I’m at Shark’s Ice right now, enjoying a fine local microbrew (21st Amendment IPA), and watching tykes skate. There’s a family at the table next to mine, watching the action, and they have a kid maybe 6 years old who is wearing a D SEDIN Canucks t-shirt. He wants to play. Right now.
“Gotta like the attitude,” I said to his dad. “Put me in, coach!”
Dad laughed and agreed.
“His beard is better than Daniel Sedin’s, too,” I didn’t say. Barely.
A couple of days ago I wrote a slightly-alcohol-inspired lament that there weren’t any good covers of the Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday, one of my favorites from the Stones, back before they turned into zombies and continued to shamble through the music scene for eternity. I had intended to do a little more research before that episode went live, but then I forgot about it completely, and out it came.
This morning I fired up eMusic and drifted through covers of Ruby Tuesday, and I learned a little bit; I now have a musing or two to share about music in general and covers in particular. You don’t have to thank me, it’s what I do.
It turns out there are a lot of covers of the song. It’s just that most of them suck. In my lament I asked where the guitar/folkie covers were, and I have since found the answer: “Right where they belong”. There are quite a few of these, and while some of them don’t suck, none that I found were particularly good. Overdone, overwrought, over-engineered. And while I applaud artists who change the original material to put their own identity into the music (fundamentally that’s the appeal of covers), those changes still have to make some sort of sense. Singing “When you change with every new day stillI’mgonnamissyou” with the last phrase crammed into the tightest space possible is jarring and doesn’t reflect the emotion of the song. Amazing how many times I heard this.
I suspect that one musician decided on this musical tic and then a host of others copied that cover, without referring to the original source material as well. So there was a lot of Band B covering Band A covering the Rolling Stones. It would be interesting (but not interesting enough to actually do it) to trace the family tree of the song based on mutations introduced along the way.
And thinking of songs going through generations and mutating, it would stand to reason that later mutations would be more fit to survive in the new market conditions. Darwin should totally work, here. As musical tastes and economics changes, the covers literally evolve with them, and songs diversify into different niches. Ruby Tuesday has certainly done that.
Take country music, for instance. A cat name Don Williams has put out several albums with his take on the song. It’s… OK, but it lacked a little something. Then I listened to a performance he did with Dolly Parton, and it was massively improved. It wasn’t necessarily that Parton was putting in the performance of a lifetime, but I realized at this point that vocal harmony on the chorus makes an incredible difference. You hardly notice it’s there in the original, but you would definitely notice if it wasn’t there. Without the harmony, it takes a great arrangement or a voice more versatile than any I sampled to pull off the cover of this deceptively simple song.
One of the tricky parts, and one that the Stones don’t do that well either, is handling how different the verses and the chorus are. Most of the guitar/folkies tried to manage that by adding a bunch of annoying stylisms. Yes, I’m talking to you, Jade Leonard.
On I searched. There were the inevitable elevator-jazz instrumentals and Philharmonic “do arrangements of pop songs to pay the bills” renditions. Lullaby versions so boomer parents (and grandparents) can indoctrinate further generations into “their” music. Single-synthesizer efforts programmed by some kid in his basement. Massive electronic efforts that sounded just like the one the kid in his basement did. There was one I was tempted to buy just for comedic value – I’d bet my favorite molar that it’s by the same guy who arranged William Shatner’s Mr. Tambourine Man, only on this one there’s no vocal and it’s 13 minutes long.
I heard a lot of vinyl pops while searching.
The first cover I liked enough to pay for was one of those impulse buys I’ll likely regret later. Sheena and the Rokkets is a classic bad-singer-in-front-of-reasonable-band outfit, with the added bonus that they are Japanese and Sheena has a tough time with a lot of English words. Words like, for instance, “Ruby”.
I came across a Scorpions cover that has its moments, and fits the definition of a “good cover” — there’s no doubt the Scorpions are performing, they do it their way, but they maintain the essence of the original that motivated the cover in the first place.
Momentum improved. I came across Don and Dolly as described above, and surprisingly, Twiggy, closer to the original but nicely done. Then the inevitable lounge versions started coming in, vapid and vacant. A modern-punk song called Jack Ruby Tuesday came up, and I simply could not tell if it was a cover or not, since I couldn’t make out a single word (or note, even) in the solid wall of fuzz.
After downloading the Don and Dolly version, I went back and listened to the whole thing. Ouch! Someone shoot the arranger and get the trumpets the hell out of there. Wow, what a difference between the 30-second preview and the entire song. There are times I really don’t miss the ’70’s.
