Memnison Journal

Lawrence Welk and his band doing ‘One Toke Over the Line’ on his show.  A new, modern spiritual, don’t ya know.

Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Two singers that the folks in the house are fond of - Rebecca Lavelle (from McLeod’s Daughters) and Charice Pempengco (young Filipino girl with quite a voice, who was lately featured on Oprah amongst other places).

Guy in Florida decides to take out a billboard, showing the Twin Towers on fire and promoting his song “Please Don’t Vote for a Democrat” on it.  Photo of the billboard, some lyrics after the cut.

I’d take the stupid song apart with a cleaver, but after having to deal with that New Yorker cover, I want to Whack At Stupid all over the place with Mr. Louisville Slugger.

And the sign said long haired freaky people need not apply
So I tucked my hair up under my hat and I went in to ask him why
He said “You look like a fine upstanding young man, I think you’ll do!”
So I took off my hat I said “Imagine that,
Huh, me working for you!”

wo-oh-ah!

Chorus:

Signs, Signs, everywhere a sign
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

And the sign said anybody caught trespassing would be shot on sight
So I jumped on the fence and yelled at the house,
“Hey! what gives you the right
To put up a fence to keep me out
Or to keep mother nature in
If God was here, he’d tell you to your face,
Man you’re some kinda sinner!”

Repeat Chorus:

Bridge:

Now, Hey, you, Mister! Can’t you read? You got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat!
You can’t even watch, no you can’t eat, you ain’t suppose to be here!
Sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside…. Uh!

And the sign said everybody welcome, come in, kneel down and pray
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all,
I didn’t have a penny to pay,
So I got me a pen and a paper and I made up my own little sign
I said “Thank you Lord for thinking about me, I’m alive and doing fine!”

© 1970, 2002 Five Man Electrical Band

Still tired from the con; the entire family went minus Grandma Connie but including my visiting niece Kelbi, who decided to volunteer for the childcare room, and worked her butt off there! ( I think she racked up 15 hours…very dedicated.) She didn’t want the con, she wanted the kids!

Well, chacun a son gout, of course.  I’ve worked all sorts of con positions over the years, but never had any interest in doing childcare.

Mere enjoyed the kids programming and even more enjoyed Hanging Out With New Pals, such as Xapling #2 (see photo above) and Zoe Saporta, and while she was interested in the detective stuff, she found it kind of went off the tracks and didn’t really go much of anywhere; she lost interest after several hours. At one point, the Klingons locked her up, and I had to bail her out of jail  (proceeds went to some charitable thing, but - crap!) unexpectedly.

(A photographic set of memories from the con is up at my Flickr site)

Susan (who was fighting off some tough allergic stuff with her sinuses) ended up coming along for the whole thing on Saturday and Friday, and everyone but Kelbi was too tired to commute to the con on Sunday. Susan had an OK time chatting with Colleen / Xap, as did I, and we saw the newly-minted Elliot M (lj: almeda), Raven, Lisagems, Uncle Vlad, Krista, Lois, the POD crowd, Awfulhorrid, and many many others. Saw Gary Cone from Milwaukee, and I didn’t recognize him at first, as I hadn’t seen him in over a decade.

Lots of people weren’t there, and we heard a lot of woes over jobs, expenses and the general crush of the economy on people. I mean, we do OK, but a lot of people we know have gotten by on the thin edge of nothing for a long time, and they’re really taking it in the face. The cost of transportation in particular was tearing up a lot of budgets…

I attended only one panel, which was a special deal for me, as I was asked to do an article on it afterwards (on the Large Hadron Collider - I found out from the talk and a pre-interview of the lecturer that my high-energy physics was waaaay dated). And I made a brief swing through the dealer’s room with Mere (where she bought a small silver bell so that her imaginary class would pay attention) to look for goodies - I was good, and didn’t buy anything for me. Susan, very uncharacteristically, wanted a filk CD of Ookla the Mok (Susan has never shown any interest in filk, and I gave it up in 1990) and so I went off to Gretchen and Bill’s table to get it for her. (Susan had heard them perform in the kids’ room and was taken by them - turned out that she wanted a CD with The Detective Song, and the CD I bought her didn’t have that one on it…so we get another one…)

We also didn’t get to the art show - mostly, we hung out in the con suite and the lobby,  chatting with friends as they passed by.  It was a lot easier on my foot that way.  Some people knew all about my medical woes and were delighted to see me, and some had not connected on the idea of what’s- going- on- with- the- foot even though they’re around online here and read my stuff.  So I had to explain a few times about the CLL and the infections and so on.

Mostly it was just delightful to get the heck out of the house and see people and chat with them.  It gets really old being so immobile.

Hilarious post from a guy who was sick of WHAMP-A-BAMP-A-BAMPBAMPBAMP from another vehicle maxing out their stereo system with MUTHA FUGGAH FUGGAH excuses for music: he rolled out his own stereo weapon - The Clancy Brothers maxed with ‘Whiskey in the Jar’.

I also loved his idea of how to bring in the ultimate weapon past that…suggestions for other ultimate sonic weapons welcome.

NYT story about a music festival in the middle of the Sahara in Mali….

Nearby, a stage rose out of the dunes, decked in modern sound and lighting gear. Off-road vehicles unloaded musicians fresh from the stomach-churning drive from Timbuktu. Digital cameras flashed. Cellphones sang. MP3 players whispered into western ears.

