The Daily Diversion Archive For March, 2004

Wednesday March 3, 2004

In celebration of being sick as a dog today, I decided to give you 10 tunes that rock.

I'm not giving them to you in a literal sense, just tossing the names out there so you might find their coolness out for yourself.

Songs For The Unwashed Rocker

1. My Sharona by The Knack
This song has it all--sex, Strat and Les Paul guitars, huge unyielding riff, slippery bass line and a long and excellent guitar solo. It's so long that most radio stations chop it in half. You can just feel the lust coming out of the singer's mouth. He wants Sharona and wants her bad. This album, Get The Knack, was one of my first albums. I think it must have been number 4 or 5. It's wall to wall with great tunes but this one stands out as the true epic. That's the problem with hitting a homerun the first time out as a band. It's unlikely you'll ever get even close your second time around.

2. Bringin' On The Heartbreak by Def Leppard
This song hinted at the greatness to come from this group. It starts out all gauzy and mystic and then starts that regretful dirgey chorus where all the band members are yelling it out. Skip the remixed version with the limp synthesizer riff all over it a la all those remixes of In The Air Tonight by Phil Collins.

3. All Over Town by April Wine
Name a Canadian rock band that has excellent musicians, great song writers and pretentions of "Art Rock." Loverboy you say? No. Rush? Well, duh--but that's too easy. How about April Wine? They scored a bunch of hits in the late '70s and early '80s and wrote some cool tunes. They even covered a King Crimson song (21st Century Schizoid Man) on Harder Faster. All over town starts with an off-beat guitar intro and rolls into a guitar duet until the singer starts. There's more rockin' and guitar duets throught the rest of the song.

4. Back In The Saddle Again by Aerosmith

The song cranks up until the horses pull up and Steve Tyler informs you that he is, indeed back in the saddle again. The guitar sounds like it has bass strings on it and the whole song nearly gallups on to the end.

5. Here In The Dark by Billy Squier
Here's one from the "Where are they now?" file. This song combines goofy synth lines with hard-edged guitar riffs and produces a sound that just screams post-disco.

6. Something About You by Boston
This particular record is so slickly produced, it's nearly sickening. This kind of production was just a foreshadowing of what was to come from the likes of Duran Duran and such. The song itself rocks. It has a sleepy intro that runs into a guitar duet that beats out the main riff right at the outset. Very nice. Couple that with the singer's impossibly high voice and those lovely, lovely guitar textures and you have a song that can be listened over and over again.

7. Dream Police by Cheap Trick
Here's a band that was goofy, but excellent at the same time. The singer has a good rock voice, the guitar player was well known for playing odd guitars and hamming it up, the bass player is great and their drummer had that loose but driving beat that reminds me of The Rolling Stones. The song jumps up and down, has great guitar fills and the lyrics flirt with paranoia. What else could you want?

8. Cinnamon Girl by Neil Young
Neil Young isn't everyone's cup of tea. This song rocks for a lot of different reasons. It has great guitars, the song just sort of bumps into it's changes--the fills seem to start too early and end too early and where the song doesn't bump, it feels like it's being pulled into the changes. The riff between the first and second verses starts right on the down beat even before he's done singing "girl." Because of the odd way it lunges around, it hooks you like no other song I can think of.

9. She's A Beauty by The Tubes
Here's a perpetually underrated group. Again, excellent musicians combined with BIIIG guitars and some weedy synth lines that really do add to the song rather than wrecking it. It has a big chorus and another riff that sticks to you like a good steak dinner.

10. The Boys Are Back In Town by Thin Lizzy
My last entry is another guitar-heavy romp. The main guitar line jumps all over the place and manages to be lithe and heavy at the same time.

That does it. Go out and listen.

You may have noticed that this page loaded faster today. That's because I upgraded my DSL speed. It's roughly 4x faster serving pages now. That's way cool. On the other side, it's about twice as fast so I'm totally jazzed. Web pages render even faster, I have a far lower ping in CounterStrike and photos in Gus' gallery load fast enough that most folks now can use the slide show feature on the default 3 seconds/photo and not have to wait for the next photo to load. That's just so gosh darned cool.

What's not so cool is that I'm sick again. This cold, like one of the other 3 I've had since Gus started going to day-care, started in my throat. Instead of post-nasal drip, this time it's just scratchy, raw and painful. I also have tons of body aches that are getting through the ibuprofen and a searing headache. So much for me today.

