Monday, February 24, 2003 7:02:50 PM
"Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil...."
Thomas Paine said that in “Common Sense”.
People often scream, or sometimes cringe, when I quote the foundling fathers.
I got to thinkin' about it watching cops handing out tickets to flustered evil doers on the side of the highway. I've sat there perplexed and embarrassed on occasion. Probably you have too. We become for that brief moment outlaws, or at least ones who have been apprehended by the strong arm of the law.
I always figured that laws and rules were great as guidelines, but as arbiters of our lives they are at best a necessary evil and at worst just plain beastly. Speeding and traffic tickets are by my definition "at worst." Who, for example, sets the speed limit at 15 miles per hour on certain stretches of road? It is damn nigh impossible if you use your foot and the accelerator to meter at that speed. Better would it be to open the door and push like a scooter.
The statistics get trotted out by the high mucky mucks of highway verification. At 65 miles per hour there were 7,000 more fatalities during the year than at the 55 mile per hour. Course, you are never told that the increased traffic on secondary roads caused by slower speeds on main roads has resulted in 14,000 more fatalities. No, those aren't real statistics. See how easy it is to be fooled. But there is some truth to them.
But I wonder would fatalities go to zero if the speed limit was zero miles per hour? Or perhaps we should lower the speed limit to 35 miles per hour on our super highways. At about ten we could abandon the automobile entirely and go back to the Conestoga wagon. Just think of how taxes would decrease. Highways replaced with gently rolling plains and deep passages through mountain gorges.
AHA!
say the lawmakers and givers. Taxes wouldn't decrease at all. Because, they say, in the star chambers of the state, under those conditions, there would be no traffic tickets and revenues would dwindle. And this, it is my suspicion, is the true reason for traffic violations. Increased revenues. In PA you get smacked anywhere from $100 to $180 for a speeding ticket. That is not a friendly warning. That, my friends, is a slap across the fiscal face.
Did you ever read what it says on those traffic tickets? You have 10 days or maybe two weeks to respond or a warrant will be issued for your arrest! If you want to pay the fine you have to plead guilty to the crime by signing your name at the bottom of the ticket. Hard to take, ain’t it when criminals of high degree walk free, less punished. And then in a wonderful week of two you receive an amount of points against your driver's license that threatens to suspend it, most likely placing your livelihood in danger of extinction. To be fair, there is an out. You can also study and take a test lessening the accrued point count to prove that you know the driving laws of the state. I suppose the reasoning of our governors is that those rules must have been expunged from your mind in a vortex of wind when you surpassed the speed limit. The studying and testing will cram them back in tight. This ain't big brother. This is big father coming home after work to mete out punishment for your evil ways.
Perhaps it is just my independent spirit. Was me. I'd give some guidelines for safe driving. Put up some signs where I thought the curve lead into Dead man’s Leap then let the driver figure it out as best they could. Is there some science of speed limitology? Did some highway mavens do empirical testing on their roadways? I figure if they did they would find that their methods of construction were far more "criminal" than people cranking up to seventy-five miles an hour. And those righteous cops who travel the highways at speeds in excess of those allowed us...what's the story...the rules of safety no longer apply. Those who are the law are above the law?
Like old Tom said....
cain't nothin' outrun my broke down V8 Ford...
Or was that Chuck Berry?
Monday, February 24, 2003
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Wednesday, February 19, 2003 6:06 PM Joe Coluccio
Help, the sky is falling! I know because a chunk of the Andromeda Nebula is sticking out of my roof!
They’ve gone too far. The news people, the weather people, those little fashionably dressed would be icons that sit in front of desks designed by copy cat surrealists out of Scandinavia. After they soften you up with traffic congestion. Serious faces suggesting that you need to “exercise caution” (I looked in vain for the caution machine at the health club. One device informed me that I shouldn’t stick a pinky into any of the many whirling gears or wires or pulleys) this morning as you “find” your way to work.
Comes the scandalous weather line. Grave face, impeccable tie, hair swept into a glazed tsunami like front wave, the weather giver (PC are they ever) speaks. The temperature is 75ºF this morning, but with the wind chill it is -454º Rankin, close to absolute zero when all molecular motion stops. You might want to give yourself an extra hour to reassemble your pulverized car windows.
Then of course the several thousand murders that have been committed in almost every village in the US and Australia and some mountainous parts of North Eastern Asia.
A moment or two for the good news. Grove Department Store is having a sale on indoor cement ponds this weekend. New Honey Oat Buncha Gran Sugar Flops are more nutritious than two slivers of tofu and the new Alera Bravada will get you six miles to the gallon highway better than any of the new military issue tanks.