Lars Brygdén did a reasonable country-ish cover on an album called “Songs I wrote”, which seems deceptive – I hope in the song data it gives proper credit to the actual writer.
Then there’s Melanie. She’s taken more than one crack at this tune, and one of them isn’t bad. Toward the bottom of the search list is the album “Pan Pipes Play Rod Stewart” in which we have the inevitable Peruvian interpretation, and the Young@Heart Chorus wheeze out a version in which the lead singer sounds like she has loose dentures. (Yes, that is mean to say, but it’s also true.)
No Hip-Hop. No Riot Grrl. A few that were labeled ‘alternative’ but really weren’t — this seems like excellent emo/shoegazer material, but none was represented. I despaired of finding a punk cover until Thee S.T.P. cranked out a definitive version that is two minutes of pure fun. We have a winner!
Ultimately, I have to conclude that maybe this is a tough song to cover, despite its surface simplicity (or because of it?). Bands with more instruments and voices seemed to do better, along with bands who are able to turn their amps up (and then turn them back down).
My sweetie is not a big Stones fan, yet there are plenty of covers of Rolling Stones songs that she really likes. I think that at this point we agree that a great cover must be based on a solid foundation.
No other band has gone downhill for forty damn years and still had a down to go. The Stones, at their peak, were so insanely great that for the next few decades of giving a shit or not, they went on making money.
But there are others ready to recast the Stones’ songs with modern sensibilities and lyric urgency. (Note: I said ‘modern’ but I’m pretty sure I don’t know what that means.) These new bands just try to carry a bit of Mick’s swagger.
I’m pretty sure that almost every Stones song has been redone better, or, at least, closer to my taste. But those songs would not have happened without Mick. And we can argue about which performance is better, but Paint it Black tears my guts out, and maybe the covers do it better (not maybe, they do) but in the end it’s the magic of the way the sounds play against my nervous system. I see the red door, and I want to paint it black. The covers wouldn’t be there without the original.
I’d be curious to see what 1960’s Mick would do if he toddled onto the stage for the first time here in 2013. Honestly I don’t think it would work out that well, if we noticed him at all. Mick Jagger would be just another one of the herd of dissolute and profligate rockers. The thing is, while the Stones may not have invented that identity, they certainly perfected it. Mostly by accident, but you can’t hold that against them.
And those early Stones tunes are still with us, getting more play and more respect (covers = respect) than anything the band has produced in the last thirty years. To me that’s an indicator that those songs were from the gut; they have an emotional resonance that later generations of performers have understood and exploited.
Except maybe “Ruby Tuesday”. One of my favorite Stones tunes of all time; released at about the moment they started going downhill for the next few decades. I love that song, but their performance of it is, well, clumsy. Ham-fisted. Doesn’t matter, I still love it. But… where are the covers? Where is the Seattle lesbian band to take that song and throw it through the speakers so hard your nose bleeds? Where’s the ska band enraptured with the way the lyrics sound? Where’s the coffee shop singer asking, “who can hang a name on you?” Where’s the alt-band banging out their big bwangy guitar chords lamenting how she changes with every new day? Where is the rendition that eclipses the original? It seems like the easiest thing in the world, recasting such a soulful song.
I’m sure the covers are out there, and I hereby resolve to go find a few. But as far as mainstream goes, all we get is a chain of fake ’60’s diners.
I am sometimes served beer by people who are not themselves allowed to drink the beverage. One such just informed me that tomorrow is her birthday. While I know that no gentleman ever asks a lady this question, I could not resist inquiring of her how old she was going to be. “Twenty-one,” she said, making the “air quotes” gesture, holding up both hands and flexing the first two fingers on each. The message: She still won’t be twenty-one, but she’s going to drink anyway. Kids these days.
It may come as a shock to some of you, but I also experienced the taste of alcohol before I reached the statutory age for such. This story starts on a Saturday, the last Saturday I would spend as a minor. I would be celebrating my birthday the next day. I invited everyone I knew to the celebration that Sunday evening. (My actual birthday was, according to my calendar, on Monday. Somehow the story in my head managed to forget this technicality. Now I’m sorry I looked it up. Anyway, I was committed for Sunday.)
By ‘invited everybody’, I mean ‘invited every female’. I went to a small, male-dominated engineering school, and I had, as any good engineer would, arrived at a simple party algorithm. Invite every female you can. Half of the ones who say they will definitely show up actually will. Twice as many males will show up.
