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Indiana Primary

Today is the Indiana Primary.  Finally.  Thank God it's almost over.  Get those politicians out of our state.

My good friend Nora has a funny post today describing what it's been like to be a Hoosier during this primary frenzy.

Time to get things back to normal around here and have folks saying again, "Where exactly is Indiana?"  Sometimes it's nice to be ignored.

How To Tell You're Married

Three women: one engaged, one married and one a mistress, are chatting about their relationships and decided to amaze their men. That night all three will wear black leather bras, stiletto heels and a mask over their eyes.

After a few days they meet up for lunch.

The engaged woman: The other night when my boyfriend came over he found me with a black leather bodice, tall stilettos and a mask. He saw me and said, "You are the woman of my life. I love you." Then we made love all night long.

The mistress: Me too! The other night I met my lover at his office and I was wearing the leather bodice, heels, mask over my eyes and a raincoat. When I opened the raincoat he didn't say a word, but we had wild sex all night.

The married woman: I sent the kids to stay at my mother's house for the night. When my husband came home I was wearing the leather bodice, black stockings, stilettos and a mask over my eyes. As soon as he came in the door and saw me he said, "What's for dinner, Batman?"

I Wish I Had a Girl - Henry Lee Summer

Title: I Wish I Had a Girl

Artist: Henry Lee Summer

Composers: Henry Lee Summer   

Label: CBS Associated 07720

Year Released: 1988

Highest Chart Position: 20

A while back HoosierBoy had a guess the song bit that he did.  One of the songs HoosierBoy described as "This one is really really hard [to guess] unless you are from Central Indiana".  Ahhhh, so true.

Henry Lee Summer is a Hoosier.  He was born in the small town of Brazil.  This song was his biggest hit, breaking into the Top 20.  While considered to be a one-hit wonder nationally, he was, and still is, quite popular in Indiana.  I saw him back in the 1980s performing at the Vogue.  It was a great concert.  Haven't seen him lately.  I wonder if he still has the famous mullet. 

Henry Lee was in the news a couple of years ago for driving through a trailer park and getting a DUI.  Not a great way to make the newspapers.  He still performs.  Maybe I'll catch his act again one of these days.

I found a few of his old videos which are included below.  Enjoy some 80s music from a local boy!

Play (4.1 MB)                                                 

Watch Video (I Wish I Had a Girl)

Watch Video (Hands On The Radio)

Watch Video (Darlin' Danielle Don't)

Clinton Visit

Former President Bill Clinton is going to be speaking today in my hometown, stumping for Hillary.  I can't even imagine what a cluster Bill and his entourage is going to create in this small town.  I'm ready for this Indiana Primary to be over with. 

Boone County is very Republican, anyways.  I can't imagine why they bothered to come here, a town of 15,000.

The last President to speak in Lebanon was Abraham Lincoln.  Then a few years later, his funeral train passed back through town.  That didn't work out so well for Abe.      

I imagine the town will weigh a bit more after he leaves...with all the bullshit that he leaves behind.  Maybe we can send Dad up there with his skid loader for the clean up.  It's gonna take a while to get that smell out of the town though.

Gravel

It looks like the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  After months of complaining by the residents on my road (all nine of us).  We got some fresh gravel on the road...the entire 2 1/4 mile stretch!  The county hasn't put down any new gravel in the five years that I've lived here.  I think we got our ten-year supply.  If you look on the left side of the picture (my driveway), that's how it looked before.  It was so bad, that you could get stuck in the muddy road after a rain.

Now, we've got tons of gravel...literally.  I bet it is eight inches deep on my brother's road; you just about need a dune buggy to get down it.  It was also very dusty after the county put the new gravel down.  But now that it's rained a few times, it has settled. 

It's a big improvement.

Cemetery

I had some time to kill while I was in the hometown.  I decided to visit a friend that lived on the opposite side of the county from me.  I don't get up to that side of the county very often.  Adjacent to his road is a little cemetery.  Two years ago, we attended a burial service there for a cousin's husband.

He was a WWII veteran and the military grave marker was there now.  I'll have to take a picture of the marker and send it to his family.  I thought it strange that grass had not grown on the grave yet.  He was buried in August 2006.

