work with many of these fine fellows back in my ad agency days. They’re an amazingly talented bunch… and super-nice as well (sometimes those two qualities can seem mutually exclusive).

A lot of the folks who attended the breakfast are self-employed. Some by their own choice; others have had their hand forced by ad agency layoffs. Freelance is a tough row to hoe, especially in the Fiverr age where it can be a “who can do this cheapest?” race to the bottom. Not only do you have to be a standout in your chosen field, but you also have to be a salesperson, a client coordinator, a project manager and an accountant. You’re on your own for healthcare. And vacation? No work, no pay. As one of the gents there put it “I’m always on vacation until the phone rings.”

My friends do mostly commercial work, but you can’t commodify what they do. It’s art. Period.

L to R, top to bottom: Rob Warnick, Chris Dye, Brian Steege, Keith Neltner, Tom Post, Keith Neltner (again), Andy Sohoza, Doug Best, Todd Lipscomb.

Christmas time is here… and I didn’t get the memo.

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I stink at “Christmas-ing”… I’m the world’s worst at getting gifts, or even remembering to shop for them. And those facts are made painfully clear when I come into the office and see stuff like this:

A holiday treat and a ribbon, hot-glued to a greeting card. And not one of those cheap cards either, it’s a 3-D one…

This person gave similar cards to a dozen colleagues. While I was opening the card, another co-worker came by and was dropping off gifts for ten of his peers: candy and gourmet nuts from two companies in his hometown, which is 3 hours away. My boss got me a bottle of wine — called “Storyteller” — and a fancy winestopper.

Such great planning, such thoughtfulness on their parts. How do I reciprocate? With a big fat box o’ nothin’! I had to scramble to get a gift card for the one and only person who reports to me. (Gift cards – the last refuge of the lazy.) And by the time I got it, she was already out of the office until 2019.

I consider myself a fairly generous guy… I probably treat for lunch or happy hour drinks more often than most folks. But X(mas) does not mark the spot for me… unless we’re talking about a blind spot.

“What’s the date for Christmas this year?”

Maybe in 2019 I’ll get it together.

Then again, maybe not.

Thought of the day… for every day

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Or as the kids like to say: 

Have an eccentric, different, perhaps strange day! 

Cutting the cord

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We dumped cable. Dropped it like a two-foot putt. Because I’m tired of paying a ton of money for it each month when I rarely watch it and the kids almost never watch it. I’m also tired of cable companies that offer better deals to new customers than to loyal customers. 

I’ve considered cutting the cord before, but never really found a Sling/Hulu/Netflix combo that had all the channels we wanted… live sports were using the missing link.

But YouTube TV has most of the channels we watch (no HGTV… much to my wife’s dismay… and my delight) and costs $40 a month. We dumped the TV and phone part of our cable “triple play,” kept our internet and signed up for YouTube TV. Now we’re saving about $80 every month. Sure, the picture isn’t quite as crystal-clear, and sometimes there’s a second or two of buffering, but that’s a small price to pay for paying a much smaller price. 

Cable providers are going to have to come up with a more enticing package than “get it cheap for a year, then pay through both nostrils.” If not, they’ll go the way of Blockbuster Video stores. 

Cornering the market on weird names

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Believe it or not, I actually have to pay money to operate this blog. But I do it gladly so that you, the few, the proud, the dubbatrubba blog faithful, can get your semi-weekly dose of semi-coherent ramblings. You’re welcome (not sure if I should punctuate this with a question mark or an exclamation point…maybe I’ll do both)?!  

The company from which I bought the dubbatrubba.com domain (surprisingly, there was no bidding war…) is always trying to sell “extras” to me. Their latest pitch gave me pause: 

Whoa, I can actually get rubbadubba.com too? I’m thinking I should lock it down, and corner the market on goofy names. Perhaps later I can sell rubbadubba.com at a profit to Three Men In A Tub, LLC. 

But what really got me was the fact that “dubbatrubba.com” isn’t considered a premium domain, yet “batrepellant.com” is. 

Guess I’ll have to spend the weekend figuring out other ways to “monetize” my site. 

Monday morning music

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You can be a corporate drone and still find a means of artistic expression (like a blog, maybe?). And you can be a real estate agent and still rock… just like Bill Janovitz, the lead singer of Buffalo Tom. 

Back in the 90s, he and his bandmates Chris Colbourn and Tom Maginnis released several albums on a major label, and toured the world.

But things have changed. 

First came love, then came marriage, then came a baby in a baby carriage… and Bill needed to provide a bit more stability to his family than the rock and roll lifestyle could offer. So he became a real estate agent. 


“Now it’s more about getting up and wearing a decent collared shirt”

You can listen to Bill talk about his day job in this Public Radio International interview.