Party set for Sunday. That’s where planning is required. Back then, on Sundays in New Mexico, the booze stores were closed. No problem; with the true foresight that five and three-quarters semesters of physics and abstract math will give one, I mounted an expedition to the local beer store on Saturday and stocked up. Thus equipped, My roommate and I sent out word far and wide. Even divided by two, the number of women who said they would definitely be there climbed into the double digits. Hell, yeah, we had a party!
Saturday evening some people came by, then some others, and of course one has to entertain. Sunday morning dawned and our stockpile had vanished. We were going to have a party, with as many as twelve female guests, and we had no alcohol. Roommate Janne and I pulled out a map.
By Alfa Romeo odometer, it is 156 miles from my dorm to the closest liquor store in Arizona. It was a good drive, over the continental divide, bundled up against the chill air as Janne and I drove with the top down. That kind of day on that kind of road demands swiftness, but the state trooper was not inclined to agree. He pulled me over and strode to the driver’s side of the car with a swagger that cannot be trained.
He asked us to step from the vehicle. It was cold, once we didn’t have the heater blowing on our feet. Trooper shook his head. “I remember when I was young and stupid,” he said as he assessed our top-down state. It didn’t seem derogatory, coming from him. He was all right. I learned later that highway 60 had become a primary drug artery heading west to California. Not smugglers, he had decided, just dumb. One speeding ticket heavier, we continued to Springerville, Arizona, there to buy a ridiculous amount of ridiculous booze. One of everything, basically*. And beer.
Back we scampered, careful not to tempt the radar gods again.
That night, the party commenced. It was pretty good, but my invitation theorem was shattered to pieces. Of the members of the distaff who said they would definitely show up, none did. Not a single one. Yeah, I had a way with the ladies, all right (probably I told too many of them my party algorithm). Still, I was surrounded by friends, and while the party was not a rager it was a good way to stagger into adulthood, story-heavy.
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* the new cocktails invented from the leftovers of this party are legendary: Lollipops, Bro Cones, and let no one forget Pink Drool.
Tonight I came home to discover that whenever I looked at this site, it was wrapped in advertising. Yikes! I was relieved to discover that it was ‘only’ on my machine; I had unknowingly inherited a browser extension that turned Safari into a giant billboard. Panic gave way to annoyance.
The creator of this extension is called Yontoo. They suck. But you can be sure that I didn’t run a Yontoo installer recently. Something else I installed did me the favor of sliding that sucker onto my machine. Tonight I wrote Yontoo this message:
How can I find out how you [sic] software was installed in my browser? I certainly didn’t ask for it, but obviously at some point when I thought I was installing something else, I got your stuff too. I want to know who to yell at.
xPad
It was Sunday, and while I’m not an avid sports-watcher, I have come to enjoy listening to a game on the radio while I putter about. And by “radio” I mean iPad with the Tune-in app. (I came close to buying a cheap radio for the garage before I realized I probably already had one.)
Due to the geometry of house and WiFi station, when I’m outside I need to keep the iPad elevated to get the signal. So I propped it up where the fence attaches to the house, double-checked it for stability, and set to work on the gate. Fast forward to when I was working on the pier that the gate latches against. Apparently the vibration caused the iPad to slowly scoot to the left, unobserved by me. As I attacked the wood with the sander I heard the clatter behind me. I turned with my heart in my throat and saw the iPad, face down on concrete, six feet below where it had been, the sound of the broadcast still coming from its dinky speakers.
It still works, if you don’t mind dragging your finger across broken glass.
Had I purchased AppleCare with the iPad, I would have been able to get a free replacement. In general I’m not a big fan of warranties on solid-state devices, however, preferring to simply not break them in the first place. Which is a perfectly workable theory except when I do break things.
Happily for me, I work with a group of people who are, shall we say, ethusiastic about iPads and whatnot. A co-worker had an iPad substantially better than mine, that she no longer used because there’s one out now that’s even better yet. She was willing to sell it to me for a (relative) song, and now I have my retina display (which is sweet). And, oddly enough, AppleCare.
