Since it’s been brought up:  all local left-wing bloggers have been cleared of suspicion of arson in the early-Tuesday fire that destroyed my garage. 

Well, no – that’s putting it a little prejudicially.  Let’s be a little more accurate; Saint Paul’s arson investigator ruled out arson, bright and early in the process.  So no left-wing bloggers are currently under suspicion…

…Dammit!  OK.  Let me try again.  There was no arson at all.  Period. 

A number of leftybloggers were brought up in the comment section – jokingly – as mock “suspects” in the incident.  For what it’s worth, I try to abjure linking people, even public or “public” figures, with abhorrent behavior (like, say, photoshopping them into Nazi uniforms or comparing gettogethers with Nuremburg rallies); it’s a rhetorical low blow akin, at best, to asking when one stopped beating one’s wife, at least when the humor is not clearly understood.  Since politics inflames the passions like few other things, attempts at humor often fall flat across the ideological divide. 

Even if they are good.

So nope.  No arson here.  Nothing to see here but a new garage starting on Monday.  I hope.

Ever cooked a marshmallow over an open flame, and had it get too hot, and catch fire?  You know that look – the marshmallow wrapped in a smooth, all-consuming sheet of flame?

That’s what my garage looked like when I woke up early Tuesday morning.

I am a fairly heavy sleeper.  I heard some sirens – and they didn’t go away.  So I opened my eyes, and saw an orange-ish flickering on the leaves outside my windows, and distinctly thought “there’s at least a 50-50 chance this can’t be a good thing”.

I jumped out of bed and looked out the back window, and saw my garage – already fully consumed in flames, looking like that marshmallow in the story above.  I was too shocked to move for a second.   The wildest part?  I felt the radiant heat from the blaze all the way up in my bedroom, 40-50 feet away.  It was warm.

I ran downstairs to try to call 911 – but the phone was out; my phone, internet and cable lines run right in front of the garage. I was dashing to find my cell phone when I heard a banging on the door.  My neighbor, occasional commenter PeterH, was pounding on the door; better yet, I saw firetrucks pulling up outside.  The cavalry were already there.

Whatever else I can say about Saint Paul’s government, we’ve long had one of the best big-city fire departments in the business.  It’s one of few parts of a Better Saint Paul I’ve always been happy to pay for.  There are stories of guys doing hitches in the US Marines to get ready to take the SPFD entrance exams.  Anyway, it took ’em maybe twenty minutes to knock down the flames.  There wasn’t much they could do, but they did it well…

The garage was a total loss – nothing but flinders.  And while I’ve heard what damage radiant heat can do, this was amazing; it wiped out my garden, killed a lilac bush, crisped leaves on my black walnut tree 25 feet away, scorched grass along the driveway at least that far, and burned an abutting fence in my neighbor’s yard.

I was lucky, of course, on many levels.  Insurance should cover the replacement (knock wood).  The garage was nearly empty – I’d actually carted off a bunch of storage last winter to make it, um, less of a fire hazard.  And my car – which is usually in the driveway, five feet from the doors – was parked in front that night; I’d felt lazy, and parked on the street.  Most importantly, nobody was hurt.

A million thanks to my neighbors, of course, a good half-dozen of whom called 911 before I woke up.

And so let me remind you – test your smoke detectors!

Posting is going to be light today and likely tomorrow. 

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Joe Soucheray has been for over 20 years one of my favorite columnists in the Twin Cities, first as a sports writer, then as a general columnist.

And I certainly like the idea of a talk show that’s focused on “conservative” principles like common sense and deflating the puffery of some of the more cliched, insufferable parts of Minnesota liberal society, while upholding the obverse.  Soucheray is sort of a curmudgeonly centerish-right retort to “Lake Wobegone”, in a way.  This is good.

And one can not argue with success; while Soucheray’s original rise to prominence probably had something to do with having Rush Limbaugh as a lead-in (at a time when talk radio was exploding from moribundity to prominence), there’s no arguing that he’s built a talk radio juggernaut.  At KSTP’s peak, Soucheray was one of an unstoppable ratings 1-2-3 piledriver punch; Limbaugh, Souch, Jason Lewis.

Today – after five years of KSTP-AM listening to consultants who assure management “Conservative talk is dead!  Really!  Honest!  Any day now!”, and having shed Limbaugh, Lewis, Bob Davis, Dave Thompson and the rest of the leftovers from the station’s glory days – Soucheray is carrying the station pretty much singlehandedly.

That ain’t chicken feed.

And Soucheray’s on-air foil and sidekick, The Rookie, has done what precious few people in the radio industry get to do anymore; developed from an annoying backslapping yahoo into one of the wryest, funniest, most talented sidekicks in the business.  Anywhere. 

So what’s the problem?

Part of it is that it feels Soucheray has been repeating the same show for over a decade now, with the same components plugged in over and over and over and over.  When the Northern Alliance got started, I tired to kick off a parody of GL’s endless, ongoing bit where guys call in from their garages, and turn on and rev engines on the air.  I wanted to have it go something like this:

CALLER: “Hey, Joe…:

MITCH:  “It’s actually Mitch, but go ahead…”

CALLER: “I got an engine from a 1974 Charger for ya…”

MITCH: “er…OK, start ‘er up?”

[Caller starts a small chainsaw: “REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”]

MITCH: “Er, thanks, caller…”

(TWENTY MINUTES ELAPSE)

———-

MITCH: “You’re on the air…”

CALLER:”Hey, Joe, yeah, I got Don Garlits’ original 451 hemi top-fuel rail rod, there!”

