So sue me; I had a decent year. Not spectacular, of course – many things could have been better. Other people may disagree, and for good reason – but if I may borrow a line from Al Franken and Tom Davis (remember him?), let’s talk about the state of Mitch Berg.

Call it “the year of the hidden blessings”, if you’d like. My kids both had lousy experiences at school – but they led us to better places for both of them. My job for the first nine months of the year went from being a career-building break to “bandmember on the Titanic” when my project wound up on the endangered list; the job to which I jumped went sour (as consulting engagements sometimes do) after six manic weeks; but in the scramble to land on my feet once again, I landed a really good – and full-time permanent! – gig that I think I’m going to like for a long, long time (knock wood). My personal life had its ups and downs – but it as mostly ups, and I learned some important things.

The blog? Well, traffic has held steady (don’t mind my Sitemeter counter – I need to update some things) after the election, which isn’t bad at all. The NARN expanded from one to three shows, and from three to six hours, and continues to beat KTLK-FM in our various time slots like a prison shower-room smackdown; in the all-important Saturday Sweepstakes, we reign supreme against our well-heeled challengers. Note to Doug Westerman, KTLK majordomo; give us a holler when you wanna bring your “A” game to the weekends.

As to the coming year – well, we’ll touch on that tomorrow.

I have three questions:

First:  I’ve been working for two months now trying to get my old MT archives to move to WP, and being stymied at every point.  Would someone be able to help me with this?

Second:  The search engine on my WP blog throws an error when I try to run it.  It looks to some sort of permissions error, like I need to change some setting in some config file somewhere.  Anyone know where I can start with it?

Third: Well, that one I’ll keep offline.  It’s a security thing.  More on that later.

Leave me a comment, and thanks in advance.

After a week of mad polling, dirty tricks, and emotional appeals, the two great titans of Lenfestation Abatement – Learned Foot and Dan “Northern Alliance Wannabe” Stover – fought to a tie!

Stover made up a five-vote last-day deficit to end up at (or immediately after) midnight with a 43-43 tie with Foot (another vote or two came in after my arbitrary deadline).

Rumors that this has anything to do with my New Years’ Eve poker debacle at Foot’s place are both in utter error and poetically symmetrical.

Anyway, congrats to Foot and Dan – and to all the entrants who made this such a fun contest! Because at the end of the day, when the measuring tapes and checkered flags and lard are packed away for next year, what really counts are the big things; skewering the writing of Susan Lenfestey.

Thanks! Until next year!

(And I’m sure there’ll be a next year. There’s always material).

Read all the entries!

UPDATE: Dan Stover.  My bad.  Changed above.

It’s the end of the year – the time when we look back and reminisce on the year of blogging that’s been.

And thus it’s a perfect time for the first annual “Shootie” awards, given by the editorial board at Shot In The Dark for contributions advancing regional blogging.

The Eva Young Trophy For Blatant Link-Whoring: This award is given to the regional blogger who best exemplifies the bloggers’ ideal for getting traffic; suck up to bloggers bigger than you as relentlessly as possible.

And the winner is: Sisyphus from Nihilist in Golf Pants, for puckering up for John Hinderaker, naming the Powerline blogger “Rock Solid in the Blogosphere” last fall.

The Baghdad Bob Award: The lineage of this coveted trophy is fairly obvious – and goes to the local blogger or bloggers who insist the facts we see before our faces don’t really exist.

And the award this year goes to Minnesota Monitor, a groupblog in which a group of local leftybloggers were paid a montly stipend in the low four digits (reportedly $1,500) to dab an “ethics statement” on top of modesly polished leftyblogging. When it was pointed out that the Center for Independent Media shared office space with George Soros’ “Media Matters for America”, and that it appeared there might be a connection between the country-destabilizing ultraliberal plutocrat and the local rent-a-bloggers, the resopnse was “Yo Momma”.

The Sisyphus Memorial Trophy for Trying To Mate Via One’s Blog: This award is named in honor of Sisyphus from Nih[i]list in Golf Pants, in honor of his game attempt to woo Mary Katherine Ham by naming her “Rock Solid in the Blogosphere” last summer. It didn’t work well…

…but to be fair, it was a better idea than that of this year’s winner, who used his LiveJournal to find out if a self-described “goofy looking dude and his goofy looking friend could wander into the scene and begin making out with some slutty collegey-looking babes with minimal effort”, and if so, where.

Blog Post Title of the Year: That’d Go To Learned Foot of Kool Aid Report, for December 13rd’s classic

Captain’s Quarters Gives No Quarter to Hind Quarters

…regarding Ed’s reaction to Chris Muir’s Thong-Gate crisis of a few weeks ago.

The Thomas Dewey Trophy for Atrocious Prediction: In 1948, the Chicago Tribune’s early edition called the election, in four-foot-high letters, for Dewey. Truman, of course, ended up winning.>

Previous winners include local rent-a-blogger Jeff Fecke, who called the ’04 presidential election for Howard Dean. Then Wesley Clark. Then Hillary Clinton. Then Hillary Duff. Then John Kerry. Before the ’04 All-Star break.

