Moving down the dial (again)

It’s been two years since I discovered the splendor that is Bishop Allen. And thank the good Lord, they released a second album. Having acquired it, it is quite different from their first; it’s more pensive, less poppy, and perhaps even better. Anyhow, I’ve been listening to The Broken String for about three weeks straight and trust me when I say that every time I listen to it, I notice something new and clever. I recommend that you give it a listen.

Four Strings of Pure Sex

It took me 19 years to come to terms with the fact that I have small hands; hands so small, in fact, that I can’t really aspire to become a world class guitarist to make girls like me. So, I’m making the best of the unpleasantness of my outrageously tiny hands and learning to play the mandolin. It’s like a guitar, only smaller and with four strings.

So, I guess that would be attractive to some girls, right? Maybe little midget women or something.

Proud to be (a little) Irish

Last week, to prepare myself for the St. Patrick’s Day holiday, I burned a CD with about thirty Irish pub songs for use in my car.

I started listening on Monday. I was still listening today, four days after the holiday. I am about to go insane, but I can’t stop.

What gets me is the fact that these Irish folks, who are presumably always drunk, can remember the eight billion words that are to be in any song and that they can spit those words back out as fast as many of these melodies require.

This is what has convinced me of the supreme greatness of Irish people: they’re always drunk, fighting, and can really drop a phat beat.

CAS is over!

To complete my mandated CAS hours for IB, I worked my tail off during these past two weeks at the Hospice Thrift Shop in Clearwater. I tell you, nothing beats multiple 8-hour days with the grumpiest, oldest people on God’s green Earth. Except maybe Root Canal Thursdays.

Anyhow, every radio in this little dirty store is constantly tuned into 105.5 (WDUV), which is apparently my choice for easy favorites. You know, old peopley stuff like Herb Alpert and Neil Diamond and Anne Murray. Now, I’m not saying that all of this music is bad. Heck, in fact, I love the majority of the songs they play (minus Anne Murray, of course). I’m a bland and uninteresting guy who is about as clueless to pop culture as people from Alabama are oblivious to the fact that the South lost the civil war. No, folks, the South will not rise again. Get over it.

But I digress. Like I said, I’m down with most of the songs on 105.5. But, folks, once you’ve stopped yourself from singing along to the same Peter Cetera song more than two times during the same shift, you know that you’ve been volunteering way too much.

Boy, am I glad to be done.

The Return of the Man Boobs

My mom just found a T-shirt from Jimmy Buffett’s 1981 Coconut Telegraph Tour. It was one of the first concerts that my folks enjoyed together. Unfortunately, my love for Jimmy and my mom’s slender build at the age of 20 do not mix.

Now, I present for your viewing pleasure the cliche Internet photograph of an unkempt blogger wearing a shirt too small for his frame and looking to his right:

Paul McCartney ate Ringo's head unit

Last night, as the family had dinner at Outback Steakhouse, the topic of conversation meandered down the path of upcoming concert events. Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson are coming to town; so are the Allman Brothers and the remaining one-four-hundredth of Lynyrd Skynyrd; and, of course, who could forget Sir Paul McCartney?

My father asked me whether in my music interests I’ve come across Sir Paul’s first album, dubbed “The Cherry Album,” but more formally “McCartney.” I knew of the album and its cover art, but I had yet to listen to it fully. After obtaining it when I got home, I went to bed.

This morning, I burned a copy of the CD before I ran out of the door at 6:10 to initiate the carpool. I walked out to Ringo feeling refreshed and ready to start my journey to school (which, by the way, I only have to do once more this week, thanks to AP exams). I got in my car, put Sir Paul in, and was on my way.

However, the CD player spit out Paul like he was a giant bowl of that greenish marshmallow stuff my mother makes on major holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. After picking up Angus and fiddling with my testy stereo for a few minutes, we noticed that there was a plume of smoke spewing from the head unit. I assumed that this was not a good sign, so I took off the faceplate and hoped that the short would not spark and cause a fire.

Now I know where my first few paychecks are going.

Thor is dead

About “eight months ago”:http://sociallyconsciousbird.com/wordpress/?p=81, I outlined the reasons for my faltering loyalty to 107.3 FM and took up my cross to go hang out with the folks at Thunder 103.5. I can honestly attest to its superiority in every facet: talent, programming, promotions, and commercial placement.

However, it seems that now I’ve upset the Gods that have been sending their rays of love down in the form of megahertz waves for the larger part of a year. Without warning and without any consideration of the devastation to which a large portion of us classic hit aficionados would succumb, the bigwigs down at Clear Channel Communications took away the compromise between The Bone’s hard rock and The Eagle’s mindless droning of softer stuff by Elton John and Jim Croche. My friends, the worst thing happened Thursday morning that I can possibly even consider: I woke up to a country station.

