Squublog

For most of my life, I've not been a sports fan. I've been a Steelers fan forever, but for most of my life that meant I got excited if the Steelers were in the Super Bowl and I'd probably watch most of it if I weren't busy playing D&D/recording music/being a dork. A few years back I finally made a commitment to start watching Steelers football regularly. (I posted about it then, and I'll provide a link if I don't revert to lazy-mode before I finish here.) At the beginning of this season I was talking to my mom before a Steelers game and I made a comment about the fact that I can never get into any games that aren't Steelers games. So while I'd done a good job of actually actively being a Steelers fan, I hadn't at all become a football fan. I'd watch the Steelers play and rarely know much about the other team or what the game would mean to the Steelers season or anything like that.

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I've already lost track of which day this is.

World's most dumbest: Right here.

Self:

Update your sidebar already. That thing's a fucking disgrace.

- Self

since I'm in the mood to post bullshit right now: could I just go ahead and post a year's worth of pointless crap all at once? Avoiding the work I need to be, but am not anyway, doing?

Sure, there'd be very little point in that. But isn't that always the point?

A few days ago I rambled a bit about a mysterious band called Keith Cross & Peter Ross.

I keep hearing this "Peace in the End" song and needing to let other people hear it.

So here you go, take a listen:

Peace in the End.

Quality-wise I think it suffers a tad from being apparently overloaded a bit when it was recorded from vinyl by whoever did that.

And while I'm here, here's the track after it that reminds me of Traffic's Low Spark of High Heeled Boys: Story to a Friend.

I posted something just now, which is yesterday and now is two days from now, and I just want to clarify some things:

1. I was astounded by Ashton Kutcher's grasp of things when I originally watched the episode of Bill Maher that that "overtime" clip was from.
2. I was set on fire with angriness when Kutcher kept saying, "Stop sending stuff to Mars," and then I was more on fire that the whole panel seemed to agree with him. Fuck I'm mad about it.
3. Still, there's funny stuff there. I just wish somebody was on there that could represent the other side of that stupid argument.
4. The metafilter thread I linked in the same post: there's some great stuff there. I am stumped by all of it.

Dear Steve Albini:

Stop sending stuff to Mars.

Thanks a lot,
Ashton

Apparently there were more than 900 Wizards registered to vote.

We are one day away from the US election and are really proud to let people know that thanks to the whole fandom, the HPA's Wizard Rock the Vote program registered close to 900 voters!

(here)

The Harry Potter Alliance? Wizard Rock the Vote? WHERE'S THE FUCKING OUTRAGE?

I really want to just rip this thing out and put it back all different. I can't do what I was doing. The gradual shift in appearance toward web 2.0 (falling short, somewhere around web 1.8652, I think) might have stifled the... no, it didn't. I just like to start off talking about completely not what I'm talking about.

Keith Cross & Peter Ross - Bored Civilians - an album from, I think, 1972. Peter Ross apparently played guitar, at some point, with Richard Thompson. If you don't know who he is you can't help me. Keith Cross played guitar in some early 70s British prog/hard rock band called T2 (presumably what the movie was named after) (!) Somewhere I read (on this very internet) that Keith Cross was some kind of next-coming-of-Eric-Clapton, or called such, or some damned thing.

I've never heard of any of this. I've been completely kept in the back room. Not for lack of trying - over the years I've kept my ears occasionally in or around the Victrola speaker whenever the doggie wasn't in the way. I downloaded a "rip" of the whole thing, taken from a vinyl copy at some point, when I found a link on a site called Time Has Told Me. If you're interested after my rant, here, you can find it there pretty easily. I'm not gonna link to the thing, just because currently I'm not in the mood. (Plus there seem to be a number of blogs that do what that blog does, which as far as I'm concerned is a public service and they should be very well commended for their efforts, but I'm not one of those guys.)

I downloaded it because I've been downloading all kinds of things at random from there ever since a friend pointed me in that direction. There's a lot of good shit, most (not all) of it really hard to get "legitimately." (Do I use scare quotes all the time because I'm as stupid as it looks? (Should I really call those "scare quotes"?)) Out of the 20 or so things I've grabbed so far, this one has stood out to me most prominently. These two guys both sing, both play guitar. There are lots of harmonies, lots of acoustic guitars, but it's not any kind of "acoustic folk" thing. For me the comparisons that most come to mind are maybe a little bit of America, a lot of Traffic once or twice, some Crosby, Stills & Nash (mostly Nash,) and a little Beatles (but everything from 1972 had to have just a little Beatles, right?) The album has lots of high points. In particular, I'm gaga for a cover of a Fotheringay song called "Peace in the End", of which I'd never heard the original. (I've probably never heard Fotheringay at all, though I was familiar with them cuzza they sort of have a lot to do with Fairport Convention, and if you didn't know who Richard Thompson was up there you still won't know or care what I'm talking about.) Conveniently in my listening right now that track's just jumped into my headphones. This is the kind of song that stops me dead in my tracks. At some point that'll wear out and I'll have ruined yet another series of synapses, but for now... ooh boy. Bliss is what.

Another comparison that's come to mind is a much more recenter kinda music group called Midlake. They came out with an album a few years ago (or less? maybe last year) called The Trials of Van Occupanther. That thing sounds like a throwback to this kind of 1970s thing. To me.

What about me, me and my kind?
If we're unknown are we left behind?
We have our lovers, too, and our friends
hope in the end.
You may think our lives are forever,
I think you may be wrong.

Another track called Story to a Friend on this Bored Civilians album bears a striking resemblance to Traffic's Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, in a lot of ways. It's none the worse song for it, though.