In that spirit, we honor “Powerliberal”, another prominent local left-leaning rent-a-blog, which called the Sixth District election for Wetterling – on October 6. Based on the Minnesota Poll – which always calls every election for the DFL/Democrats. Apparently some Democrat bloggers haven’t gotten the word…

The Molly “The Hatchet” Priesmeyer Award For Hatchety-est Hatchet-Job: This award is named in honor of the work of the eponymous Ms. Priesmeyer, whose riveting 2004 expose of conservatives eating dinner was so chock-full of facile stereotypes one assumes Ms. Prisemeyer was on the payroll of the Cliche Anti-Defamation League.

>And for the ninth year in ten, the award goes right back to the City Pages, for their election-night “coverage” of the GOP “victory” party that wasn’t. So chock-full of smug cliches was this piece that the Cliche Anti-Defamation league actually sent City Pages’ editor Steve “Not The Journey Guy” Perry a cease and desist order. (The CP’s only loss in this category in recent memory came, ironically, in ’04 – to a Twin Cities exile Jen Vogel’s classic tantrum, “F*ck the Suburbs”. But Vogel’s piece appeared in a paper so similar to City Pages, it’s close enough for Ramsey County work – or, given the tone of Vogel’s piece, perhaps “close enough for Oaxacan mystery meat” would fit better)

The Charles Townsend Award – In 1765, British parliamentarian Charles Townsend, in noting the Colonies’ protests against the Stamp Act, said:

“And now will these Americans, Children planted by our Care, nourished up by our Indulgence until they are grown to a Degree of Strength & Opulence, and protected by our Arms, will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?”

And this year’s winner is: Growth for Justice. The group – led by former far-left-leaning Strib editor Joel Kramer – took out an ad in the Strib last summer, signed by 203 wealthy liberals demanding that we all get happy and pay for a better Minnesota, by bankrolling (with taxes, as opposed to their own largesse) to the tune of two billion dollars a plan by a group of their “experts” to revive the state (which has a throbbing, thriving economy, by the way). Funnier still, they advertised themselves as “bipartisan” – the add said “Growth & Justice has a board of directors of 24 distinguished Minnesotans, including Democrats, Independents and Republicans…” – even though our blogswarm showed that 95% of their contributions went to Democrat/DFL causes; as I noted back then, the signatories “gave a total of $4,782,724 to DFL and national Democrat campaigns – 95.63% of the total. The GOP netted $188,580, for 3.77% of the total. Other parties/campaigns – mostly Greens, if you look at the spreadsheet – snagged $29,800, less than a percent of the total.”

The Kevin McKay Award For Protesting Too Much – McKay was (and might still be) a local leftyblogger famous for his spittle-flecked, thud-witted, sour-grapeolicious snivelling about what angry. thud-witted, sour-grapeolicious people conservative bloggers were.

And this years’ award goes to… this snivelling infant.

And finally, the Kate Perry “We Will Tell You What the Facts Are” Award, given to the mainstream journalist or story that most grossly manipulates or conceals facts, and then rationalizes it away later.

This year, no contest – the Strib, from Anders Gyllenhall on down, for Rochelle Olson’s hatchet piece on Alan Fine – which took 35 column inches to explain the inner details of a 12 year old domestic abuse record – but didn’t bother to mention that the arrest record was expunged, that the case never went to trial, that there was no physical evidence of Fine’s guilt, or that the ex-wife that brought the original charges was eventually charged with domestic abuse herself – seemingly validating Fine’s claim about the original incident.  But Kate Perry said there was no problem, so there must not be a problem.  Natch.
That’s it for this year. But we’ll be back in 2007 with the next edition of the Shooties! Goodness knows there’ll be material…

Another meme via Red.

1. Was 2006 a good year for you?

It had its tough spots – a planned job change followed by an unplanned one, some other stuff, runarounds with schools that are fodder for many posts to come, and the unending comedy of my personal life – but all in all, it was good. Kids are in better school situations, I’m in an awesome job – I’m pretty happy, all in all.
2. What was your favorite moment(s) of the year?

• Sitting in the press booth at the State GOP convention, interviewing one notable after another, seeing candidates lined up out the door waiting to talk with us.
• Honestly? Driving around with my kids Christmas evening.
• Climbing over the rail, walking down to the field at old Taylor Stadium, and scattering part of my grandfather’s ashes under the goalposts. More below.
• Sitting at the top of the Navy Pier ferris wheel in Chicago at about 10 at night, looking over Lake Michigan.
• That’s all I can tell you about…

3. What was your least favorite moment(s) of the year?

Let’s not go into that.
4. What did you do in 2006 that you’d never done before?

Drove a minivan.

5. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don’t do them – but I have goals for the year. None of them really panned out, but ’07’s another year.

