Doctor Who may have been caught up in the intricate, mind-bending complexities of time and relative dimensions in space...but I was really in hot water.
Let me set the scene.
I was in my living room, relaxing with a cup of hot chocolate with my hearing aid in place, watching the season premiere of Doctor Who. The action on the TV had come to a particularly dramatic point; The Doctor and his new assistant/companion were facing a rampaging Wi-Fi-enabled robot threatening to download them, as all the lights in that neighborhood are being switched on while the lights in the rest of London are going out. Not to mention the out-of-control airliner that was heading right toward them. And over all, a high pitched sound can be heard, something between a scream and a train whistle, a sound that added significantly to the drama of the scene, growing in pitch and volume until it reached a crescendo just before the commercial.
Then came the commercial. And the screaming didn't stop.
I experienced a moment of near panic. What could be making that sound? My imagination raced to any number of fanciful conclusions while my rational brain immediately dismissed each in turn. (I may have been watching Doctor Who, but I wasn't that far into a Doctor Who mindset.) Still, it caused me no small amount of concern; just what was that sound?
My first rational conclusion was my hearing aid; under the right conditions, feedback in that device makes just such a sound. I reached up to the hearing aid and switched it off...and the screaming did not stop. I tore the hearing aid out of my ear. The screaming did not let up.
Starting to get somewhat frantic, I looked about my home seeking the source of the screaming. The smoke alarm didn't normally make such a sound; nevertheless, I pulled it from the wall and removed its battery. The screaming continued.
I checked the carbon-dioxide alarm. No, the CO2 alarm wasn't going off. I checked my computer; it was off. Thinking that something must be wrong with the TV, I turned it off. The screaming continued.
I wasn't standing on the cat's tail. My radio was off. My car wasn't running. And the screaming continued.
Something of a frenzy had by then set in. I began to knock things from the table to the floor and dig among the piles of cloths, books, papers, and old dishes in a frantic search for something--anything--that might be causing that sound. Nothing.
Then, just as my frenzy was giving way to a full panic, I burned my hand on the stove.
I had left the stove burner on.
The burner under the tea kettle.
The tea kettle with the whistle-thingy that was intended to say, "Take me off the burner, fuckhead, I'm boiling already!"
Damn, I am dumb...
The Blues Viking
The opinions herein expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.
Saturday, March 30, 2013
Thursday, March 28, 2013
We now return you to your regularly scheduled curmudgeon...
Approaching this blog again after such a long absence is rather daunting.
As any of you who have followed my tribulations of late will realize, it's been a bad winter. For me, anyway. I haven't felt like blogging, so I haven't. For the last three months. I like short, fragmentary sentences. Like this. I really do. Honest.
I'm getting back into it, obviously. Here I sit at my keyboard, hoping inspiration will hit me and I'll be able to wow my dozen or so regular readers with my keen sense of political reality and my rapier-like wit. Well, I can dream, can't I?
By this time it should be apparent that I'm struggling a bit. I am faced with that old question: What the hell do I write about? You might think that I had accumulated topics of interest while I was busy enforcing my enforced silence, but you'd be wrong. In that cavernous void that is my mind, wherein I compose my thoughts before I commit them to the typewritten word (no, I don't actually use a typewriter) there are precious few new topics on hand. Most of what I find there are old issues that have been done to death, issues upon which I really have nothing to add, issues upon which I have continued to heap nothing until the nothing is so high my thoughts appear lofty. I am hesitant to do that again.
For example, there's gun control; a topic that both I and the nation have done to death but that no one seems to be tiring of. In the political world, it was generally accepted that following Sandy Hook this subject would burn brightly in the public square for a while, but would soon run out of fuel (as it had so often in the past) and politicians could go back to taking soft money from the NRA and doing nothing about what the public actually wanted. That isn't happening now; the fire is still burning. Maybe that's because the NRA keeps throwing fuel on it. I think people are finally waking up to the fact that that the NRA is no longer primarily concerned with the rights, the needs, the desires of its membership; that it has become a bunch of lobbyists for the firearms industry and is doing their will. But all this has been said before, time and time again, and adding my voice to such a discordant cacophony will not help.
(Extra points to me for using a redundant tautology. No extra point for that one, though.)