MITCH: “Um, it’s still Mitch, but OK – kick it…”

[Caller starts a small chainsaw: “REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”]

(TWENTY MORE MINUTES ELAPSE)

———-

MITCH: “You’re on the air…”

CALLER:”Yeah, Joe, I got me a 1952 MIG-15 jet fighter”

MITCH: “Er, I’m…ah, who cares.  A MIG-15?  Cool.  Go ahead, rev ‘er up”

[Caller starts a small chainsaw: “REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”]

And so on.  Note to Joe: all engines sound the same over the phone.

And the bit about ‘Foghorning” kids’ names that, apparently, aren’t what you’d find in a Catholic Parish in 1955?  Yeah, Joe, try insulting kids’ names to their parents’ faces, m’kay?

But the worst – and by worst, I mean “most objectionable to a conservative” – part of Garage Logic is the constant invocation of “The Mystery”.

Sit down for a minute, Garage Logicians.

If someone were to present to you an overweight, shrieking single mother of five wearing a “Wellstone Action” button, who were to say “I and my people are being disempowered and kept in poverty by racism that wants to keep us down!”, what would you say?

“Take some personal responsibility”, right?

So replace a few words. 

Change the sentence to “I and my people  common sense and traditional values are being disempowered and kept in poverty  marginalized by racism a huge impersonable, undefinable but inescapable “mystery” that wants to keep us down!”, then what’s your response?

That the comparison has escaped “Garage Logicians” for almost two decades amazes me.

I’ll be cross-posting at Hot Air’s “Green Room” when the occasion warrants.  My maiden effort was yesterday.

A zillion thanks to my radio colleague Ed Morrissey for the opportunity to reach a whole new audience!

Somebody with a French-y sounding name – Bartleby Camembert or some other limp-noodle fake name – writing at Anti-Strib took yet another dork-fingered whack at bikers a few weeks ago.

Unusually for a “conservative”, writing on a “conservative” blog, Mr. Chablis’ piece borrows from that great conservative thinker, Vice President Joe Biden, and is entitled “Efficiency is Patriotic”

There is another problem I have with biking as a primary means of transportation, is that it is inefficient which I feel is un-American

Yeah, that’s right.  “Life, liberty, and on-time trains”.  It’s right there in the Declaration of Independence.

No, Mr. Brioche; “Efficiency’ is a market imperative.  Since you are (or ape) French, we’ll have to explain that to you.  That’ll come later.

I know that a few people are confused as what could be more patriotic than an individual pedaling alone to work?

Really, Mr. Cote-du-Rhone?  “A few people” are “confused” about this?

Name them. Provide some cites.

Because…no.  Nobody is confused about the “patriotism” of riding bikes.  Nobody.  Not one person in the entire world.

Seriously – when did Anti-Strib hire Grace Kelly?

One of the greatest assets of our economy has been its flexibility. Americans, much more then Europeans, have always been ready and willing to change. Liberals want us to become less flexible and more rigid. They want us all to live near LRT and bike paths.

Right.  So what?

Some liberals would also like us to be vegetarians; that doesn’t mean enjoying a veggie burrito at Chipotle for lunch is “Unamerican”.

But since the subject is flexibility, let’s talk about how very, very hidebound and inflexible – which apparently means “Unpatriotic” – Mr. Pepe-le-pew is:

Biking is a big part of the liberal dream to restrict the freedoms of Americans. If you can only afford to bike or take mass transit to work, your job options are severely limited. This not only reduces the pay of the individual, it also reduces the productivity of our society.

Let’s stop right here.

Who says it’s a matter of affording to ride a bike?

I bike to work because I enjoy it.  I drive it sometimes, I bus it others, and when weather permits, I bike it.  In other words, I exercise flexibility.  Something that apparently is beyond Mr. Blancmange’s comprehension.  I have spent most of my career driving to work, because the drive was too far and the kids’ demands too great.

And now – after years of looking – I finally have a job in the city proper, an easy six miles or so from my house.  And I can do anything I want to get to work…

…by Mr. MarieAntoinette’s leave, naturally.

My schedule this fall was this: up at 6:30 AM so I could be at the U of MN campus by 8:00 AM. Drive to client A north of St. Paul after class. Drive to client B in White Bear Township at 12:30. Leave WBT at 5:15 to go back to the U of MN campus, drive home at 9:00PM. Now try this scenario with LRT, buses or bicycles. It just doesn’t work.

Oh, waaaah.

I remember when I could be the kind of layabout slacker with a schedule like Mr. Passepartout’s.  I’m up at 5:15 most every day, getting in an hour or so of blogging.  Then I’m waking kids up, getting them up and on their way, and getting off to work -which, over the past fifteen years, has been anywhere from Chanhassen to Maple Grove to Eagan to Farmington to Eden Prairie to Minnetonka (and sometimes more than one; when I was a consultant, I’d sometimes work two or three gigs at a time) to, after 13 years in IT, Saint Paul.  Then home, for making dinner, housework, kid stuff, finish work that I brought home, doctor appointments, grocery shopping – I rarely stop moving before 10PM.

And somewhere in that schedule I gotta find some time to try to stay in some kind of shape, so I hopefully don’t die of a heart attack before I’m 50.  Some guys might go to the gym – but that’s pretty much wasted time.  Inefficient, if you will.

So I bike.  It’s fun.  It’s just about the best cardio there is.  I get between 40-60 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous cardio a day, including the brisk, humility-induciing climb up Cathedral Hill at the end of the day. It fits into time I’m already spending; it’s faster than the bus, and when you factor in parking and walking to work, not a whole lot slower than driving.  It costs almost nothing (more financially efficient).  It makes my work day more efficient, since the morning workout pumps up my energy to a level that – I guarantee this – you can not match, Froggy LeFroggue. And it is fun, which is more than you can say for plodding away on a treadmill or sitting in traffic in your Renault LeCar or puttering along on your “motorcycle”.

As you can see this level of productivity is only possible with roads and cars.

The level of productivity Mr. Baguette is yapping about is only possible if you have a stroke and a broken leg.  Give me a break.

