One good thing about music - When it hits you, you feel no pain

It's 8:30am on this warm Spring Friday. I'm in the office alone and listening to Bob Marley's African Herbsman. I didn't know it when I put it on, but this record evokes a random memory of hanging out in my high school girlfriend's driveway with my friend Dan, listening to tunes on his car stereo.

I love it when music can dig into the recesses of your past, pull out an unimportant sliver, and make it feel like it happened yesterday.

Like most erstwhile indie boys with a midwestern streak, I am utterly obsessed with the new Neko Case CD.

Now, the quandry is, am I obsessed enough to drop 80 bucks on a show at Webster Hall? That's $20 for me, $20 for Sarah... and $40 for the babysitter.

This is the perpetual question I face as a parent.

I wonder how much it would cost to have Neko herself to stop by and coo the words to "Star Witness" in my ear a few times. That I'd pay for.

It's been the perfect day so far.

That's gotta change (seeing as how it's only 8:45am, and I haven't started the daily barrage of meetings), but I wanted to record this before it does.

I woke up at 5:15am feeling oddly refreshed, which led me to hit the gym for the first early morning workout session I've had in months.

Asher didn't wake up until I got home and took a shower. And contrary to recent behavior, he was all smiles in his crib, wanting to show me a new stuffed animal.

When I turned on his CD player and hit shuffle, the Beatles' "Here Comes The Sun" came on. I opened a window. Truly a beautiful spring morning.

Sure, I had to drive out to Long Island today. But the only traffic was the stuff coming out of the car speakers.

Now, cue the disaster music. I'm off to a 9am meeting.

Happy Birthday to me. Happy Birthday to me. Happy Birthday to me.
Happy Birthday to me.

No, No, No

The new Yeah Yeah Yeahs CD is proof positive that garage rock should stay in the garage because (a) it generally sucks, and (b) it generally sucks worse after it's been processed and re-processed in the studio.

What's the last good fiction or non-fiction book you read?

Any new CD's I should own?

Recommendations, please.

My company just gave me a $100 Amazon certificate and it's burning a hole in my pocket. I'm currently considering:

The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians

Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in Amreica's First Mass Medium

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Gilead

Bob Dylan Live 1975 (The Bootleg Series Volume 5)

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor - a lifelong Republican - gave a speech at Georgetown University last week in which she blasted the Administration and certain, specific members of Congress for interfering with Judicial review.

O'Connor warned that we were in danger of "sliding towards a dictatorship," when judges are threatened with retailiation - physical, fiscal, and political - for judicial acts.

This is incredibly strong rhetoric from a Supreme Court Justice, not to mention a Republican one. It should have been huge news.

So, who covererd it? Far as I can tell, only NPR and oddly, a few editorials in Texas papers. The usual suspects (the Post/the Times) only mentioned it in passing.

Weird.

Bands/Artists that have recently been, are currently, or will soon be on tour that I would consider getting a babysitter so that I could see:

Keren Ann
Andrew Bird
Shelby Lynne
Mercury Rev
New Pornographers
Flaming Lips
Nellie McKay
Film School
Jeremy Pelt w/electric band
Wilco
Built to Spill

Sarah and I went to see Matt Pond PA with Youth Group last night in Williamsburg. Asher slept over at Sarah's parents' house.

The show was okay (Youth Group was better than the decidedly monotonous Matt Pond PA), but we didn't get home until around 1am. With my now built-in kid schedule, I'm ill-equipt to handle those hours, and am having a difficult time this morning, to say the least.

Good thing I don't have to do anything terribly responsible today.

Oh wait, there's the proposal that needs to be written this morning. And the contract that needs to be re-negotiated this afternoon. And I probably should check in on one of the people in my group who seemed ready to explode yesterday.

Yikes. Today's going to suck.

Remember when I was applying to that Master's program at the very last minute a few weeks back?

I got in.

It's the Media Ecology program at NYU - basically a less heady version of what I studied in Undergrad at Northwestern. BUT... it will allow me to dip my feet back into academia again. AND... the program's got a few big name professors (especially this guy) who might be able to help me down the road should I choose to pursue an academic career.

File Under: And you thought you heard everything

My respected fortysomething colleague tells me that his daughter's male friends have hit on a great way to pay for prom: They're donating to sperm banks all across Long Island.

Spend five minutes digging into the numbers in Pew's latest political poll. Some pretty crazy stuff there.

Quick - someone hold an election before the Democrats have a chance to blow this opportunity!

That Hurts

Isaac: Come on, I know you know that song!

Co-Worker: I do, actually. My aunt was really big on it.

