Raccoons

For the last ten days, the local raccoons have ripped up my lawn looking for, apparently, grubs that resemble succulent prawns that live under the turf. I've attempted to kill the grubs, which this late in the season means applying Sevin, a totally poisonous dust, to the grass.

It hasn't made any difference - each night the raccoons have torn up the turf. But something in their dynamic has changed. This morning at 6 am, I heard them fighting. I got out too late to see what they where squabbling over. A few minutes ago at dusk, I heard them fighting again, and watched them climb into the tree that serves as their stepladder between my yard and everyone else's. Hopefully this means that the free shrimp bar is over and the patrons are arguing about the remnants. I'm only sorry that I had to apply the world's worst insecticide to get it done. Next year I'll apply less harmful barrier products earlier in the year.

Today in Shopping

I was treated as a potential criminal at a store today. It was the Farm to Market in San Juan Capistrano, where I go to get cheap local produce, herbs, spices and above all, organic hair dye. My hair's been fading from red to ginger over the past couple of years. Being of British origin, ginger doesn't exactly cut it, so I first resorted to henna, then Herbatint. I suspect Herbatint is made of exactly the same stuff I would buy in Vons, but it's very careful to tell me it's "herbal" and I fall for that kind of stuff.

The woman behind the cosmetic counter asked me if she could help me, and I said no. After a second I realized all the hair dye had been put behind the counter glass, so I said, "Apparently you can help me...I need a box of Herbatint and it's behind glass now."

She fished for the shade I wanted, handed it to me and then as I made to push the cart off into the uncharted waters of the Made-Up Vitamins Aisle, she stopped me. "You can't put that in the cart. I have to take it up to the front. We've had kids taking them. Are you done shopping?"

I wasn't done shopping, I said, but I didn't point out I was far from a "kid".

"Nothing personal," she said as she took the box from me. "You can collect it when you're ready to leave."

It might have been "nothing personal" but I felt like I'd been singled out as a common criminal. I fumed in humiliation all the way through the store and wanted to leave without collecting the dye - at $17, it was twice the price of everything else I was buying combined, but not exactly an X-Box or an iPhone - but I realized that if I left without it, I'd definitely be known forever as the Woman Who Tried To Lift Our Hair Dye But Was Foiled.

"Ready," I grated at her when I was set to leave. She made small talk and wished me a nice day about eleven times on the way to the cash register, but all I could think of was that she'd essentially accused me of being a thief.

I won't be going to Farm to Market in San Juan Capistrano in future. I don't need to be humiliated while shopping. The city has a farmer's market in town once a week where I can get fresh vegetables, and I can buy ordinary hair dye at Vons like a normal person. It won't be "herbal" but then again it doesn't seem to harm anyone else.

Farm to Market is one of those places that sells organic veg along with things like negatively-charged water (the extra electrons stop the water molecules clumping together, apparently), water with added oxygen, and Colloidal Silver. SJC is a pragmatic town, and I'm surprised there are enough Fans of the Woo to keep Farm to Market going. Well, it just lost me, and my steady $20 a month. A major blow, I'm sure.

I first got this treatment many years ago in East London, when I was shopping in some megastore - English equivalent of Target or Walmart - and a security guard came up and followed me around. He didn't follow at a discreet distance, but shadowed me from a foot away, looking at what I was looking at and bending when I bent down to look at something. I spent longer than I should have pretending it wasn't happening and trying to act normally, but after a while I gave up and left the store, which is what he undoubtedly wanted. I never went back there again, either, but since I can't remember where it was, I can't badmouth it on the internet.

I remember later, also in East London, going to a chemist's opposite the teaching hospital where I worked and asking for carbon tetra-chloride. The assistant called for the pharmacist who came down some wooden stairs from the attic like a wandmaker from Diagon Alley, and stared at me like I was a bug. "I don't have any carbon tetra-chloride, and even if I did, I wouldn't sell it to YOU," he said, as if I were Amy Winehouse or something. "What do you want it for?"

"I need to clean carbon deposits off the nylon spindles on my amplifier knobs," I said, trying to be reasonable in the face of frank condescension. "The build-up is making the sound crackle when I change the settings."

"Use nail polish remover. Acetone," he said, walking away from me.

I wanted to shout at him, "Nylon is soluble in acetone, you utter failure as a supposedly degreed chemist! It'd soften the spindles and wreck my entire amplifier." But I didn't. I just learned to hate East Londoners.

Although I no longer wear a leather bike jacket and a Ramones t-shirt, it appears I'm still in the drug-addict/thief class as far as store owners are concerned. Fuck 'em all.