Look – seriously, for a moment?  DUH.  I mean, big D, small uh.  As I’ve noted in this space for years, most of the transit snobs you read and run into may or may not have jobs, but the incomprehensibly vast majority seem to live alone, or with another able-bodied adult.  And it might be possible to live a car-free life with kids, but who the hell wants to try?  The transit snobs are screechingly myopic; anyone who thinks they can live and work and raise kids, even near a bus or train stop, and have a life that involves much of anything but planning how one is going to get places and earn the fare for it, obviously hasn’t tried.

Which doesn’t excuse the kind of “us against them” conceit that Mr. Gruyere wallows in.

So if you believe in freedom and want to leave your kids with a growing economy and a shot at a life at least as good as yours, you’ll stop supporting job killing ideas like LRT, mass transit and bike paths.

Whoah, Monseuir Andouilette!  You changed the subject!

“Biking” is not the same as “bike paths”.  One is a personal choice one makes with one’s own money, time, and effort, exercising the adult free will to decide how to live one’s own life, using streets he or she has paid for with taxes already.  The other is a government program. 

Do try to keep things straight, here?

Our country and economy are built in individual freedom, flexibility and efficiency. Anything that reduces that is a threat to our future and ultimately our country.

Whatever, Mr. Phroux-Phroux Authoritarian Scold Who Learned Everything He Knows About Blogging, Logic and apparently Politics From MNob and Grace Kelly (Who Have Never Been Seen In The Same Room).  The future of this country depends not one limp froggy piddle on how we get to work.  It depends on the job we do once we get there.

Jeez, Tracy Eberly; who’s checking the green cards at Anti-Strib these days?

My “evil” twin brother Jed sent me an email:

Mitch,

The overwhelming positive response I got from debuting “Planet Terry” yesterday on your blog really was the wind beneath my wings.  I think this might be my future, after all.

I thought I’d share my latest work with your audience first.

Many thanks to you and your many readers.  Say hello to Marisa for me.

Your twin brother,

Jed

He also sent another edition of “Planet Terry”:

I think he’s onto something.

Periodically, I feature work from my evil twin brother Jed. 

Jed isn’t “evil”, per se.  It’s just that twins are just that much more dramatic when they are one’s diametric opposite.  And Jed loves drama.

He also loves trying new things.  He’s changed careers.  Again.  After spending five years as a forensic intellectual property lawyer, he’s decided to change paths, and become a cartoonist.  With that in mind, he’s sent me the first strip of his first effort, called “Planet Terry”.  I’ll let Jed describe it:

Planet Terry is the story of a young planet trying to find its way in the universe. 

Here it is:

I dont’ know that it’s all that good. I don’t know much about cartooning – just the obvious stuff, like “Swiftee’s a better cartoonist than Ken Weiner”.

Anyway. Jed wanted to say hi.

Hi.

I think we’re all set!

Don’t get me wrong.  I have nothing against being wealthy.  In fact, all I really want is the chance to prove that money can’t make me happy.

But maybe it’s because I grew up one generation removed from the Dust Bowl in a place where wealth was something people kinda kept to themselves.  Perhaps it’s all the baggage of my obsessively-modest Scandinavian anscestory.  It might be that family life on a single middle-class income doesn’t allow for much in the way of excess.

But I’ve never much cared for conspicuous consumption.  And I suspect that even if Premiere Radio hired me to replace Limbaugh in 2016 (which would be a swell idea, if any Premiere execs are reading this!), I wouldn’t change a whole lot.

And by the opposite token, while I do like the environment (especially on weekends like thsi past one in the Twin Cities), the environmental movement is pretty much out of control in this country; the Global Warming scam is only the latest of the con games they’ve played to try to wrest control of society from  the democratic process (for a detailed chronology of the various scams, just look up Paul Ehrlich’s bibliography).   I believe mankind would have to work very hard indeed to destroy the environment.

But that doesn’t mean he should try.

In recent years, conservatives have found some wry ways to stick fingers in the eyes of their liberal nemeses.  I participate (enthusiastically) in things like National Ammo Day, the Tea Parties, and of course Talk Radio (which proves every day that liberals only care about the First Amendment when it comes to saying naughty things and waving ones’ privates in public).

And so I get the spirit behind things like “Carbon Belch Day“, and groups like “Minnesotans For Global Warming” – with a nudge and a wink.

But I get the impression that there are more than a few conservatives who miss the “nudge and a wink” bit.

Look – wealth is good.  Indeed, in the long run wealth, spread over the world, is the only thing mankind can do that will positively affect the environment.  Remember forty years ago, when the same crowd of people who are ramming “Global Warming” down everyone’s throat were doing the same thing with “overpopulation”  (I do.  It gave me nightmares when I was seven years old), and demanded the same sort of response (global government action)?  And yet the only thing that actually slows population growth is prosperity; when people don’t need to have kids to ensure their own survival, they have fewer of them.  Likewise – even if we assume that mankind does have an effect on global temperature, it is only generalized prosperity that will prompt the parts of the world that are doing the actual polluting (China and India) to worry more about smog and less about feeding their populations.

Still – and I’m going to take a moment to enforce my theocratic constructs on you – God does ask us all to be good stewards of His creation.  When you’re out hunting, not only should one not slaughter wantonly (state fish and game rules notwithstanding), but one should dispose of their beer cans and jerky wrappers properly.  Likewise, just because one can wreck something, doesn’t mean one should wreck something (a lesson that’s hard to get across to teenagers, but should be quite this hard for adults).

I talked with one “conservative” a few years ago who said it was every conservative’s duty to buy a Hummer, keep their homes at a constant 68 degrees, and create as much trash as possible.