6. Where were you when 2006 began?

At a friend’s house.

7. Who were you with?

My girlfriend at the time, our various kids, and her family.

8. Where will you be when 2006 ends?

At an undisclosed location.

9. Who will you be with when 2006 ends?

Not who I’d like to be. And yet there’s noplace I’d rather be.

10. Did anyone close to you give birth?

No, but my sister – who turned 40 this year (and still looks all of 28, the little brat) found out she’s expecting; the baby is due one of these next few months, and will join her 16, 14 and 12 year olds.

11. Did you lose anybody close to you in 2006?

No, but we sorta closed the book on my grandparents. I never got around to writing much about it; I went to North Dakota in August to scatter their ashes around the college where they met (and where I graduated). It was fun – I saw my aunts and uncles, including my mom’s brother, whom I’d not seen in almost thirty years – and sad as well.

12. Who did you miss?

See above.

13. Who was the best new person you met in 2006?

Let’s not go into that, either.
14. What was your favorite month of 2006?

July. I got to go back to my 25th reunion. I had a wonderful time.

15. Did you travel outside of the US in 2006?

No.

16. How many different states did you travel to in 2006?

NoDak, Wisconsin and Illinois. That was it!

17. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?

Senses of peace, accomplishment, and that my kids have finally, officially turned the corner.

That, and some sort of national syndication deal for the NARN. (A guy can – no, indeed, must dream).

18. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Not sure any date is “etched”; some of the usual important days, I’ll remember.

19. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Tie:

1. Current job
2. Getting my daughter into a much better school situation. The change makes “night and day” look trite. It’s the change I’ve been praying for for years. Hopefully this year my son will follow suit. He is, actually – with Bun, it’s been a dramatic shift, while with Zam it’s been more incremental.

20. What was your biggest failure?

I can’t honestly say there were any huge “failures”. I had one job that went sour unexpectedly, but I can honestly say I did my best on that one, and I’ll tell it to the face of the little jag that caused the issue.

21. Did you suffer illness or injury?

I was actually very healthy this past year. I hope I haven’t jinxed myself.

22. What was the best thing you bought?

I can’t think of a single thing I bought.

23. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Honestly? My daughter’s. With the school change, she went from being – honestly – a straight F student to achieving well in line with her abilities; and oy, does she have abilities. I am serious – you can not imagine the weight this has lifted from me.

24. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Chad the Elder.

No, seriously, I expect so little of people (especially celebrities) that nothing really appalls me.

25. Where did most of your money go?
The mortgage, Excel Energy, and food.

26. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Don’t ask. It didn’t pan out.

27. Did you drink a lot of alcohol in 2006?

I drank so little this past year. I bought a six-pack of St. Pauli Girl in October, and there’s still a bottle left in my fridge. I barely made it to Keegan’s, either.

28. Did you do a lot of drugs in 2006?

I wish. That might actually be a relief.

But honestly, I may have had a dozen Aleve this past year.

29. Did you treat somebody badly in 2006?

No.

30. Did somebody treat you badly in 2006?

No. A couple of situations disappointed me, but it had nothing to do with “bad treatment”.

31. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder? – At the moment, sadder. But it won’t last. If you leave out the comedy of my personal life, I’m probably happier.
ii. thinner or fatter? – A little thinner, actually. That’s a big goal for this year.
iii. richer or poorer? – A little richer, and a lot smarter. That’s another big goal.

32. What do you wish you’d done more of in 2006?

Everything fun; relaxing, hanging out with friends, sex, travelling – yet more goals for the coming year.

33. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Worrying, grovelling.

34. Did you fall in love in 2006?

Yet again, let’s not go into that, either.
35. What was your favorite TV program(s)?

I finally discovered Scrubs. Oh, I’d seen part of an episode or two, years ago, and thought it was funny, but I never absorbed all the real poignancy the show also has. For all the surreal laughs (and go ahead and ask my kids – I laugh harder and more loudly to this show than any show I’ve ever seen), it’s got a bittersweet, real edge to it. It yanks me back and forth from shrieking mirth to gulping back a tear in less time that it’s taken to write about it. Wonderful.

Oh, and catching up on 24 was a six week hoot.

36. What song will always remind you of 2006?

That “OK Go” song.

37. How many concerts did you see in 2006?

None.

38. Did you have a favorite concert in 2006?

NA

39. What was your greatest musical discovery?

I can’t actually think of one.

40. What was the best book you read?

No question – Red sicced me on Children of the Arbat by Anatoli Rybakov. A chillingly mundane look at the early Stalin era. Incredible.

41. What was your favorite film of this year?

I think Eternal Sunshine was last year, right? It might have been Little Miss Sunshine.

42. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Opened a card and presents from my parents, took the kids out to Bascali’s, a little Italian joint by the Fairgrounds that I save for special occasions.

43. What did you want and get?

Nothing, and more than I could have asked for.

44. What did you want and not get?

Puhleeze.

45. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Many little things, few big ones. Everything from finally conquering my personal finances to meeting the “right” person.

46. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?

Stay Alive.

47. What kept you sane?

Prayer, Blogging, the NARN, and the fact that going insane is never really an option. No matter how freaked out I start to feel, dinner’s gotta get cooked.

48. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

The winner, as for the past 15 years – Marisa Tomei.

49. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006.

Sorry, no.

50. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year.
With a nod to the honorable mention, Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long”, I gotta go with one that might be no surprise; if my life were a movie, Bruce would be half the soundtrack:

One soft infested summer, me and Terry became friends/Trying in vain to breathe the fire we were born in./Catching rides to the outskirts, tying faith between our teeth,/sleeping in that old abandoned beach house, getting wasted in the heat, and…

(CH) Running on the backstreets, running on the backstreets. /With a love so hard and filled with defeat./Running for our lives at night on the backstreets.

Slow dancing in the dark, on the beach at Stockton’s Wing,/where desperate lovers park we sat with the last of the Duke Street Kings./Huddled in our cars, waiting for the bell to ring,/In the deep heart of the night, we could cut loose from everything, and go

(CH) Running on the backstreets, running on the backstreets. /Terry you swore we’d live forever – taking it on the backstreets, together.

Endless juke joints and Valentino drag, where dancers scraped their tears up off the streets dressed down in rags,/running through the darkness, some hurt bad, some really dying,/and at night sometimes it’d seem you could hear the whole damn city crying./Blame it on the lies that killed us, blame it on the truth that ran us down,/hell, you can blame it all on me, Terry. It don’t matter to me now./When the breakdown hit at midnight there was nothing left to say,/but I hated him. And I hated you when you went away…

Lying in the dark you’re like an angel on my chest,/another tramp of hearts crying tears of faithlessness./Remember all the movies, Terry, we’d go see, trying to/learn how to walk like the heroes we thought we had to be?/Well after all this time, we find we’re just like all the rest,/stranded in the dark, and forced to confess to…

(CH) Running on the backstreets, running on the backstreets. /Terry you swore we’d be forever friends, on the backstreets ’til the end…

Tonight was the big night. Sunday, December 28, 1986. It was going to be a huge night on two fronts.

The evening would kick off with my band’s first gig at Williams’ Uptown Bar on Hennepin in Minneapolis.

Then, after load-out, I’d race out to KSTP to do my show. I was going to interview a childhood idol of mine.

———-

When you play in a dinky garage band, it’s easy to dream big. Sitting in your home studio writing music, or standing around in the basement listening to your band’s progress, and especially standing on stage in front of an appreciative crowd (or “crowd”), it was easy to think “next stop, the big time”. The optimism that accompanies the sort of muted arrogance that makes one think that anyone actually cares to hear what you write makes it easy to think, on reading one’s lyrics, hearing one’s practices, and seeing people watching you play, that you’ve got it going on.

But loading-in usually levels that out nicely.

Turns out I was the only driver in my band. The other three guys bused everywhere. And while we didn’t have a lot of equipment by the standards of the bands I’d played in high school (where we had to haul a PA system along with our instruments), there was enough – two guitars and a bass, their amps, a drum kit, and a Crumar T1 organ – and it didn’t haul itself, and it wasn’t going to fit into the back of my Jeep. I’d managed to borrow a van from one of my roommate’s parents, though. I got to the band’s house, and we started hauling our gear out of the stinky basement into the frigid late afternoon.

The good part – it was only about five blocks to the bar. The bad part – we were early.

The headliner that night was a group called “Bathyscope”. The name meant nothing to us – yet. What we did know was that they had a ton of gear – guitars, bass, two keyboard players (whose equipment is always heavy and bulky) and a drummer with a huge kit, and a box packed solid with other percussion instruments and stage props – and bigger pretensions, it seemed, in getting it set up and soundchecked. It took them a solid ninety minutes to get their gear up on stage, soundchecked, and ready to go.

Then it was our turn. As the opener, we were supposed to put our gear in front of the headliners, plug in, and grab a sound-check – if we had the time. By the time Bathyscope got off stage, it was 8:25. We were supposed to go on at nine.

We pulled, hauled and plugged, and got our stuff set up and more or less ready by about ten ’til, and started our soundcheck – a few bars of one of our songs. People were filing into the joint. The Bathyscope people – who looked, except for the drummer, to be distinctly “uptown” by the standards of Minneapolis in the day – were not visibly impressed with our Iron City Houserockers-Via-Lou Reed vibe.

But it didn’t last long. Will, our drummer, stopped in mid-song. I turned – he was frantically fiddling with something under his snare drum. I walked over.

“My hi-hat’s broken”.

Five minutes until we’re supposed to start. Crap.

Our options were two: Borrow a couple of pan lids from the kitchen, or hope someone would come through for us.