As I walked back to the car, I saw a cat lying in the grass near a headstone.  It was dead.  It was lying on its side, eyes open, and tongue hanging out.  We saw dead animals all the time on the farm.  I guess it had died within the past day.  Still, how odd for an animal to die...in a cemetery.

Then I just started to get the creeps about the whole thing.  Alone, in an isolated cemetery.  Better get going...before the zombies arrive.

Office Supplies

My name is Jerry...and I am an office supply addict.  As my regular readers know, I'm a bit of an organization freak too.  Well it finally came time to organize my office supplies.  They were getting a bit out of hand.

I have three two-drawer file cabinets.  Two of them house all my work and personal files.  Old archival files go out in the garage in a sealed plastic file container to keep out the rodents and spiders.  I have even more files and binders out in the garage that I brought with me when I moved here.  So my third file cabinet is used to house my office supplies.  I soon had to put bulkier items in a cabinet out in the kitchen.  I've got hanging files, file folders, binder clips, staples, labels, diskettes, push pins, rubber bands, a wide assortment of paper products, and pens.  Finding them when I needed them was the problem. 

I recently cleared out a box of 500 long envelopes.  I bought this box five years ago at an office supply store.  The box of 500 was actually cheaper than 100.  Since I can't resist a bargain, I bought it.  Every trip that I take, I pull out an envelope and write the destination and date, and put all the receipts inside the envelope.  I then make sure that I get all my frequent flyer credit for these trips.  After a year, I pitch the envelope.

Since I cleared out that box, I noticed what a damn mess it was in there.  So I cleared out the cabinet and threw the contents out onto the kitchen floor.  Then I brought out the contents of the third file cabinet.  It was a heap o' supplies.  It took me several days, but I was able to finally get it in some sort of logical order.

I put the tiny, lightweight stuff in the top drawer of the file cabinet.  Below, are the bulkier, square items...mostly paper products.  In the kitchen cabinet are envelopes (large and small, regular and security), expanding folders, three ring folders, boxes of hanging files, and file folders. 

I do love being scary organized.  Bwwwwahahahahaha!!!!  Yes, I could use a good 12-step program.

We Built This City - Starship

Title: We Built This City

Artist: Starship

Composers: Bernie Taupin / Martin Page / Dennis Lambert / Peter Wolf 

Label: Grunt 14170

Year Released: 1985

Highest Chart Position: 1(2)

Blender magazine just announced their list of The 50 Worst Songs Ever!  It is hilarious.  Although, I don't think it's very thorough.  I'd say the authors must have been born in the 70s and seem to be picking on the worst of the 1980s and 1990s.  They forgot the 1970s, a decade rich in bad songs.  They have really skewered some sacred cows.  Here's a sampling: 

50
CÉLINE DION
“My Heart Will Go On” 1998
And on and on and on…

Worst Moment The third chorus, where she goes from soft to eye-bleedingly loud.

34
DAN FOGELBERG
“Longer” 1979
Dear Mr. Fogelberg: Why not consider a stage name?

Worst Moment Any musician who uses the phrase forest primeval with a straight face must be stopped.

12
THE BEACH BOYS
“Kokomo” 1988
They might as well have just pissed in Brian’s sandbox

Worst Moment The most diabolical rhyme is saved for, um, first: “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya!”

....and last but not least the top five.  I've included the YouTube videos below.  Enjoy (or not)!

5
VANILLA ICE
“Ice Ice Baby” 1990
When hip-hop stopped being the “black CNN”

Making fellow early-’90s pop-rap pioneer MC Hammer look cutting-edge by comparison, the chart-topping “Ice Ice Baby” was mindless white rap for mindless white people, set to the plodding bass line from Queen’s “Under Pressure” for easy move-busting. Lyrically, the Iceman recounts a trip to Palm Beach, where he is forced to reach for his “nine” by some moody dope fiends. It later emerged that this nice suburban boy fabricated his tough past and would probably soil himself at the sight of a real gun.

Worst Moment “To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal/Light up the stage and wax a chump like a candle.” None of this was remotely true.

4
LIMP BIZKIT
“Rollin’” 2000
In which nü-metal veers from disaffected rage to “Will this do?”

Sounding like a middle-aged man trying to fight his way out of his son’s frat party using only random words of youth slang and an unconvincingly gruff tone of voice, Fred Durst dictates a light aerobic workout (“Hands up, now hands down.…Breathe in, now breathe out”) against a background of histrionic metal noise. The song is meaningless and embarrassing in equal measure.

