A book review of sorts.

This book was written by a child of parents who immigrated to this country from the Middle East. It's about how growing up in this family in a small New England town shaped the beliefs that are the foundation of the author's life. He looks at various traditions that were important to him and his family. The book is not an instruction manual or self-help guide. He states in the beginning that he is often asked "...what forces shaped" him, and that there is an easy short answer to that question ("I had a lucky choice of parents"), but an in depth answer couldn't really be given in a few minutes, so he wrote this book.

There is a fair amount of the "we didn't have TV when I was a kid, we had to make our own fun with a stick and a handful of rocks" kind of thing (he didn't really say that, I made it up to illustrate a point), some rather obvious common sense, parts that I disagreed with and some interesting biographical details.

Some quotes:

From his mother: "Listen more than you speak, and think before you speak."

From his father: "Either we spread the wealth in a country where millions of humans go without, or we spread the misery."

A conversation between his father and a doctor who was drinking coffee in the father's restaurant:

DOCTOR: Why are the auto workers' wages so high?

FATHER: So they can afford to pay your bills! Why do you charge so much?

DOCTOR: Because we often treat poor people for free.

FATHER: In that case, since we give free coffee to poor people, your coffee [then 10 cents] today is $1.00.

The author is someone for whom I have a great deal of respect, so I wish I could say this was a great book and you should go out and get it. Alas, that is not the case. It's not a bad book and it's an easy read, but nothing earth-shattering.

Oh, yes. The title is The Seventeen Traditions and the author's name is Ralph Nader. Sorry, I guess that was kind of sneaky, but I didn't want to mention the author's name at the beginning. Mere mention of the "N" word (Nader) is enough to get some people riled up or decide what they think before they hear anything.

My baby's back!

My first bass, a 1971 Fender Precision which I bought used in...., let's just say it was a few years ago (it wasn't old enough to be considered "collectable" when I bought it), is now back in playing condition after a long period of lying dormant and unplayable. A couple of years after I bought it, I removed the fretted neck and replaced it with a fretless neck. After a number of years of playing and several fingerboard dresses the fingerboard got so thin it started to split. (The problem with playing fretless is that the act of playing actually wears grooves into the fingerboard, necessitating the removal of material from the fingerboard to level it out, which is called "dressing" or "re-dressing." Eventually, you run out of fingerboard.) By that time, I had acquired a second bass to serve as a back-up instrument, but it became my only functioning bass when the Fender became unplayable. The Fender went into storage until the day when I would figure out what to do about it. A few years passed, I ended up making yet another fretless bass and eventually decided I didn't need three fretless basses, so why not put the original neck back on the Fender so I could have a fretted bass in addition to the two other fretless instruments? It took over a year to accomplish this, as it turned out that there were other problems that needed addressing to make the instrument playable again. The luthier to whom I had entrusted it for these repairs was very busy and I made the mistake of telling him it wasn't a rush job. Now it's done and I played it for the first time tonight. It's kind of beat up, but it feels good and it sounds great. It was nice getting reacquainted.

Here we are when we were first getting to know each other.

Photo: Elizabeth Miller

The Now Look For Now People

I've been muddling about changing the layout of this blog for some time. I found the white text on black background, among other things, to be kind of hard on the eyes, but since no one ever complained about it, I assumed it was just me. I was also leery of changing it after witnessing the chaos that ensued when Luminiferous Ether changed her blog. She lost a bunch of stuff and it took her days to get it to the point where she was happy with it again. Then Quakerdave mentioned in a comment that he couldn't even read it due to the unfortunate color scheme I had chosen back when I first started the thing. That was enough to convince me that the time had come, and here it is. I may play around with it some more, as I'm not totally happy with how it looks, but it's a start. I hope you all find it easier to view, and please let me know if anything about it bugs you.

Thanks,
Ed

P.S. A special thank you to QD. Without your comment I may not have gotten around to changing it for months.

By popular demand...