Bathyscope’s drummer – a big guy who looked to be in his late teens or early twenties, the only black guy in the room – came up on stage. He and Will conferred back behind the drum kit – and then he reached back to his own rig and grabbed his hi-hat. They turned to moving Will’s broken ‘hat out of the way, and putting his in place.

And we were on. Larry Sahagian, sitting at the sound board, went on the crackly, on-its-last-legs PA system and announced “Ladies and Gentlemen – Tenant’s Union”.

————

The gig itself – well, it was rough.

Turns out that excitement does make people go a lot faster than they think they are. The tapes we heard after the gig were shocking; it sounded like we were playing 50% faster than we were supposed to. The sound was garbled, my voice sounded like a fractured, out of breath yelp, and we sounded more like four guys playing at the same time than a band of four guys playing together.

The crowd was worse. There was a decent house, about 3/4 full…

…that seemed pretty uninterested in us. The clapping between songs was muted and wan. We weren’t dying – just gravely injured.

Still, I had fun; to me, there’s never been a feeling quite like working a room, even if it’s not perfect. We played ten songs, eight of them mine. And, rough as we were, by about the sixth or seventh song we started finding whatever groove we had; we were loud, (too) fast, and even though things were rough, we had a certain power to our delivery that felt like climbing on a big motorcycle, one that may need a tuneup but still makes the air crackle with power just a little bit.

During the third to the last song – “Five Short Words” – one guy back at the bar stood up with a look of recognition and a broad smile on his face, and started clapping along. I played the whole song directly to him – might as well reinforce success – and filed the guy’s face away for later.

After the tenth song, we were done. There was scatted clapping as we unplugged and started hauling our gear out of the way and Bathyscope started moving theirsinto place.

We hauled our gear out to the van, and sat down to watch.

And figured out quickly why the crowd hadn’t really dug us. “Bathyscope” was a jazz-pop band with very arty aspirations. The lead singer, a (how do we say this in our politically-correct age) aggressively gay guy dressed in an untucked tunic with laurel wreath (!) on his head, danced about the stage like an oversized dwarf from Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” scene. They set their amps and keyboards (and their stage props) on – I’m not kidding – doric half-columns. The band was modestly tight – the drummer was amazing, and the rest of the band was not great, not bad – and extremely ornate in that music-major-y kind of way. It was very unlike our thrashy din.

Um.

As they finished their set, the singer announced “Come see our art next Saturday at the Riflesport Gallery!”

Double Um.

Before we left, I walked back to the bar. The guy who’d been clapping walked up to me.

“That song you did – that was a reference to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, wasn’t it?”

It was.

Six weeks work, and our fan base is a fellow English major and Russian Lit geek.

I also saw Larry Sahagian, who paid us our twenty bucks. “You guys did all right, but you were totally the wrong band to open for these guys”.

Anyway. At least none of our friends had seen us.

——————

We went back to the basement and loaded our gear downstairs. By the time we were done, it was 12:30AM. I had to race out to the station to get on the air. I got there at 1AM – a little late, given the obsessiveness I put into show prep at that point in my “career” – but I got down to it.

Among my various geekinesses as a child and teenager was a fascination with fighter planes and aerial combat. I knew a little bit about many of the world’s classic dogfights. The protagonist of one of my favorite dogfights – a Navy F-4 ace from the Vietnam War that I’d been reading about for years – had just written a book. I had booked him for a phone interview from his home in LA.

After five months of doing the show, I was starting to settle into a bit of a groove. The awkard halting of my first couple attempts at guest interviews had been replaced by a little confidence and a tad of polish – which is damning by faint praise, but whatever – and at least I knew the subject matter for this interview pretty intimately.

The interview went…very well. It clicked as well as the gig had not. I knew the material in the book, and the guest appreciated it. I knew things about his story that, clearly, he wasn’t used to radio interviewers knowing. And the callers surprised me; one of the callers had even served on the carrier, the Constellation, with the guest during the Vietnam war, and added a lot to the commentary.

I wasn’t the only one who thought it went well – I heard the following week from the PR agent that the guest had had more fun on my little show than with any other interview he’d given.

I could have told her that.

I drove home that night – exhausted, cold, and giddy. The music career needed some work, but was off and running. And for the first time since July, I was starting to feel genuinely confident as a talk show host. I felt, for the first time, like I could fill in for any of the daytime hosts, and not embarass anyone in the process.

I could see the top of the world from where I sat in my Jeep.

————————

Postlude: It’s interesting to me, twenty years later, to note that I had one degree of separation with both fame and infamy that night (three, if you count Larry Sahagian, whose band the Urban Guerillas was about to release their proto-grunge classic Attack of the Pink, Heat-Seeking Moisture Missiles.  But for the benefit of those who weren’t marinating in Twin Cities underground music twenty years ago, I won’t count that).

The personable, friendly, good-samaritan drummer for Bathyscope went on to much bigger and much better things. He turned out to be Mike Bland – at the time an Augsburg student, who was gigging for a few bucks on his way to a career as one of the most sought-after session drummers in the business, as well as stints with Prince and the New Power Generation and Soul Asylum.