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Photo notes:
Turns out my 24-105mm zoom has pretty nice bokeh as well. I was using it as a macro lens, and actually stopped it pretty far down to get more depth of focus. When you get that close, however, there’s only so much you can do. The pros use a technique called focus stacking to overcome this difficulty – they take a series of pictures with focus at slightly different distances from the front edge of the product to the back, and combine them together with electronic magic, taking the in-focus portion of each slice. The high-end shops actually have servo-controlled gizmos that move the camera a tiny bit at a time between shots. I saw an animation of an iPod photo that had fifty-something individual slices.
Photoshop has the tools for focus stacking, but taking the slices would have required far more effort than I was prepared to put into the project today.
Since the KHL seems to be the preeminent hockey league these days, I need to adjust. My dilemma right now: Do I pull for Lev Praha, the team from Prague? It seemed automatic until I saw Slovan Bratislava in the standings. Slovakia’s pretty cool; it wouldn’t be hard to root for them.
The Slovak team has way more history; Lev Praha was founded this year, Slovan dates back to 1921. Not a lot of names I recognize on either roster (Why the hell is Zdeno Chara playing for the Czechs rather than the Slovaks?), and should the NHL start playing before the KHL completely eats its lunch, those names I do know will be back here in North America.
But if I were an enterprising sports network, or a desperate one, I’d consider banging out a contract with the KHL, and bringing more than just a token couple of games over here. It might be too late to really make bank on this labor stoppage, but it seems a safe bet that another will come along soon enough.
I looked in the KHL shop, and you know what you can get with Slovan’s logo on it? Nothing. A big, fat, zip. Which makes me really want a Miroslav Satan sweater. (He’s the only name I recognized at first glance, and he’s also the only player on that team’s injured list.) Anyone in Bratislava who can hook me up?
Edited to add: The league does have a Che Guevara hockey shirt, which appeals to me most because it’s their best effort at capitalist exploitation to date — but we can’t underestimate the impact of Che in a hockey helmet. Viva La Hockey!
Yet one more addition: I might have to root for Kazakhstan! Because it’s Kazakhstan! The only thing that cools my enthusiasm is that less than half the team is actually from there.
It was a tough day, overall. I’ll go into details later, maybe. But here’s a happy story, even if it’s a few years old. It’s the story of Popsicle, a puppy found wrapped in a plastic bag in a freezer.
Popsicle was saved, and went on to be awesome. So, yay, Popsicle!
Long, long ago, a female friend of mine told me excitedly that she finally owned a car. Back then, that was a big deal. What kind? I asked, getting swept up in the excitement. “It’s yellow!” was her response.
Then I bought a car of my own, and I was bemused when the first question by many of the females around me was, “what color is it?”
Really? I mean, sure I care what color my car is, but that comes way behind a lot of other considerations. As I age the other parameters reshuffle, but color remains pretty low on the list.
And we all know the woman who wins the office football pool based on the colors of the team jerseys. Aye Caramba.
But men know colors. A grizzled old farmer tells his grizzled old pal that he bought a tractor, and if it weren’t unthinkable that grizzled old pal wouldn’t already know the answer, he might ask “what color is it?” Because with big tractors there are two colors. Green and orange. John Deere and Massey Fergusen. If it’s a smaller tractor it might be red. You will never see green and orange on the same farm. Hell, you’ll rarely see both in the same town.
Real men know their colors, where those colors matter. They can tell Makita Teal from Bosch Blue; at a glance Milwaukee’s red stands out next to DeWalt’s Yellow and Black, which is totally different from Stanley’s Black and Yellow. Bonus points if you know Northern Industrial’s Maroon and Gray, and the occasional less-than-tasteful neon green of Kawasaki.
If I were to go to a financier and ask for money to start a tool company, I would fully expect one of the first questions to be “what color are they?”
Postscript:
As I perused a tool catalog to make sure I’d got my colors right (and to look at tool porn), I noticed that both Klutch and Wel-Bilt are going for silver and black. Sorry, guys. Craftsman is predominantly black but has gold highlights, and they own that space. Silver and Black just says you don’t want to be noticed. When a carpenter is trimming the end of a 2×4 with his silver-and-black circular saw, no one will think about the brand of saw he’s chosen for the task. While I find Kawasaki’s color choice brash, there’s no doubt that their tools are not afraid to strut on the worksite. If you’re selling a tool, at a glance everyone who matters around the worksite should know what brand your happy customers chose. Money can’t buy that kind of marketing. Which do you think sells better:
“Bosch has great roller bearings.”
“Joe uses Bosch, and Joe knows his shit.”
How do we know Joe uses Bosch? Bosch Blue, that’s how. And it’s nothing like Makita Teal.
