1708 Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man

It’s August 6, 2105. Now that the radiation levels have calmed to tolerable, the archeologists and anthropologists from Saturn are wandering through what used to be the City of Chicago.

The nuclear war left the city in ruins, but scientists from outer space are trying to determine what life was like on earth before the great destruction.

They come upon what once was 2120 South Michigan Avenue and stop before the wreckage of the Chess Record Company.  Sticking out from the debris, they spot what seems to be a slip of paper.

Yes, it is!

Carefully -- very very carefully -- they extract it and return with it to their flying saucer.  The translation computer scans it and prints out these words:

“Hooka Tooka My Soda Cracker.

Does your mama chaw tuhbacker.

If your mama chaws tuhbacker, then

Hooka Tooka My Soda Cracker.”

From this, the landing party will attempt to reconstruct life in the American Midwest in the 21st century.

The Dead Planet Scroll!

“Hooka Tooka my soda cracker…” is not exactly great literature.  It’s just a song.

So is this from Bob Dylan’s “Hey Mr. Tambourine man:

“In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you.”

Parts of the nose-in-air literati went into anaphylactic overdrive at the announcement that Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

All the Monday morning quarterbacks start their public floggings with some paean to Dylan the lyricist, Dylan the musician, Dylan the cultural force.  Member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Grammy winner. All that.  And then, the punch line: “But he’s not a writer.”

The singer songwriter tradition is as American as a do nothing congress or the Great American Novel.

Think of some of the luminaries:

Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, Joni Mitchell, Lionel Ritchie, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, John Denver, Paul Simon, Usher, Hank Williams, Harry Chapin, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, Randy Newman, Buddy Holly, James Taylor, Tracy Chapman.

Or go back a couple of generations and think about some of the towering songwriters who had the grace to not sing: Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Stephen Sondheim, Alan Jay Lerner

Granted Mitchell and Cohen are Canadian and Lennon and McCartney are British.  But all were huge hits in the US.

Nobel prizes for anything are generally awarded to people you never heard of.  Some of them become household names… Albert Einstein… James Watson. Most of them don’t.  Anyone remember who Svetlana Alexievch is?

She’s a writer from Belarus.  She wrote about Russia’s women soldiers in World War II.  She won the Nobel for literature one year ago.  

Who’s that again?

So when the awards committee votes for someone who is not stilted, does not sound like he lived in the 1700s or 1800s even though he’s alive today, the stilted among the living -- pretending it’s still 1864 -- don their smoking jackets, grab their glass of sherry and their whalebone cigarette holder and pose for pictures with captions about how the literature prize has been diluted or devalued.

Nonsense.

Today’s Quote:

--“Only when I can borrow a pen as good as yours.” -- Woody Guthrie answering the question “do you always write your songs that fast?”

Shrapnel:

--If nothing else, this year’s winner shook up the stuffed shirt crowd of believers who won’t read anything unless it’s so old it’s moved into public domain.  A lot of Dylan sounds dated today, but not dated enough to please those who read nothing but poetry past its use-by date. Dylan is not nearly stuffy enough… yet.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1707 Attack of the Killer Cellphones

By now you know to return your Samsung Note 7 for a refund or trade it in for a more benign model. Pretty good reason: they can catch fire and explode.

Improvised explosive devices for the masses.  You don’t have to hide a pressure cooker filled with BBs or waste a perfectly good alarm clock when planning your terrorist attack in Boston or Times Square.  And you can hide a telephone almost anywhere.

Weaponize! Mobilize! Take our country back.  

Well, it was a good thought. But despite the efforts of the National Android Association, we now have Note 7 control.  Even though cell phones don’t kill people.  People kill people.  

(Cellphones are said merely to give you brain cancer. Unproven -- but we know, don’t we. It started as the Great Nokia Conspiracy and spread at 4g speed to all the manufacturers. Or was it Motorola?  Blackberry? No, no, not Blackberry.  Canadians are largely nonviolent. With them you only get occasional worldwide data blackouts, and usually only when they try to upgrade their software, “Gutenberg 2.0.”)