I demurred – not so much because any of them “cause global warming” as…:

It’s expensive as hell, and when it comes to money, I put the “Conserve” into “Conservative”; Hummers are a lot of money that I’d much rather spend on other things. I don’t even have AC; at any rate,the free market has a way of moderating this sort of behavior, at least for me; it’s expensive as hell.

And excuse me but, um, why?  I mean, if spending money and time for the hell of it brings you joy, then knock yourself out, I guess, but I never quite got it.  I’m not going to tell you not  to do it, but it really has less to do with politics than with finding a high-sounding justification for “gluttony”, in the “seven deadly sins” sense of the term.  And naturally, since we have free will, you have every right to be a glutton.  Just tread carefully when trying to ennoble it with some higher purpose it doesn’t deserve.

After 9/11, as the US got ready to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq,the left launched any number of deeply stupid symbolic protests; “Naked Unicyclists for Peace” and the like.  As if unicycling naked – by any definition more of a narcissistic attention-getting exercise than an actual political act of any use – was somehow raised to a form of high political purpose by tacking “…for Peace” onto the end of it.  In other words, it falsely ennobled narcissism and self-centeredness (with, usually, hilarious-yet-nauseating results).

So in all honesty, what makes gluttony-dressed-up-as-politics any better (other than “not having ageing ex-hippies riding unicycles in the nude, of course)?

It’s my dad’s birthday today.  I wish I could have made it to ND to celebrate – but for the third year in a row, things just didn’t stack up.

I’ve written about my dad a fair amount over the years; he was a public school teacher for the better part of four decades, back when that meant something; he was just about the best teacher a kid – not just his children, mind you – could hope to have (how good a teacher was he? Try this story in particular on for size)  I’ll hope to write a lot more!

Anyway – Happy Birthday, Dad!

…stop by the Minnesota State Capitol grounds for the July 4th Taxpayers Tea Party!  It runs from three-ish until six-ish, I think – plenty of time to fit around cookouts and fireworks!
I’ll be there – I’m speaking, in fact; I’m fairly early in the lineup, which means it goes way uphill fast!

Hope to see you – and lots and lots of your friends – there!

I will bike between 50-100 miles a week.

I’ll hit the gym 2-3 times a week.

I’ll walk the dog, weed the garden, windmill while playing my damn guitar.

But be advised that under no circumstances will I “Groove” anything.

Ever.

That is all.

Does anyone out there know anyone who’s selling a trunk or roof-mount bike rack?  Relatively cheap?

I’ve got a stretch coming up where I have to try to mix car and bike commuting.

If anyone has any leads, I’d love to hear ’em.

Columbia, Missouri – known as “The Berkeley of the Ozarks” – has passed a law against road-raging against bikers. 

My jury is still out on the law itself – stupid road rage is stupid road rage, no matter who it’s aimed at.

But this op-ed in the Wichita paper touches on some preconceptions that need to get looked at:

Imagine if you will, cruising down the street in your car when you come upon several bicyclists heading the same direction that you are going. It’s a busy street and they are riding two and maybe even three wide, and you’re not able to get around them for quite some time. What do you do?

That does depend on local laws.  Bikes are entitled to half a lane and three feet of clearance in Minnesota (assuming I have it correct).  They’re also well-advised to clear out of the way of traffic, into the parking lane, if people are piling up behind them; tense drivers are dangerous drivers. 

You might decide to hit your horn to encourage them to move over a bit. You may shout at them, telling them to get off of the road, or, as you finally do pass them, you may extend a hand and a certain finger while yelling obscenities at them. Now I would never endorse nor do the two latter ones, there have been plenty of times when my horn was put into effect.
As of this past Monday, all of those reactions could cost a heavy fine or even land you in jail for up to a year over in Columbia, Mo. The Columbia City Council passed an ordinance prohibiting such road rage geared towards bicyclists. Don’t be surprised if that trend starts to take hold here in Kansas, especially over in Lawrence.

Enh.  Road rage should be illegal, no matter who the target is.  Bikers are more vulnerable, since we’re not wrapped in a ton of metal, but rage is rage. 

But here’s where we get into preconceptions:

I understand that road rage is high, especially against bike riders. The general knowledge, or I should say, what everyone thinks concerning bicyclists may be wrong. They do have a right to the road just as much as cars do. I don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is the fact that bicyclists are supposed to follow the same rules as cars do.

Stopping at stop signs and red lights. Signaling when turning.

Well, no kidding.  I mean, bikes are vehicles, and they should act like vehicles – right?

I mean, just like the semis on Summit Avenue have to follow “turn on red” rules, and dirt bikes on University Avenue have to mind the speed limit, and mopeds are allowed to use the shoulders on the freeway just like MTC buses, and bicycles have to maintain proper clearance on the freeways!

Well, no – semis aren’t allowed on Summit, dirt bikes aren’t allowed on the street until you slap a lights and signals on ’em, and mopeds aren’t allowed on the road at all (much less freeway shoulders), and bicycles aren’t allowed on the Interstate. 

Vehicles are not one size fits all, even in the eyes of the law.  They have different rules. 

I’m an advocate of the Boise Stop rule, in which bikes are allowed to treat stop signs as “Yield” signs, and stoplights as stop signs.  It doesn’t change the rules of the road – just makes them safer.  Intersections where cars and bikes aren’t mingling about as fake equals are just plain safer.  Having bikes and cars trying to accelerate out of corners together is bad news – getting through or out of intersections is always good if you’re a biker – and that doesn’t even address the stress injuries caused by sitting too long at pointless lights, letting ones’ muscles get all cold, then heated up, then cold again.

So yeah, bikers should follow the rules.  But the rules should make sense, too. 

Yeah, I know – Jazz is the only American art form.  It ties together all of the strains of American life from the civil war to the present the late 1950’s.  It’s the apogee of American music.

And I’m straining to think of any American jazz in the past forty years that’s really grabbed me.

