Aloha

I was researching hotels that are by my house and I came across this thorough account of one:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dr_memory/sets/72157594404253408/

If you look at the “slideshow” you miss out on the captions this guy provides for each snapshot. Click each pic one by one to read the funny remarks. It makes me think of that episode of “The Office” when they shine the black light in the hotel room. “Those stains are either blood, semen, or urine.” “God I hope it’s urine.” It's a bit of a letdown to see that The Aloha Motel has the same zip code that I do. I’m always glad to learn a little bit more about my neighborhood, though.

Life's Too Good

While watching five hockey games in a 36-hour period over this past weekend, there were points when it was almost like I was hovering somewhere above my body, watching myself watch hockey. There were two college games at Blue Cross Arena on Friday, followed by the Sabres game on television, and then Saturday it was one more college game down at the Arena followed by another Sabres game on TV. During both Sabres games I think the realization hit us all at the same time. Someone would comment on what the rest of us were thinking, that it’s really weird to watch that much hockey. We saw 324 shots on goal. There is no way of knowing how many dump-ins, how many offsides, and how many face offs we might have seen. Weird. The NCAA tournament was great. I’m glad that Maine is representing the East. They play Michigan State in the frozen four and although Ryan Miller went there and the Spartans have three guys from Buffalo, I have to stick with Maine. Another totally surreal part of the weekend was the mascots. The Maine Black Bears have a mascot named Bananas. He’s a black bear. Named Bananas. It means that every time he does a lap around the ice during the intermissions wearing his personalized jersey you have to convince yourself over again that he’s not a gorilla. “He is a black bear and I’m not crazy… He is a black bear and I’m not crazy…”

I also hit two record shops over the weekend while the family was away. The Record Archive on East has quite a substantial record collection and a couple of experts on hand. Most of their collection you can’t even get to yourself, but the less collectible stuff is in bins by letter of the alphabet. There were quite a few people digging around getting in each other’s way and one gobshite who was trying to show the guy behind the counter how much he knew about old records. There was a box of 7-inch punk singles on the counter that I went through that made an impression on me. The artwork was all cartoons or photocopied pictures in black and white of whatever the band must have thought most gruesomely or offensively captured what they were trying to get across. The thought that bands would press these records and pass them out or sell them at shows and maybe some kid would collect them and cherish them for a week or two is so cool to me. That’s punk! I should have bought one. I picked up a Pete Townshend and a Cheap Trick album instead. On Sunday I went to Lakeside and bought a Sugarcubes record. Lakeside has more newly released stuff on vinyl. The Sufjan Stevens state-themed records for Illinois and Michigan were there and the artwork was incredible. Buying that new stuff on vinyl considering the turntable I’ve got would be senseless, but the used Sugarcubes album fit my vague criteria for something that would be particularly fun to listen to at my dining room table. I think “Life’s Too Good” came out in different colors. Mine is green.

Lest anyone think it was all fun, I finished our income tax return on Saturday morning in a quiet, peaceful, and sun-filled house. I think Mark Twain said something one time about it not being work if a body isn’t forced to do something in the middle of a chaotic and noisy house. Or maybe I’m thinking of Roger Miller when he said that you can’t change film in a car with a kid on your back wearing roller skates. Anyway, I felt so civilized going over the forms and enjoying my cup of coffee, Maxwell House should have shot the whole scene for a commercial.

Sunday the family was reunited and we went over to my sister’s house for my dad’s birthday party. We had the sunshine and the growlers of beer, the only thing missing on the front porch was a new mix CD and another five degrees centigrade.

Can you hear that singing? Sounds like gold.

I am really enjoying this spring. I am much more an autumn guy than a spring guy. Spring usually makes me anxious. In the fall, I’m just thankful for every warm day that slips in, I enjoy the autumn colors, and I like being able to cozy in a bit. On the other hand, I always try to rush spring. I wear short-sleeved shirts too early and I get crushed when April is frigid and snowy. Usually, we try to have happy hours on my sister’s front porch the first few temperate days of spring. More than once they’ve ended with me shivering, underdressed in a hockey sweater, finally giving up and going inside, and cursing this part of the country. I’m not sure why this spring is different. There may be a number of reasons. We had a serious snowfall on St. Patrick’s Day and I had a blast making a snowman with Syd the next day. The Sabres are looking great for the playoffs. I have been almost completely insulated from the details of March Madness, for whatever reason. I haven’t even had a chance to make fun of the diapered dandies, the ones who weren’t invited to the dance, or who will wear the glass slipper, cliché, cliché, cliché, blah, blah, blah. The groundhog saw his shadow. Daylight savings time came early. There is something new about Alex Rodriguez in the New York papers every day and no one has said a single word to me about it. Coily the Spring Sprite hasn’t been up to any of his old tricks.