So, all the Note 7s have been recalled.  And Obama is personally going house to house forcing holdouts to turn over their weapons.

How much did those things cost?  It’s really hard to tell because most customers bought them on interest-free two year agreements.

Agreements.  We used to call them contracts. But the carriers are offering “no contract” voice and data plans.  So now we have no contracts, just... agreements.

The actual price was between $600 and $700.  Kind of expensive for a low ranking plebe terrorist just starting his career.  But with an “agreement…” well.  Easy enough to get hold of one.

As of this writing, Samsung doesn’t know why the phones can overheat and start burning.  That seems odd. After all, they designed the things.  Except for the parts they are said to have borrowed from Apple.

The company takes the phones into the lab and tries to duplicate the conditions under which they combust. As of this writing, they haven’t been able to.

And that’s because they’re looking in the wrong places.  

They call these devices “smartphones” for a reason.  They’re smart.  And belligerent. They won’t explode while physicists and electronic engineers start playing with them.  The phones hibernate on the lab table.  But when one investigator slips one into his pocket and walks out with it?

Boom!

You’re not allowed to take these things on airplanes.  So?  Who needs an airplane to fly when the explosion will send you into the air? No peanuts on this kind of flight.  But there’s plenty of legroom… if your legs stay attached.

So do you think Samsung is behind this? Of course not. The phones are invaded by interplanetary aliens.  And Samsung has no beef with Americans.  If they exported the phones to North Korea, you might have a case.  But they don’t… so you don’t.

You still have your Note 7?  Here’s a suggested dialog.

You: OK Google.

Phone: Listening.

You: where’s the nearest pizza joint?

Phone:  There’s a Papa John’s two blocks north. Destination on your right.

You: No. I said pizza.

Phone: Oh. Sorry.  There’s a Ray’s Original three blocks south.  Destination on your left.

You: Where’s the nearest trauma center?

Phone: Don’t sweat the small stuff. You won’t need one after I finish with you because when I do, you’ll stay finished.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1706 Send in the (real) Clowns

NEWROSES PA --  (Wessays™) -- Creepy guys in clown costumes?  Not here.  But we’ve developed another scary phenomenon, creepy guys in football costumes. The NewRoses Police Department --the NRPD or “Nerp” as it’s known locally -- reported sightings by the dozen just this past weekend.

They invade along with throngs of creepy cult followers almost every weekend in the fall.  And it’s the cult followers who are the big problem, though less scary individually than those in costume.

While those in player garb tend to be large and lumbering, they seem to keep to themselves.  Good thing, too because they’re outsized, heavy and fast- moving.  And they seem not to like one another much. They’re forever fighting. They knock each other down. They hurt themselves and each other chasing what looks like a small pigskin covered blimp around the field.

We suspect there are frequent cases of brain injuries as they clash. But it’s been theorized that people in these costumes -- they are people, after all -- have brains in their butts, kind of like some dinosaurs.

There’s some doubt about that, though. Why would they wear protective headgear if there’s nothing up there?  Tradition?  Maybe.

The real trouble comes from the camp followers, rowdy louts who live in tents and Winnebagos spending from Friday afternoon until early Sunday morning with bottles to their lips and Sunday afternoons hung over to the point where they can’t leave town and flood the little country hospital with alcohol poison cases.

So many, in fact, that they have to close parts of the building because the influx of the poisoned disturbs customers at the hospital’s main business, the first floor Jiffy Lube.

The town’s college has a football team, The NewRoses University Centipedes.  The name is said to come from members’ ability to shoot themselves in the foot but still move on the spares.  They’ve even built a huge holding pen -- a concentration camp of sorts -- to house visitors.  It’s called Centipede Stadium.

But the stadium holds only 107,000 people along with the costumed guys who have benches to park their brains on and a large lawn on which to frolic.