The author and fighter pilot? Well, he was Duke Cunningham – still a hero, in those days, known for shooting down five North Vietnamese jets, including three on one climactic day, long before his political career and eventual status as poster-boy for Congressional corruption.

I knew ’em both when.

So at the nadir of my misery on Monday, I fire up the MP3 player. 

And what are the first three songs that insensitive software bastard serves up immediately?

• “Found Out About You”, Gin Blossoms 
• “Backstreets”, Springsteen.
• “Light Don’t Shine No More”, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes

So much for the “healing power of music”.

(No, don’t worry – I actually got a good laugh out of it).

Get through the morning without blowing chow.

So far so good.

Christmas was hard this year.  Actually, the holiday was fine, other stuff intervened.  More, maybe, later.
I haven’t had a significant break from blogging in a couple of years.  And I don’t think I will now – but posting is going to be very light for the next day or two.

My daughter had her radio on last night.  Call me un-hip, but the music sounded like a hair dryer running.  No rhythm, no lyrics I could make out, just…a hair dryer.

What is with music today?

UPDATE:  I’m informed that my daughter was actually drying her hair…

It was Christmas Eve, 1986. Life was pretty dang good, I reflected as I drove north on Cedar Avenue, the lights of downtown shimmering in the distance.

It had been a long day. I had been feasting like a vulture on all the board shifts nobody else wanted to work that day; I screened calls for the Mike Edward morning show, ran the board for Geoff Charles, the mid-day syndies (Owen Span and Michael Jackson), the Vogel Show (Don did a special Christmas show), and was planning on running again from 10AM to 6PM the next day, for a bit of extra money. I was learning to love holidays largely as a revenue booster – I had worked pretty much every holiday in the past year.

After the Vogel show got off the air, I started on my evening’s plans. I’d gotten a few invitations – to a couple of my roommates’ families places, and to one of my coworkers’ families house. I stopped by an evening church service, and then off to Edina (hors d’oeuvre and eggnog), Bloomington (a vodka sour and swedish meatballs) and South Minneapolis (dinner, cheesecake). By the end of the night, I was full, comfy, and pretty darn happy.
Things had changed a lot since Christmas of ’85, my first in the cities:

I pulled out and baked a Tombstone pizza – at $3, a bit of a splurge – and a couple of beers (Stroh’s, as I recall), opened a couple of presents I’d gotten from my parents, and turned on the TV. I had two beers left, and ran through one of ’em as I called my family (my brother and sister were still living with my parents, whose divorce was still five years in the future).

By 9-ish, that was pretty much it. I kicked back on the couch, ate the pizza, drank the last beer, watched the Pope’s mass on TV, read the book Dad gave me…

By 11ish I was bored. The TV ran an ad for “Gab Line”, a phone chat line back in the era before Chat Lines got their seedy reputation (or at least when I was just off the turnip truck and didnt’ know about their seedy reputation). “Only 10 cents a minute”. I dialled in.

I did what I usually did on night like this; took a drive. I did a turn around Lake Harriett, then Calhoun, and finally Lake of the Isles. It was crisp and cold, but not brutal that night.

I pulled over at Thomas Beach. The lake was frozen, and I had the whole place to myself.  I walked across the street, to the frozen sand, and perched on a bench to look over the city skyline gleaming in the distance.   It had been a pretty busy year, and I had a ton to be thankful for. I’d made some good progress on at least some of my life’s big goals. My “career” in talk radio – a business I’d barely known existed a year earlier – was going well beyond anything I’d dreamed. My band was going to be debuting in four days – we were so ready for that! And the girlfriend thing…well, we’d work on that soon enough.
It’d been a great year. The next year, I thought, could be a whole lot better.

In March of 1984, during “Spring Break”, I was on tour with the Jamestown College Concert Choir.  The annual tour was a big fundraising junket that involved cramming 70 college kids into two buses and caravanning around the US, staying with host families and eating at church potlucks and usually givine 12-13 concerts in ten days.  Those trips, every “spring”, were the first times in my life I’d left North Dakota or Minnesota, and the first times I’d been in cities larger than Fargo. 

The highlight of the trip was always the one “Free Day”, usually at the apex of the tour – and usually more like a manic half-day; the demands of fund-raising often led to a morning or evening gig on our “Free Day”, but no matter; we got to spend a day off the bus, and the college even sprang for a hotel (although usually four to a room – but it beat dealing with host families).  In three years, I’d seen Washington, Seattle (and in 1985 I’d see Phoenix)…

 …and now Denver.

Five of us – Kris Erickson, Ray Zentz, Ellen Aafedt and her boyfriend Tom Krohn and I (2nd soprano, bass, 1st soprano, tenor and baritone, respectively) – without much else to do took off walking in downtown Denver.  It felt like a pleasant enough day; warm (in the ’30s), so we all wore light jackets, and didn’t bother with hats or gloves. 

