Rode in today from the Inman Park station. Thinking about my history with this station gives the lie to the notion that only people without cars would ride MARTA. When I lived in Little Five Points, I had a car but I still walked the mile to this station (when I didn't ride the #3 or the #16 bus.) A very pleasant time in my MARTA history because I wasn't dependent on any one route or train, and I could drive if the weather was bad. I once drove to Inman Park when an ice storm was threatening; that evening my car was iced in and I walked home. I'll never forget that walk home, the dark white of it with the warmth of the houses of Inman Park (for my money, the most beautiful part of Atlanta). And the walk in the next morning was also beautiful.
Inman Park is the westernmost station on the East Line with free parking; King Memorial used to be but the lot closed down several years ago. This is one aspect of my MARTA riding that will be different from most other folks': on days when I have someplace to be after work (today it's play rehearsal) I'll drive as far in as I can to minimize the chance for MARTA to ruin my evening. The commute was about as perfect as it could get today. The drive in on McClendon is one of my favorites and traffic was light, and I even got a seat on the train.
Today begins a new feature here on Boviosity, the Brian Jones of the week. You may or may not know that my name is Brian Jones. As such, I have received my share of teasing over my name, all because of this chap, the first Brian Jones of the week. He was guitarist for the Rolling Stones and a pioneer rock burnout, kicked out of the band and dying less than a month later.
My favorite tease was from a member of the band Skinny Puppy, whose album I won on an on-air radio contest. The autographs on the album included a notation from one of them, "Hay, ain't you a dead Rolling Stone?" I never listened to the album, unfortunately, so I can't say anything more. But I liked the obviousness and lack of over-cleverosity in this little dig. Well done.
I get a lot of "stay away from the pool, dude!" You're all sick.
A roommate of mine once created an entire Brian Jones shrine (here's the scary part) out of materials she had on hand, including books and posters about Jones. Eep.
So, there it is. The anniversary of his death in 1969 will be on Thursday, so it's only fitting that Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones is our first Brian Jones of the week!
No MARTA today. My department is having our annual "off-site meeting" (i.e. our boss buys a bunch of beer and burgers and dogs and we head out to the 'hooch and hang out.)
OK, I'm going to take the plunge and get back onto mass transit.
I think mass transit is a wonderful idea whose time is way overdue. But that doesn't mean that I am willing to take whatever junky mass transit authority is foisted off on me by local government.
Enter MARTA, Atlanta's mass transit.
There was a time when I didn't own a car and had to use MARTA to get from home to school to work. In other words, I was square in MARTA's target demographic. Like many, many people who have been forced to ride MARTA for any length of time, the second, the hot second I got a car, I no longer even considered MARTA. It's been blatantly obvious from every customer service interaction I've ever had with MARTA that they regard their passengers as a captive constituency.
The buses are relatively nice but they not only don't run frequently enough (which I could get around by appropriate scheduling); they don't stick to the published schedules! I can't tell you how many times I've been stuck waiting 30 or more minutes for a bus after making sure that I got to the bus stop well before the scheduled time.
OK, fine, I'm no longer a candidate for the bus service anyway. I live in Gwinnett County, which has a transit authority but no buses in my area yet. So I'll be driving to a train station and parking. But MARTA's trains aren't much better.
They're unpredictable. Some days you go to the station, wait a few minutes, get on a train, and go. But about 30% of the time, there are inexplicable delays. And god forbid there's a crisis on the tracks. Last time I was a MARTA regular, they had two incidents close together of jumpers over the tracks. Both times, MARTA was totally unequal to the task, which was to get its passengers around these blocks. Did they send buses to ferry people around the affected stations? Are you kidding? No, we sat and waited at the new end of the line. When that happened the last time, I simply went back to work and waited for news that the situation had cleared up. Did MARTA make any attempt to get local media to announce that riders could get through again? Are you kidding? The interesting thing about these incidents was that, despite what had to be numerous complaints after the first incident (I know I complained, in writing and on the phone), there was no change in the passenger experience between the first incident and the second.
But it doesn't take a crisis to slow the system down to a crawl. Some days there's never any reason given why I waited 20 minutes for a train.
Fortunately, though, the trains are somewhat comfortable and air conditioned. Most days.
We'll see how it goes. I'll report here.
Bryan over at Arguing With Signposts regularly posts song lyrics to his blog. Today he's posting one submitted by yr humble Servant.
