“It’s the cheapest psychiatry there is. I love writing; it takes a lot off my shoulders. Everyone should write. There’s no way you can lie to yourself; you can try, but you know better. When you get it down on paper, it’s like you’ve taken off a load and you feel lighter. Confession is good for the soul; at least it is for my soul.”
Billy Joe Shaver
“Outlaw country” singer/songwriter Billy Joe Shaver passed away Wednesday at the age of 81. He led an interesting life for sure. This article from Paste provides a nice overview.
There was a lot of heartache too – especially losing his song Eddy, a great guitarist and his bandmate in Shaver, to the scourge of heroin.
Eddy died of a heroin overdose on New Year’s Eve, 2000. The father had a hard time surviving that blow, but as he did with all his crises, he wrote his way out of it. He turned that impossible pain into the elegiac song, “Star in My Heart,” that he sang at every show the rest of his life.
From the Paste article linked above.
Billy Joe Shaver has left us, but thanks to the writing he did, he’s gonna live forever.
Half a world away from the United States, there’s a country that seems like our polar opposite.
While coronavirus cases here are surging before flu season has even started, thanks to a mask-avoiding, dithering president, over there they’ve essentially eliminated it because their leader acted swiftly and decisively, with an ambitious goal to wipe out COVID-19, not just control the spread.
While the U.S. never manages to pass effective assault weapon bans or even mild, common-sense restrictions, over there, after 51 people were killed in a house of worship last year, they quickly passed new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons.
While this country has never been more divided, that country’s leader just won re-election by a landslide.
What’s the difference? Well, let’s start with the fact that New Zealand’s leader is a woman. I know that may sound like a fairy tale to many Americans, who are getting ready to re-elect a 74-year-old man (please no!) or elect a 77-year-old man as their 46th (male) president. But somehow, 40-year-old Jacinda Ardern is managing just fine, thank you very much.
Sure, New Zealand is a much smaller island nation. And Ms. Ardern has her detractors (what politician doesn’t?). She’s not invincible (sorry Helen Reddy), but she certainly seems to be doing a much better job in trying times.
“This has not been an ordinary election, and it’s not an ordinary time. It’s been full of uncertainty and anxiety, and we set out to be an antidote to that.”
We’ve never had a female president. Even though study after study has shown that women score higher than men in most leadership skills.
Source: Harvard Business Review
Research has consistently found women tend to adopt a more transformational leadership style, which includes demonstrating compassion, care, concern, respect and equality.
Compassion. Care. Concern. Respect. Equality. I’d say our current leader is 0 for 5 on those. Unless “care” = “cares only about himself” and “concern” = “concern about stock market prices.”
Maybe someday… hopefully sooner rather than later… we the people of the United States of America will wise up and elect a woman president. It shouldn’t be such a foreign concept.
There’s not much to do in the Age of COVID, but we can still take walks around the neighborhood. This past weekend, I went by a house featuring these two signs:
Based on another yard sign (not pictured because I’m not giving Rump any free ads), I’m assuming the HER in question is Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. You know, the same governor who was recently the target of a kidnapping plot by domestic terrorists.
Several members talked about murdering ‘tyrants’ or ‘taking’ a sitting governor,” according to the complaint.
Yes, a woman, a wife, a mother, a stepmother, a survivor of sexual assault, a public servant, was targeted for kidnapping or worse, and our country’s president immediately blamed HER for being divisive, and less than a week later he was laughing off chants of “lock her up.” It’s victim-blaming on steroids. To use his own words “Sad! Very sad.”
“You know, the fact that after a plot to kidnap and to kill me, this is what they come out with. They start attacking me, opposed to what good, decent people would do is to check in and say, ‘Are you OK?’ Which is what Joe Biden did,” she said.
At least Le Cheeto-in-Chief is consistent – he never met a dumpster fire he didn’t want to add more lighter fluid to. He’s also consistent in HIS narcissism, HIS avoidance of responsibility for HIS words and actions, HIS wanton disregard for civility, and HIS misogyny. (Four years ago, there was another HER he wanted to lock up. Meanwhile, there are a lot of HIMS in the president’s circle who have been locked up, and deservedly so. )
Michigan’s Republican Party Chair, Laura Cox, said this:
“We live in a nation where we settle our political disagreements at the ballot box, not through violence, and any attempt to do otherwise is an attack on our Constitution, our values, and our American way of life.”
If you haven’t already, please vote. Right now, the pathetic sounds of the hateful name-callers are being amplified. But our voices can drown out that noise.
A lot of baseball fans were upset that the Houston Astros players who participated in a sign-stealing scandal in 2017 and 2018 were never punished. But one fan took matters — and a megaphone — into his own hands.
Photo credit: New York Times
Dude’s name is Tim Kanter. He’s a White Sox fan (obvi, from the photo above) but he lives in San Diego. Due to the pandemic, the baseball playoffs are being played at neutral site stadiums in warm weather locales. The American League Championship Series between the Tampa Bay Rays and the aforementioned Cheatin’ Astros was hosted at Petco Park in San Diego. Tim works at a software company whose offices overlook the stadium. So he and his buddies pooled $200 to buy a mega-powered megaphone. And during Game 4, Tim spoke for most fans:
Hear, hear! Attaboy Tim! Thanks for giving voice to the feelings of so many fans.
(The quotes above are from this New York Times article. It’s well worth the read. Tim Kanter seems like an interesting person.)