After dark, turbans bobbed in peaceful Tamashek-language conversation around simple fires, while amplified electric-guitar Malian blues floated from a nearby dune. A cluster of Tuaregs around the guitarist clapped and cheered.

Top acts, from Robert Plant to Jimmy Buffett, have made their way to the festival in recent years, but most are local blues and West African roots musicians. This year’s special guest was Tinariwen, the Tuareg band that recently caught international attention and a spot opening for the Rolling Stones.

Sometimes, you do get the idea that the idea of a common human spirit is out there…

My mother was not a shrinking violet, and if something bothered her, she would sometimes go right up the ladder to complain - or to buck someone up.  (And sometimes, she’d put my name on the letters, too…assuming I agreed, I guess.)

She sent a letter to the Pope complaining about the Vatican choir being flat after a televised Midnight Mass one Christmas, and a letter of support to the US Secretary of State (over this gaffe).  Here’s their replies…

jarandolph_letterfromthepope (PDF, 200k)

secretary_of_state_to_jackie_1981 (PDF, 200k)

Chicago Tribune obituary for Ross Cascio, the founder of the Lincoln Park Pirates - er, Lincoln Towing Service in Chicago, that mentions the above as the church where his funeral was going to take place…

ross_cascio_obit (PDF, 350 K)

Susan: is recovering from that leg thing that laid her up, but she’s been through a good deal of pain with it, and is only starting to get around moderately well again. She and I have been spending a lot of side time as well on a get-all-these-photos-digitally-scanned deal, where a service does the bulk of it for us. She’s surprised me recently with a big interest in this semi-gardening thing, and also into genealogy stuff.

She and Mere are taking off on May 1st for a camping trip to Camp Juliette Low in Georgia with Mrs. Harrington, Meredith Ellen and Ally, so I will be left with Connie (my MIL) and the dogs for a few days. My intent for that weekend is to work like an SOB on the basement while they’re gone. The camping trip should be an experience for Mere; she’s not used to ‘primitive’ camping, or all the bugs, and so on, but if Sissy Can Do It, So Can She.

Meredith: I think she kind of feels as if she’s at a crossroads for What She Wants To Do in a number of ways. She’s been taking a lot of time with her roller skating (been doing private lessons for the last few months at the local rink) and she’s gotten down to one major skill she has to pick up to ‘get her trophy’. But the path to getting that skill has turned out to be a serious, slow bear, and I think that she’s losing steam and reconsidering whether she wants to go on to competitive roller-skating.

Susan is taking her to see a local roller-skating competition on Mother’s Day, and I think that will either kill or cure her interest in doing that. Probably kill; Mere can really work at things hard and with dedication, but if she thinks that something’s totally hopeless, she will drop it like a dead stinking fish and walk away. She may see the competiton stuff as being waaaaaay too hard to deal with.

She’s gotten somewhat more interested in ice skating; a lot of the same moves, and the skates are a lot easier and lighter to move around.

Her piano stuff is doing well; she’s a demon sight-reader, and I have to get her piano tuned and straightened out, because it’s been acting really clunky - a set of keys around high C are stuck, and that seriously screws with her practicing.

School is only a month off from Meeting Its End For The Year, and she’s not looking forward to ‘being bored in the summer’. She really likes school, and the challenge of learning. She’s seriously hot on her math right now; getting into division, memorizing basic multiplier tables, et cetera. She’s quick on doing things in her head, and she has good math skills along with seriously killer writing and vocabulary skills. Her present plan is to be a writer and journalist and to illustrate her own books.

Youtube from Secret Talents of the Stars: George Takei singing On The Road Again.

In other news, Willie Nelson was instantly found to have dropped dead.

h/t to Deb Geisler on this one.

Susan wants me to note a slight correction; we got the two American Girl dolls for Meredith Ellen, fwiw.

Sinterklaas came and went relatively quietly. I went ahead and stocked up on a collection of Dutch licorice, drinking chocolate, stroopwaffels, and a few other odds and ends, and also a bag of the Frisian and regular kruidnoten (a type of gingerbread cookie, small and round and relatively hard - the Frisian sort have anise in them). And of course, chocolate letters, thanks to a store in DeKalb that made them and a friend who lives a few blocks away in DeKalb and brought them east for us.

Unfortunately, aside of the letters and the kruidnoten, I found that the family just didn’t care much for the cookies and candy, so I will reduce that considerably next year. Mere got a country and western CD that she had wanted - not my idea of a present, but it’s not for me, so…

The anniversary went pretty quietly too, but we did get a little time to ourselves. With Mere, that’s sometimes really hard to do.

The holiday dinner has been described in an earlier post, so I’ll just link back to that.

Meredith was also in a Christmas / Holiday concert at school as part of the third grade chorus; there were two versions of it, one during the day (which I attended and we have photos from) and one at night (Susan caught that one too).

Well, this is coming out way too late for Christmas, but crikey, it’s coming out right on top of my birthday.  Holy Jebus Hermione Crissake, but this looks good.

*thump*bwamp*baboomba*  (SFW, but loud)

I have to hand it to them.  This took some doing, and I’m sure the crowd loved it.

“Never forget me I am Nirodh!”  (somewhat NSFW, youtube)