Okay, I may be exaggerating a wee bit. One person suggesting that I write about an event doesn't really qualify as popular, nor as a demand, but she has requested it several times, so does that count? I thought of writing about it in the meme I posted prior to this, but it seemed like to long of a story for a meme. Besides, I already had made reference to it in a previous meme and I promised to write about it some day.

Here's the story...

It was a dark and stormy...

Oops. Wrong one. Try again.

As has been mentioned a couple of times on this blog, I once worked for an electric guitar manufacturer. It's not a particularly well known company, but, at least at the time when I worked there, they also made guitars for other brands, one of which was Dean Guitars. While nowhere near as well known as Fender or Gibson, Dean is a pretty well known brand in the world of electric guitars. At one point in time, we were in the process of building a prototype guitar for Dean. I don't remember the exact details, but as I recall it was co-designed by Dean and former Pantera guitarist Dimebag Darrell and would be the first in the Dimebag series of Dean guitars. They were calling it The Razorback. While working on it, I enjoyed playing around with the concept of being named Dimebag Darrell. "Hi! I'm Dimebag Darrell. This is my little brother, Nickelbag Darrell, my sister Douchebag Darrell, my cousins Sleazebag and Scumbag Darrell and my grandfather Colostomybag Darrell." Etc., etc..

Since the manufacture of most electric guitars these days involves at least some automation, some programming needed to occur before the first cuts could begin, and as always seemed to be the case, there were some bugs that needed to be worked out causing the entire project to be, ummm, let's just say it was behind schedule before we even started building. As I understood it at the time, there was an impending photo shoot scheduled for Dimebag and the prototype Razorback and it was looking like we weren't going to have the guitar ready. Some long days followed, mostly for the owners of the company, as I was obligated to pick up my daughter after school and, most days, couldn't stay late. It gets to be the day before the scheduled photo shoot and the guitar is close to being finished, but not quite. I made arrangements to work late, but when I went home it still wasn't quite done. I got to work the next day to find the guitar was still in the shop. Not good. When I asked about it, my employers told me that, yes, it was done. They had finished it at around 9:45 the previous evening. "Then why is it still here?" I thought to myself.  Better not to ask, I thought. Hadn't I heard? Dimebag Darrell was shot and killed on stage the night before. Later we found out that he was shot at around 10:45 Eastern Time. The guitar was finished at around 9:45 Central Time. Think about it. As Dimebag's guitar was getting ready to be packed up, Dimebag was dying. (I might not be remembering the exact times accurately, but relative to each other, they are correct.) It felt pretty creepy, even though I had never met the guy.

So that's it. The story you've all been waiting for, whether or not you knew you were waiting for it. Here's a picture of the Dime Razorback, although it's not the prototype.

Tag, I'm it.

I've been tagged with the "Seven Things" meme. First, The Quaker Agitator got me, then, probably because I was slow in getting to it, Luminiferous Ether got me. I guess, technically, it ought to be Fourteen Things, but I'm just not that interesting. I had a difficult enough time coming up with seven things, and I'm not even going to claim that they are seven interesting things.

Here are the rules:

1. List these rules on your blog.

2. Share seven facts about yourself on your blog.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to their blogs.

And away we go...

1. I once played softball with Jonathan Richman. You know, the singer/musician. It was back in the eighties sometime. A lot of the local “punk rockers” used to get together at the local elementary school playground on Sundays for some informal softball, beer drinking and fun. Richman and his band were playing in town and joined in the punk rock softball game. They were nice guys, not bad softball players either, but it’s a good thing they stuck with their night jobs (musician joke.) If you’re not familiar with Richman as a musician, you may remember him from the film There’s Something About Mary.

