Yesterday I took my car to get it worked on. In Ballard. Across town. When I find a good shop, I stay with it.

But the point here is that I rode my bike back home, on the Burke-Gilmann trail. The trail goes right next to Gasworks Park, which is a pretty cool place. The grass had just been cut, and the sun was just right, so that all I could think of, gazing across the hilly green velvet was, “Ti-ime for teletubbies! Ti-ime for teletubbies!”

I spent some time laying around on what used to be a concrete wall, but is now more like a concrete thing that’s a foot high. Sat there in the sun. Moved to the shade and sat there, too. And after a while, I became aware that there was a jet-black feral cat by the wall, too, and it wasn’t running away or hissing at me.

When it comes to speaking cat, I’m The Man. In fact, I’m pretty much The Cat, too. It’s all about eye contact and body language. Eventually this feral cat was rubbing up against my hand and wanting to lay in my lap. She was a little, ahem, unwashed, so that didn’t happen. But the episode reminded me of a cat that’s been coming around my house.

For a while this little cat, almost a kitten, would show up around 6pm-ish, wandering through my front yard en route to the alleyway beside my house. It would be a little skittish when I’d open the door, but eventually it was OK with me, and would come over for neck scritches and so forth. This went on for about a week, and then, for another week or so, it didn’t come around.

Then it started showing up around midnight, on my doorstep no less. I’d see its head pop up from below the picture window, right next to where I was watching TV. I’d try not to startle it by opening the door, but that’s what usually happened anyway. It’d take a little coaxing to get it over to where I could give it neck scritches and so forth. But there was one important difference this time: It was wearing a collar. The collar had a tag that said “Tuck.” At least, I hope that’s what it said.

I figured the owners had had some kind of scare, and decided to put a collar on their cat. This went on for another week or so. And then I’d start seeing the cat without the collar. Then with.

Well, today the mystery was solved:

I think they like my yard because it reminds them, in some instinctual way, of the African savannah.

Really great ‘blog entry from thenarrator about education reform.

(I was going to make the Currently Watching: thing link to this movie, but no matter how I search for it, Xangazon won’t show it to me.)

Update: Via boingboing (can anyone get me a date with Xeni Jardin?):

Here’s a video of Billionaires For Bush chanting things like ‘This is what plutocracy looks like!’ The file sizes are huge, considering how small the movies are, but good for a laugh.

The boingboing link above also references a bunch of other video footage of protests and what-not.

200,000 people protested the GOP in NYC on Sunday.

Yeah!

More music:

Ten Hands: ‘I Was Confused.’ It’s Ten Hands at their zany/groovy/social commentarian best. White guys from Denton, TX, who are Frank Zappa fans play Afro-Cuban music about the hypocrisies of American television. Ten Hands, by the way, were the tightest band ever to exist. Some of my best memories involve being in the Ten Hands groovy good-vibe mosh pit of funk.

This was during the Golden Age of Texas Funk, about which I will have more to say later.

thenarrator’s ‘blog made me think about how I never had to ride the short bus, and never had to go to the special class.

I think it was mostly because I never acted out. I didn’t start fights or yell or scream, though I’d probably have felt better if I did. I always assumed that my perspective was wrong, and that there was some kind of reason why kids had to go through this bullshit thing called high school, so it was best for me to try to play along.

I was a test-taking machine. I seldom did homework, and I floated on test scores. I hated doing homework because I knew the stuff already, I didn’t think that non-school time was for school stuff, and if I told my parents about any homework I had, they’d hassle me about it. I’d end up at the kitchen table with my mom humiliating me into doing the work, and I really, really hated that.

Tests. Tests were easy. All you had to do was show up for class, be reasonably attentive, and then you’d know what was going to be on the test. So you’d take the test, break the curve, and everyone would hate you. I never felt skilled or smart or anything, just able to remember a thing or two and then write those things down on tests. What’s so freaking hard about that? Why couldn’t any of those other kids do the same thing? I sauntered through school on a passing grade. C meant ‘average,’ and I was trying to pass as average.

I never went to a ‘special’ class, but I did once end up in the dreaded CDC, or Campus Disciplinary Center. It was because I was late for three detentions in a row. I had been given three detentions for being late to class by about ten seconds. I ‘missed’ the three detentions by being about ten seconds late. And if you miss three detentions, you get CDC.

CDC was a small classroom with five desks along one wall, with partitions between the desks. They’re like cublicles, but the desks point towards the middle of the room. There aren’t any desks along the facing wall, because then there’d be something for you to look at. The teacher says, “This is CDC. You won’t speak. You’ll do work assigned by your teachers.” She hands you a packet of worksheets. “We’ll have a lunch break at 11:07. It’ll last fifteen minutes. Then we’ll come back here and you’ll all sit without speaking until the day is over.”

The whole of school was bullshit like that. However, once I had been to CDC and survived, I knew I didn’t need to care any more. Not long after, I dropped out the first time.