Cool idea!
OT No need to have a cow, but President Bush is a fascist pig who is ruining this country. Here's a link to indymedia.com and democrats.org that proves it. No need to respond, I know this is a (guitar/acting/humor) discussion group, back to your (guitar/acting/humor) talk. Anybody who disagrees with me, on or off the list, is just a humorless hateful right wing tool who's trying to ruin the (guitar/acting/humor) discussion for everybody. Dibs on political speech on the group, no dibs-back double dibs no talk backs. As one of the few remaining thinking people in the United States of Amerikkka, I just had to get that off my chest.
Signed: A Nasshole (D - Mars)
I met Maynard Jackson once, on a city street one block over from where a parade was passing on Peachtree. He was very kind and friendly, shaking my hand and engaging me without hesitation. I even managed to pull one of those great silver-throated laughs out of him when I asked him when he was going to run for Mayor again (this was during the mess that was Bill Campbell's tenure, so anything would have been an improvement.)
He was the first powerful Black man who I was able to see without using the racial filters I was raised with. I disagreed with him on just about everything, including not only his ideas but his tactics, but I'm sad that he won't be around any more.
This article gives important historical perspective on the Arab/Israeli conflict. I'm not going to exerpt it. Read all of it.
Hamas says it may take part in a truce with Israel, halting terrorist attacks if Israel will halt targeted killings of the murderers.
But how would this work? Hasn't the "Cycle of Violence" concluded, for now, with Israel in the lead? Does Israel now have to give Hamas a freebie? "OK, you punch, no punch backs?" I didn't think so when this idea occurred to me this morning, but now a new idea has come to me. Suppose, just suppose, Israel were to grant Hamas the right to send one more suicide bomber into its territory? But wait, I'm not talking on the sly - no, escort him in, right in the open. Give him a nice meal, a few drinks, and escort him into the middle of a huge crowd of Israelis, say in a sports arena, and let him blow his damn self sky-high. I bet they could even sell some tickets - for charitable purposes only, of course. Just make sure he doesn't hurt anybody, and we all get to see the desperate lengths that Israel has driven him to, and we move on.
Win/win!
Hillary Clinton makes like a battered wife in this open letter from Dick Morris. Once you read down past the point where Bill Clinton physically assaults Morris (even I never thought I would write those words) you get this:
You grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me. Then you walked me around the grounds of the mansion in the minutes after, with your arm around me, saying, "He only does that to people he loves."
David Brinkley was the news to me when I was growing up. I don't know if it was due to some animus toward Walter Cronkite, but my folks watched the news every night and it was the Huntley/Brinkley report.
I'll miss the crusty old bastard.
You won't normally find links to the shrill, overbearing Ann Coulter on this site, but I think she's really onto something with the street theatre surrounding Hillary's new book.
First in line for Hillary's book at Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center on Sunday night was Charles Greinsky, who told the New York Daily News he rushed out at midnight to get one of the first books because he supported Hillary's health-care plan. A few years ago, the Associated Press identified Greinsky more fully. It turns out he is "a longtime Clinton campaigner" from Staten Island, who has been the Clintons' guest several times both at the White House and at their home in Chappaqua, N.Y.
and
Another average individual eager to get Hillary's book was Greg Packer, who was the centerpiece of the New York Times' "man on the street" interview about Hillary-mania[...]It was easy for the Times to spell Packer's name right because he is apparently the entire media's designated "man on the street" for all articles ever written. He has appeared in news stories more than 100 times as a random member of the public.
Although I do wonder if New Yorkers may have all just decided to start giving the name "Greg Packer."
Should the Bush administration submit to an investigation of pre-war claims of WMD? Part of me says, "sure, why not, nothing to hide, let them waste their time (and my money)."
But another part says, "oh, and have every misspelling in every memo paraded as evidence of stupidity and mendacity before a supine media? Forget it!"
Screw it. I think the people are onto these administration-haters. Let them do their worst, waving that blood-free shirt right on into oblivion.
I've tried everything I can think of, and I can't play music on my computer. It's a Dell running Windows 2000, and every music program exhibits variations on the same problem. The program will start out playing music, then will either stop and I have to restart the track (Foobar), or stop and refuse to play anything else (Winamp, Foobar), or stop and freeze altogether (MusicMatch Jukebox, Windows Media Player). In every case, I can then only play music if I restart the computer.