Another example: gay rights. I'm not sure I have the credentials to speak about gay rights, not being gay myself. That hasn't stopped me in the past, but in reviewing my blog archives I find that I haven't often spoken on this topic. I did once comment on California's Proposition 8 (at the center of much of the current controversy) as a constitutional issue, but beyond making a general statement of support for gay rights I have been mostly silent. Again, as I am not gay myself I'm not sure how much relevance my comments would have; all I can do is reaffirm my support of gay rights and say that I stand with them in their struggle (damn, that sounded condescending) and since I just did that... (I have changed my Facebook profile pic to one of those nifty "=" thingies; a pathetically small gesture, I'll admit, but a sincere one.)
I could always talk about Congress' inability to get anything done, and this is something that hasn't yet been talked to death (it still hasn't died). I could talk about how the Republican effort to oppose and/or veto literally everything has completely stalled government and turned the democratic process into a grotesque parody of what the Founding Fathers intended, that this isn't helped by the unwillingness on both sides (but honestly I see it more from the Right) to give up enough to reach a compromise on any issue, that our fates are being determined by ideologues who are more concerned with serving their ideologies then they are in serving the public (a situation far from ideal), but I don't see any way to get a joke out if this so I'm not gonna.
There's always the "fiscal cliff;" I could do an article about having gone over it, a sort of "view from the bottom" thing. The problem with that is that we're still falling, and we won't know how badly we've injured ourselves until we actually hit those jagged rocks we've been promised. So that one will have to wait.
Then, of course there's a trick I've used in the past to get around writer's block; just to sit at the keyboard and type free-form in the hope that something coherent and article-like might come out of it.
No, that'll never work...
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.
As any of you who have followed my tribulations of late will realize, it's been a bad winter. For me, anyway. I haven't felt like blogging, so I haven't. For the last three months. I like short, fragmentary sentences. Like this. I really do. Honest.
I'm getting back into it, obviously. Here I sit at my keyboard, hoping inspiration will hit me and I'll be able to wow my dozen or so regular readers with my keen sense of political reality and my rapier-like wit. Well, I can dream, can't I?
By this time it should be apparent that I'm struggling a bit. I am faced with that old question: What the hell do I write about? You might think that I had accumulated topics of interest while I was busy enforcing my enforced silence, but you'd be wrong. In that cavernous void that is my mind, wherein I compose my thoughts before I commit them to the typewritten word (no, I don't actually use a typewriter) there are precious few new topics on hand. Most of what I find there are old issues that have been done to death, issues upon which I really have nothing to add, issues upon which I have continued to heap nothing until the nothing is so high my thoughts appear lofty. I am hesitant to do that again.
For example, there's gun control; a topic that both I and the nation have done to death but that no one seems to be tiring of. In the political world, it was generally accepted that following Sandy Hook this subject would burn brightly in the public square for a while, but would soon run out of fuel (as it had so often in the past) and politicians could go back to taking soft money from the NRA and doing nothing about what the public actually wanted. That isn't happening now; the fire is still burning. Maybe that's because the NRA keeps throwing fuel on it. I think people are finally waking up to the fact that that the NRA is no longer primarily concerned with the rights, the needs, the desires of its membership; that it has become a bunch of lobbyists for the firearms industry and is doing their will. But all this has been said before, time and time again, and adding my voice to such a discordant cacophony will not help.
(Extra points to me for using a redundant tautology. No extra point for that one, though.)
Another example: gay rights. I'm not sure I have the credentials to speak about gay rights, not being gay myself. That hasn't stopped me in the past, but in reviewing my blog archives I find that I haven't often spoken on this topic. I did once comment on California's Proposition 8 (at the center of much of the current controversy) as a constitutional issue, but beyond making a general statement of support for gay rights I have been mostly silent. Again, as I am not gay myself I'm not sure how much relevance my comments would have; all I can do is reaffirm my support of gay rights and say that I stand with them in their struggle (damn, that sounded condescending) and since I just did that... (I have changed my Facebook profile pic to one of those nifty "=" thingies; a pathetically small gesture, I'll admit, but a sincere one.)
