El Burro Volador

Once upon a day in the world, a burro was detailing a car.  This car had been very much “lived in” by its previous owners, and they had left a few things in it that the burro had to take out so that the car would be nice and clean again.

First, the burro found a screw.  The burro took the screw and put it into the bin where his auto shop kept assorted screws in case they needed them someday – like when they had to put license plates on cars.

Next, the burro found a penny.  This he tossed into a jar full of pennies that he kept tucked away on a shelf.  “Hmm,” said the burro, “my jar is about half full.  Maybe soon there will be enough there to buy a pretty hair ribbon for Mrs. Burro, or a soda pop on a hot day.”

Finally, the burro found a shiny compact disc.  It said “Soulja Boy” on it.  The burro threw it in the trash can.

So, I was leafing through my copy of 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die , and I decided that, funds permitting, I am going to start acquiring some of the music therein and listening to it every week.  If you think about it, at 1 recording a week, it will still take 20 years to fit it all in, so I guess I’d better get started.  And if I chronicle my musical adventures here, then y’all can come along for the ride – it’ll be great!

What I wanted to share with you first of all, however, was a gem I discovered while flipping idly through the tome.  It is an album title.   Specifically it is the title of an album released by The Bothy Band in 1976.  For those of you who like to do your own digging, I’ll leave it at that.  For the rest of you, the answer is here.

I’m sorry that I was gone for so long.  I am going to try to set aside more time for this from now on.  The most significant happening in the recent blank interim was Rebekah’s return to college.  This semester she is taking a math course, a composition course, and a course in Colorado history.  She has already been studying hard and just generally demonstrating the kind of preparedness and responsibility that I am not so much known for.  I predict that she will be a resounding success.  Other recent highlights include a memorable trip out on Horsetooth reservoir and Clem’s utter conquest of her Doggie Arena.

I intend to steal some of Rebekah’s thunder over the next couple days.  For some time now she has been running patopatoganso, the world’s premier bird-related blog.  Lately, though, she has let a couple of major bird stories slip through the cracks, so I guess it is up to me to catch them.  I am El Burro Volador, after all, so I guess flying things are sort of my purview.  I mean, if I were El Burro Strollador, then, yeah, I guess I would have to limit myself to news about walkers only.

Anyhow, today’s news tidbit applies to a species of vulture, a branch of the bird family for which Rebekah alone expresses any fondness.  Despite a healthy dislike of the corpse-eaters, however, a team of conservationists recently managed to facilitate the first-ever captive breeding of the endangered Slender-billed Vulture at a zoo in India.  Scientists reportedly achieved the breakthrough by dressing the birds up as members of other, more attractive bird species.  “Well, there is another repulsive creature preserved by the power of human science,” said chief conservationist Mahendra Ojha “I would like to think that the descendants of these horrible birds will one day eat the corpses of my children’s children.”

I find it interesting how television viewing has changed since I was a kid.  Although there are still some shows Rebekah and I sit down to watch when they are putting out new episodes, it is far more common for us to discover a great new series once it’s out on dvd – as often as not, this happens after the show has been cancelled!  I can’t offer a better example of this than our current favorites, Jericho and The 4400.  Both series are gone from tv, but Rebekah and I have been watching at least one episode a day (right now it is mostly Jericho, as Ty has graciously loaned us both seasons of it, while we have to wait for new 4400s to arrive via Netflix).

For those of you unfamiliar, Jericho chronicles events in a small Kansas town after a devastating act of nuclear terrorism wipes out much of the United States.  The 4400‘s premise is that 4400 people who have gone missing over the years suddenly return in a ball of white light, unaged and with no memory of where they’ve been, but definitely changed.

Another recent favorite discovered in this way has been Dexter, a show based around perhaps the most sympathetic serial killer in the history of fiction.

So, Jon Hughes died recently.  He’ll always hold a special place in the hearts of many of my generation, who grew up watching The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Hughes brought a much-needed sincerity to teen comedies back in the day, moving the genre away from the raunchy Porky’s style of movie which portrayed teen boys as sex-crazed maniacs and girls as, well, more or less “targets”.  Instead, Hughes populated his movies with teens that had more complex inner lives, and was instrumental in bringing about the popular view of adolescents as vulnerable fledgling adults trying to cope in various ways with their new place in the world.  If he also promoted a bunch of teen angst, well, nobody’s perfect.

The death of the guy who gave us the bajillion-grossing Home Alone quite naturally eclipsed the death of Budd Schulberg the day before.  After all, Schulberg’s best work went out with Bogart half a century ago.  Also, Schulberg’s legacy is a little more ambivalent – he wrote the scripts for classic classic films like On the Waterfront, yes, but he also named names for HUAC in ’51.  Still, I’ll always recall Schulberg fondly for his work in the seamy underworld milieu of boxing culture.  His writing is full of washed-up pugs, crooked promoters, ghetto kids on the make, desperate longshoremen, out-of-work journalists, and other hard luck stories.  In Schulberg’s stories you took your best shot and probably lost anyway, ’cause the game was rigged to begin with.