I wish I updated this blog more often. I’ve been really busy and all the thoughts I have about what I want to say basically die on the keyboard. I am sick of hearing about The Family Guy all the time, but I think Carol Burnett is insane for suing them. Alberto Gonzales proved that he had no respect for the law long before President Bush made him the top law enforcement agent in the country, so they are reaping what they have sown. But why point out the obvious? As Morrissey says, the world is full of crashing bores, and I must be one. Speaking of which, in the back of my mind I have a Morrissey tribute, plus a report on the state of my backyard after the thaw. I hope I am a tough enough editor on myself.

One of the great things about The Band is the uniqueness of every person in the group and what they brought musically. I think when the music speaks to you on such an emotional level you overlook personal flaws or negatives and focus just on the beauty of the music and find truth in that. That’s why when I look at this video I still think that Rick Danko is a stud (and why I don’t hold a grudge against JRR). This is from the Classic Album series about the making of “The Band” album. Now there’s no excuse for anybody not to be able to diagram Sammy Davis Jr’s pool house. Sherner explained to me how Danko plays this song like a bass player and there is a much simpler way to play this tune on a guitar than we’re seeing here. I don’t remember the specifics. Maybe Jeffy will come on here and set it straight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbznWv6Jko

The Band is just as great in the spring as it is in the fall. Cheers to the butcher from Simcoe, Ontario.

Snow’s gonna come and front’s gonna bite
My old car froze up last night
Ain’t no reason to hang my head

I could wake up in the morning dead

Light A Candle For The Man From Lowell

Jack Kerouac would have been 80 on Monday. I tried several times to write something on Monday that didn’t sound pretentious and gave up. I’ve always admired him and I enjoyed the two Kerouac books I’ve read, but Kerouac is one of those iconic figures that inspire some people to compose odes, and I’m in no position to do that. But I will take a beatnik over a hippie any day of the week.

I searched out City Lights Books when I was in San Francisco quite a few years ago and bought Dennise a book of Kerouac’s letters as well as “Fever Pitch” by Nick Hornby, which I started to read at a bar next door called Vesuvios. I was drinking some sort of liquored up coffee with lemon peel and the third one had lipstick on the glass. Depending on whether you are a glass half-full or half-empty type of person, it was either one or the other, and I told myself I wasn’t going to let it ruin the experience. Regardless, it’s something I can obviously recall with quite a bit of clarity. At a beat poetry reading in Japhy Ryder’s place drinking tea with a bunch of loose girls, you wouldn’t notice lipstick on a glass. When you’re a tourist drinking coffee in a tourist place at tourist prices it makes it that much harder to not be self conscious about the whole thing. Worrying about how clean the glasses are is about as far away from Zen as you can get. It’s the litmus test for beatniks. There are always plenty of corporate hellholes that you can count on to provide sterile glassware, if that’s what you’re into.

Kerouac came up with his own type of Strat-O-Matic baseball when he was a kid. It’s been inaccurately reported as being a “fantasy baseball league,” but it was more like Strat-O-Matic, for those old enough to remember. The New York Public Library has it as part of its collection. When we lived in New York, I think they were displaying it at some point, but we were too late to catch it. Time Out New York actually had a picture of the cards. Each team was named after a make of car and was done in different color ink. I always got a kick out of this because it kills the stereotype of the Beat Generation being too far out for organized sports, or too cool for obsessive juvenile hobbies. Strat-O-Matic baseball gave Kerouac more depth.

The new Uncut came in the mail yesterday with The Who on the cover, featuring primarily Keith Moon. With my subscription I’ve come to think that Uncut takes more trips down memory lane than Joe Franklin, but I digress. The Moon feature includes many recollections of the late Patent British Exploding Drummer from friends and acquaintances, including Roger Daltrey. Although I haven’t read the entire thing yet, the bombshell to me is that Daltrey recalls the story of Moon driving the Rolls into the pool of the Holiday Inn in Flint, Michigan on Moon’s 21st birthday as being one hundred percent true. Moon biographer Tony Fletcher went to great lengths to disprove that this really happened. The fact that Roger was there and so strenuously insists that it happened is pretty dramatic stuff, especially if it’s not true. I haven’t been to Fletcher’s Jamming! website since the magazine came out or had time to dig out my copy of “Dear Boy” to conduct an investigation yet, but either way I am even more impressed with Keith Moon. Four decades after the legendary event, people are still talking about it. The fortieth anniversary of Keith Moon’s 21st birthday party is August 23. Everyone is invited over to my place to break something.