2. I don’t like the Beach Boys.

3. While a member of Appliances-SFB, some of the musicians and/or groups we opened for included: John Cale (he wasn’t particularly friendly), Bauhaus (kept to themselves, didn’t meet them), The Mekons (nice people), Sonic Youth (pretty rude and full of themselves, they seemed to believe that no good music could possibly happen outside of New York), Hüsker Dü (pretty nice guys), The Replacements (they were pretty drunk), Siouxsie and The Banshees (kept to themselves, didn’t meet them), Snakefinger (didn’t meet him, either), Soul Asylum (nice guys), Big Black (nice guys), The Butthole Surfers (didn’t meet them), The Violent Femmes (seemed pretty full of themselves), The Meat Puppets (nice guys) and more. We were scheduled to open for Joy Division, but Ian Curtis committed suicide the day before their tour was to begin.

4. I have a piece of marble that was once part of the Taj Mahal. When I was in elementary school, a friend of mine went to India. The Taj Mahal was under construction while he was there and he nabbed a piece of it and gave it to me when he got back.

5. I went to El Salvador in 1995. The war had been over for less than two years when I was there. It was an eye opening experience. I’ll never forget visiting the town of Cinquera. The town had been used for target practice by the air force and was still pretty devastated. Bullet holes everywhere, bombed buildings, traumatized people, a downed helicopter lying in the town square. When my group arrived, someone started ringing the bells in the town square to greet us. Upon closer examination, I discovered that the bells were unexploded bombs whose innards had been removed. Right on the cases it said “Made In The USA”. Our tax dollars at work.

6. During my career working in a record store (remember records?), I had the opportunity to meet such personalities as Natalie Merchant (she wasn’t very nice to us lowly store employees due to the fact that we failed to provide her with the proper brand of bottled water), Karla Bonoff (she was nice), Celine Dion (she was also nice) and Tony Bennett (he sang a few songs, signed a boatload of autographs, then his management whisked him away. His people kept the masses away from him - get your CD signed and move on, sort of thing - but he was courteous.)

7. I have been face-to-face with a wild wolf. I was 18 years old and on a backpacking trip on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. I was walking with a couple other people and we had gotten pretty far ahead of the rest of our group. Carrying a 40 lb. pack sort of discourages conversation, so we were pretty quiet. We went around a bend in the path and right in front of us was a wolf heading toward us on the path. At the time, the rangers said that something like one in 10,000 visitors sees a wolf and that most reports of wolf sightings are actually coyotes and foxes. I’ve seen coyotes and foxes, and that was no coyote, nor was it a fox. It was very big. Anyway, we almost walk right into this wolf. We stop, the wolf stops. We look at each other for what was probably less than 5 seconds, and the wolf just sort of melted away into the woods. On that same trip we saw lots of foxes. They weren’t very shy. Also a fair number of moose. One night a (Gaggle? Herd? Murder? School? Passel?) of them ran through our campsite. It sounded kind of like a stampede of elephants. In the morning there were moose tracks everywhere. Since then, I have discovered that meese can be downright nasty. We were lucky they didn’t stomp on our tents.

It's going to be difficult to find seven people to tag who haven't already done this, or who don't object to memes. So, if you're tagged and don't want to do it, don't feel like you have to.

Tagging:

1. Cinderbelle

2. Gomonkeygo

3. FranIAm
4. Pagan Sphinx

5. Jess Wundrun

6. Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein

7. Matty Boy

WTF?

It's friggin' 63˚ outside and my neighbors have their air conditioner running! It's drowning out the frogs, crickets and other more pleasant night sounds of late summer. I didn't have to listen to air-conditioning the entire time we were on Rock Island, so it bugs me even more. Aaarrrghghgh!

Debriefing

Well, we got back from our vacation a couple of days ago, but I haven't been able to muster up the energy to write anything until now. I know, "bummer" say you, dear reader.

So, as I mentioned in the last post before we left, I had to play a gig in the late afternoon before we could head up nort'. It was hot and sunny. As a bassist, that means my strings get all loose and floppy, which makes it difficult to play, particularly if I need to play anything fast; the strings just don't snap back as quickly when they're hot. Still, everything was going pretty well until the middle of the second-to-last song, when Pam's guitar amp abruptly stopped amping. We played the rest of that song and the entirety of the last song without guitar. It sounded just plain weird, if you ask me (but who asked me? I'm just a lowly bass player, after all.) Here we are in all our middle-aged rock 'n' roll glory. Not the best photo in the world, but at least you can see all four of us; it's a rare photo that includes the whole band.