Scary. They frighten little children. They frighten dogs. But somehow, they don’t frighten the herd of drunken groupies.

Fortunately, this is a seasonal phenomenon.  So the whole thing dies down when all the Centipedes have shot holes in every one of their feet.  

Shrapnel:

-- With the political season coming down to the wire… we’ve heard some words far too often.  Shackle and unleash are two of the worst.  There should be a moratorium except when unshackling a jailbird or unleashing a dog.

--Biographer Peter Ames Carlin’s biography of Paul Simon will be published in a few days.  And it’s bound to make waves because it paints the singer/songwriter as tyrannical, scheming and nasty and not as the dreamer-musical genius he’s spent a lifetime trying to play.  The truth at last.

Grapeshot:

-Amazon.com has just sent around a note proudly announcing that the price of Carlin’s book has been lowered by two cents which it is refunding and setting me to wonder where to spend it all.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1705 The Case for Sloth

Joey the Millennial goes by the book.  Gets out of high school (barely,) gets out of college (on a wing and a prayer) and floods prospective employers with his resume, which is both long of wind and short of substance.

And like many in his demographic, the torrent of resumes results in no job offers or even interviews. So it’s job pick up time:  temp agencies, part time grunt work. Part of the world of today’s fake economic recovery.

Along with the fakery is the very real threat of fines if the gods of Obamacare spot you, so Joey -- embarrassed Joey -- goes to the Medicaid office and applies.  “They were very nice,” he says. “They grilled me for an hour or so, inspected my invisible tax forms, all that.”  And presto, health insurance materializes.

Any doc. Any reason. Any time.  Great. At least there’ll be no government pecking around looking for a fresh face to fine.

Eventually, Joey finds work, a job that comes with the usual benefits of the recovery: Bad hours. Long days. Short weeks.  But there’s Medicaid in case he has a nosebleed or a broken leg.

That is, there was.  As soon as a month of earnings looks like it’s going to exceed the maximum annual income, Medicaid kicks him out.

Joey sees he’s $100 a month too rich on an income of under $10-thousand.  A smart operator would ask for reduced hours (bosses seem all too glad to reduce hours for anyone who asks and many who don’t.) Then re-apply for Medicaid.

In the meantime, Healthcare.gov offers him a host of “customized plans to meet your needs and your budget.”  That will suck up about 30% of his income.

Does this make any sense?  A guy who wants to work. Can work. Is working but isn’t making little enough for insurance help but enough to put him into the poverty pool by price gouging.

So why work?  Just go back into the poverty pool, reapply for Medicaid and live off the land.  By which we mean food stamps, Medicaid, and “Human Services.”

Note that when first created, the social parachute was called “home relief.”  At the time that was an adequate and accurate title.  And it applied to a certain narrow segment of the population.  When it was renamed “welfare,” the segment widened.  Now it’s Human Services, which -- technically -- means all of us. To make it more accurate, why don’t they just drop the “Human” part and call it “Services.”

This corner of the internet has no problem supporting people in need.  But as in the case of Joey, sometimes the meaning of “need” needs broadening.

TODAY’S QUOTE: “I’m not a quitter.” --Donald Trump when asked if his crass and sexist statements will see him leave the presidential race.  Someone ask Richard Nixon how the phrase worked out for him.

SHRAPNEL:

--Some Republicans of sound mind want Trump to leave the ticket, possibly allowing Pence the top spot. That would be worse. Pence is a creationist, has approved defunding Planned Parenthood, tried to curb LGBT rights, wants Roe v Wade overturned and calls himself a “born again evangelical Catholic,” a position that the Vatican never heard of.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1704 The Nine Lives of Radio

Once again, the know-it-alls are predicting the death of radio.  It’s happened before.  Many times.  And each time, radio surprised the know-it-alls by bouncing cat-like off the medical examiner’s autopsy table to chase a mouse.

FM was rumored to be the death of AM. Didn’t happen.