Worst Moment Being addressed as both “partner” and “baby” in Durst’s drawling intro, shortly before being told, bafflingly, “You know what time it is.”

3

WANG CHUNG
“Everybody Have Fun Tonight” 1986
If this song was a party, you’d lock yourself in the bathroom and cry

Initially called Huang Chung, but in no way Chinese, London-based funk tools Wang Chung changed their name to make it easier for whitey to pronounce, thus patronizing Asia and Europe in one stroke. Musically one of history’s least convivial party songs, “Everybody Have Fun Tonight” was both lyrically preposterous (“On the edge of oblivion/All the world is Babylon”) and sung by Jack Hues as though he would turn to sulphur at the very thought of “fun.”

Worst Moment That chorus: “Everybody have fun tonight/Everybody Wang Chung tonight.”

2

BILLY RAY CYRUS
“Achy Breaky Heart” 1992

At least the haircut never caught on. Oh, wait…

Country, but not as we know it. Written by Vietnam vet Don “Pickle Puss” Von Tress in the style of a brain-dead “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Achy Breaky Heart” represented every prejudice non-believers have about country: It was trite, it was inane, it was big in trailer parks and it was thoroughly enjoyed by the obese. Strangely, it was covered by Bruce Springsteen, with slightly less irony than you might imagine; still, this does not make it good.

Worst Moment An instrumental break that single-handedly rejuvenated the line-dancing fad.

1

STARSHIP

“We Built This City” 1985

The truly horrible sound of a band taking the corporate dollar while sneering at those who take the corporate dollar

The lyrics of “We Built This City” appear to restate the importance of the band once known as Jefferson Airplane within San Francisco’s ’60s rock scene. Not so, says former leader Grace Slick, who by 1985 had handed her band to singer Mickey Thomas and a shadowy team of outside songwriters.

“Everybody thought we were talking about San Francisco. We weren’t,” Slick says. “It was written by an Englishman, Bernie Taupin, about Los Angeles in the early ’70s. Nobody was telling the truth!”

Certainly not Starship, who spend the song carrying on as if they invented rock & roll rebellion, while churning out music that encapsulates all that was wrong with rock in the ’80s: Sexless and corporate, it sounds less like a song than something built in a lab by a team of record-company executives.

The result was so awful that years afterward, it seems to bring on a personality disorder in the woman who sang it. “This is not me,” Slick remarks when reminded of the 1985 chart-topper. “Now you’re an actor. It’s the same as Meryl Streep playing Joan of Arc.”

Worst Moment “Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names,” sneers Slick — whose band had changed its name three times.

Watch Video #5 (Ice Ice Baby)

Watch Video #4 (Rollin')

Watch Video #3 (Everybody Have Fun Tonight)

Watch Video #2 (Achy Breaky Heart)

Watch Video #1 (We Built This City)

Postcard from the Local Truck Stop

   

Contortionist

My pink bathroom has a tiny little closet between the tub and the entry.  It also has the powder pink tile on the floor.  I loosened most of it using the sledgehammer.  Still there were some tiles around the edge that wouldn't budge. 

There was no good way to reach the back of the closet.  If I went straight in, my shoulders hit the sides of the closet door.  If I went in on my side, there wasn't enough room to hold the chisel and swing the sledge.  Then I got a bit of inspiration:  I could remove the bottom shelf.  With the shelf out, I could fit in the closet.  I was all the way in the closet, seated, with my back up against the side of the closet.  My legs were in the way a bit.  I had my knees against my chest and my feet resting on the shelf support.  I had to hit the chisel with the sledge under my knees, blind.

But I got all the tile removed.  I wish I could've taken a picture with me inside the closet.  Alas, no photographer in the house. 

I learned a thing or two:

• I am very flexible, for a six foot old guy.
• I can fit in a 23 x 25 x 38 inch space.  I remember as a kid hiding in a hexagon-shaped end table when we'd play Hide 'n Seek.
• I am not claustrophobic as long as I can breathe.
• I need to work on my arms more at the gym.
• Always have the cell phone handy and the doors to the house unlocked, just in case you get stuck (I didn't, thankfully).
• I am out of Advil.

Just call me Gumby with a sledgehammer.