Source: https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-11-15/making-life-and-living-after-buffalo-tom-s-heyday?amp&__twitter_impression=true

As Bill’s real estate bio states, he and his bandmates “still play and record music to this day.” Indeed they do… and they do it quite well. Here’s a great video for a song from their new album:  

Thank you Bill for so poignantly profiling middle-age malaise in your music… and for setting such a good example for other family-centered folks. 

Playing the hand that’s dealt you… or thrown at you

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Ain’t it funny how time slips away. And ain’t it funny how some isolated, seemingly trivial incidents from your childhood get lodged in your brain for decades?

25+ Best Memes About Memories | Memories Memes

In December of 1976, I was a wee lad of 11. And even in the three-network universe of my youth, pretty much anyone with a pulse could get a TV special or even a summer replacement series (looking at you, Shields & Yarnell). In that fateful winter month of our country’s bicentennial year (remember the red, white and blue fire hydrants?), skinny, buck-toothed magician Doug Henning appeared in his second TV special, the appropriately titled “Doug Henning’s World of Magic II.”

Most Famous Magicians - List of Famous Magicians in History

Michael “Little House on the Prairie” Landon was the guest host (Doug wasn’t much of an emcee.) And one of the guests was fellow magician/illusionist Ricky Jay, who passed away a couple of weeks ago. It’s been 42 years since that show aired, but I vividly remember the segment with Ricky throwing playing cards into the audience.

My siblings and I were so enamored with that trick (and Ricky’s showmanship) that we tried to replicate it… with absolutely zero success. But the concept of throwing playing cards seemed so weird that it became a running gag for us. In the ensuing weeks and months, we’d pick up a playing card, shout “Ricky Jay!” and throw it to the four winds… or at each other.

Image result for peanuts playing cards

(It goes without saying that in the ensuing weeks and months, we could no longer play traditional card games because we managed to lose several cards from every deck we owned thanks to our Ricky Jay impersonations.)

Yes, we were easily amused… and maybe that’s the point. Throwing cards seems so tame (or, to use the current parlance “lame”) in a post-Jackass, Red Bull Stunt Team, Call of Duty, VR goggles world. But making your own fun can be the most fun of all. It’s the most memorable too… I guarantee you that if I picked up a playing card in front of my siblings and shouted “Ricky Jay!” it would still coax a smile out of them, four decades later. And that’s pure magic in my book.

 

P.S. Ricky Jay was quite the Renaissance man – in addition to being a master magician, he was also an accomplished author, actor and businessman (he and his business partner created the wheelchair that made Gary Sinise look like a double amputee in Forrest Gump). Check out his obit from the New York Times and the trailer of his documentary below.

Richard the Great

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Oops, I did it again… I went and saw Richard Thompson live in concert again last night.

I’ve posted about him before. And I’m going to do it again, because he’s so doggone good. Nay, great. Last night it was the Richard Thompson Electric Trio, featuring RT, a bassist and a drummer (and occasionally Richard’s guitar tech on guitar, making it, as Richard said, “a very large ‘trio'”). They absolutely rocked the Southgate House – a former church… saints be praised!

To see a man who is 69 years old (and has been in the business 50 years) absolutely shredding on guitar is life-affirming to a middle-aged dude like me. Although it’s a double-edged sword – a couple of friends of mine who are in local bands (Wussy and Pike 27) were in the audience, and they joked about donating their instruments to needy kids after seeing Richard Thompson because they realized they’ll never be as good. But there’s no shame in that; millions of performers aren’t fit to carry his guitar pick. He’s a quadruple threat, as I mentioned in my previous post (with a few updates):

The show was a typical RT show… which is to say, amazing. I don’t think you’ll find his rare combination of talents in too many folks:

  • virtuoso guitarist – I’d put him up against any teenage phenom. 
  • phenomenal voice – so strong, even at age 69. 
  • fantastic songwriter – great, sometimes twisted lyrics and wonderful melodies. It’s no wonder his tunes have been covered by the likes of R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Bob Mould, Bonnie Raitt, Reckless Kelly, The Neville Brothers, Marshall Crenshaw and Dinosaur Jr. (that’s a festival lineup I’d like to see).
  • entertaining stage presence – that droll British wit is always in evidence.

The Electrio Trio was fantastic (you can catch their entire Shrewsbury Folk Festival performance from a few months ago here). The songs from Richard’s latest album 13 Rivers are a great addition to his oeuvre. Back catalog highlights for me were “Wall of Death” and “Tear Stained Letter.” But late in the show Richard played back to back acoustic numbers that are utterly brilliant: “Beeswing” and “Dimming of the Day.”

 

Most artists would kill for just one song as good as those. But for Richard the Great, they’re just par for the course. I still have goosebumps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blossoming when it’s cold and dreary

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Let’s talk about blossom.

Wait, wrong Blossom.

I’m talking about this kind of blossom:

“Let us be grateful for the people who make us happy. They are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”

— Marcel Proust

Thanks for reading. I’m grateful for you. And that’s not a bunch of bullsh…er, fertilizer.