Gus is feeling better now. This is a good thing. We brought him to the Emergency Room at Childrens' Hospital on Monday night. Normally we'd go to the Urgent Care, but we've received such lousy treatment there that it just wasn't worth it. We're going to get socked with a $50 co-pay, but here's the rub: The ER at Childrens' is staffed with tons of excellent people who seem to get us in and out with great care AND rapidity. Gus had pink-eye and both his ears were infected so there's no wonder he was cranky. It's been less than 48 hours since he was there and he feels TONS better. He doesn't like his medecine much, but he puts up with it and he just looks so much better. It's amazing how much the comfort of one person is the only thing that matters.

Friday March 12, 2004

For those of you who don't live in the Minneapolis St. Paul metro area, our transit drivers are on strike. If you were visiting here, you probably wouldn't know, either.

The way I see it, not only are the transit drivers kinda phoning in their pickets, but all us commuters are finding out that traffic is flowing better without the buses. I'll leave it to the experts to find out exactly why, but I figure it's because more people are carpooling and that buses do, in fact, mess up traffic flow.

So now the drivers are on strike, nobody who has a voice in the community is missing them and lots of people are starting to think that the bus system might just be disposable.

I'd say the drivers are gonna get the shaft from management pretty soon. ATU, the union that's on strike, must have run out of ideas to get the rank and file out to spread the word that they're on strike. The poor know, but they're the one's walking, aren't they. The important people are enjoying shorter commutes. So what's a union person to do?

Well, here's some free advice. Make yourself seen in the most inconvenient way possible. I've noticed that whenever some Green Party or We Love The Earth Party candidate is running for office in this area, there are tons of idiots on the overpasses over I-94 waving signs and raising a ruckus. This invariably slows traffic down.

I would think the union might want to make their point to the driving public and get out on those overpasses and slow traffic down. Make big signs--big enough to be read at medium distances, but small enough so that drivers have to slow down from regular speeds to read them. People will then slow down. I don't think we can help it.

Here's another idea: Get a bunch of drivers together with several vehicles. In the early minutes of rush hour both morning and afternoon, get on the freeway, spread out across all the lanes and go exactly the speed limit. This will hopelessly snarl traffic for the remainder of the rush increasing commute times and making all of us wish for both sides to get back to the bargaining table.

It's free advice. Take it for what its worth.

Wednesday March 17, 2004

Sarah had a business meeting in Chicago this last weekend so we all piled into the car and went. We left on Saturday afternoon after packing what seemed to be every last thing in our house into the trunk of the MDU. We left under leaden skies that turned most foul as we crossed the boarder into Wisconsin.

First it rained, then it sleeted, then it rained ice chunks, then it added sleet to that delightful mix and then, just to top it all off, it changed to heavy snow. It's hard to make time when the car is being blown all over a slippery, slushy road by crosswinds of at least 30mph. Add a sqalling baby to the mix and you get neck muscles as tight as guitar strings, ringing ears and a loss of the will to live.

I toughed it out to Black River Falls where we stopped for dinner. We got our dinner and then went back to the car so the baby could get his. Once he was done feeding, we strapped him back in and proceeded on. The weather cleared around Madison and we had dry roads once we hit the Tollway in Illinois. We made terrible time on the trip down. Due to a couple of baby stops, we ended up getting to our hotel in the exurbs at around 11. 6 1/2 hours to Chicago isn't great time, but when travelling with a 4 1/2 month old through bad weather, you take what you get. And like it.

I was there to take care of August while my wife went to her business meeting. Since Sarah is still Gus' only food source, the baby had to be close by to get fed. I got to hang out with my precious Gus, and got really familiar with the hotel room.

On Sunday, we went over to Katie and Ted's place for a nice brunch. It was lovely, but Gus wasn't feeling so well and we ended up bolting after a couple of hours to a nearby emergency room to see if his ear infection/fever had returned. It turns out that it didn't, and that's good. The doctor, Dr. Paul and the nurse who's name I didn't get, were a couple of the best health care providers we've bumped into in our tour of clinics, urgent care centers and emergency rooms. Gus has been hit hard by the Day Care Center Parade of Maladies. The virus of the week club has been clubbing Gus, but it's been clubbing Sarah and me even harder. Heading to Chicago, Sarah couldn't hear out of her left ear due to an ear infection and my right ear was only starting to clear from my ear infection. I'm sure Gus is tons happer now as he seems to have shaken the last of his colds, but this is probably temporary.

Anyway, thanks again to Katie and Ted for having us over. Your hospitality is excellent and your house is lovely.

