Disappointments 2

I see I have been a disappointment to the blogging community, having not posted anything in six months. I was waiting to see if they would cancel my account due to underuse. I guess 6 months is not enough - maybe they never do that, figuring they have an almost limitless amount of disc space. But I have a new blogging goal - to get my first comment . They say it's good to have goals, and I think this one passes - it's specific, measurable, attainable, reasonable and time-limited (hence "SMART" you see. clever, i'n'it?). Attainable is the only doubtful attribute on this goal, it seems to me.


But some encouraging updates on the previous post: last week Zoe's Aunt Suzanne, with whom she is deeply in love, took her to the Natural History Museum. And I took buddy John to the rescheduled Yes concert last month. So disappointments can be temporary - just like commentless blogs, I trust!

Disappointments

Yesterday my daughter Zoe wanted to know the meaning of "disappointment". I offer 2 examples:

A couple of weeks ago, Zoe had a "no school" day on a Tuesday, which is unusual (they are usually Mondays or Fridays). Grandad works at the Denver Museum of Natural History on Tuesday mornings, so this seemed an ideal opportunity to take Zoe there and give Grandpa a surprize! But over the weekend prior, we were informed by our local newscaster (sorry, "anchor") that the museum would be closed that particular day, because president Obama had decided not only to come all the way to Denver to sign the stimulus act, but felt that the ideal location for said signing would be, yes, the museum of natural history, presumably because it is powered by the solar panels atop its roof.

A few months ago, I bought 4 primo tickets to see my teenage musical heroes, Yes. Admittedly a couple of the band members were precluded from joining the others due to advanced decrepidness, including grumpy old man Rick Wakeman, who offered son Oliver as stand-in (and an excellent one too, by all accounts). Still here was probably the last chance to see them again in all their Caesar's Palace Morning Glory. Then at 5pm the very night of the gig, at the point of greatest anticipation of the goodies to come, buddy John calls to say the gig's cancelled, another band member got decrepid. Oh, no Yes! The efficient auto-refund into my credit card account confirmed that no rescheduling was to take place.

Ah well, hopefully Zoe will learn that life is rich enough to overcome such disappointments!

The Rest Is History is Bunk

Have you ever read a magazine article (or blog for that matter) which you found interesting enough to read past the headline, and come across the words "and the rest, as they say, is history"? And have you ever thought, as I always do when I read that, "but it's a history I don't know, and I thought you were going to tell me!" Elton John started playing tunes on this mother's old upright, and the rest, as they say, is history. Well yes, seeing as how it happened in the past, the events that lead from there to fame and fortune are history, but the story might actually be interesting enough to tell. Or am I to understand by the word "history", "enshrined in the collective consciousness that everyone is perfectly familiar with."

And who is the "they" who say "and the rest is history" - just other journalists too lazy to look up and recount the story? I say commit this phrase to the flames, and to those "they" journalists - please resist future temptations to use it!

Presidential Fourtay

Our new president Barack Obama
Is a modern knight in shining armor
After Bush and the Iraqi drama
Things I hope will now start to get calmer!

Christmas Fourtay

I have a special Christmas fourtay (what's a fourtay? You must have missed this entry)

At Christmas we welcome St Nick
I do hope his deer don't get sick
Or his sleigh slip on ice that's too slick
Then our own presents we'd have to pick!

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Super Solstice!

Pink Over Cold

Two tours in town last week worth considering, Australian Pink Floyd and Coldplay. APF play Pink perfectly, plus they have the background video, lights and lasers to back it up. But they are not the real thing, so they play in an old Victorian theater called the Paramount, rather than in the big arena that seems a more natural home to such expansive music. A big sound demands a big hall. Coldplay, on the other hand, deal in intimate songs for the most part - the likes of The Scientist, Yellow, Green Eyes are small, intricate ballads. Yet Cold are Hot these days, so the Paramount wouldn't do at all, unless they camped out there for a week! So there they are at the massive Pepsi Center, an indoor hanger built for spectating indoor professional hockey and basketball - and the real Floyd.