And when I say “grabbed me”, don’t get me wrong. I appreciate all music in one or both of two ways.  One of them is, as a musician, appreciating technical virtuosity and musicianship.  The other is, “does it grab me in the liver?”  And most jazz of the past fifty years is the former; I can appreciate virtuosity, and – better yet – musicianship.  I can appreciate Miles Davis or Larry Carlton in about the same way I do Steve Vai; yes, indeed, they are very good at what they do.  Of course, nothing they do grabs me by the liver and says this tells you something about life, love, the universe, and everything, the way Darkness On The Edge Of Town or “Boulder to Birmingham” or “I Cover The Waterfront” or Mahler’s Tenth Symphony or “Duke’s Place” or “Hand of Kindness” or “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down” do.

Or the way jazz did, for a long time; stuff from the twenties through the fifties, Billy Holiday and Sarah Vaughan and Benny Goodman and Count Basie and Peggy Lee and Duke Ellington and the Dorseys all made music that was intricate and inventive and accessible.

Two things, I think, happened to jazz.

First: it ceded “accessibility” to the rest of pop music, and became a tight-knit, self-referential little club full of people who were all in on the same joke and loved keeping the uninitiated out of it.  Sort of like Simpsons fans who’ve shot too much smack.  Along about the time of Elvis, pop took the “accessible” route, leaving jazz – the form of the day was “bebop”, all quirky and technical and really really dull if you weren’t actually busy playing it yourself – to those who really cared about, well, quirky and technical and just plain holier than thou.

The other?  It became “art” more than just music.  Jazz became an audio museum more than a living, breathing art form. 

And I know – the jazz buffs will squawk “but jazz is alive and well and living and breathing”, to which I answer “Really?  When was the last time you saw a bunch of kids get together in a garage to start a jazz band to set forth and take over the world?  No, not a bunch of prodigies like the Marsalis brothers, normal people? When was the last time you saw a kid play air saxophone in the hall at school?  And no – I don’t mean that music has to aspire to the lowest common denominator, or be a “do it yourself” thing with no barrier to entry; most of music would be better if kids actually learned how to play these days.  But there you have it – how long has it been since you heard a normal, regular kid say with a straight face he aspired to play like Brandford Marsalis or Joe Pass or Charlie Parker?

How long has it been since a jazz – not “jazzy”, not “jazz-inflected”, but jazz – album captured the imagination of anyone who isn’t a musician in the first place?

Put another way; once people started getting National Endowment for the Arts grants to do jazz, and once it became the province of college music departments, jazz became to music what Latin did to languages.

Put another another way:  When was the last time jazz was any couple’s “song?”  Indeed; most jazz of the past fifty years is exactly like the scene from Jerry McGuire, where Tom Cruise and Renee Zellweger are gettin’ happenin’, and for whatever reason Cruise took the advice of the creepy jazz-fan friend (!) and put on some Miles Davis mix CD to help close the deal on the big seduction – and stops in the middle of the hot scene, and breaks up laughing; “What the hell is that?”, as Davis honks and blats abstractly away in the background.  Jazz has been a mood-killer since Charles Mingus supplanted Billie Holiday; Nine Inch Nails is better date music.

So jazz is fine.   I just…can’t stand it, too.

I called Jason Lewis one day, during his first stint in the Twin Cities, probably close to ten years ago.  He’d just said “Rap isn’t music!” – hardly an original idea among talk show hosts.  “It’s just rhythm”.

I called in, and got on the air quickly; Joe Hansen always got me on the air pronto back in the day.

“Jason”, I asked, “were Gene Krupa’s albums “not music” just because they were mostly a single drummer playing solos?”

There really was no answer, of course.

So yeah.  I like rap.

And when I say I like rap, I mean “I disdain the vast, vast majority of rap, and I can honestly think of maybe three rappers in the past ten years that haven’t bored me stiff, and the rise of gangsta rap has pretty much killed most originality not only in rap but in most of R’nB, which has largely adopted the thudding bass/tinkling ornament/big attitude style that west-coast rap adopted ten or fifteen years ago or so, and it’s not like I’d know most originality anymore anyway because I really don’t go out and actively find much new music in any genre anymore, certainly not like when I was a nightclub DJ and had whatever was left of my brain marinading in new music all the dang time”.

But yeah.  There’s been plenty of rap that I liked.  A lot.

Run/DMC’s King of Rock de-mystified the whole thing for me as a college kid in North Dakota.

It’s when I realized “Hey – it’s not some strange cult ritual! It’s – like – music!  Only without guitars and stuff”

It’s hard to say “Leave aside all the references to Louis Farrakhan and militant Afrocentrism on Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions Hold Us Back; it’s like staying “ignore all the George Harrison on that Beatles album”, or “dig Simple Minds, but ignore the parts where Jim Kerr preens”.  It’s everywhere; militancy and all the most bombastic trappings of black anger as of 20 years ago jumped from the grooves and pimp-slapped you from almost every cut; by the time Flavor Flav brought the comic relief (on the hilarious “Cold Lampin’ withe Flavor”), you need it.  Chuck D at his peak (and this album was his peak) made Kirk Hemmett seem laid-back.

But listening to Public Enemy’s It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back was a little like listening to Phil Spector the first time.

Alan Shocklee produced it – and he was to rap, in those days before the courts clamped down on the use of samples and loops, what Spector was to producing Rock and Roll; the king of everything.  And while the material was raw and angry and really, really provocative, and I think my Jewish friends had a point about the anti-semitism hidden in all that black militancy, and the group really did start to believe their media after not very long at all, the album had the two things that all the best rap had twenty years ago; great production, and really sharp, intricate wordplay delivered flawlessly.  Someone once called Chuck D the Bob Dylan of Rap.  I think it sticks.