After the onerous North Eastern snow fall this week, which was sufficiently scary on its own, thank you (winter precipitation here in Pittsburgh is now measured by milk, bread and toilet paper sales at the local supermarket), came the word of the possibility of floods. Cute little news babes, red nosed with long knit scarf hats, sit on the bank of the Monongahela River and warn of the impending disaster that floods will bring. If, of course, they happen. Hence, the flood watch is born.
One station had the absolute genius to supply us with a list of things we would need in a flood. Sand Bags. Wouldn’t be caught wet without them. Plywood and nails. So we can build a raft to join Huck and Jim on our way down the river? 3 gallons of bottled water. No brand names mentioned, but a nice flavored designer mineral water is probably best as you munch on one of the many bloated dead fish that leisurely float past you while you lounge on the roof of your house.
I and most of the residents of Western Pa, live so high above the river level that if there were a flood on our collective properties, the world would be in serious need of Noah and his boys.
My mind shudders. What next? There are so many things missed by these news mavens and only a viewing of 50’s horror movies and their rabid imagination can predict and prepare us for the next conflagration.
A plague of goats. Large roving bands of monstrous free range chickens pecking at the tops of trees and television towers. A skyful of whoopee cushions floating fearfully to earth making that dread noise as they splatter in a noisome puddle on the moist ground. Rampaging bowls of Mother’s Oats, sticking to people’s pallets like pasty peanut butter as we try mightily to swallow. Cascading mounds of pre chewed gum sticking together the very gears of civilization. A raging virus that actually makes our computers work correctly.
I think I’ll tune in early tomorrow. Seldom have I been so genuinely entertained.
Help, the sky is falling! I know because a chunk of the Andromeda Nebula is sticking out of my roof!
They’ve gone too far. The news people, the weather people, those little fashionably dressed would be icons that sit in front of desks designed by copy cat surrealists out of Scandinavia. After they soften you up with traffic congestion. Serious faces suggesting that you need to “exercise caution” (I looked in vain for the caution machine at the health club. One device informed me that I shouldn’t stick a pinky into any of the many whirling gears or wires or pulleys) this morning as you “find” your way to work.
Comes the scandalous weather line. Grave face, impeccable tie, hair swept into a glazed tsunami like front wave, the weather giver (PC are they ever) speaks. The temperature is 75ºF this morning, but with the wind chill it is -454º Rankin, close to absolute zero when all molecular motion stops. You might want to give yourself an extra hour to reassemble your pulverized car windows.
Then of course the several thousand murders that have been committed in almost every village in the US and Australia and some mountainous parts of North Eastern Asia.
A moment or two for the good news. Grove Department Store is having a sale on indoor cement ponds this weekend. New Honey Oat Buncha Gran Sugar Flops are more nutritious than two slivers of tofu and the new Alera Bravada will get you six miles to the gallon highway better than any of the new military issue tanks.
After the onerous North Eastern snow fall this week, which was sufficiently scary on its own, thank you (winter precipitation here in Pittsburgh is now measured by milk, bread and toilet paper sales at the local supermarket), came the word of the possibility of floods. Cute little news babes, red nosed with long knit scarf hats, sit on the bank of the Monongahela River and warn of the impending disaster that floods will bring. If, of course, they happen. Hence, the flood watch is born.
One station had the absolute genius to supply us with a list of things we would need in a flood. Sand Bags. Wouldn’t be caught wet without them. Plywood and nails. So we can build a raft to join Huck and Jim on our way down the river? 3 gallons of bottled water. No brand names mentioned, but a nice flavored designer mineral water is probably best as you munch on one of the many bloated dead fish that leisurely float past you while you lounge on the roof of your house.
I and most of the residents of Western Pa, live so high above the river level that if there were a flood on our collective properties, the world would be in serious need of Noah and his boys.
My mind shudders. What next? There are so many things missed by these news mavens and only a viewing of 50’s horror movies and their rabid imagination can predict and prepare us for the next conflagration.
A plague of goats. Large roving bands of monstrous free range chickens pecking at the tops of trees and television towers. A skyful of whoopee cushions floating fearfully to earth making that dread noise as they splatter in a noisome puddle on the moist ground. Rampaging bowls of Mother’s Oats, sticking to people’s pallets like pasty peanut butter as we try mightily to swallow. Cascading mounds of pre chewed gum sticking together the very gears of civilization. A raging virus that actually makes our computers work correctly.
I think I’ll tune in early tomorrow. Seldom have I been so genuinely entertained.
