Author: fifteenkey (Page 60 of 96)

Yep, it’s another edition of Tube Time, or ramblings above 25,000 feet! It’s time to sit back, relax, and enjoy whatever is squirming through my oxygen deprived mind.

Cleveland. It’s the butt of many “city jokes” like, “it could be worse. We could be in Cleveland,” but my day here has somewhat changed my view on “the mistake by the lake.” Actually, that unkind description was tagged to the old Municipal Stadium. The old ball yard had fog, wind and cold issues similar to those in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park except it was in Cleveland. The former home of the Browns, Indians and the inaugural venue of the RnR Hall of Fame is now just a memory, but it’s immortalized, at least in my mind, by the words of ex-Sox hurler “Oil Can” Boyd, who insightfully described the environment after a game was postponed due to fog, “That’s what they get for building a park on the ocean.”

iPod aside: “Impossible Germany” (track 3) from Wilco’s new record is a tour de force. I’m not sure if “tour de force” really fits here, but damn…

After a gridlock-free trip from our office in Independence, OH to Jacobs Field and $10 parking a pitching wedge from the entrance, six of us gathered for a beer at an adjacent beer joint for um, beers. I savored a locally brewed Dortmunder and recommend it for your next trip to Cleveland. It was still north of ninety degrees when we crossed the street to the ballpark. As we sauntered through the warm, dry air a twenty foot statue of Indian’s great Bob Feller passed by my left shoulder. “Wow, that is cool,” I cleverly commented to our host, Tom. “Yeah, too bad he was a lefty,” Tom replied. “Really,” I asked, the hook firmly planted in my cheek. Good one, Tom.

Having flunked my baseball history quiz, I sheepishly entered the cavernous park and soaked it all in… sun, heat, beer, a dog… It was a beautiful night for baseball and a nice 24 hours in Cleveland.

After working Father’s Day morning on a presentation, the plan was to hit up the Hopper exhibit at the MFA. We arrived at 1:00 to discover the first available viewing was not until 3:00, and I knew Kyle would be “Les Miserables” if we were gawking art for 3 hours, so we needed a Plan B. About an hour later, we were eating a Bianchi’s Pizza in a warm breeze under some shade at Revere Beach and I said to my munching Megan and Kyle, “this is better than the museum.” Just then my phone vibrated with Father’s Day wishes from Mom. “I thought you’d be coming over. I made meatballs.” I see. Winding up Revere Beach Boulevard, a jeep merged in front of us. It had one of those “Life is Good” stickers affixed to it’s bumper. “Yeah,” I thought, “it is.”

I’ve been using Google Analytics since January 30th to measure traffic here.

Oh, as a side note. Of course the image
in the previous post is not Magritte’s
“The Voice of Silence,” but rather
“The Scream” by Eddie Munch.
But you knew that…

Anyway, the Google tool has allowed me to gather quite a bit of information on you. I don’t know who you are; well, actually, I do know who some of you are and frankly, you scare me. What about you lurkers? You voyeurs… To quote Pete Townshend, “Who the fuck are you?”

Let’s begin with where you are. Although not the majority, many of you live in Massachusetts. Here are the top 10 locations and number of visits:

Maynard 86 Hey Jeff…
Leominster 49 Who are you?
Waltham 46 That goes for you, too.
Hudson 20
Cambridge 18
Braintree 15
Clinton 14
Foxboro 12
Andover 9
West Roxbury 9 Um, hi.

Now let’s delve into some of the search terms that get people here and what they do once they arrive…

Fifteenkey.com is the most popular search term, but I’m not sure how people come up with it to do a search. Searches on my name are the second most popular, and those people spend quite a bit of time “just looking,” averaging about 8 pages viewed per visit. Other popular search terms leading the unfortunate here are:

count chocula
http://vistadome.com who moved my cheese
rob zombie “god of thunder”
phil rudd wife
phil rudds house
phil rudd’s wife
pomade liquid tsa regulation?
songs about depression loneliness fakeness
symbolism in jm barrie’s peter pan
????

Finally, fans of Wilco have ended up here with a variety of searches:

there’s a light (one light)
there’s a light what light
there’s a light, white light
what light letterman mpeg
wilco letterman “what light” mpeg
wilco

Speaking of Wilco, I’m getting fired up for their upcoming show on Thursday, June 28th at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston.

So, who are you?

I turned off the Sopranos years ago after a particularly brutal beating of a woman by Ralph Cifaretto, played by Joe Pantoliano. I’ve just never been a big fan of gratuitous violence. An old friend wouldn’t watch the show as a protest of the depiction of Italians in it. Perhaps my boycott helped me to swallow last nights um, ending of the HBO series. I had picked up again toward the end and endured the last few episodes. My heart was pounding in the last, brilliant few minutes to the point I could hear the blood surging through my heart in anticipation of Tony’s spraying on the screen. Creator David Chase wrote and directed the finale and he used every trick in the book, even stealing shamelessly from “the Godfather” to peak the tension, but the climax never um, came… That left many fans feeling frustrated and blue.