If you cheat, you should pay a price. The Chicago White Sox players who “threw” the 1919 World Series were banned for life. Pete Rose broke the rules by betting on his team and was banned for life. The Astros clearly cheated, and while the manager and GM were suspended for a year (and wound up losing their jobs), and the club was fined $5 million and lost draft picks for a couple of years, the players involved never had to miss a game.
Last night was Game 7 of the ALCS. Tampa Bay beat Houston. Fair and square.
Matt Berninger is a singer and songwriter, best known as the frontman for The National, a group he formed with two pairs of brothers (Bryan and Scott Devendorf, plus identical twins Aaron and Bryce Dessner). All five of them hail from Cincinnati. Matt has a new solo album coming out this Friday. You can read more about that here and here. (Sidebar of note: the album artwork was done by my friend Dale Doyle – you may remember him from this post, when he was “downsized” by the ad agency where he worked for 23 years. What a difference a couple of years makes!)
Artwork by Dale Doyle
Growing up in Cincinnati, Matt tuned in to a tiny station with an even tinier transmitter, broadcasting from 35 miles northwest of the city, in Oxford, Ohio. 97X (WOXY-FM).
From the November issue of Uncut magazine
Nearly four decades ago, Brian Eno made a now-famous statement about The Velvet Underground in particular, and gratification in general:
“I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band! So I console myself in thinking that some things generate their rewards in second-hand ways.”
I’d like to think a similar concept holds true for 97X, where I worked for a few years in the late 80s and early 90s. The station only had about 3,000 listeners, but everyone who tuned in was a true music lover. Not all of them started a band (although Matt did), but to a person, they were folks who cared deeply, profoundly, sometimes rabidly, about the music. It wasn’t just about the artists, it was about the community that formed around that music… the “tribe” in Seth Godin parlance. Many listeners grew up misfits and outcasts in “normal” society. At 97X, they found a home, a place where they truly felt like they belonged.
You hear a lot about diversity and inclusion these days – it was baked right into the station’s programming. 97X ran the gamut of “modern rock” – jangle pop, punk, goth, singer-songwriters, grunge, you name it… with specialty shows for blues, reggae, dance, industrial, metal, and local music. If it was new, if it was different, it probably got played. We’d always err on the side of the listeners’ ears – play it and let them decide, not us. To be a 97X fan was to be open-minded, tolerant, adventurous, liberal in the broadest definition of that word.
All of this helps explain why, more than 16 years after the terrestrial station went off the air, and a decade after the internet version died, 97X still holds a special place in a lot of people’s hearts. There’s a FB group called WOXY Forever. There’s a monthly playlist of new music on Spotify, compiled by dedicated listeners who never lost the joy of discovery that was inculcated by 97X.
There are college professors who give speeches about it. There are listeners who have painstakingly recreated countless hours of playlists, and archived each year’s “best of” and the “Modern Rock 500” (a Memorial Day countdown of the top 500 songs). It’s why Dave Tellmann (who worked at 97X for a decade) and I do a podcast about 97X (shameless self-promotion: it’s available on Podbean, Spotify and Apple podcasts).
The fact that Matt Berninger developed his musical tastes listening to 97X is super-cool. But I’m just as thrilled about all the other listeners who made 97X their station. We were all part of a small but mighty band… and we’re still focused on “the future of rock and roll.”
A few years ago, we installed 23 solar panels on the roof of our house. Actually, “we” didn’t install them – Third Sun Solar, an Ohio-based company, was our partner in the project. (And by “partner” I mean they did all the work, and we wrote a check.)
I’m not climbing on that roof… these days, I’m afraid of stepladder-level heights
Third Sun likes to write brief articles/case studies about current solar users, to help them promote the concept to other potential customers. I was more than happy to be a pawn in their marketing game. I mean, check out the hyperbolic headline:
I’ve never, ever been a champion of anything… I did finish 2nd in the Clarksville, Arkansas locale of the Punt, Pass & Kick competition back in 1972.
Facemasks are for wimps!
(I suppose I should mention that because 1972 was the first year for the national Punt, Pass & Kick competition, and because Clarksville was (and is) a podunk town, there were only two contestants in my age bracket. So in this case, “second place” was just another name for “last place.” More on that in another blog post… I love reliving humiliating events.)
Hmm, where was I before I started my sports stardom reverie? Oh, yeah, solar panels. The full Third Sun puff piece is here. It won’t win any writing awards — but at least they spelled my name correctly, so I won’t be confused with the evil kid in the Omen movies.
In all seriousness (OK, semi-seriousness), if you’ve never considered a solar installation before, do some quick research on the ol’ interwebs. (Use DuckDuckGo!) And if you’ve considered solar previously, take the next step and get a free evaluation. Third Sun was great – very helpful at every step of the process. I’d highly recommend them. And I’m not the only one:
From this site, which has a very handy and easy-to-use solar calculator
The price of panels has dropped significantly over the past few years, and you still get a decent tax credit (26% in 2020, 22% in 2021). We also got an EcoLink loan from the State of Ohio that knocked 3% off the loan rate (taking it down to 1.34% back in 2017).
Maybe you, too, can bask in the glorious glow of being a solar champion.
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
Thomas Kuhl on We’re alive, because nothing happened.: “That is why we should celebrate every day when our feet hit the floor. Another to enjoy and share with…” Jun 25, 04:33
Thomas Kuhl on We’re alive, because nothing happened.: “This simply explains why we should celebrate every day our feet hit the floor. Another day to enjoy and share…” Jun 25, 04:31
You done said…