We put in miles.  We wandered down Colfax far from downtown, into a slightly seedier neighborhood.  The snow came down a little heavier as we stopped into a bakery to grab lunch, and then a pawn shop (where I bought a lockblade knife and a copy of Warren Zevon’s Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School  for a buck); it seemed like a pleasant little snow shower.

We took the bus back to the hotel, and started cleaning up for our evening plans (going out to a restaurant and drinking a lot) when someone turned on the TV. 

“BLIZZARD PARALYZES DENVER”, the graphics screamed, as the anchors voiced over footage of endless rows of stalled cars amid the pleasant little snow shower.

We looked at each other, shrugged, and went out into a city reeling from inches of snow.

I think of that day every time I see that Denver is, yet again, shut down by a blizzard. 

Holiday travelers stranded by a blizzard that paralyzed Colorado’s biggest cities lined up at ticket counters in Denver’s snowbound airport Thursday only to learn they wouldn’t be going anywhere for another day.

Is it just me, or is Denver to blizzards what trailer parks are to tornados?

It’s official – I made the big time!

Congratulations! You are the Time magazine “Person of the Year.”

Talk to my agent.

(Many have responded – as lamely as I did, in fact – to Time’s even lamer selection.  And then there’s Sisyphus, who is actually funny).

It was Thursday, December 18, 1986.

It had been almost a month since I met the rest of my band. Things had clicked famously. The three brothers had been playing in bands together for years, so they were pretty tight. So when we got together and actually started playing – in the basement of a duplex on 24th at Hennepin in the Wedge – things really took off.

After the radio interview, I’d worn a groove in the carpet at William’s Uptown Bar, where Larry Sahagian – who’d made the mistake of being my guest on the Mitch Berg Show that late night a few weeks ago – was the booker.  Finally, perhaps as much to be rid of me as anything, he booked us to play.  We’d debut on Sunday, December 28.

Right before my show.

No matter.  I could do it all.  Besides – we had bigger things to worry about.

Like picking a name.

And getting some posters out.

And learning an hour’s worth of music, while we were at it.

We started practicing in late November; three nights a week, Tuesday through Thursday (the bass player worked Mondays, and who really wanted to practice on the weekends?).  The first few weeks of practice with any band you enjoy playing with are like the first few weeks of a really fun relatiionship; you just can’t stop, you want to spend all your free time at it.  So we did; I’d head over to practice after I got done with the Vogel Show in the evening (I’d haul my guitar to work), we’d start at seven, and play until ten or so (and usually later, since the neighbors on the top floor of the squalid duplex usually were too high to care).

Coming up with music was easy; I had demo tapes for about four dozen songs I’d written; I managed to sell the guys on a solid couple dozen of them.  The other guitar player, Nick, the oldest of the brothers, had four or five of his own.  It only took 10 or 12 songs to play a set (you only got about an hour if you were an opener anyway), so we were fixed.

But getting people to show up?  On a Sunday?  Another entire story.

As to the name…

I’d never been in a band where selecting a name was anyting other than a complete donnybrook.  Egos were involved; creative people were getting doused in each others’ creative juices.

The four of us spent an hour or so after several practices tossing out names.

“The Joseph Stalin Band!”

“The Head of Alfredo Garcia!”

“Couch Beautiful Shriek…”

“The Turning Cookies!”

And on and on and on.

We were getting to the point where we had to do something to start publicizing the gig.  It was Thursday night.  I walked into the basement – which always smelled very faintly of natural gas, probably from some not-entirely-sealed pipe somewhere – and set my guitar case on an unused clothes dryer…

…and saw a notepad covered with scribbled notes in the various brothers’ hands.  At least one of the brothers had been putting band names in the notebook; I noticed a few names that had come and gone over the past few days.  One note read, tersely…

“Tenant’s Union”

I broke up laughing.  “Perfect!”

“Huh?” asked Will, the drummer.

I expounded briefly on how I loved the name “Tenant’s Union”.  They all cocked their eyes…

…and agreed, although with a few rolled eyes.

Thenceforth, we were “Tenant’s Union”.

It took me the better part of a year to learn why they seemed so quizzical;  the note had nothing to do with naming the band.  The guys were literally going to call the Tenant’s Union on their slumlord landlord.

But no matter.  We had a gig to get ready for.

I’ve been humming “Circle of Steel” by Gordon Lightfoot incessantly for the past two days .

Not that that’s a bad thing, but I have no idea why.

After weeks of progress…

…I’m back to “Life Begins At The Hop” by XTC.

What have I done to deserve this?

The song that I can simply not  stop humming today…

…is “Fine Fine Day” by Tony Carey. 

Why this 1983 one-hit wonder (from a solo outing from the leader of another one-hit wonder, Planet P) would burble to the top of my head, I have no idea.  But there it is. 