And before the courts shut down looping and sampling (a court decision in the early nineties required artists to pay royalties to whomever had written the songs from which ones’ own song sampled), there was time to squeeze out one more great production masterpiece – one of the two best rap albums ever done by white guys:

The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique is like a jazz album – all fluent interplay between instruments, where “instruments” means Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D’s voices and the avalanche of loops, drops and samples behind ’em.  If you’ve never listened to it, then curb your preconceptions and give it a shot.   And if you don’t like it?  Well, fine, but don’t come whining to me.  The album capped a brief flash of time where the thing that makes any kind of music fun and interesting – cross-pollination – was happening, when white/black amalgamations like Third Base and House of Pain were doing great stuff (shaddap about Vanilla Ice and Snow and Gerardo if you know what’s good for you), if only briefly. 

The late eighties were an awful, dry spell for music; if you get a copy of Paul’s Boutique, Tunnel of Love, Appetite for Destruction and Nation of Millions, you’ve got most of the good stuff. 

Well, that, and maybe one more:

It’s tempting to blame NWA’s Straight Outta Compton for all of its’ successors’ excesses.  It was the first really big ganster rap album.  And after the ghastly crimes against culture that the genre has given us (and, worse, given right back to “urban” culture”), it’s tempting to try to make a case for censorship.  And it launched the “west coast” rap “mystique” that has inflicted so much stupidity, criminality and really bad music on the world (to say nothing of Dr. Dre’s producing career – of which more below – and Ice Cube’s acting career).

But if George Jones made it safe to visit the world of the regretful cheater and the wistful drinker, and Merle Haggard and Gretchen Wilson and Hank Williams Junior made it possible to vicariously line-dance through the world of the budweiser-pickled redneck, and Born to Run gave everyone a taste of roaring down the turnpike in a suicide machine (even if you were just a schlubby high school kid), Compton  – whatever you think about gangster rap and the ills of urban culture – is a lyrical thrill ride in the theme park of the wanna-be badass.  And – here’s the wierd part, if you’ve listened to what’s passed for rap this past decade and a half – it’s fun.  I mean, if you can get past all the prattling about killing cops and the gleefully-casual misogyny, it’s just plain fun to listen to.

Which most of rap since then has not been. With two exceptions – both of ’em crackers from Detroit:

Eminem is to the vocal technique of saying things real fast to a beat, and around a beat, and in between the parts and sides and, I dunno, underneath the beat, what Eddie Van Halen is to the guitar; with both, you hear them start a passage, and you wonder “how’s he going to get to the end of this?”  And then – both of them do, and only with style, and you go “Dayum” from wondering it all.  Don’t believe, me?  Try to copy either of ’em.  Get ready to feel very humble when you’re done.

And Kid Rock?

If Eminem is the Van Halen of rap, Kid Rock is the Ian Hunter.  He’s been around forever, he’s done everything, he brings an air of gleeful excess to the whole thing, he goes outside the form just for the pure fun of it; he’s the first person I’ve seen try to tie redneck rock’n roll and sh*tkicker country/western into something like rap, ending up with an amalgamation that doesn’t really match any style at all, and who really cares anyway?

So yeah. I’m “supposed” to hate it.  And most of it, I do.  But not just because it’s “rap”, but because most of it, like most rock and roll or most C’nW, is garbage.

As with most things in life, it’s best to focus on what’s not garbage.

…what could be a better way to knock out a couple hours on Fathers Day Weekend than a trip to the Minnesota Street Rod Association’s  Back To The Fifties Weekend?

It’s an annual tradition in the Midway – and the Northern Alliance Radio Network will be there! 

Ed, King and I will be doing our annual “The Band Is Back Together” show from 11-1.  Ed and I will solo next from 1-3, with special guest James Lileks joining us during the show.  King Banaian will return for the Final Word at 3PM. 

Hope to see you there, literally or figuratively!

In seven plus years of blogging, I’ve noticed that it’s the times I undertake my most ambitious projects that the rest of my life – the day job, the kids – get the most crazy. 

So I’ve got a raft of notes for the final stretch run of my series on MN2020’s hit piece on charter schools – but I’ve had almost no time in the past week to bring it all home.  Hopefully this’ll be a nice relaxing weekend for the purpose.

Hah.  I slay me.  But I’ll git ‘er done, because it’s fascinating stuff.

Posting will be VERY light until this afternoon.

Yep.  One of those days.

“Conventional Wisdom” among anti-bicycling conservatives is that as the number of bikers rises (as it has been steadily for some time, which accelerates as gas prices rise), the carnage on the road rises with it.

Not, apparently, so, according to Quimby:

…as bicycle ridership has increased in New York City, the absolute number of bike injuries and fatalities has dropped.

That means the rate of accidents has dropped from roughly 4,000 annual casualties per 80,000 daily riders to well under 3,000 per 160,000 riders — about a three-fold improvement.

Which I’d suspected would happen, but this is the first empirical evidence I’ve seen.  It’d be even more interesting to break that into accidents per rider mile – since I’d suspect as the number of bikers doubles due to gas prices, the lengths of their trips do as well.

The most interesting thing to look at of all, though?  I started looking at this a few weeks ago, but haven’t had time to follow through:  Compare the number of person/years lost to bike fatalities to the number of person-years gained by previous non-riders getting into better shape from the exercise they get from biking.

Example:  Say in a typical year (1992, in this case) 459 cyclists above the age of 20 died in bike/vehicle accidents (we’ll discount children, since they’re not likely to be commuting or biking for fitness).

Let’s break ’em down by age group:

Now, let’s figure how much life expectancy was lost (taking the US average life expectancy of 78 years  and the average age in each bracket (let’s assume that the years spread evenly in each age bracket; there’ll be as many below the midrange of each bracket as above it) to figure the total person/years lost.

The result?  Bike accidents claim 15174.4 person/years (using the figures above).  A ghastly toll?  Certainly.