TV was rumored to be the death of terrestrial radio. Didn’t happen.

The internet was rumored to be…

The iPod was rumored to be…

The ageing out of the audience was rumored to be…

Interference from the power grid was rumored to be…

Interference from neon signs and cell phones were rumored to be…

Too many commercials were rumored to be…

Over-niche-ing was rumored to be…

The mass acquisition of stations was rumored to be…

Pay radio satellites were rumored to be...

That’s eleven lives.  Once you pass nine, the count resets.

Seriously, radio has become a pile of scrap. But dead it ain’t.  People still have it on. (Digression:  when they say “you’re listening to…” they often err.  You may have it on, but you may not be listening.)

The industry has been fretting for years now about declining audience, sinking revenue and increased competition.

Creative types with a few bucks aren’t going to pull the transmitter plug and walk away.  There are new rows to hoe.

Creative types who can sustain a few years of losses for eventual gains… we should have said.

To buy a station now will cost you less than when Clear Channel/iHeart, CBS, Cumulus, Entercom and others were picking up properties like a Dyson picks up pebbles and other debris that no one really ever encounters on the rug.  At some point, that dust bin has to be emptied.  Now may be the time.

Let’s bust some myths:

--AM sounds lousy.  This is half true. But it’s fine for talk and for music with people who are used to less than pristine audio.

--No one is listening. Wrong-o. Radio still is the medium of choice for most Americans.

--Pay to Play works.  Yes and no. Yes, cable and satellite TV has conditioned us to accept satellite radio and the automakers are pushing us to sign up using nifty freebees and long term trials.

But there’s a difference.  With pay TV, everyone sells content to local service companies which then sell to you along with region-specialized services. Pay radio tries to be both content and hardware providers. Hence, little or no local programming.

--Radio is only for old folks.  Wrong if you train young ears.

So the industry is taking a pounding. And there may be a long- needed thinning of the herd.  But dead? No. There are seven lives to go to get to the next number divisible evenly by nine.

Today’s Quote: “I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and a radio.” -- Rodney Dangerfield.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1703 Not Ready for NASCAR

Sometimes, you have to learn new skills.  And sometimes as you do, you have to take some moderately hard knocks.

Like when the new shower head you install falls off the wall pipe and flusters you long enough to cause a small flood in the bathroom.

Like when the car won’t start and you open the hood and look in and have no idea what any of that stuff is.

Like when you re-set the date on your calendar watch and don’t realize until much later that you have inadvertently also set the clock back 45 minutes and arrive somewhere an hour late.

Like when a temporary health problem reduces your ability to walk and you find yourself in the grocery store trying to use one of those electrified sit-down carts.

Unrequested advice #1: the previous guy on the motor cart didn’t plug it back in. The battery gauge shows five out of five bars until two minutes of run time and while you’re heading for the bread aisle, you’re stranded among 500 bottles of nail polish.  Please please plug the thing back in when you finish with it.

Some observations:

--By turning the machine off when it needs a charge and stalls, waiting a moment and turning it back on, you can move maybe eight or ten feet as you search for a wall plug.

--People in the fancy grocery are less likely than those in the discount shop to give you room to pass.

--Cashiers who normally tend to overfill bags at checkout will give you more of them with less stuff in each than if you had a pushcart.

--These things need rearview mirrors.

You think the merchants will spend up to a grand each for these things because they’re kind and considerate?  That may be a part of it.  But here are some more

Observations:

--You will spend more time in the store when you use one of these.

--You will travel at a more leisurely pace and visit more aisles than you normally would.

--When you see more, you will buy more.

So, it’s not just convenience and altruism.

But there are disadvantages:

--The gizmo that takes your credit card is usually too high to reach seated.

--You can’t operate the self checkout machines without standing.

--You can’t reach the high shelves.

--Unless your market has sliding doors on its coolers, you can’t open them for the milk or the juice or the Coffee Mate or the eggs if you get close enough to reach them.

