Rubbing Bad Music in the Wound

Since I spend so much time on hold these days, I end up listening to a lot of bad music.

Dell's hold music is abominable. Since my Inspiron 4100 malfunctions so often, I spend a lot of time working with my cell on speakerphone. I wait for help while some sort of insipid cool jazz drools out of it. The people in Manila are wonderful, though. It's the product that needs help.

After my latest hard drive crash, Dell sent me a new drive, but it's pins didn't reach their contact points. I'm no tech but I could tell why. The tech had to keep insisting that the new drive qualified as a proper replacement, even though it was almost a quarter of an inch shorter with different kinds of contacts.

"They're supposed to reach," she had to insist, because that's what her screen kept telling her.

My local internet connection used to go down so often, usually with it rained, that I've heard a good deal of Cincinnati Bell's on-hold music. Bell's beats Dell's, but that's not much of a recommendation. I spent so much time with them, that I had an assistant to the president assigned to me. After about five visits, we figured out the problem. It was the solution that needed fixing.

Suppliers of the world: If you can't make products and systems that work, could you please at least feed your holds with good music? Okay, tolerable music? Please?

Labels: customer service, music, on-hold music, technology

I'm Not From Around Here

I'm not from around here, so I hope you take this the right way, but even though you seem to be neurologically complex enough, you flesh-bearing bipeds make an incredibly contradiction-riddled species, as if you're all bent on comic self-destruction. Of course, you could be vastly superior in some inscrutable way. So allow me to share some of my recent observations and perhaps you might be able to help me understand your kind.

I saw one of your kind walking with a quadruped progeny substitute. The poor thing was tethered to a territorial freedom constraint. Still it managed to defecate on a chlorophyll-covered status exhibit, when someone ran out of a privacy protection unit and yelled, "Get that mongrel out of my yard. Why don't you dump its shit on your own damn lawn!" The other pretended like she didn't hear and muttered underneath her breath, "Animal hater."

I ventured into one of your culturally vacant expanses of sameness and found myself in the middle of one of those mass consumption pits. They were running some sort of consumer feeding frenzy, when I overheard a verbal exchange between two discretionary income disposers.  "John's out of town," one said, "I've been shopping now for two whole days. This is really gonna cost him."

The other just chuckled and replied as she winked her eye, "Serves him right."

I headed out to the surrounding asphalt field neatly divided into grid-lined stalls packed side-to-side with air-polluting transportation pods as your sun was shining through your withering ultra-violet buffer. I passed some bipeds operating carcinogen intake units. One said
"I don't know why people complain about smoking indoors. I mean like I don't complain about other people's perfume."

Labels: music, song, songwriting

The Easiest Way to Write a Song

My latest song was a gift.

Some songs play hide-and-seek with me. Others tease and flirt. The words come but the melody won't surrender. Or a melody haunts me while its words never show.

Every once in a great while a song just jumps up says, "Here I am!"

I scramble to get it all down and enjoy every second of the game. That's exactly how "All My Friends" showed up. I heard it on my morning walk, went inside and started, scribbling down the words. Found the chords for the ready-made melody and recorded this scratch track.

All My Friends

I looked around for the sound effects, but the free-sound-effects website I found made it too difficult to download what I wanted, so I picked up my pocket recorded and did it myself.

It's only a scratch. Somebody else can make it sound better.

Labels: all my friends, song, songwriting, sound effects

A Most Extraordinary Shock

A woman named Susan Boyle sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Miserables on Britain's version of "American Idol," a program called "Britain's Got Talent."

Toward the end of this video, after Susan stunned the audience with her performance, one of the show's panelists mumbles to one of his peers that what he had just witnessed was the "most extraordinary shock" of the show's history.

Why was he shocked? Because Susan stepped forward to sing dressed in an ordinary house dress, her hair arranged in a conventional style, her 47-year-old frame far from svelte. In short, a very conservatively dressed, average-looking, middle-aged woman.

Watch and you'll see, before Susan sings, the panel's leading judge rolls his eyes, expecting a flop. A disgusting display of prejudice, in the sense that the word prejudice comes to us. Susan Boyle, the no-frills singer, was pre-judged. She's going to fall on her face, the panel clearly assumed. The audience, in lock step, smirked and all but gagged when Susan announced that she hoped to be as successful as Elaine Paige someday.

During Susan's stunning performance, no one could argue with her talent. From what I could hear over the din of the screaming morons in the audience, she sings very well. Afterwards one judge, reeling from shock, called Boyle's performance, "the biggest surprise I have had in three years."

And as the audience heard the judges fall over themselves with praise, the auditorium of sheep could not contain their expressions of conversion.

Why was anyone surprised? Because Boyle was not decked out like a pre-teen prostitute? I'm afraid that their shock betrays the shameful shallowness of the public eye. What have we become that an average-looking woman shocks people with her voice? Have we become such slaves to appearance?

Susan's performance was outstanding. The audience's performance was appalling!

Labels: britain's got talent, prejudice, susan boyle

Abominations

Can you think of a creature that flies and has only four legs?

Neither can I. Maybe the flying squirrel, but it doesn't actually fly? If you ever run across one, though, don't eat it.

Flying creatures with four feet make the list of Biblical abominations. Along with aquatic life without fins or scales, blemished sacrificial animals, artwork made of silver or gold, prostitutes and dogs procured in church, the thoughts of fools, lying lips, tilted scales, sleeping with your wife's mother, and of course, homosexuals. Especially the effeminate kind. You'll find most of these and more listed in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

Despite their prophetic scope, none of the scriptures of our major religions warns us about many of the abominations we encounter today. So I suppose it's incumbent upon us to identify and warn each other about modern abominations.