But what do we gain from having thousands more people being in better – much better – physical condition?  Say, having a bunch of formerly-sedentary mid-forty-something suddenly getting into the best shape of their lives?  Or a bunch of twentysomethings go through their lives never falling out of shape in the first place, since biking is, along with swimming, the the most sustainable form of exercise (and a lot less likely to bore you to death than swimming)

How many person-years do we gain?

Let’s extrapolate from New Yorks’ numbers: growing from 80,000 to 160,000 bikers out of a population of 12,000,000 extrapolates a rise from 2 million to 4 million bikers nationwide; let’s arbitrarily lop those numbers in half, just to be very (what else) conservative and allow for those who live where biking just isn’t tenable (say, people who commute 60 miles to work, or farmers, the handicapped, everyone), and say that the American recreational, fitness and/or commuting biking population has risen from 1 to 2 million in recent years.

Thirty minutes of (aerobic) exercise a day adds four years to life expectancy compared to sedentary people.

So let’s say that one percent of those two million bikers rides half an hour a day (which, by the way, I do): it’s a hopelessly-low 20,000 – which translates to 80,000 person/years of life expectancy added.  Ten percent (200,000 daily riders, 800,000 person/years) seems on the high side of plausible; let’s split the difference, say 100,000 Americans, like myself, ride at least five days a week for at least half an hour a day.  That’s 400,000 person/years added to life expectancy (using a formula that fudges sharply toward the conservative),

But even if you take the lowest feasible figures it’s a 6-1 skunking: Biking saves 80,000 person/years to 15,000 lost to accidents, even if we take comically-low numbers, 30-or-more to one otherwise.

Some biking critics say (chant, really, more as an autonomic response than a considered position) that biking is a “dangerous hobby”.  But when you look at actual numbers, it seems that not biking is the risky frippery.

It wrenches the needle off the jingo meter.

It still provokes somber tut-tutting from our betters about the knee-jerk ignorance of NASCAR America.
And nowhere in American pop culture after 9/11 did the id of the vast mass of America between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre get expressed better.

Which isn’t to say there wasn’t competition.  Springsteen’s The Rising evoked loss, commemorated heroism, and opened the faucet on the best evocations of spirituality during times of tragedy in American pop music history. Neil Young’s “Let’s Roll” and Big and Rich’s “Eighth of November” took very different approaches to illuminating the best in American, and human, character against horrendous odds.

All well and good.

And it’s true; there are times when diplomacy and nuance and meeting your enemy halfway and being aware of ones’ own faults is essential – even in wartime.
But there are some times, some moods, when putting a boot in someone’s ass, the American way, is all that will suffice.  There are times when, like Churchill’s “Dunkirk” and Reagan’s “Shining City” and “Brandenburg Gate” speeches, I just need to hear it.

There is no substitute.

So kudos, Toby Keith.

Yeah, yeah, I know – most important American band of the last twenty years, bla bla bla.

Save it.

REM – Michael Stipe, Pete Buck, Mike Mills and the long-departed Bill Berry – have been critical darlings and, for the most part, commercial powerhouses for a generation now (it used to really bug my stepson that after a jag of feeling hip that he’d gotten the new REM record, I pulled out my copy of Murmur from my sophomore year of college. Psych).

Well, good for them.

Here’s the maddening thing about REM; I can scarcely listen to a single one of their albums all the way through.  Pete Buck once described the band’s is-it-a-stereotype-or-is-it-a-cliche style:”Minor key, mid-tempo, enigmatic, semi-folk-rock-balladish things. That’s what everyone thinks and to a certain degree, that’s true.”  REM’s music is all oblique this and badly-enunciated enigmatic reference that and sophomore poetry-class the other thing, and always, always Michael Stipe prancing around going “hreydee-yo hree murrup” and “and nuh freyn konnukter fez, ryever ape, pake a mape”…

Mind you, I don’t mind oblique, enigmatic and sophomoric per se. And I can’t knock the band itself; Mills and Berry were an excellent Watts ‘n Wyman-style rhythm section; Mills has a distinctive yet perfect backing vocal style; Pete Buck is…well, perfectly functional given his chosen limits. And Michael Stipe is a good singer with an excellent (albeit not Bono-like) and distinctive voice.

But most of REM’s music invariably bores me stiff…

…except that every album (that I bothered listening to, which hasn’t happened since 1998’s Up, includes one, and only one, song that I just absolutely love, love love – which always comes out after  the dreary, minor-key mid-tempo southern-mythology-sodden ballad.

Album by album:

• Murmur – was entirely dispensable – except that life without “Radio Free Europe” would be a lot poorer.  But it’s more a visceral thing – the rhythm section’s tight snap, the cool (if inscrutable) hook line, the zing of the thing.  Certainly not the lyrics, as delivered by Michael Stipe  “Sigh this elf if radio munna slay/Reason it muld paw ish utta pray/poodat poodata poodta up your wah/Mrs. Islecumfray ah haul.  Raving station, be fly…”
• Reckoning led off with the “South Central Rain (I’m Sorry)”, or as Stipe pronounced it, “Um Hawry”, which makes me nod off a bit 25 years later – but followed up with “Don’t Go Back To Rockville”, which was a really good song.
• Fables of the Reconstruction – Produced by Joe Boyd, who produced Richard Thompson’s classic “Shoot Out The Lights”, Fables breaks the pattern only slightly: lead-off single “Driver 8” didn’t suck, and follow-up “Can’t Get There From Here” is actually IPod-worthy.
• Lifes Rich Pageant – Not even Don Gehman – who’d just produced John Mellencamp’s classic Scarecrow, could make most of this album less tedious – except for the gorgeous “Fall On Me”.
• Document – “The One I Love” almost made me pound my ears out with a potato masher.  And “Exuming McCarthy” may have been the dumbest anti-Reagan song in a decade full of standouts.  But “It’s The End Of The World As We Know It” jumps in at last minute and staves off self-mutilation.
• Green – What if the Brill Building was in Athens, Georgia in 1988, instead of Philadelphia in 1962?  You’d have gotten “Stand”, and most of the album.  Except “Orange Crush”, which, dude.
• Out of Time – I used to wonder if “Losing My Religion” was a self-parody; if I were going to write a spoof of REM, it’d sound just like LMR, and have just about the same lyrics.  But I still love “Shiny Happy People”, although having Kate Pearson on board helps.
• Automatic for the People – Small breach of protocol: “Everybody Hurts” and “Man In The Moon” don’t suck.
• Monster – Bla bla bla “What’s the Frequency KennetH” bla bla bla.
• New Adventures in Hi-Fi – Broke the pattern again – all of it sucked.
• Up, Reveal, Around the Sun, Accelerate – never heard any of ’em.