It’s a fine, fine day for a reunion…

Funny coincidence, courtesy of Katie: re this past Monday:

My bra Joe’s birthday today. Happy Birthday, Jofey! It’s also Mitch’s b-day, and they went to the same college, WEIRD! That is so freaky!!

Only the latest of many freakinesses: Katie and Joe’s sister Mary (proprietor of this blog) married my college’s basketball coach. Katie’s husband interviewed for another coaching gig at the same school. And Joe and I were, in fact, classmates.

Furthermore, the school – which had about 500 students back then – had a total of five people, counting Joe and I, with December 11 birthdays; four students and the journalism professor. (That, and a total of four leap babies, which is even weirder. Weirder still, if memory serves, one of the leap babies was (ta daaaa) Joe’s roommate.

So let’s see…a heartwarming story about growing up Joe’s lil’ sisty…um, when our folks would go out for the evening, I’d hide in my closet cuz he’d immediately start looking for me so he could sit on my face and fart.

Does this explain anything?  You be the judge.

My blog seems to have dumped a number of posts that I had up and running this morning.

If WordPress’ database is really that unstable, I might be a candidate for MT3.x after all.

UPDATE: I find I’m re-approving comments that I approved earlier today. It’s like the blog stepped 12 hours back in time or something.

Anyone?

…that I started giving Bruce and Jan Berg years of parenting practice.

Another long crazy day.  Light posting, again, ’til later today.

I have an exceptionally crazy day going on today.  It is 5AM, and I’m already cranking on stuff.  This could be that rarest of all days – a weekday off from blogging.  At least until 6 or so.

 Posting will be very light until later in the day.

 In the meantime, if you see a WWII veteran, thank them.  The biggest event in their lives started 65 years ago this morning.

And you thought  you had a rough morning waking up today.

(This post was actually written about a month ago, in the middle of a quick, sharp job search. I figured discretion was the better part of ire, and tabled the post at the time – but I figured I’d post it now, in case it helps someone).

You know who you are – you’re a contract vendor. You essentially run a high-tech temp service; you connect companies that want to rent a programmer or a project manager or a business analyst for a project (and maybe to evaluate for a fulltime gig) and the people who do the job. You take a handsome cut off the top – somewhere between 33% and 50% of whatever client pays.

Now, high-tech – after the misery of the early ’00s – is back to being a bit of a seller’s market. It’s hard to find people in some fields; business analysts are hard to find, and Usability people are at a bit of a premium (score!).

And we have memories. And as long as the economy is doing well, we can afford to use them.

So here are a couple of tips for you, Mr. Contract Vendor:

1. If you call us up to tell us about a “three to six month contract”, and at the interview the client tells me the project has a hard eight-week deadline, that’s a bad sign.
2. If you quote me a rate in that initial phone call – to pick a figure at random, say, $40 an hour – and after the interview tell me “um, the highest we can go is $32”, that’s even worse.
3. If, as we’re waiting for the client to make up their minds, you try to get me to commit to the (shorter, lower-paying than you told me) job and blow off any other leads I have working, I might suspect that you are desperate to land this gig, and probably not the kind of vendor I’d like to work for if I don’t have to. Which, heaven be praised, I don’t at the moment.

That is all.

Another of Red’s memes. This one is word association. Some answers need vaguely more than one word:

1. Yourself: Frazzled
2. Your spouse: Ex
3. Your hair: Ex
4. Your mother: Eccentric
5. Your father: Centric
6. Your favorite item: Guitar
7. Your dream last night: Can’t.
8. Your favorite drink: Lemon Drop
9. Your dream car: CJ7
10. The room you are in: Family room
11. Your ex: Which?
12. Your fear: being alone when i’m old
13. What you want to be in 10 years: Nationwide
14. Who you hung out with last night: Kids
15. What you’re not: Patient
16. Muffins: Savory
17: One of your wish list items: iPod
18: Time: scarce
19. The last thing you did: Made some french bread ‘za for dinner.
20. What you are wearing: Blue dress shirt, khaki pants.
21. Your favorite weather: Overcast, cool, drizzly.
22. Your favorite book: Crime and Punishment
23. The last thing you ate: See #19 above
24. Your life: Not so bad.
25. Your mood: tired
26. Your best friend: Several
27. What you’re thinking about right now: kids’ school
28. Your car: blah
29. What you are doing at the moment: listening to daughter
30. Your summer: Medora
31. Your relationship status: Why bother?
32. What is on your TV: Scrubs
33. What is the weather like: Cold
34. When was the last time you laughed: About two minutes ago, watching Scrubs.

For the whole 21 years I’ve been living in the Twin Cities, I’ve been wanting a job downtown.  I love the hustle and bustle of downtown life – and the costs of commuting from Saint Paul to the southwest, west and northwest burbs every day were a galling taunt.

Oh, I’ve had bits and pieces.  I had a couple of really crappy temp jobs, a few very short-term gigs, and one eight-month contract gig. 

Today, I start another.  And hopefully this one will be for the long haul.