I was having an email conversation with a respected colleague this morning, a fortysomething guy with a wife and kids and a nice house out on Long Island.

He considers himself a Republican, despite admitting that the party has come to stand for all the things that he detests - fiscal irresponsibility, big government, and a disregard for personal privacy (a la wiretapping and Terry Schiavo).

"I could not agree with you more about this, Isaac," he said to me. "But where's the next Reagan to take us to a new American morning?"

I responded, "It sounds like you think of yourself as a Republican because Reagan - a great leader for his first term - came around when you were really forming opinions about such things."

"It's really all about strong leadership and inspiring Americans to strive for the best in themselves. Reagan did that. Kennedy did that. FDR did that. Wilson and Teddy R. did that. Bush Jr/Sr, Carter, Nixon, Coolidge, Hoover and Taft did not. Ike was what the country needed in the 1950s, and LBJ did some really good things and really bad things in the 1960s, but neither were strong, inspirational leaders."

"Today, there are no strong, national leaders that can inspire Americans in the way that we need to be inspired. Chalk it up to 21st century cynicism where process, pragmatism and politics trumps idealism. In the face of that reality, I think the best thing we can hope for is someone who can get good shit done, someone who can master those three "P's" in a way that's a net positive for the nation. Clinton, I think was that sort of President. Maybe, that's McCain (though he freaks me out personally). Maybe, that's Mark Warner."

Checking my email from Jury Duty, I read a note from Chickpea asking if my parents were okay in tornado-torn Springfield. That's the first I heard that my hometown was apparently blown apart by the forces of nature.

No word from my parents yet on how - if at all - the storm impacted them. But news reports don't put the touchdowns in their neighborhood - several points within a mile or two, but no direct hits.

Apparently, the video store at which I worked in high school didn't survive. The owner was a racist jerk - a fact not included in any of the news reports.

Jody, Tom, Ryan, Shannon, any other Springfield friends - hope all is okay with your people there.

Sunny Saturday on Union Street

Asher's sick with a double whammy of the croup and an ear infection. Sarah's got some sort of viral thing, and I'm being plagued by a nasty cold. Needless to say, the past couple of nights have been quite an adventure.

Inexplicably though, I'm almost overcome by the sentiment this morning that I am the luckiest man alive, with a strong and loving family. Maybe, it's the support we're providing each other in the face of this latest adventure. Maybe, it's our promise and security relative to the characters in all the mid-period Pink Floyd songs I've been listening to in the past 48 hours. Maybe, it's my recent exposure to close friends and colleagues with health problems far more serious than ours. Maybe, it's the combination of caffeine and sleep deprivation fueling a wellspring of raw emotion.

Whatever it is, if I were a religious man, I'd say that I'm feeling particularly blessed this morning. And who can argue with that?

Last week, Zogby, a highly reliable, non-partisan pollster, released the results of a survey of U.S. military personnel in Iraq. Here are some of the topline findings:

- 72% of U.S. troops think we should pull out within the next year. 30% believe we should leave immediately.

- 42% of U.S. troops serving in Iraq say that their mission is somewhat unclear/very unclear to them, or that they have no understanding of it.

- 85% say they originally thought the mission was to retailiate for Saddam Hussein's role in 9/11.

Margin of error is +/- 3.3 percentage points.

Wow.

Congrats to Ferd and Smeltz on pending parenthood!

If you can survive the first three months, the rest is cake... Hess's Thrillwaukee multi-post account (3/4-5)notwithstanding.

Asher has the croup, and whined for 12 hours straight today.

The only thing that made the poor guy happy was this awful toy piano that plays rocked-out, 30 second midi bits of John Philip Sousa and Mozart when you hit the keys. It's without a doubt the most repugnant toy that anyone has ever given him, but I made my peace with it today. He actually played with it for a 20 minute stretch once, and I didn't mind.

Mice and Men and City Living

All of the comments I got on my rodent post below came from folks living in big cities. Do folks in the less populous areas (Ryan? Jody? Shannon?) also have this issue, or is it special to us cityfolk?

The Fall of the Urban Male

Before we left for the Bahamas, Sarah put out some cheap, exposed glue traps to catch our mouse. Last night, I came home to success and met it with failure.

The mouse had stuck itself to the trap under the living room radiator earlier in the day, and was still squealing and scratching its way toward death when we sat down to dinner. It was unnerving to say the least, but the thought of digging out the rodent and packing it off to the garbage outside was not exactly palatable. Not only did I not want to manhandle the thing, but I also couldn't deal with the idea of killing a mammal. In fact, I was so squeamish, we called a guy and paid him to take the mouse away.

Weak. I'm weak.