But as with most of these “things I should love but don’t” pieces, it’s not so much the artist as the artist’s fans. And it’s not just that REM fans are just this side of Grateful Dead fans in terms of worshipping.  No, it’s the damage they did.

An alt-rock radio program director I once knew summed up alt-rock in the late eighties: “There are two types of music”, said the learned sage; “Noisy rock, and Jangly rock”.  The poles of his universe were Dinosaur Junior on the one hand, and REM on the other.  And this program director was hardly alone.

So for a couple of years in the late eighties and early nineties, alt-rock diverged into two miserable paths: sludgy, mopey glop that eventually morphed into grunge, and jangly, folky music in a zillion nearly-identical permutations (The Connells, Wednesday Week, Aztec Camera, Let’s Active!) that eventually morphed into…

…well, landfill.  Nobody remembers any of it.  Not even – be honest! – most of what REM did.

Well, some of it, we do.  Only we can’t make out the damn words.

I got to throw out the first pitch at a Saints game last night.

OK – I got to throw out one of five or six first pitches; the Saints brought a guy who does a club-hopping show on the local CW affiliate, three Coon Rapids city councilpeople (the city was celebrating its fiftieth birthday last night) and me to the mound.  For a guy who hasn’t thrown a ball in anger in probably eight years, I did OK; it would have been high and outside for a lefty, and a near-beaner for a right-handed batter, but I didn’t have to bowl the ball across the plate, and the catcher didn’t have to bolt for it like he was going for a foul, so I was pretty happy.

And as it turned out, one of the councilmen and I might have had a better outing than the Saints’ starter Adam Cox did.

We were followed by the usual Saints game events, and a woman singing the national anthem – one “Andrea”, a bartender from Somerset – who did a version that’d have sounded good, I kid you not, in a strip club.  And I don’t mean that entirely as a bad thing.  You had to be there.

I always love going to Saints games.  Pretty much everyone there does.  I saw a few people from the neighborhood, some Patriot fans (AM1280 is one of the Saints’ sponsors this season, again), and the usual Saints game crowd (although I didn’t see Bill Murray).

I’ll hope to make it again sometime this season.

Yeah, yeah, I know – funny show, groundbreaking comedy, yadda yadda.

Look, don’t get me wrong; I like The Simpsons.  I liked Life In Hell, the  comic that brought creator Matt Groening to scuzzy, underground prominence in the eighties.  I liked The Tracy Ullman Show, on which The Simpsons started as a series of interstitial shorts.  I even enjoy watching the show, usually (except for the last five or ten years, when the show hasn’t been nearly as good as the first ten or fifteen years, or whatever).

No, it’s not The Simpsons I dislike, per se.

But The Simpsons are a lot like Star Trek; it’s not  the show itself that bugs me.  It’s the fans.

Over-the-top Simpsons buffs – the people who sneak show references into the most mundane bits and pieces of everyday life, who sit around cafeterias and trade show trivia for day after day, who answer serious questions with vaguely-appropriate Homer quotes – remind me of Star Trek fans, the kind that’ve adopted “Gene Roddenberry” as their worldview and live the creed in their daily lives.

They’re just like the Comic Store Guy…

…oh, crap.  Now I’ve done it.

Conventional wisdom is that Rocky is the only part of the franchise worth watching (or was, until Rocky Balboa, the sixth part of the series, came out).

But I beg to differ, from the CW and from most critics; I loved Rocky III.

The film featured Sylvester Stallone and “Mister T” – both of them at the brink of the “caricature” phases of their careers (from with Stallone only emerged in the mid-nineties, and T has not), but not quite there yet.

I saw this film about the same time I was drifting toward conservatism.  And that may have been one of the reasons I loved it; Rocky, the old-school plugger and ex-kneebuster from Philly (along with former foe and now-teammate Apollo Creed) were the old school; T’s Clubber Lang represented all that was gauche and vile about modernity.

And yet, for a film that basically was a cartoon, I loved the Clubber Lang character; T played it with visceral, uncompromising anger that went – I thought, and still think – way past the material.

Look, Mister T will probably never do Shakespeare in the Park – but after watching Clubber Lang, I was always disappointed he wound up on “The A Team” and chattering “I Pity Da Fool” for the rest of his career.

Rocky was, of course, a classic – one of my favorite movies ever.  Rocky II was, of course, utterly predictable; there was never a moment of suspense; you knew Apollo Creed was going down (and even though I’ve seen Rocky at least a dozen times, it’s still got suspense).

And even though I was a Republican by that time, Rocky IV was too obvious a “morning in America” Cold War movie even for me, the newly-minted Reagan voter; I knew the entire plot as I walked into the theater; First Blood was a much better movie.  I have yet to see V, and Balboa was another whole thing altogether (a great movie, but just…different).

But Rocky III?  I felt that one.

It’s a wrecking crew.