I wonder what it would have been like if these two had collaborated?

I could see a Schulberg-penned remake of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off which focuses on the hapless principal Rooney, a laughingstock in his own school with one last chance at redemption if he can catch brilliant truant Ferris Bueller in the act.

Or maybe Hughes could have written a sort of sequel to On the Waterfront where Terry and Charley’s teenage sons try to overcome their fathers’ history and become friends, making it out of the waterfront together.

I can even imagine a bleak Schulberg sequel to The Breakfast Club.  Titled High School Reunion it revisits those same characters at middle age, chronicling how their potential has been squandered and blighted, their solidarity revealed to be ephemeral and all but meaningless.

For a while now, Sunday mornings have been pretty special.  Rebekah and I have gotten to go over to Merlyn’s place and have breakfast with him and Abbitha, something I look forward to all week.  This Sunday was to be an extra big day for Clemmie, as she was finally given the green light to tag along.

Unfortunately, Rebekah is feeling poorly this morning, and the mission had to be scrubbed on the very launching pad, as it were.  Hopefully we’ll all be able to get together next week.

Also, as a certain Ferret correctly pointed out, Rebekah’s far-famed Arctic Fox Photo resides here, atop its pile of awards.

Also, I’ve been thinking about a new series of posts here in the blog.  Rebekah says she has a marked preference for posts that are “about something”, and when pressed to elaborate, clarifies “not just about a book or movie, or journaling”.  The recent post on Haggis was offered as an example.  So, in an effort to please my beloved spouse, I’m contemplating a series on various…personages.  We shall see how it turns out.

Lately, Rebekah has been getting quite a bit of recognition for her photography on Flickr.  One of her recent pictures has received like 5 separate awards – as soon as I figure out the address, I’ll link you to it.

Ever since I heard the latest news about haggis, I have been trying to decide whether it is a win or loss for Scotland.  What?  You aren’t already familiar with this story?  Perhaps you’ve been paying attention to other big stories?  Well, okay, let’s recap:

Haggis has long been considered the mainstay and pillar of Scottish cuisine, the one food that was quintessentially Scottish.  So Scottish, in fact, that poet Robert Burns, himself a major component of Scotland’s national identity, even wrote a poem in praise of the dish.

Recently, food historian Catherine Brown discovered a reference to haggis in an English cookbook written in 1615, over a century older than the first known reference to haggis in any Scottish text.  According to Brown, this indicates that haggis is in fact an English dish.  Scots do not seem to be too happy about this, making counterarguments chiefly around the point that haggis may well have been prepared in Scotland before any written record.  To quote one Scottish expert “Auld Rabbie Burns was nae even born afore 1759, and he was the first o’ hus tha’ really wrote things down!”

I find the whole situation provocative.  First of all, we have to consider the possibility that the whole thing is an extremely dry British parody of the controversy over Obama’s birthplace, with this English document the “Kenyan birth certificate” of the affair.

Even assuming the whole thing is legitimate, we are left with several pressing questions.  Like, for example, how does one get to be a food historian, and how the hell come they don’t tell you about jobs like this when you’re deciding what to be when you grow up?  Also, and perhaps more pressingly, is this an English gambit aimed at achieving a total hegemony in the field of ghastly cuisine?  With the addition of Haggis to their existing arsenal of Black Pudding, Jellied Eels, Spotted Dick, Picalilli and Gentleman’s Relish, they may be unstoppable (Note to self: pitch the Food Network a version of “Fear Factor” that involves typical Americans being confronted with/ forced to eat the more bizarre English dishes).

And one final point for your consideration: what does this leave Scotland with, cuisine-wise?  What can replace haggis as the national dish?  Scotch Broth?  Cock-A-Leekie soup? Crappit Heid?

I have the drafts of two or three good posts lying around half-finished; I can’t seem to focus my creative energy for the last few days.  I am far too occupied, I think, with mundane matters.  So I figured – if they won’t clear out of my head long enough to make room for Clem’s zany antics or my own offbeat ramblings, well, I might as well serve them up instead.

Lately, my major concern has been growing this roleplaying business I have fallen into.  The main group that I DM for brings in $300 every month,  which is a nice bonus, to be sure, but hardly a business.  In the wake of my gig at the PG retreat, however, I have been slowly amassing clients interested in a web-based game.  I am trying to get this off the ground now – if I am successful, it looks as though it could be good for anywhere from $200-600 in additional revenue each month.  If it turns out to be near the top end, then perhaps my dream of Dungeon Mastering to pay the mortgage will actually be in reach.

I am also working on expanding my “real space” efforts into a second group, which could mean that D&D would be taking care of the mortgage and paying back my student loans.  I can’t help but feel like I have been more passionate than most about this weird little pastime, and I am certainly getting more back from it than most.