I don't know when which guy is singing, listening to this thing. But the lead voices are fantastic. Everything about this thing is fantastic. And here comes my frustration, the point (believe it or not) of this rant: why can't the internet tell me what the hell happened to these two guys? All I can find is the sort of brief history I've already hinted at. Keith Cross split with T2 after one album, joined up with Peter Ross, and they made this thing. These two guys then split up. That is all. End of story, according to the internet.

HOW CAN THAT BE? I don't claim to know everything about 70s rock music, but I have gotten pretty good over the years at being able to track down information I don't have on the subject. But here everything's a dead end. Allmusic.com, wikipedia, google and whatever random shit I find there. I can find people talking about this album, but they're all saying the same things.

What happened to these guys? I'm pretty satisfied that they didn't do anything else for any major labels, but I just can't believe that one or both of them just gave up music altogether.

The only time: the only time I really even think about blogging is when I'm supposed to be working. I think. Seems like that's the case. So when I'm sitting here, supposed to be working, thinking, "I should really start blogging more regularly again," I am also fighting my self, my conscience, my better self, saying, "you need to concentrate on working."

I could blog in the evening except that's basically family time. Most often. Immediately after working hours are over I'm on kid duty. Once my wife gets home we're both on kid duty. Even if I could pull some time out of then, I'd not want to write. My daughter goes to bed around 8:30. I could post then but I'm not sure my head works then.

(How many entries have I made like this? The real thing to do would be to make this a real entry, and see where that leads. But... man. As soon as I start writing like this I realize that I'm just not... I've not got it in me anymore, right now. I'm nothing but a bunch of ellipses blurred together. A heart attached to a cone. Spread thin like mayonnaise. Melted chocolate. Juxtapositions that mean nothing.)

The other day I drilled a hole right through my wall so I could run the only nearly-long-enough Cat-5 ethernet cable I have here (why does Firefox want "ethernet" to be capitalized?) through the wall to my Vista laptop. Vista has this awesome feature where your wireless connection to the internet can work wonderfully for months and then suddenly you'll be told that the connection is "Local Only," and then you won't be able to get to the internet anymore. You can find 217,383 solutions to this feature online, but none of them work reliably because the feature is not easily duplicatable. Because I was frustrated, and in a hurry, and because my other laptop, that one with XP, had contracted a piece of horrible spyway while I was using it to search for a solution, I drilled a hole. So now occasionally I have to hook up to this cable, which isn't quite long enough to run in any out-of-the-way way, in order to be on the internet. I've heard rumors that sometimes the Vista "Local Only" internet feature also works for a direct-ethernet connection. Here's hoping.


In part I started this entry because I'd been envying my past. I like some of my previous entries. I also like the way this place looked when it was hand-made. In an effort to shake myself out of this stupid reverie, here are some choice quotes from the past that maybe... well, they're probably more representative of the kinds of things I say here than would be quotes from entries I actually enjoy reading:

"This whole thing is horribly out of date. I just want to, just, I just want to. I just. Man, I just. I've got, I wrote some thing, but then, this is."

"HOW IS IT THAT THIS WOULDN'T BE BORING? I'm out of the loop so I've got nothing to talk about that's related to the loop."

"Don't get used to it. There's no reason to think this is anything except a stab out of the blunk, right from up in the... out, there, where it comes from. It's a one-offer, unless of course (oh, it's not an offer at all. I thought you said "soul,") I continue to do things."

"Taking the time to come up with anything to say that even vaguely resembles what I've come to associate with the sort of thing that this place is for is not something I've ever got a mind to do anymore."

"So then. I've become so utterly disheartened, and yet buried myself deeply into other endeavors lately, that putting anything here has seemed like just a... a... something that wasn't something to do."

"I've been juggling heavy (for me) things lately, all the while thinking that the floodgate for this weblog would open soon, and out would gush the well-considered and inerrently argued entries that should, in all fairness, be wedged right against that gate."

"I am failing to be relevant or revelatory."

"So this morning on the radio I heard a quote from your manager saying that Chinese Democracy would be out before the end of 2006, and this brings me to the favor I'd like to ask: please, whatever you do, don't release an album called Chinese Democracy."

Yeah yeah that's not right. I had to get out of whatever that waste of time was somehow. So that was 2006, that last thing. (Truth be told it was a little more difficult finding those "I've got nothing to say" posts than I thought it'd be; though I'm certain I didn't even come close to exhausting the list there.)

Currently, as of this writing, November, 2008 (fuck it just took me three tries to get the year right. Started with 2006, which makes sense after that last quote, but then I went to 2011. Let's do the time warp...) the Chinese Democracy album is due to be out on Nov 23 at Best Buy, early December elsewhere. So it looks as if everybody but Axel aren't the only people not reading my infrequent mumbles here: Axel is ALSO not reading them. Rolling Stone has a review, also. But I'll still hold out to the last, being blindly confident that he won't release the thing. Something will happen, and we won't know what it is, and it just won't appear. Like every other time a date has been specified. What bigger "fuck you" to the rock establishment than to release something to Rolling Stone and then pull it, somehow, before it ever hits a store. (Yeah, I understand that there could possibly be a bigger "fuck you" than that.)

Finally: My only post from April, 2007, started this way: "This won't be important. I doom myself to fail that way."

I couldn't have said it worse myself.

(This post dedicated to the 3 or 5 readers over the years who've occasionally bothered to come to a post that's been stuck at the top of this thing for months and asked me to post something new.)

(Seriously, this post has a dedication. That's wonderful.)