And so, that leaves to those of us who appreciate the music that shaped society as we know it roughly three stations. We’ve got The Bone (102.5 FM), which, in my humble opinion, has some sort of bass and screaming fetish. We still have The Eagle (107.3 FM), which has been far less impressive since the name change from The Bay on 1 January 2004. Nowadays, its play list is tiny and repetitive, sort of like Ross Perot. I reckon that leaves us with The Point (101.5 FM), whose inclusion in this list is debatable because I’m not sure the eighties can be considered a markedly impressive era for rock and roll.

That’s it, folks. This kind of thing happens with no warning, either. I think had Ledge called my house and let me down easy like a fat Prom date, it would have been okay.

“Hey, uh, Casey? Yeah, hi. This is Ledge, you know – that DJ from Thunder? Yeah, well, I just wanted you to have a heads up on this. Starting next Thursday, we’re going to be a country station. Just wanted to let you know. Bye.”

That’s all I would have needed. Then, I could have weaned myself off of the addicting drug known as Thunder 103.5 by going back to The Eagle or The Bone for a certain allocation of time daily. But as it stands now, I am very, very shell-shocked. And mad.

The most disgusting entry to date

Last night, I didn’t want to deal with the daily hassles of teenagerdom, so I escaped all of that by vowing to high-tail it out of this town and to not answer my cell phone. So, if I ditched you last night, I’m sorry. The same goes for if I didn’t pick up your call. I needed it.

To escape from the perils of Pinellas, my brother and I trekked down to Sarasota, where we used our last minute concert tickets. The act? Art Garfunkel.

You know, the tall, quite one with froofy hair from Simon and Garfunkel. He’s lost a bit of his hair by now, seeing as how he’s like a billion years old and all. The show was pretty good; he has quite the pretty voice and can really belt out a love song.

But I think his career is really going downhill. He couldn’t even sell out a small performing arts venue. And we got front row tickets from a scalper for $45 for the pair. That isn’t very good when the tickets have a face value of over $40.

Maybe his lack of support is a product of the way he puts on a show. He’s very queer about every thing he does on stage. During the long instrumental bridges in the songs, he would pretend to play the instruments that were being played by the band. A little air guitar here, some imaginary drums there, and a whole heck of a lot of fake piano playing everywhere else.

Another thing I noticed, and pardon me for being the biggest hypocrite in the world after razzing Art for his gaity, was the fact that *Art Garfunkel is hung like a HORSE*. He wore the tightest pants he could find on the clearance rack at Ross and, I swear to you that it was two entities singing to us last night: man and beast.

It was like hitting two birds with one stone while at the same time getting more bang for your buck. That’s two acts for the price of one!

Moving down the dial

I know I don’t usually venture outside of my thirty year old box when it comes to music, but I recently acquired the “Bishop Allen”:http://www.bishopallen.com/ _Charm School_ release, and believe me when I say that this little indie band is going to be big one day. Very big.

Hiding behind a wall of illusion

Determined to read a book at least once in my life, I ordered from Amazon.com a piece about the possibility of John Lennon’s murderer being a “Manchurian candidate.” A strange possibility, indeed, but it seemed interesting enough to choose to do for a TOK presentation. Evidently, there are just too many coincidences surrounding the assassination and there were too little questions raised after the act to constitute a “lone nut” theory. Daily, I read this book with as much diligence as I had ever put toward reading. So, after about a month of reading (note that I read at about the rate of a mildly retarded sock puppet), I finished Bresler’s Who Killed John Lennon? – just in time to present to Dr. Yarborough the chilling facts surrounding John’s Death.

Ian, upon realizing that I had, against all odds, actually read 200 pages straight, gave to me R. Gary Patterson’s The Walrus Was Paul, a book that investigates all the legendary clues pointing to McCartney’s alleged death. Looking not only at album covers (i.e. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), but also at backward masking and lyrics with double meanings, this volume ever so delicately suggests that the Beatles pulled off the greatest practical joke in history, even if it wasn’t so obvious. Underneath the exquisite musical stylings of the pre-breakup Fab Four lies a whole other artistic realm that is really, really cool to read about. After two days on the interstate between Clearwater and Dillard, Georgia, I am proud to say that I successfully read this book too; that’s two books (which I highly recommend) within a year, a new personal record.

Presently, I am reading The Catcher in the Rye, the piece that Mark David Chapman’s controllers used to allegedly brainwash him into killing John Lennon – this may take a while.

Edit 2/13/2011: I just ran across this post while restoring my database. I remember when I wrote this over six years ago, I took great pride in the fact that if you take the first letter of each sentence backwards, it spells a secret message. I was a tricky kid.