#21 XxXxxxx

The Bills getting rid of Willis McGahee is probably the right move. The sad thing is it makes me look back on the Tom Donohoe era and contemplate once again what an utter waste it was. I’m glad that Levy and Jauron are building this team through the draft and focusing on the offensive line. I think they deserve our patience. There hasn’t been any real enthusiasm about the Buffalo Bills since Flutie left and Donohoe came in. Maybe this team will put something together as soon as next season. Ralph Wilson has been an old man for a long time, but with the direction the league is headed, this is the first time I’ve really worried about the future of the Bills in town. It’s always in the back of my mind whenever I think about the team these days.

Not to sound like I’m defending Gary Matthews for probably using human growth hormone, but it’s hard not to have a little sympathy for the guy when you consider the free ride that Shawne Merriman got both from the media and the NFL itself. If anything, the four game suspension that Merriman got only built his credentials because of the numbers he put up in a shortened season. Apparently no one finds it relevant that Merriman was juiced for part of that season. If anything, I feel sorry for Jason Taylor that he had to contemplate losing the NFL Defensive Player of the Year award to a convicted cheater. Merriman’s first game back after his suspension was against Buffalo, and you would think that no one had ever made a tackle before by the way he celebrated on the field. With the praise he gets, maybe you can’t blame him for thinking that the football season didn't actually carry on the four weeks he was gone.

I often preach the values of the following presentation to my daughter with no success. Perhaps it will make an impression on your family:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvVhm0-gyC0

When the dinner hour at home is treated with a certain amount of graciousness and ceremony, it can be memorable. There is no family so poor, but that the evening meal can be eaten in an atmosphere of warmth, and gentleness. There is no family so busy, but that it can come together in the evening for a dinner date, which will give its members something to look back upon with happiness all their days.

Tough Talk

Time once again to add another disgrace to the legacy of the Bush administration. The Walter Reed Army Medical Center fiasco is the next logical point on the timeline that includes no weapons of mass destruction, inadequate troop levels in Iraq, lack of body armor for soldiers, Abu Grahib, and billions of dollars unaccounted for in the war and rebuilding effort. One point that will never occur on the timeline is the point when flag-waving evangelicals begin to demand the most basic level of competence from this administration. If wounded veterans in squalid conditions aren’t enough to produce a backlash from the conservative base, then nothing will, short of Bush suddenly reversing his pledge to protect marriage from homosexuals.

If the playoffs were to start today, Toronto would be the eighth seed and play Buffalo in the first round. I would hate to see this happen because I think it would clearly turn into a bloodbath like the Buffalo series against Philadelphia last year. Toronto would be incredibly overmatched by Buffalo and I’m concerned about the Sabres making it out of the first round with everybody healthy.

My frustration with the Bush administration is equal to my frustration with the Bettman administration. Neither is able to recognize its failures. In the Sabres/Canadiens game last Friday, Thomas Vanek had a breakaway towards an empty net in the waning seconds of a game that Montreal could not possibly win. Defenseman Sheldon Souray gave chase. In Bettman’s NHL, it’s expected that Souray would slash Vanek on the wrist. He did. Just as in Bettman’s NHL, it’s expected that Cam Janssen is going to go mercenary on Tomas Kaberle. It’s all part of the game in Bettman’s NHL. Luckily Vanek’s wrist did not get broken, because the top scorer on the top team in the league getting his wrist broken on an empty-net goal doesn't merit a second though in Bettman’s NHL.

It’s trivial to compare sports with war, but in both cases you’ve got leaders who talk tough but can’t fulfill the role of real men, which is protecting the people you’ve been sworn to protect.

Syrup, Beer & Donuts

I was granted 24 hour leave this past weekend and enjoyed some fine recreation. Saturday night was spent at Phil and Mary’s Camp for Worn Out Thirysomethings along with five friends for pulled pork sandwiches, mac-n-cheese, and Sabres hockey. Luckily I was able to fight off sleep during the first period of the hockey game and make it to a bedtime of 11:00. My two fellow skiers from that afternoon didn’t stay up quite so late. Perhaps if I had been offered any Cisco I might have crashed for good much sooner. Being parents who have forgotten how to sleep in, we were up at 7:00 the following morning and beat the rush to Cartwright’s Maple Inn pancake house. We rookies were put to shame by Hauer, who packed away eight buckwheat pancakes.

