The Ford doesn't have a rosary, so before I knew it this morning I was scanning through the FM stations and heard a great hook worthy of the Beatles. I went back and found it was the local evangelical "Bible verse of the day" (just one verse?!) radio station playing a pretty good tune. It being the evangelical station, I was dreading the tinkling, saccharine keyboard sound that runs like an itchy rash through most of their music, but this morning I was surprised. I don't know who the singer was, but she'd written a darn good song with a quiet, smart "I got off drugs" alternative sound. Her melodic hooks were somewhere between the Beatles and Tori Amos and she had an attractive breathy falsetto that she used intelligently (that is, sparingly) between some good solid singing.
GGHRRRGGHGHHHHGGRRGGH. That's what I said when I stepped out of the car at the gas station. Thirt-friggin'-teen. It's cold in Illinois this morning. Two cheers for involuntary shivering. Mr. Riddle, does the daily warmth and sunshine in Florida become cloying after a while? That's what I've heard, but I don't believe it.
Some other FM meditations on the way to work this morning:
I wish I could play guitar like David Gilmore. He excels at a quiet sort of meditative phrasing, as if he sings his guitar solos before he plays them. Add a sweet vibrato, good melodic hooks and an intelligent harmonic relationship to the surrounding music, and you have my favorite guitar player.
Does anyone really care about Mick "Geriatric" Jagger and his Rolling Gall Stones anymore? Why are these perpetual losers still staggering around on the radio? The old guys at the barbershop, the ones with stiff white flattops, enjoy the Stones.
The Offspring are a good screaming punk band. I think they're from Goleta, CA, separated from lovely Santa Barbara by the steaming armpit called Isla Vista. I spent two weeks at UCSB for the TUG94 conference, where my friend Mike and I had hoped to present a paper on color separation and page imposition directly from LaTeX. Management killed that idea, being afraid of giving away "trade secrets." The same managers did send us to the conference, though, which was a pretty cool thing to do.
I used to have a decent falsetto, as usable if not as good as Dave Matthews' and Peter Gabriel's, but it's gone now. What the heck happened?
The "oldies" station is for folks who were sentient in 1960 or thereabouts (that's what the stiff white flattops listen to at the barbershop). They occasionally sneak in a tune from those whippersnappers from Liverpool - an early one. Meanwhile, the "classic" rock station is beginning to play songs from my high school days. Hm.
Dear Mr. White,
Admittedly sunshine does begin to become a bit overbearing at times--but warmth never palls. I've been out in this cold for less than 2 weeks, in the course of which I have become completely convinced that I am in the right place--or perhaps I need to move a bit further south. No--you make look forward to the rain clouds for a respite, but I must admit to never being particularly bothered by the sunshine.
shalom,
Steven
Posted by: Steven Riddle at December 7, 2002 02:50 PMMetaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.
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