My fruit-flavored music-playing device has a not-quite-as-intuitive-as-it-should-be feature called “genius”. The theory is simple. When you’re listening to a song you like, you touch a little fifties-era atom symbol and the machine will find twenty-four more songs that the genius inside believes are similar, so you can keep the mood going.
My first attempts with the genuis mix button were frustrating. I had the FFMPD set to play random music while I worked out. A song came on that helped fuel a second wind, so I hit the genius button. It glowed under my finger and returned to normal when I released my touch. The song ended and another came on, not dissimilar. But I couldn’t tell – was it geniusing? Another song came on, also similar, and I concluded that there was a decent chance that my music player was indeed genuising, but there was nothing in the interface presented to me to indicate that fact.
Then the player went from Blink 182 to a Beatles song. “Elanor Rigby”, if memory serves. Nope, I concluded, my music player was NOT geniusing; there’s nothing that song had in common with the one I had asked it to base the list on.
I went back to a particularly racous, up-tempo tune that had gone by (unsteady hands poking at the screen as I chugged along), and tried the Genuis button again. Three songs later I was treated to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”
Don’t get me wrong, I really like that song. Good for listening to in the dark, illuminated only by the glow of the stereo while sipping whiskey and wondering what the point of it all is, on those nights of doubt where inertia is your only guide. Not so good for working out, though.
“Fine,” I thougt, poking at the screen. “I’ll go through the interface and choose a particular song, while not on random play, and see if it geniuses for me.” Stabbing at an iPad while working on an elliptical trainer is not ideal; if you move your finger while touching the surface the machine assumes you mean to drag something. Which under any other circumstance is correct. I jabbed and poked until I came upon a tune (if I recall correctly, which honestly isn’t that likely) by Mudhoney, and pushed the little atom. “Not enough information to make a genius list,” I was told. Same story with Drill (whose eponymous and only album I once picked up used and remains one of my faves of all time). Maybe I should have started with L7.
My workout ended before I got a satisfactory answer to the genius problem.
Of course, I could have fiddled with the device while not working out, and possibly have found the answer sooner, but that’s not how I roll. After a little frustration at the start of the next workout I decided to turn to a playlist I’d already defined. There right next to it, was a Genius list based on “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” by Nirvana. “Sweet,” thought I, the genuis button had worked after all. I fired up that mix and started my toil.
And… after a few tunes had been pumped into my ears, a Beatles song came on. It was “Come Together,” which, yeah, I can see working with Nirvana. Nice work, Genius! I wouldn’t have gone looking for that one. A little Queens of the Stone Age, then Black Sabbath, followed by “Blackbird” by the Beatles.
What the hell? That is nothing like Nirvana.
I viewed the songs in the genius-created playlist. Three were by the Beatles. Out of curiosity, I geniused the Ravonettes. Three Beatles songs. Green Day? Three Beatles songs. I tried some other bands, sticking to what I thought the mainstream might be. Three Beatles songs each time. When I genuised ‘Holiday in the Sun” by the Sex Pistols, there were only two Beatles songs.
So it turns out the genius feature was working all along. It just wasn’t telling me it was, and it has a boner for the Beatles. It should be noted here that the Genius ex Machina has more than 10,000 tunes to choose from.* I promise you that fewer than 10% of those are by the Beatles.
The question, of course is, “Is this a conspiracy? Does the Genius get a kickback on Beatles albums sold?” Or are Beatles tunes the automatic fallback filler when the database that guides the genius is confronted with too much unknown?
You know where this is going, of course. I’m going to be hitting the genius button a lot, looking for The Tune That Has No Beatles Matches. I’ll keep you posted.
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* I miss the unlimited legal downloads back when eMusic was young, which was when they hadn’t cut deals with major record labels yet. That might be part of the problem; my library is skewed strongly toward indie labels and obscure bands that I discovered by spending an afternoon sampling the used CD bins at Wherehouse. I contend that the only difference between a popular band and an obscure one is the marketing budget.
That is how I found Drill, sitting on a stool, headphones on, operating a CD player in a suburban music store. I had a system. I’d listen to the first track, and if it seemed to be going well, I’d skip to maybe the third or fourth. Also good? Sweet. Vocal power is absolutely required to get past this stage. Skip forward in the song. Does anything change through the song? Good musicians know how to find strength in softness as well as noise. The final test: skip around through several songs. If there’s not variety, then that sound they do every time better be awesome.