And after I dropped out, the whole structure of my life came apart. It turned out I needed high school as much as I hated it; I fell into the kind of depression that usually accompanies the death of a spouse.

And that, my friends, is irony.

I was going to hold off on ‘blogging another thing I’d pulled off cassette with the aid of my nifty new cassette deck, but I’m just too excited about it, because it’s one of my favorite songs ever. My enthusiasm over this tune is amplified by the fact that I can’t find it anywhere on gnutella or any such service, and that’s because this is the rarest of the rare David Sylvian limited edition CD singles.

If you know what I’m talking about, then you already know what I’m talking about. This is a dub of a dub of a dub of David Sylvian’s ‘Pop Song,’ which you simply can’t find anywhere, unless you were wise enough to have purchased it when you first saw it at Record Exchange in Houston in the late 80s, and you held it in your hands, but it was an import, and you couldn’t afford it, and this was the same trip to the record store where you saw Negativland’s ‘U2‘ CD, and thought about buying it, too, but you didn’t because you were spending your money on.. well, you can’t remember what you spent your money on now, but you were clearly AN IDIOT.

Ahem. ‘Pop Song’ is so perfect, simultaneously simple and complicated, dense arrangement and production, avant-garde toe-tapper. Sylvian should be given an award or something.

Today I went to a garage sale. For $10 I got a cassette deck and a turntable. The turntable was an upgrade for me, and I haven’t had a cassette deck since my last thrift store one died.

But the point here is that I’ve pulled a few things off cassette and into the digital domain. I’ve had access to my landlord’s deck, but I didn’t want to pull it out of his stereo rack and mess with it. It’s a nice one, too, so the temptation has been great. But now, I can do it guilt-free with my own deck.

So I’m going to be ‘blogging some tunes.

The first comes with a story: Back in 1986, I was going to school to learn how to be a recording studio engineer. While I was at that school, I met a guy who turned out to be a good friend over many, many years. This friend of mine is Brett, who I wrote about not long ago. The point of this story, however, is that he had a band called The Bends, and he asked me if I wanted to jam with the band. Naturally, I did. We both had work to do in our recording classes, so we shared projects to a degree. We recorded ourselves, shared the responsibility, and turned in two sets of projects.

This was one of the things we turned in. It’s the kind of thing that happens when your time in the studio is 1-5am and you’ve had too much Mountain Dew. It demonstrates all the freaky crazy stuff you can do with 2″ tape. It also happens to be enjoyable enough to present here. I apologize for the fact that I used to enjoy the sound of overdriven reverb inputs, foolishly thinking they’d make up for what I thought was missing from the tracked material.

The only thing at the proper speed and in the right direction is the guitar solo, played by Mr. Pat Stallings. The tune is ‘Never Let Anything Mechanical Know You’re In A Hurry,’ which was written on a sign over the 24-track deck.

There used to be a really really long remix version of this, where we spliced together three mixes of it with various bits muted in and out in odd places. Thank me for not being able to find that one.

Read about Sheri Dew, who will be opening the Republican National Convention with a prayer.

In the recent past, she has made very confused comparisons between the gay marriage movement and Nazism. It’s funny: She means to say that opposing gay marriage is the moral equivalent to opposing Nazism back at the time of WWII, but what she actually ends up saying is that supporting ‘traditional family values’ is equivalent to supporting Nazism.

No wonder she was chosen to start off a convention to nominate George W. Bush for president… She’s about as eloquent as he is, and as ignorant of history, too: The Nazis put gays in the concentration camps before they imprisoned the Jews.

However, it’s nice to see the RNC expressing its diversity: Choosing a Mormon over an evangelical is a good way to demonstrate the wide, vibrant spectrum of spiritual endeavour present in that political party.

And in other muckraking arenas: I’m diggin’ this entry by the freewayblogger. It’s the Revolutionary War Veterans For Truth.

You know what I love?

I love to come home from the grocery store with a bag of groceries and some antipasto from the deli counter, put the stuff away, start some water boiling in the pot, slice up some canteloupe into what a friend of mine calls ‘canteloupe steaks’ and salt ‘em (I’m from the south, OK?), put the hot dog in the boiling water and turn off the burner, plate up the antipasto (that rice-size pasta, chunked artichoke hearts, sliced red bell peppers and olives, oil and vinegar) with the fruit, get a dog bun and slather it with a bead of mustard from the squirt bottle, wait around a while for the dog to get plenty hot, pour the last of the chocolate soy milk in a glass and mix in some plain soy milk to fill it up, fork that dog out of the water and into the bun, sit down on the couch with this plate of food in front of me, and watch ‘Kill Bill Volume 2′ on DVD.

“Do you consider me sadistic?”

Profound irony alert! This is a spam email I got:

From: greenwoodj@recyclermail.com
Subject: Re: details about your organization

“An Arthur Anderson Online Panel reveals that 85% of online users say that broadcast email advertisements have led to a purchase.”

Arthur Anderson. 85%. Yeah.