I could always talk about Congress' inability to get anything done, and this is something that hasn't yet been talked to death (it still hasn't died). I could talk about how the Republican effort to oppose and/or veto literally everything has completely stalled government and turned the democratic process into a grotesque parody of what the Founding Fathers intended, that this isn't helped by the unwillingness on both sides (but honestly I see it more from the Right) to give up enough to reach a compromise on any issue, that our fates are being determined by ideologues who are more concerned with serving their ideologies then they are in serving the public (a situation far from ideal), but I don't see any way to get a joke out if this so I'm not gonna.
There's always the "fiscal cliff;" I could do an article about having gone over it, a sort of "view from the bottom" thing. The problem with that is that we're still falling, and we won't know how badly we've injured ourselves until we actually hit those jagged rocks we've been promised. So that one will have to wait.
Then, of course there's a trick I've used in the past to get around writer's block; just to sit at the keyboard and type free-form in the hope that something coherent and article-like might come out of it.
No, that'll never work...
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.
Tuesday, March 26, 2013
The Defense of Accordions Act of 2013
Yes, I know, I’ve been away from this blog for months; I’d
say “I’ve been busy” but the opposite is the case. You don’t need details, and
I really don’t want to give them, so I’m going to start out with a subject near
and dear to my heart…accordions.
I had a ruder-than-usual comment about the accordion today.
Not about my playing itself…this person has never heard me play, nor do I care
to play for them…but about the accordion in general. Actually, I don’t think
this person knows that I play one myself, and I really don’t take their comment
as a deliberate insult, but I think it deserves a response.
Here’s what was said: (paraphrased a bit) “Why would anyone
play the accordion? It’s not like it’s a musical instrument or anything.”
No big deal, really; I make rude accordion jokes myself all
the time. Quite known for them, in fact. Usually when I get something like this
I just take it as the good-natured comment it was intended to be. Besides, most
such comments come from people I know well and get on with, and they’re people
I know and that I know wouldn’t say anything deliberately rude or hurtful.
And, in truth, this was hardly hurtful.
But I must admit that that “not a musical instrument” crack,
coming as it did from a near stranger, got to me.
Look, if you don’t like accordion music I’m not going to try
to convert you. If you just can’t stomach the sound of the thing, nothing I can
say will suddenly make you love them and I’m certainly not going to try to
accomplish that. I am not going to engage in such a fruitless exercise. Tell ya
what I will do, though…
Below are three web links to Youtube videos of a guy named
Remco Sietsema. He’s from The Netherlands and, you guessed it, he plays the
button accordion. Well. Very well, in fact.
(Yes, I already posted a clip of Remco to Facebook; in
that clip he was playing beside Mark Söhngen, another accordionist from The
Netherlands but one that favors Cajun/Zydeco music.)
All I ask is that you give at least one of these a listen. Just one. (Unless, of course, like me you just have to hear them all.) Once you have done that, I challenge anyone to claim that the accordion isn't a musical instrument. I challenge anyone to claim that the sound it makes is not musical. If you don't like it, fine, you don't like it; there's a lot of accordion music that I can't stomach, either. But once you've listened to it, I dare you to call it unmusical.
And before you ask...no, I can't play like this. There aren't many that can. I am not in Remco's league; if I may extend the baseball metaphor a bit, Remco is in the All-Star game and I am barely playing sandlot.
But enough about me; here's Remco Sietsema.
And, for good measure, here's that Cajun jam with Mark Söhngen that I posted to Facebook a couple of days ago.
If you still don't like the accordion, fine. If you can't abide the music, or the instrument, or anything else about it, fine. The accordion may indeed be the Rodney Dangerfield of musical instruments ("...It don't get no respect! No respect at all!"), but do not sit there and tell me it isn't music.
(Oh, and those accordion jokes, memes, and pictures? Keep them coming. If you haven't noticed, I post a lot of these myself.)
We now return you to your regularly scheduled political ranting.
The Blues Viking
The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.
(ADDENDUM: I should add that Remco Seitsema has a presence on Facebook; I've been to that page but it's mostly in Dutch and no one in my family has spoken Dutch since the British showed up in New Amsterdam with their guns, saying "Right, you lot; you're all British now an' we're callin' this place New York!" Here endeth the history lesson.)
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