My original copy of Drill was badly damaged when I loaned it to a friend, and it took a couple of years on the waiting list at Spun.com for me to find a replacement. Should I become president, I will track down the members of that band and have them play at my inauguration.
How many other Drills are out there? The chances of me stumbling on that band were remote, which suggests that there are many more waiting for me to discover them.
But the point of this giant footnote is that the genius don’t know Drill. Can we teach the genius? Broaden its horizons past RIAA-sanctioned muzic? I aim to find out.
I’ve read stuff, I’ve talked to Folks Who Know, and I’ve got personal experience. I’m about to drop a health bombshell on you, and I’m not going to cite sources. But I’m right.
Here’s the thing: Exercise doesn’t make you thin.
Sorry, Nautilus, Nordic Trac, Bowflex, and all the rest, exercise doesn’t make you thin. It does make you healthier, stronger, and by all accounts happier. Any one of those effects would be enough to make exercise worthwhile, and you get them all.
But exercise doesn’t make you thinner. Exercise makes you hungry. Exercise gives you the opportunity to get thinner, but whether you do or not is based on how you deal with the hunger. Just yesterday I had one of my best workouts in months and followed it with a second heaping helping of lasagna. I was starving. My heart is stronger, my muscles tighter, my outlook on life a little sunnier, but at the end of the day when the ledger is balanced, I’m no skinnier.
You might have already noticed that when you look at individual episodes, there’s a list of similar posts at the bottom. I had this feature once before and now I have no recollection whatsoever why I turned it off. Maybe I’ll relearn something shortly.
So what the thing does is compare the text, titles, categories, tags, and whatnot of the episodes and comes up with the ones that match the best. The whole thing is tunable, for those inclined to do things right; I just chose some numbers that seemed reasonable. So far, I’d have to say that the code really likes episodes with exclamation points in the titles. I’m good with that.
I just spent about twenty minutes cruising through history, following one episode to the next (ostensibly) related one. It was pretty fun for me, but probably in a you-had-to-be-there way. To be honest, I think this feature is mostly for my entertainment. But you can use it too, if you want.
I’m at Stanley’s right now. It’s a bar that sits high above three of the four rinks at Sharks Ice, where as you might guess the local NHL team would be practicing right now were it not busy not playing.
I came here to get some writing done, but that’s proven difficult. Below me the ice is filled with tykes in hockey gear, skating, falling, getting back up, and moving pucks around. It’s awesome!
Truth be told, those six-year-olds are better hockey players than I am. There’s an odd combination of clumsiness and grace, where a kid will lose the puck, spin, reach and collect the puck, and once on his way again fall over for no reason. Right now the bunch of kids directly below where I sit is running a drill that involves carrying the puck around obstacles, turning back and putting a shot on goal. The coaches provide very light resistance to those ready for it. One kid put a shot on goal, the coach deflected it, and that kid dove after the rebound like it was game seven of the Stanley Cup. Get that kid’s number — he’s going places!
A whistle just blew four times, and all the kids shifted to the next station. There’s a new guy below me who may be the smallest dude on the ice (assuming it’s not a dudette — no telling with all that gear). He is not graceful with the puck. But here’s the thing — Little Guy falls down a lot, but he gets back up. This is probably the best lesson Pee Wee Hockey teaches a kid. (As I typed that he had a harder time than usual getting up, and a coach came over and helped him until he was steady over his skates. His shot went just wide of the goal, which bummed me.)
But back to the falling down/getting up thing. I’m not a parent, but if I were I think this is a lesson I’d want to teach my kids. For my hypothetical daughters soccer would be an option (those kids are tough), but for the boys there’s no alternative at that age. Honestly, I’d prefer that my daughters played hockey as well; it’s safer. And none of the alternatives have ice. You might get knocked down in soccer, but in hockey you will fall, without any help from anyone, over and over. There’s no making excuses, no blaming someone else. Nothing to do but get back up. You’ll fall again, but that’s all right. You’ll get up again. That’s what I’d want my kids to learn.
Over on the left side of this humble media empire you will find a link to Discopants and Haircuts. That link, it seems, is dead, and that makes me sad. The proprietor of that Web property is a right good guy, a gracious host, and an articulate individual.
Were I better at the whole “maintaining-contact-with-people-who-are-awesome” thing, I likely would not have been surprised to find DP&HC was offline. But, well, I suck at that. Dr. Pants is out there, somewhere, and I hereby resolve to restore that connection.