I'll start with those that have come to my attention and hope you will make me aware of those I've missed. Wherever possible, I'll post your comments as well.

• SUVs, especially the Hummer H2
  
• Westboro Baptist Church
  
• Advertising, Spam, Popups, Phone Spam, Billboards and all kinds of in-your-face product hustling
  
• Leaf Blowers
  
• Jet Skis
  
• Not recycling
  
• PBS and NPR Pledge Drives, "the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding"—Charles McGrath
  

Labels: abomination, advertising, Bible, environment, npr, pbs, scripture, spam

Oh, No! Not Socialism!

After bringing the economy to its knees, America's conservatives are squealing like pre-teen princesses with no date for the prom. They're not hissy-fitting for those of us who have lost the wealth we have earned. They're wailing because an emergency plan to prevent economic catastrophe will take away more of their funny money.

Lately they're comparing the plan socialism. And I love it!

We know socialism. It's the principle that has everybody pay for the street in front of their house rather than making every property owner construct their own section of road. We remember Ben Franklin's socialist notion, born a hundred years before socialism, that gives us the public library down the street.

The full extend of American socialism boils down to this: we all pay for something, so that it's there for anybody who needs it. This all-for-one-and-one-for-all system leaves no one out of the picture. That's why our fire departments don't let houses burn down if the homeowner can't pay what it would cost to put out the fire.

Conservative crackpots want us to believe that the plan our President, Democrats, and some Republicans want to put in place, to clean up after the economic devastation they've brought down with their greed and corruption, is not just socialism but Marxism. And so they scream, "USSA!"

It's neither the Marxism of Marx and Lenin nor the socialism of John Stuart Mill, Oscar Wilde, George Orwell, G. B. Shaw, Bertrand Russell, and others. It's necessary.

When regulation for the common good is relaxed, capitalism, that great engine of creativity, begins to devour everything within its reach. First, the livelihoods of those without wealth. Next, those who depend on their purchasing power.

When the party in power sides with and gives free reign to those who own and control the tools of work and production, they can and usually do siphon wealth produced by you and me into their own pockets. As has happened before, in a cycle that can't do anything but end in collapse, the economy collapses.

Why would it surprise anyone, then, that the correction for imminent collapse would involve a bit of redistribution?

Yet, what has been proposed is nowhere near that Christian concept rephrased by Communists, "to each according to his need, from each according to his ability." We're so far from public ownership and government administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. We're nowhere near equal opportunities for all or egalitarian compensation.

So why are they weeping?

Our most strident demagogues are squealing "USSA," because they know that the numbest skulls among us will bob brainlessly in accord.

To most of us, though, the overused socialism bugaboo betrays thinking in want of substance. Fortunately, volume won't make up for the vapidness of their complaint this time. We know that the our social institutions and those of many of the world's nations make good use of controls for the common good to keep capitalism in its place.

The Constitution of the United States, our nation's mission statement, if you will, lists as its ultimate aim, "to provide for the general welfare." That's why we're organized as a society rather than hunting and gathering in tribes at war with each other. Conservatives, abusing the word freedom, would pull us back to the tribalism Karl Marx predicted would follow the failure of capitalism.

Let's hope we can liberate enough of what belongs to all of us from the greedy grip of the few before they wrest power from the rest of us again.

That's why I hope they continue to cry, "The sky is falling!" It shows them for the spoiled brats they are.

Labels: Bertrand Russell, communism, conservatives, G. B. Shaw, George Orwell, John Stuart Mill, Lenin, Marx, Marxism, Oscar Wilde, socialism

The Party of Lincoln

Yes, technically, the Republican Party is the American political party that has descended from Abe Lincoln. There, I said it. But that's sort of like saying Jefferson was a Republican, which he was. So I guess it's more like saying Clarence Thomas is black. Well, maybe it's like Hitler was a Catholic. Okay, W is a Yale graduate.

No, think Ruth Westheimer and Laura Schlessinger. Now there's a paradox!

It can be confusing. Lincoln was perhaps our greatest President. Everybody's gushing all over him as we celebrate his 200th birthday. So how could the advancement of our civilization be in any way associated with what we know today as the Republican Party?

In order not to be befuddled by the specious Republican claim on Linclon, I have to remind myself that when I'm facing north, east is to my right. But when I'm facing south, it's to my left. American political parties re-orient themselves left and right as well.

Under Lincoln, the Republican Party was the left-wing, Liberal, anti-slavery party. Even though Lincoln acted more like a conservative henchman at times, suspending habeus corpus, for example, he was, like Jefferson, a irreligious, forward-thinking, bleeding-heart, Liberal. He would have driven a Volvo.

Lincoln's Democrat opponents, as well as his assassin, were cold-hearted, capitalistic, right-wing, Bible-citing supporters of slavery and the aristocratic feudalism that depended upon it.

Here's Lincoln at his visionary best:

Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Does that sound like a Republican?

Conservatives have given us slavery, the Dred Scott Decision, Prohibition, the Great Depression, Plessy v. Ferguson, Senator Joseph McCarthy, racial segregation, Watergate, Reaganomics, creationism, and the most corrupt and incompetent Administration in American history—our eight-year nightmare.

So for a tax-slashing, anti-science, Bible-thumping conservative to claim any affinity with Lincoln is just plain nonsense. Those who do so either mean to deceive or don't know what they're talking about. I really don't know which is worse.

I take solace from the birthday boy, who said famously, "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

Labels: Bible, conservatism, liberal, liberalism, Lincoln, slavery