It’s always interesting to share family “news” with family members, especially when it’s not news like “Kyle just graduated from Harvard” or “Megan’s artwork is being auctioned at Sotheby’s” or “Jessica just got the lead in Evita.” My news is typically more subtle, but Kyle is happy and an absolute joy to be around, Megan is maturing rapidly and finding peace with the path of her life, and Jessica is coming around to understanding she’s still got tremendous potential to fulfill. It’s all pretty positive from a particular point of view.

Last week the news I shared was with my Dad, a man with his head stuck in the norms of a half century ago. He reminds me of “Beulah” in a scene from “Field of Dreams.” When Kevin Costner’s wife, played wonderfully by Amy Madigan, suggests to Beulah that “if she had just experienced the sixties.” Beulah indignantly fired back, “I *experienced* the sixties,” to which Annie calmly replied, “No, I think you had two fifties and moved right into the seventies.” That’s Dad. He sees black and white and right and wrong with no shades of gray. He ended the call shortly after I shared my news, only saying, “I don’t know how you do it. My heart breaks for you.”

The strange thing is, I gave him no reason to think I was at all distressed. I described the positives, but I guess all he heard was the white noise of 50’s shame. It’s ironic that decade is looked upon generally with such nostalgic fondness, but it was largely cold, dark and repressive. Its society would have shunned all of my children for different reasons. I’m glad I caught only 14 months of it.

There’s a Boston.com feature today on all the New England war dead from the Bush fiasco in Iraq. Specialist Kyle Little was from West Boylston and he had not yet reached the age to legally have a beer at the family cookout today. Now he never will. This one Kyle was killed May 8, 2007, in Iraq, by a roadside bomb.

Today there are over 3,000 American mothers mourning their lost children and there’s no end in sight. How many more mothers will be reduced to writing letters to their dead child like Gina Barnhurst does every Sunday? Her son, Eric was killed by a sniper in Iraq on Oct. 21st.

Last night I awoke to a glowing TV promoting upcoming HBO shows. I heard Bill Maher say, “I’m pissed off that more people aren’t pissed off.” Since President Bush addressed the nation March 19, 2003, the word “stability” has been frequently used by an administration who’s Iraq policy has produced anything but. Not that there hasn’t been stability as a result of the Bush-Cheney war. ExxonMobil’s profit growth has been obscenely stable:

It’s not often you hear the name of a customer in a song, but I just did. Somewhere between sit-up 21 and 22 of set 2 of 8, I heard this in the Drive By Truckers “Never Gonna Change:”

The “ABI” is the Alabama Bureau of Investigation and they were an AFIS customer of mine when I worked for NEC. That’s pretty much all I’ve got for ya… Hey, it’s a holiday weekend! Oh, alright. Here’s the video and some more lyrics of the song…

In a George Orwell essay, “Why I Write,” the author of a novel titled the same as a David Bowie song cites four primary reasons. The first, or um, primary primary reason is clearly listed in the description of this space, just with a different word; vanity. In Mr. Orwell’s words it’s:

(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

I’ll admit, the white-hot spotlight is a hot rock massage for my ego. Recently it was suggested to me that blogging may be driven by an “acting gene.” I asked it and was stunned to find this article on the tendency of special needs children to love acting. Needless to say, Mr. Kyle Daley is a fine actor and impressionist. One that cracks me up is his take on Robert Shaw as “Quint” in “Jaws.” He gets all shy when I ask him to do it in front of an audience, but when he barks this Quint line, it just fills me with hope and light.

As for my own “acting gene,” it’s probably more aligned to this gene.

I’ll paraphrase Freddy Neech replacing “Poets” with “Bloggers.”

Fulfilled. When I got to step 33, “attach the net,” it felt good. After mowing the weeds today, I successfully reversed the step that could not be reversed and completed the following 28 steps to completion. Of course my back is aching now so there won’t be any more than an obligatory few layups… Now it’s time for a shower and 30 minutes of stairs and rock followed by another shower and who knows what. Kyle is in a “I miss my mom” mood and will be hanging with her tonight so I’m solo and single! Yeah, I’ll probably stay in and watch the Sox…

Kyle’s mom has been gone since Thursday to rescue her own mom who was left in Canada by her insanely evil (not in a good way) husband. He’s a real dick. He once said to his wife about Kyle, “in my day they used to put kids like him away.” He’s a fucked up old man, and I hope if I ever see the small minded SOB again, I’ll rise above the emotion his heartless statement brings out in me.

Anyway, let’s get that out of the system with some stair climbing, shall we?