Monday, February 17, 2003
Monday, February 17, 2003 6:32:16 PM Joe Coluccio
Come a Ti Yi Yippie Yippie Yeah Yippie Yeah.
I admit it! I love Cowboy Songs! I ride around, CD set for stun while Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee sing Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tale or Ken Maynard paints his Home On The Range.
I have no idea why. What better time than this present to plumb the wrecks of my aesthetic dead reckonings.
I have always preferred Gene Autry to Roy Rogers. Not because Gene went off to war and Roy remained Hollywood side and reaped the name King of the Cowboys. Nope! That fact in my formative buckaroo years was not available to me. Besides the Duke also stayed in America and did so much during WWII to squelch the Nips that he died movie end with a frightful frequency. My screen favorites are Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys filling in with song and an improbable set of old jug and new swing instruments during the lighter moments of (hard to believe that moments can get much lighter than the script itself) the endless westward march of the Durango Kid. Charles Starrett.
Nope! Nor does fact that I resonated with the dapper Cisco Houston and the talkative Ramblin' Jack Elliot rather than Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger give more than just a slight compass shift to the west. The world of song does not get much better than Ramblin Jack singing Guabi Guabi in tongues.
But all this isn't really getting any nearer the roots of what some would label my malady. ...A rootin' tootin' son of a gun from Arizona, Ragtime Cowboy Joe...
Two things to get straight before we move forward one single demisemiquaver.
I am not a particular fan of Country Music. And although I do love Hank Williams and Alison Kraus is a miracle and swoon over Emmy Lou Harris. Like George Strait, revere Patsy Cline etc etc etc. A certain brand of commercial country produces a vile song like "The Baby" sitting high on the country charts by a white stetsoned long haired blue eyed devil called Blake Shelton singing about the fact that he is the baby, so his mother always called him, and he could do no wrong in her eyes and one night he was called home from afar but didn't make it in time for his mother’s expiration and then he cried just like a baby. A song like this, dependent as it is on a prurient emotion and commercially produced desire, falls squarely within the bounds of my definition of pornography.
Second, cowboy songs just aren't country music. They are, to use the tautological categorization, Cowboy Songs.
Twas in the town of Jacksboro in the spring of seventy-three,
A man by the name of Crego came steppin up to me,
Saying, "How do you do young fellow and how would you like to go
And spend one summer pleasant on the range of the buffalo?"
That is Verse One of “The Buffalo Skinners”. Needless to say, "While skinning the damned old stinkers our lives they had no show, For the Indians watched to pick us off while skinning the buffalo", the summer was not a pleasant one. Crego tells these honest working Americans lads when it is time to drag up and head back that they had been extravagant and were in debt to him so "We coaxed him and we begged him and still it was no go, We left old Crego's bones to bleach on he range of the buffalo."
This song may have been written, possibly experienced, by a guy called Buffalo Jack. It takes my breath every time I hear it. Among the best of the cowboy songs. It has all the irony and impact of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Sioux City Sioux, Across the Alley from the Alamo, Happy Trails, Back in the Saddle Again. Tumblin' Tumbleweeds, Water, San Antonio Rose, Along the Cimarron, Sante Fe Trail, Sons of the Pioneers, Riders in the Sky, The Flying W Wranglers, Hot Club of Cow Town, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Asleep at the Wheel.
Yes I envelope Western Swing Music under the dusty serape of Cowboy songs. Lovingly I sweep Tex Mex Border Music (lately called Tejano I believe) into my westward progressing wagon train.
It is music with humor and passion and rhythm, written often by common working folk, expressing longings and exposing desire. Its performance allows catharsis, much as a throbbing of a blues can rid you of darkness and despair. Hey, I guess it's just not the far from all the art that I love.
Most of the working cowhands on that wagon trail from southern Texas to Abilene sang a more salacious version of the Old “Chisholm” Trail.
I don’t define that as pornography at all.
Come a Ti Yi Yippie Yippie Yeah Yippie Yeah.
I admit it! I love Cowboy Songs! I ride around, CD set for stun while Powder River Jack and Kitty Lee sing Tying a Knot in the Devil’s Tale or Ken Maynard paints his Home On The Range.
I have no idea why. What better time than this present to plumb the wrecks of my aesthetic dead reckonings.
I have always preferred Gene Autry to Roy Rogers. Not because Gene went off to war and Roy remained Hollywood side and reaped the name King of the Cowboys. Nope! That fact in my formative buckaroo years was not available to me. Besides the Duke also stayed in America and did so much during WWII to squelch the Nips that he died movie end with a frightful frequency. My screen favorites are Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys filling in with song and an improbable set of old jug and new swing instruments during the lighter moments of (hard to believe that moments can get much lighter than the script itself) the endless westward march of the Durango Kid. Charles Starrett.
