beautiful, funny, sad & true

I don’t normally like to do ‘filler’ blog entries, but I’ve been too busy to write. With all apologies for the long time gap between entries, I’m going to have to ask for your prolonged patience. This has been, and continues to be, a very busy week. In a good way.

I’ll be celebrating two birthdays tonight and tomorrow, AND rehearsing with IrishBand. Sunday I’m sleeping in and listening to This American Life, then meeting with a guy who wants me to produce one of his songs, and THEN I’m seeing a movie with a new friend.

I’ll letcha know how it all goes, and hopefully even manage to take a few pictures. It promises to be a great weekend.

Naturally, all of this Mac nostalgia made me think of the comic strip Bloom County, in which the character Oliver Wendell Jones got a computer for Christmas which had a hilarious mind of its own, and which was obviously inspired by the first Macintosh.  It was called the Banana Junior 6000.

You can click on all of these to make them large and legible, by the way.  Here are two strips, from when Oliver first got the computer. . .

. . .and here are two from some time later, when Oliver and the Banana started to feel the effects of Moore’s Law:

This was the 1980’s, after all, so there was plenty of heavy metal music in the culture at large.  Some people listened to it, some people ridiculed it, some of us even got guitars and learned how to play it.  I told you that story so I could tell you that Kiss was one of the biggest bands in the world back then (you could argue that they still are), and one of their claims to fame was definitely Gene Simmons’s tongue.  The creator of Bloom County designed a hilarious mock-advertisement for the Banana, using Gene as the negative model for what will become of your child if he or she doesn’t grow up with the necessary skills and tools to survive in this cruel and unforgiving world.  Like any good, intrepid Kiss fan, I instantly recognized it as a classic, cut it out of the newspaper, and tacked it to the wall in my bedroom.

Still rings true today, eh?

I love the name of the program ‘Bananamanager.’  That’s just pure genius.  Somehow, I suspect that’s where he got the idea for the whole Banana thing in the first place.

Incidentally, I need to give special thanks to this blog and this blog, from which I scrounged up these strips.  Without them, I would have been trying to take pictures of my old Bloom County books, which would have been a huge pain, and wouldn’t have looked nearly as good either.  My hat’s definitely off to both of them.

That might be the weirdest title I’ve ever written for a blog entry, but all I ask is that you bear with me on this one.

I got a text message from a friend yesterday that said, “Turn on NPR right now.”  I did, and heard a story about a bunch of bizarre medical conditions that afflict musicians, like that badge-of-honor rash that violinists get on the left side of their necks from rubbing a violin across it for years or decades.

I didn’t hear anything that would have caused my friend to write with such urgency, though, so after the story was over, I wrote back and said, “Caught a bit of it. . .musicians’ ailments.  What’d I miss?”

“Cello scrotum.  You need to hear the whole story.”

“Holy crap!”  I had to find out more.

As it turns out,  an English medical journal back in the 1970’s reported about a condition called ‘guitarist’s nipple’ that is (supposedly) an irritation caused by a guitar rubbing across your chest.  I suppose that’s assuming that you’re not wearing a shirt.  I’ve played guitar for many years, and my nipples are fine and dandy, thank you very much.  (TMI?  NEI?)  My ribs do go in a little bit on one side, where the top of the body of the guitar rests against your chest while you’re sitting down with it.  Oh yeah, and the calluses on my fingers are thick enough that I can touch a hot pan or something for a while and not feel it.  (“Mmmm, what’s that smell?  Smells like bacon.  Oh. . .it’s my finger.”)

So.  Anyway.

Around the time of said nipple affliction, this English doctor and her husband thought it would be funny if they one-upped that condition, so they dreamed up ‘cello scrotum’, which they said was chafing in the scrotal area.  This is, of course, impossible, because when you play the cello, you hold the instrument between your knees, which are spread far apart, which also means that your nether region is getting plenty of air, so there’s no opportunity for chafing.  Not to belabor the point, but. . .

. . .there, you see?  No chafing.  You DO get sore sometimes from sitting on the edge of a chair all the time, but that’s about it.  The cello is one of the most ergonomic instruments out there.

Apparently, though, the myth of scrotal chafing persisted for decades, until another journal mentioned the condition last December, which prompted the doctor to write to the journal and put the matter to rest once and for all.

The money quote of the article was this:   “Perhaps after 34 years, it’s time for us to confess that we invented cello scrotum.”

Here’s a link to the story.