This happens with both .mp3's and CD's. Oh, and system sounds play fine.
I need my music. Does anybody have any clue whatsoever about this?
UPDATE: I might have it fixed. That is to say, MusicMatch Jukebox has successfully played 3 songs in a row for nearly 10 minute's worth of uninterrupted music. I think the problem is caused by the hateful, hateful Lotus Notes program. How I despise that program. But it's required for work e-mail.
Interesting resource on Oliver! includes information I didn't know about Victorian society and such.
I'm mainly interested in a precise answer to exactly what is a "beadle." He's a lay church functionary, responsible for order during services - but there are no services in this play. So he's also responsible for church properties etc. I'm gathering that he goes around to church properties and gives them moneys for the food, that kind of thing. But I don't really know.
UPDATE: Here is another excellent resource, very colorfully done. Better than the PDF above.
I've just updated my blogroll to include Mitch Berg's "Shot In The Dark" and my old Blogger archives. Plenty of Boviosity goodness over there, if you haven't already read it!
Sometimes I wish my blog was like this guy's. Then I fear that it actually is. (Use the "show similar links" option if you only get a couple of hits.)
I believe Juanita Broaddrick. I think a lot of people would believe her if they would listen to her, which is why a lot of people won't listen to her (i.e. Eleanor Clift & Susan Estrich.) But I think Sean Hannity's interview of her last night on Hannity & Colmes was a mess. Sure, he asked a few hard questions, although without anything in the way of followup (if he would follow up on her denials and reasons for not coming forward, for instance, then Susan Estrich wouldn't be able to dance so beautifully on the edge of proclaiming whether or not she believes Broaddrick.) I hadn't heard the bit about Hillary Clinton approaching Broaddrick at the fundraiser soon after the rape. That was chilling stuff. (I believe that Hillary would have behaved the same way if she believed Broaddrick was merely another of Bill's trysts, so I don't think she knew about the rape at that time.)
But Hannity really stepped in it (and his show's producers should have cut this crap) when he started asking her opinion of the Lewinsky segments in Hilary!'s memoir. Surprise, surprise: Juanita Broaddrick's opinion of that obvious self-serving pack of lies is the same as anybody else who's been paying attention for the last decade or so. I kept expecting another bombshell and when it didn't appear I was embarrassed for both Sean & Juanita.
But at least it was better than Barbara Walter's hour-long french kiss of an interview with Hillary!.
This isn't ultimately about whether folks believe Juanita Broaddrick, I think. Eleanor Clift's cold reliance on the lack of a rape trial and Susan Estrich's head-in-the-sand recitation of rape statistics mask a cold, hard fact: whether you believe Broaddrick or not, the question remains: Why is the Democratic Party so determined to protect and coddle a person against whom an allegation like this is utterly believable?
What are you reading? I'm reading Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler. It's the story of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, a place I first read about in Harper's Weekly magazine (before I got sick of it.)
I would really like to visit the museum someday. I just hope it's still around whenever I make it to the Left Coast.
Guess I'll have to check Dean's MT Newbie blog and figure out why Extended Entry doesn't seem to work. Keep testing the link below - I'm getting a 404 (that's me as the kindly old bachelor Matthew Cuthbert, from Anne Of Green Gables, setting wayward websurfers at ease, in the 404 page.) Use the comments to let me know if you are able to read the extended entry.
UPDATE: Try it now! I think I fixed it!
If the extended entry link works, you will now be reading this.
I'm playing Mr. Bumble in the New London Theatre's production of Oliver! this summer. Here's the latest.
Short rehearsal, for me at least, last night. I was supposed to rehearse the songs "I Shall Scream" and "Boy For Sale" but I blew out my voice last Thursday (never try to sing at concert levels without warming up your voice, people!) So last night Lisa ("Widow Corney") and I worked on notes - most of the recordings of the song involve lots of talk-singing, so it was illuminating to play the actual scored notes and see how the song was written.
Then the entire cast rehearsed "Consider Yourself." I'm sitting the number out - Bumble has just left the scene when this song occurs and it would look strange for me to be out there - but I'll be singing from the wings! (I snuck and did this last summer during "Shipoopi." Lots of fun.)
I moved the blog from the main url to a blogs directory
Many, many thanks to Dean Esmay for setting up this blog. Go read his blog right now, from top to bottom, and hit his paypal button. Then maybe I'll have something more to say here.