After the gig, we headed north pretty quickly, thanks in large part to the efforts of Ms. Geranium. We managed to catch the second-to-last ferry to Rock Island on Sunday, carried all our stuff to our campsite and, Bob's-your-uncle, it was time to get down to the work of relaxing. And hard work it was, as you can see from the following photos.

Ms. Geranium (Terry Pratchett's Wyrd Sisters in her lap) and Molly hard at work.

Sparkly Seacow and Violet hard at work.
Is it just me, or does something happen when kids get to a certain age that causes them to forget how chairs work?

Rock Island was, of course, originally settled by Native Americans. More recently (1800s) it was settled by European-americans who built a fishing village on the island. It was the first european settlement on the Door peninsula. The village was deserted in the latter part of the 1800s when the villagers resettled on neighboring Washington Island. The entire island was purchased in 1910 by an Icelandic immigrant and Chicago resident named Chester Thordarson, who had made a fortune in the U.S. as an inventor. (Incidentally, Thordarson spent some of his childhood in Windsor, WI, which is only a few miles from where I live.) Thordarson used the island as a private summer resort until his death in 1945. In 1965 the State of Wisconsin purchased the island from Thordarson's heirs and it is now a state park. Wake up! (I think all that history stuff is interesting. Sorry)

Anyway, Thordarson must have eaten a few too many of these.


Why else would he have thought that building this was a good idea for keeping deer out of his garden?

It didn't work, and the deer on the island ate every single one of the 6,000 apple trees he planted. He planted 1,000 in one year and none of them survived until the next year. (Okay, he also built a 10-foot high barbed-wire fence, but the deer jumped over it.)


Speaking of his garden, Thordarson was an afficionado of Japanese gardens and planted many Japanese plants, but, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he bulldozed them all. I'll bet you didn't know we have Chester Thordarson to thank for the U.S. victory in the Pacific arena of WWII. If he hadn't bulldozed that garden, we'd all be speaking Japanese right now.


He also planted some native Icelandic plants. Here is a patch of the Icelandic thyme that is still plentiful on Rock Island.



Looking to the southwest, you see Washington Island about two miles away and it doesn't feel all that exposed to the elements.


But, look in any other direction and you realize that you are way out there in the middle of one of the Great Lakes (kind of like the ocean, but without the salt.) It makes you feel, well, small.




When you're on "The Rock", as many people refer to it, the weather can get kind of intense. We were pretty lucky last week, but we did have some stormy weather. One day, after an afternoon of overcast skies and high winds, at the end of the day the sky was clearing in the west and the sun managed to illuminate the island as it set, shining underneath the cloud cover. I love the way it looks when the landscape is lit up against a dark sky.




Returning home is an odd experience. From the primitive conditions on Rock Island, (pit toilets, hauling water from the only pump, no cell-phone reception, even the single telephone on the island wasn't working while we were there) you head across on the ferry and Washington Island sort of eases you back into civilization.
Washington Island is only accessible from the mainland by ferry or light plane, but there are roads, cars and, of course, tourists. But, thanks in part to that ferry across what they call "Death's Door", it's a slightly different class of tourists. Take the ferry from Washington Island to the mainland and, WHAM!, instant tourist hell. You know the type. Polo shirts and deck shoes. Loud. Big honkin' boats. Entirely too many Illinois license plates (up here in Wisconsin we have a name for people from Illinois with their big honkin' boats who think of Wisconsin as their playground, but it's not very nice, so I don't think I'll say any more.) The rest of the trip home is a little less of a shock after that.


There are cool and awesome places all around the country and the world, but I'm partial to the combination of the North Woods and Maritime feel you get at places like Rock Island. The light is different. The air smells different. The air feels different. I had a similar reaction when we took a trip to New Brunswick and the Bay of Fundy. It's about as good as it gets for me.