I have decided relatively recently that I am not going to have anything to do with “pancake syrup” ever again. There is a reason that Aunt Jemima can’t call its product “maple syrup,” and that is because it is total crap made up primarily of corn syrup. I only use real parmigiano reggiano as well. No more Kraft parmesan cheese for me. I think the real stuff is worth it. I just wish that I could afford to drink Saranac all the time, not for the cache of the brand, but just for the quality of the beer. Some of Dennise’s extended family rips on me for drinking Stroh’s, Genny, or PBR, and I make no apologies for it. If a beer snob who drinks Harpoon regularly thinks I’m a slob for drinking PBR, I can accept that. I just won’t make any apologies for not drinking a more heavily marketed beer. You will never convince me that Coors or Budweiser is superior to Pabst. There is nothing wrong with Budweiser, but let’s dispense with the idea that it’s the kind of beers.

Speaking of marketing and maple syrup, I hate all the Dunkin Donuts commercials. They are on during Sabres games constantly. Let’s run down the list:

“Human Interest Stories” – Premise apparently is that human interest stories are an addictive new feature of television and people are gradually able to pull themselves away long enough to go out and fill up on donuts. Sorry, I guess I missed something here. I didn’t realize this new trend was going on, so I can’t identify. I know a similar spot about reality television would have been timely about ten years ago. Oh well.

“Coffee Shop Menu” – Premise is that the offerings in a trendy coffee shop can’t be understood by patrons. Now I KNOW this would have been timely about ten years ago when people weren’t taking trendy coffee shops for granted like they are now. Ten years ago is roughly around the time that this type of “humor” became stale as well. You can actually go into a Starbucks and ask them for an extra large coffee and get served. You don’t have to slink off to Dunkin Donuts in humiliation or learn “Fratalian.” Nice repetitive monotone as the line of drones reads off the menu. That's exactly what I want to hear.

“Maple Tree in the Cubicle” – You get tree sap from a maple tree, you don't get maple syrup. According to the placemat at Cartwrights, it takes 40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of maple syrup. I hope you burn in hell.

The only thing that resonates in these commercials for me is “America Runs On Dunkin,” the Jeopardy! style answer to the question “Why is America a fat country?”

Thankfully the olive-skinned girl in the Blue Cross commercials jogs through every Sabres telecast to provide some sort of counterpoint.

SA-LUTE!

One of the sideshows during the Sabres/Sens game on Saturday night at Sherner’s apartment was trying to come up with corny jokes to tell over Jeffy’s banjo pickin’. I have a bunch of Hee Haws saved on my dvr from a CMT marathon last summer and watched a couple last night in hopes of getting some pickin’ n’ grinin’ or cornfield jokes that would be suitable for a gig at Spot Coffee. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one line worth repeating. The two episodes I watched must have been filmed about fifteen years apart and watching the decline of the show in the course of two hours was pretty sad. I don’t know when the show jumped the shark, but the later episode had no Buck Owens and a bunch of sorry replacements for Junior Samples, Don Harron, and Archie Campbell. And whereas Misty Rowe looked about 19 or 20 in the early episode, she was pretty matronly in the later one. The first episode would have been hard to follow in any case, because the guest stars were George Jones and Tammy Wynette. They each did a song separately and one song together. They also appeared together holding pitchforks with Gordie Tapp in front of the fence for the “Pfft You Were Gone” number with lyrics about George sitting on too many other women’s laps. Classic!

The funniest cornfield joke we could come up with was off the Hee Haw website.

“Says in the paper that a guy gets hit by a car in New York City every thirty minutes.”

“”Wheee, he must be getting awful tired of that by now!”

If Hee Haw didn’t jump the shark when Buck Owens left, I’d put the blame on George “Goober” Lindsay. He is a rural Ted McGinley. Look at what he did to The Andy Griffith Show. Case closed.

Eric Moulds was cut by the Houston Texans and Drew Bledsoe was cut by the Dallas Cowboys. Kid-sized Bills jerseys of both were on sale at the Bills store at Eastview Mall when the family and I were there a few weeks ago. The laws of supply and demand dictated that the Moulds jersey was priced $14 and the Bledsoe jersey was priced $10. I bought Sydney a Moulds jersey. The enjoyment I get out of watching her in the jersey is part pride in the fact that it’s the Bills, part fun in seeing how much she enjoys having it on, and part satisfaction in thinking about how much I enjoyed watching Moulds play. The day after our wedding Dennise and I went to the Bills game against the Raiders with friends and family. The Bills lost, but Eric Moulds scored a touchdown in our corner of the end zone. My friend Ondy swore that he could hear Moulds’ pounding feet on the turf as he ran to get underneath the ball.

Honorable mention goes to the person who can answer this trivia question: On the Huey Lewis and the News album “Sports,” what is written on the sign behind the bar on the album cover?

The number to call is BR-549.