Nope! Nor does fact that I resonated with the dapper Cisco Houston and the talkative Ramblin' Jack Elliot rather than Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger give more than just a slight compass shift to the west. The world of song does not get much better than Ramblin Jack singing Guabi Guabi in tongues.
But all this isn't really getting any nearer the roots of what some would label my malady. ...A rootin' tootin' son of a gun from Arizona, Ragtime Cowboy Joe...
Two things to get straight before we move forward one single demisemiquaver.
I am not a particular fan of Country Music. And although I do love Hank Williams and Alison Kraus is a miracle and swoon over Emmy Lou Harris. Like George Strait, revere Patsy Cline etc etc etc. A certain brand of commercial country produces a vile song like "The Baby" sitting high on the country charts by a white stetsoned long haired blue eyed devil called Blake Shelton singing about the fact that he is the baby, so his mother always called him, and he could do no wrong in her eyes and one night he was called home from afar but didn't make it in time for his mother’s expiration and then he cried just like a baby. A song like this, dependent as it is on a prurient emotion and commercially produced desire, falls squarely within the bounds of my definition of pornography.
Second, cowboy songs just aren't country music. They are, to use the tautological categorization, Cowboy Songs.
Twas in the town of Jacksboro in the spring of seventy-three,
A man by the name of Crego came steppin up to me,
Saying, "How do you do young fellow and how would you like to go
And spend one summer pleasant on the range of the buffalo?"
That is Verse One of “The Buffalo Skinners”. Needless to say, "While skinning the damned old stinkers our lives they had no show, For the Indians watched to pick us off while skinning the buffalo", the summer was not a pleasant one. Crego tells these honest working Americans lads when it is time to drag up and head back that they had been extravagant and were in debt to him so "We coaxed him and we begged him and still it was no go, We left old Crego's bones to bleach on he range of the buffalo."
This song may have been written, possibly experienced, by a guy called Buffalo Jack. It takes my breath every time I hear it. Among the best of the cowboy songs. It has all the irony and impact of The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Sioux City Sioux, Across the Alley from the Alamo, Happy Trails, Back in the Saddle Again. Tumblin' Tumbleweeds, Water, San Antonio Rose, Along the Cimarron, Sante Fe Trail, Sons of the Pioneers, Riders in the Sky, The Flying W Wranglers, Hot Club of Cow Town, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Asleep at the Wheel.
Yes I envelope Western Swing Music under the dusty serape of Cowboy songs. Lovingly I sweep Tex Mex Border Music (lately called Tejano I believe) into my westward progressing wagon train.
It is music with humor and passion and rhythm, written often by common working folk, expressing longings and exposing desire. Its performance allows catharsis, much as a throbbing of a blues can rid you of darkness and despair. Hey, I guess it's just not the far from all the art that I love.
Most of the working cowhands on that wagon trail from southern Texas to Abilene sang a more salacious version of the Old “Chisholm” Trail.
I don’t define that as pornography at all.
Monday, February 03, 2003
Monday, February 03, 2003 6:51 PM Joe Coluccio
Looking for the greens…
The extreme pressure of searching for something humorous to ponder and develop with deep glimpses of insight into the all too human condition has actually stopped me from writing entirely...that and the demands of my schedule at work, which had the effrontery to eat into my vacation and several of my latest weekends.
My mother made minest tonight. Perplexed, I thought how the hell do you spell minest, so out I goes to the internet and look it up. I tried manest. Not anything close, except for manifest destiny. I will in good time reveal what I have come to believe is a gospel according to minest, but first I will tell you that the eating of tonight’s delicious dinner put me in another decade. A decade which frequently substituted pastafazool, or even better green peppers stuffed with a wonderful mixture of tuna, bread and spices baked in tomato sauce, for meat on Friday. I have long since forgiven my mother for the endless meals of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
A decade where my severe, white hair pulled back in a bun, black dress that covered to her calves her rolled down stockings, grandmother on my father’s side of the family would sit in her Carver Street home gazing equally out the window to the back yard into a garden of mint and greens and pop dragons and the weekend afternoon wrestling matches on a luminous black and white kind of oval television screen. What is that geometric shape? The cross between the rectangle and the oval. Rectovular? I’m sure that some cathode ray marketing inventor came up with a technologically adept name. I need only to mention the Superhetrodyne Radio to prove my point.