I had a ball writing this entry, by the way, but ultimately I find this subject to be completely nuts.

Today was, quite frankly, hellish.

The company at which I work was recently bought and taken over by a (formerly) rival company.  Originally, my company was split into three different ‘brands’.  Today we got word that the company that bought us is planning to close one of those three brands, and that Friday will be the day of reckoning.  This means that quite a few of my friends are going to be on the dole.

For a while, we thought that they intended to close the entire department that I’m in.  It wouldn’t surprise me if they do that, to be honest, but at least we made it through this round.  For me, the timing would be spectacularly bad, but then again, I don’t suppose there’s ever a really good time to lose a job.

So yeah.  Between thinking I was heading for unemployment, and then finding that no, a bunch of my friends are heading for unemployment, I just feel like I’ve been tied in knots.  It was an emotionally challenging day.

And by the way, I still have something in my eye; the same thing that was in there yesterday, in fact, and it hurts like effing hell.  Someone told me today that a “crazy but good” way to get things out of your eye is to pull your eyelid away from your eye by pulling on your eyelashes, then plug your nose, and then blow.  Yeah, I know.  It didn’t make any sense to me either, but I did give it the old college try, and I’m here to report that it was ineffective.  Apparently, rather than being ‘crazy and good’, it’s just crazy.

Sorry for the long lapse between entries.  I had a super busy and fun weekend, and then an incredibly busy and stressful week so far.  On Sunday night, IrishBand’s drummer came over and we recorded the drum tracks for another song, then I recorded the bass part and worked out a few guitar parts.

Tonight I have rehearsal, and my cohorts will be here pretty soon, but I did want to check in and give you an update.  And now I’m going to eat dinner and shut my eyes for a while until my friends arrive.

Was today frickin’ Christmas and nobody told me?  I got so many random gifts, it was absolutely unreal.

At work, my friend LC sent me an e-mail that said, “Are you here?” and then showed up with a bag full of CD cases.  There must have been twenty-five or thirty cases, and in each case was three CD’s!  I mean. . .oh my GOD that’s a lot of CD’s.  And best of all?  They’re all 80’s metal.  (Except for maybe a handful, like the New York Dolls and At The Drive In.  But otherwise. . .)  Seriously.  I was shaking, I was so excited to start listening to them.  After listening to the inauguration speech and a little bit of the commentary, I got through two Dio’s, a Mötley Crüe, and At The Drive In.

So then I called my mom while I was on my lunch break, and she happened to be over at her friend’s house.  This friend is my adopted aunt, by the way, who recently tracked us down on the net after we’d all been out of contact for almost thirty years.  Turns out that she lives about two blocks from my mom, so she wrote to my mom a few weeks ago and they’ve been reconnecting and spending incredible amounts of time together, which is mind-boggling and also makes perfect sense at the same time.  Naturally, my mom passed the phone to her, so I got to talk to her too.  In fact, here’s a picture of us together, which was taken when I was about a year old.

It was. . .I mean, I was practically speechless by then.

But there’s more.  My friend VL-W sent me a message which said, “Come in and see me when you can.  I have something for you.”  We were super busy, so it took me about an hour and a half, but when I was finally able to make it in there, I found that she had a super-cool black bowler hat waiting for me, which was the same one she let me borrow the other night at the IrishBand show.  She said that I could borrow it until I got one, but then wrote back right afterwards to say, “You know what?  I always think I look like a dyke in that hat, and you totally rock it.  It’s yours.”  Again. . .oh my GOD.

So I got home and there were two copies of the new Susie Blue CD waiting on my doorstep for me.  I’m in her band, and on this CD, which looks great and sounds great.  The other copy is for GuitaristDavid, my neighbor and friend, who also played on the CD.

Oh yeah.  The Susie Blue CD’s were resting on top of a box from my mom, which I didn’t even know that she’d mailed!  It  was full of new towels and kitchen stuff that she just randomly got just because she’s nice that way.

So. . .between the 75 new 80’s metal CD’s, the Susie Blue CD that I’m on, the hat, the box of housewares, the fact that Barack Obama is president now, AND I have an IrishBand show-slash-Obama-celebration tonight which is gonna frickin’ RULE. . . could today be any better?

I suppose that if I didn’t have to work (and work overtime at that) it would’ve been better.  But then again, if I hadn’t gone to work, I wouldn’t have the 75 CD’s or the hat.  So there you go.  Pretty damn good day, if I do say so myself, and it ain’t even close to being over yet.