So which lopsided concert to go to (both would be far too extravagant)? Well, partly on the strength of my disappointment with Cold's latest pandering CD, I went with Pink, and was glad I did. My older brother loved PF in the day, while my younger brother and I always went for Yes and Genesis over PF in the "progressive music" department; yet somehow the Floyd captured the spirit of the time more - DSoTM was in the charts so long that it became self-generating: people were rebuying the album after their original was worn-out! Listening to APF doing The Wall really brought that sense of The Time home. The "we don't need no thought control", the marching hammers, the Scarfe cartoons - and the Ultimate Guitar Solo in Comfortably Numb. I have to say, I loved it, every minute, every note, every light and laser! Maybe I'll catch the Australian Coldplay 20 years from now - the setting will be right then!

Wassail! (It's a kind of beer)

A couple of weeks ago I was pulling into my driveway when I noticed my neighbor had his Christmas lights up already - and it was not yet Halloween! Jeez, Christmas just gets earlier every year, I intoned to myself, repeating the annual mantra, there ought to be a law against it.

Later, I was shopping in Target Boutique when I realized it wasn't busy. And I thought, wait a minute, this is perfect for Christmas shopping - the Christmas crap isn't out on the shelves, there are no crowds, no checkout lines, no annoying Salvation Army bell ringers on the way out. This is when we should be Yule shopping, not waiting until some appointed hour! Besides, I'm a great lover of Christmas music (the real stuff, not the aural torture meted out by the misnomered entertainment industry), why not start early listening to it.

So thank you, yon neighbor, for igniting such inspirational advice. I sure wish I'd taken it!

Black Dog

A friend at work told me her 12 year old does not listen to current popular music, preferring instead the music of the seventies - Zeppelin, Floyd, etc. So do several of my teenager nephews, so I'm inducing that this is a common phenomena - tired of the same old tired music being mass-produced these days (by computers, I'm suspecting), kids are turning back to the days when rock music was being invented - when talented folks were experimenting with new sounds, new song structures, new wave, when record companies were prepared to ride initial failures to get to the more mature later goodies (Genesis, Elton John, Yes all had rather feeble first offerings), when artists produced an album a year (or more - look at the prodigious Elton collection) - remember those days?

So it's not just the old fogeys like me complaining about today's music nadir - the current audience is complaining too, and doing what I did the other day - slipping Led Zeppelin 4 into the CD player and marvelling at what those "heavy metal" guys did - a song for vocal duet accompanied by mandolin and acoustic guitar only, a song (now legendary) that starts out with vocal and recorders (the kind you blow, not the kind you tape), and a song with the raw energy and excitement of Black Dog. I remember when I first heard Black Dog. It was not awesome - it was awe a lot!

I feel sorry that our youth are not getting the excitement from popular music that we did in the 60s and 70s, even 80s. It really was better back then!

Fourtaying

I have come up with a new form of rhyme that is proving productive - for me anyway! It's my answer to the haiku! I call it the fourtay, and there are four rules:

1. There are four lines in a fourtay
2. Each line has the same meter - akin to the first line of a limerick
3. Each line has the same rhyme
4. The fourtay is about something whose proper name is in the first line

Here is my first foray into fourtay writing, one about my daughter's beloved toy cat Stitches:

There once was a young cat called Stitches
Who had such a strong fear of witches
That he used to go hiding in ditches
Although then he got covered in itches

Or take one of my favorite things, the LHC:

There is a Large Hadron Collider
That has fast balls of protons inside her
That are thrown by the magnets astride her
That sometimes deliver a slider!

We can get silly:

There once was a beautiful Rose
That began one day growing a nose
Now why was that do you suppose?
Well the truth is that nobody knows!

or political:

So Johnny chose one Sarah Palin
Who at answerin' questions is failin'
But she knows about huntin' and whalin'
But VP? not for me, I'm bailin'!

what's your fourtay?

Now We Are Six

My daughter recently turned six-and-a-half. So only six months of her sixiness to go. I mention this because six is such a great age. The baby-stuff - learning to walk, talk, pee and poo appropriately, feed oneself, etc. - is long gone, the personality is blooming, it's the first year of real school, learning exciting concepts like time-telling, calendars, addition/subtraction, even science and Spanish. And yet the innocence and joy is still all there. The love of pretending, dressing up, playing, drawing, picking flowers, strewing petals, swinging on swings is at its strongest, the excitement of the best friend ringing the doorbell, the treat of ice-cream or going to ballet class is at its freshest and the attention to the details of dress, band-aids, food-placement, and routine at its most precocious. Zoe is as purely authentic as she will ever be!

Sixteen may be sweet, but six is precious.