That was a time when we were all our own television technicians. We would take hot glass vacuum tubes from the set (remember the 6AU6) up to the drug store and stand for a delicious half hour or so in front of the Tube Tester watching for the plate of the glass evacuated tube to glow hot and orange. The more sophisticated testers gave some kind of gauge that read in a science fiction theatre logorhythmic scale, along with a more “user friendly” meter that indicated – green: good – yellow: marginal – red: bad. We would sigh when then needle settled solidly at the red end of the TV Tube spectrum. Purchase a new one of the offending valves (British, you know) from the well stocked bottom of the Tester cabinet and return to plug the lot from our inelegant brown paper carrying bag into the appropriate sockets, button up the back of the set, a happily view that week’s December Bride.
In any case, there sat Grandma Coluccio, on her stove endlessly was a large pot with boiling greens of many sorts (escarole, spinach) billowing steamy into the air making a kind of vitamin rich inhaler for the world to savor and be cured. “What the hell are you making, Ma?” My father used to say in grave frustration, white face turning florid, a dangerous mixture of both disbelief and disapproval that often lead whole nations into armed conflict. “Minest, again? You gotta eat something else once it a while!” My grandmother, tough bird that she was, just used to look at him and snort. And root for the guy in the white shorts who was finally pinning the evil black dressed contortionist to the mat. Sonamabitch!
Minest is a soup made of greens, (spinach) and tomato sauce and pork and perhaps some broth. I don’t know the recipe and like an initiate to the Latin Mass, In Nomine Patris Et Filii Et Spiritus Sancti, I don’t want great detail. Just mange! Enjoy! And, oh yeah, I figure the name is short for minestrone.
Did Gorgeous George ever beat Crusher Lisowski?
Looking for the greens…
The extreme pressure of searching for something humorous to ponder and develop with deep glimpses of insight into the all too human condition has actually stopped me from writing entirely...that and the demands of my schedule at work, which had the effrontery to eat into my vacation and several of my latest weekends.
My mother made minest tonight. Perplexed, I thought how the hell do you spell minest, so out I goes to the internet and look it up. I tried manest. Not anything close, except for manifest destiny. I will in good time reveal what I have come to believe is a gospel according to minest, but first I will tell you that the eating of tonight’s delicious dinner put me in another decade. A decade which frequently substituted pastafazool, or even better green peppers stuffed with a wonderful mixture of tuna, bread and spices baked in tomato sauce, for meat on Friday. I have long since forgiven my mother for the endless meals of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
A decade where my severe, white hair pulled back in a bun, black dress that covered to her calves her rolled down stockings, grandmother on my father’s side of the family would sit in her Carver Street home gazing equally out the window to the back yard into a garden of mint and greens and pop dragons and the weekend afternoon wrestling matches on a luminous black and white kind of oval television screen. What is that geometric shape? The cross between the rectangle and the oval. Rectovular? I’m sure that some cathode ray marketing inventor came up with a technologically adept name. I need only to mention the Superhetrodyne Radio to prove my point.
That was a time when we were all our own television technicians. We would take hot glass vacuum tubes from the set (remember the 6AU6) up to the drug store and stand for a delicious half hour or so in front of the Tube Tester watching for the plate of the glass evacuated tube to glow hot and orange. The more sophisticated testers gave some kind of gauge that read in a science fiction theatre logorhythmic scale, along with a more “user friendly” meter that indicated – green: good – yellow: marginal – red: bad. We would sigh when then needle settled solidly at the red end of the TV Tube spectrum. Purchase a new one of the offending valves (British, you know) from the well stocked bottom of the Tester cabinet and return to plug the lot from our inelegant brown paper carrying bag into the appropriate sockets, button up the back of the set, a happily view that week’s December Bride.
In any case, there sat Grandma Coluccio, on her stove endlessly was a large pot with boiling greens of many sorts (escarole, spinach) billowing steamy into the air making a kind of vitamin rich inhaler for the world to savor and be cured. “What the hell are you making, Ma?” My father used to say in grave frustration, white face turning florid, a dangerous mixture of both disbelief and disapproval that often lead whole nations into armed conflict. “Minest, again? You gotta eat something else once it a while!” My grandmother, tough bird that she was, just used to look at him and snort. And root for the guy in the white shorts who was finally pinning the evil black dressed contortionist to the mat. Sonamabitch!
Minest is a soup made of greens, (spinach) and tomato sauce and pork and perhaps some broth. I don’t know the recipe and like an initiate to the Latin Mass, In Nomine Patris Et Filii Et Spiritus Sancti, I don’t want great detail. Just mange! Enjoy! And, oh yeah, I figure the name is short for minestrone.
Did Gorgeous George ever beat Crusher Lisowski?