Sarah's conference started on Sunday night (!) so I got to look after our not exactly cheerful baby for the balance of that evening. Monday morning dawned with an even crankier baby and I was at my wit's end by mid-morning. It seems awfully unfair that Sarah can get Gus to calm down within about 3 minutes of showing up and doing what she does. When Gus gets past a certain level of crankiness, he goes ballistic and there's no calming him down for poor, old daddy Tim. Frustrating.

The rest of Monday was spent hanging out and playing with baby. Tuesday was another day of meetings for Sarah. They ended at about 4 and we hit the road soon after. I had taken time out and loaded up the car during one of Gus' feeding breaks so we were able to make tracks rather quickly.

Gus was OK for the first hour or so, but hit the crank zone just as we were leaving Chicago traffic. He cranked through stops for dinner and for cranky baby relief in Beloit. He finally knocked off for the rest of the trip just south of Madison. It was a lot of crying to take and it made me long for the days of yore when it was "ok" to hold your baby in your lap in the front seat.

Of course we would never do that now. Physics is a harsh taskmaster. Still, it would be nice to have a way to pacify baby without endangering his life.

I'd had well and truly enough of this little trip and I was in no mood to put up with Wisconsin's idiot speed limits. 65mph? Surely you jest. What reason could there possibly be to go so slow through such a large state? Certainly it's not the scenery. The views along I-94 are not breathtaking by any stretch of the imagination. Revenue, perhaps?

I set the MDU's cruise control at just a tick under 80MPH and wasn't bothered the whole trip. I thought for sure my goose was cooked near the I-90/I-94 split, but the Statey was on his way to assist another officer in a traffic stop a couple of miles up the road.

We made pretty good time until about Eau Claire (Clearwater). At that point it started to snow. Weakly at first, but then it really started to drive in and stick. By the time we got to the boarder, the snow was making the dividing lines invisible and making traction not a sure bet. I kept the speed as high as I dared, but by the time we hit our exit, I was doing about 30mph or so. We got home and there was already 2" down and it was snowing biiig flakes furiously.

We dragged all our gear in and the various packages that had come in our absence. I had a beer and went to bed.

Tuesday March 30, 2004

Sarah and I fought through our colds and did some massive de-junking this weekend. The next thing out the door was roughly 150 LP records. Yep, I have a still numerous collection of the black disks. I have less of them now. During our de-junking time, we went through all my record boxes and separated the records into three groups: Keep, record and toss, and toss. I got rid of the toss group last night.

I went to our local record store and brought in a bin and a box of records. The guy behind the counter was very cool about it and told me how the whole process was going to work. He was going to look at all the records, separate out the good ones and then grade the good ones. He said that most records weren't going to be worth much. I assumed I'd get a couple of cents for each, and I was cool with that. All I wanted was to have these things out of my house. Any money I cleared as a result was strictly a bonus.

True to form, of the 150 or so records I brought in, he had about 50 that he said were "good". The rest he'd give me a tenner for. Deal. He then started grading the other ones.

After a while, he called me back up to the front and complemented me on my music taste. He said he'd give me $100 for every thing. That's very cool. Especially since he was only giving $2.00 for the top price.

What he was paying the big money for was old punk and alty stuff. I assumed that'd be the case. He also was giving big money for Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and other stuff like that. That blew me away as I'd always figured those would be worth next to nothing. Not so, apparently. He told me the deal was that kids who were just getting into albums and music would get the Zeppelin and Floyd albums first. Because of this, he couldn't keep them in stock.

So anyway, I walked out of there with what I thought was a pretty good deal, all things considered. It'll be even better when I get the albums I want to cut to CD done with. Good times, good times.

On the baby front, we've decided that we'd be better off with a nanny and my mom caring for Gus. The center we are going to is just wrong for us now. We've been sick for a month and a half. Gus has been to the doctor at least once a week now for 7 weeks. It isn't good for him and it's not good for us, either. This changeover should happen within a couple of weeks.

In other news, Gus had his first solid food last night. Yes, I do have pictures. They will follow as soon as I can find the time to get them downloaded off my camera.

Lastly for today, I'm going to be taking the Net+ exam very soon. I hope to get it done later this week, but I might hold off until early next week if I feel I need to study some more. These certification tests aren't all that hard if someone who knows how to write a good multiple-choice question wrote the questions. I find the practice tests I've taken rather unnerving as they aren't written very well and I've found many typos. Including a wrong answer. I figure that most of these on-line practice tests weren't written by professional test writers. They were probably written by geeks like me.

If I get the time tonight, I'll be recording albums.