--While you can put a week’s worth of groceries in the basket as you travel, once bagged, the stuff no longer fits.

But the real problem is learning to drive these machines.  They have an admirably small turning radius.  But maneuvering takes practice.  There’s no Driver Ed; no license required.

You have to rehearse “Y” turns in aisles where hardly anyone goes.  The place where they display toaster ovens and coffee makers is usually customer free.  The worst locations:  Greeting cards, vitamins and bottled drinks.  People congregate in knots and ponder their choice of birthday greetings or the size and strength of fish oil capsules. (If you spent as much time studying as you do picking an anniversary card, you would have passed Algebra.)

On your maiden voyage, you will

--Crash headlong into something.

--Sideswipe something else.

--Leap out of your seat in surprise the first couple of times you squeeze the reverse lever and the warning beep sounds much louder than you remember -- if you remember it at all.

But it’s not all bad.  From your seat, you get to see a lot of nice backsides without people noticing and thinking you're a pervert.

I’m Wes Richards, not Richard Petty or Dale Earnhardt. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016

1702 Remembering Oscar Brand

1702 Remembering Oscar Brand

So an old man you might never have heard of has died of pneumonia. It happens every day.  When we spoke over the past summer, he sounded a little creaky.  But at 96, you expect that.  And he replied instantly that I was sounding a little creaky myself even though wet behind the ears and decades his junior.

Oscar Brand, a Midwest Canadian with a Brooklyn upbringing and a New York education… who recorded a zillion albums.  Who recorded his radio show in his living room, first on 12th Street, then on 14th… and later at a suburban house of the kind he would regularly mock. Oscar was an imp.  A tall imp, but an imp nonetheless.

That radio show on WNYC?  It was the longest running program with a single host in the history of the medium.  Seventy years. Oh, recently, he played a lot of records instead of live performers.  But in the beginning, everyone gathered in those living rooms to pick and commit attempted singing.  Later, Oscar would edit the tapes and hand carry them to the Municipal Building downtown for broadcast.

A small and devoted audience. Most of us who listened also sang and played on it.  Brand wrote so many songs, he lost count.  Bawdy songs. Political songs. Work songs.  Parodies of spirituals. Parodies of parodies.  Songs about the weather and the news. Songs about war.  Songs for peace.  Songs about history. All with grace and good humor.

He played guitar -- marginally -- and sang with enthusiasm.  Once he said of his earliest days “I listened to my recordings and I couldn’t believe how bad I was.”  He wasn’t.  He had that wink-wink charm, the look that went with it and could put over a song with the best of them.  Because he was with the best of them.

His stuff kind of snuck up on you.  Did he really say that??  He was Howard Stern-lite long before Howard Stern was born.  A pioneer of getting away with murder in that low-key Manitoba-comes-to-Midtown way.  His lyrics were graceful in an inelegant way or were they elegant in an awkward way?  Or both.

No show off, he. Except that second apartment’s living room had flocked red wall paper and lawn furniture.  No one was going to fall asleep on the “couch.”  The Chaise? That was a different story. The house on Baker Hill Road, on the less prosperous side of Great Neck NY, was relatively sedate.

As was the lifestyle in later years.  Not that he had been a party boy. Funny guys on stage and on the air tend to be serious people when the microphone is off.  The Herald Tribune’s Art Buchwald said you could always spot the humor columnist in the newsroom… he was the guy scowling at his typewriter while everyone else joked around.

Oscar was serious about things he believed important. Human rights at ground level, the right to organize, corporate dumbness, wars, famines, plagues and broken doorbells.

We once compared the number of different union cards he carried.  He won.

The titans of the New York City Folk Scare have been dropping off the planet in recent years. Pete Seeger, Fred Hellerman, Ronnie Gilbert, Jean Ritchie along with some opening act types -- Lionel Kilberg and Eric Darling to name two -- all gone.

Some advice: if you have a friend who has lived for almost a century, make the final call before the final call.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2016