Scrubs, the jammies of the medical professon

I saw another woman in the supermarket wearing scrubs today.

I HATE that. I can just imagine her shopping while thinking, "Shit, what a horrible day I've had in the Emergency Room, treating people with MRSA, Rabies, drug-resistant TB...that HIV-positive guy who'd had the bloody catfight with the Hepatitis C-infected guy...then the possible-Ebola guy bleeding out all over the floor and Ol' No Nose Phil, the Leprosy Man, coming in to have a few bits of dying flesh snipped off...I'm too tired to even change my clothes!" Meanwhile she's squeezing avocados and bending over the peaches looking for a good one.

I can also imagine her leaning over some deathly ill Flesh Eating Bacteria Guy in the hospital cleaning out his wounds as her scrubs' top rubs against him, the same top she was wearing when she carried the bag of moldy onions on her hip back to Von's to get her money back at lunchtime.

Update: an article in the Atlantic on the subject of scrubs in food shops - by an MD!

A rose in Spanish Harlem blooms no more

Yesterday, Jerry Leiber died.

Who?

The guy who wrote Hound Dog, among a thousand more.

Nick Ashford died today as well.

RIP both.

Black Waterside

As for White Summer/Black Mountainside, in case anybody feels my fangirliness precludes adequate exploration into Jimmy Page's roots, here's Black Waterside by Bert Jansch.




And here's the corresponding Zeppelin tune. Can't figure out how to embed it, so you'll have to click. I think Jimmy wins, but then I always did.

And White Summer? Davey Graham.

Led Zeppelin, the I

For whatever reason, today was Led Zeppelin day. Always loved the first album.  I'd had it for many years before someone told me Jimmy Page's guitar on the album was a Telecaster.  Listening to I Can't Quit You Baby, it was natural to assume it was a Gibson ES 335.



Nope, it was a Telecaster - same as on Communications Breakdown, the world's first angry punk song.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of I Can't Quit You Baby, which I think of as a Savoy Brown song, but hell, it's a fuck of a version.

Daily Telegraph develops a sense of humor

I'm not sure how the Torygraph managed to match up the (stock looking?) picture with the headline but it made me laugh like a drain.

You can find the original at the Daily Telegraph site. Hope they don't change it!

Radio Off

SiriusXM just dropped BBC Radio 1 from its lineup without warning. On the 2nd of August, I paid a year's dues, on the 9th, BBC Radio 1 disappeared to be replaced by a disembodied voice saying I can find songs like the ones I used to enjoy on several channels.... It didn't explain how I could find people like Annie Nightingale and Zane Lowe, or things like Radio 1 outside broadcasts from Ibiza, or the Live Lounge.

I cancelled - they gave me my dues back minus two bucks - complained, and will listen to Radio 1 on the website instead, although that wrecks the timeshift that XM used to put into it. (It was streamed five hours late, so the times on the BBC clock were correct for the east coast - three hours wrong for me, but not as weird as listening with an 8 hour offset.)

I'm not sure what the issue was. I've seen folk say that the BBC did it, as they are readying for iPlayer, and I've seen people say that XM simply backed out of the negotiations.  Either way, it wasn't a nice thing to do. And it's not like I have other things to take my mind off it, like lay-offs at work, the Crisis of Capitalism or the England riots.

How could I dance with her mother?

I was alarmed today to learn that the worst song ever just became No. 1 in the UK charts. It has a couple of inescapable hooks, but still. I mean, I sometimes hum Hot Butter by Popcorn, or it may be Popcorn by Hot Butter forty years later, but I don't have it confused with a good song.

On the chart show today they interviewed Cher Lloyd and she's 17 and new to the business, which almost made me hold off from posting. But on the other hand, I was first taught Clementine when I was six, and although Sir Mix A Lot was not around when I was six, I could have learned Buttermilk Biscuits at the same age. It's no excuse to say you put them together because you were just seventeen (if you know what I mean).

Also, it doesn't explain what a Swagger Jagger is. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with Mick Jagger and I'm not getting anywhere trying to track it to Staggerlee. I wish I could.



All I get from it is orange boxes without topses were shoes for Clementine and a touch of Buffalo Girls go around the outside, around the outside. Or Buttermilk Biscuits.





At least Clementine is out of copyright.

I quite liked that Friday song. And that Pricetag song. And the Friday song by the Pricetag lady. Whatever happened to the good songs of three months ago?

Rango, DVD 2011 (Spoilers)

I watched Gore Verbinski's Rango yesterday. What an odd film. I spent the first half of it hating it, and only began to make sense of it near the end, shortly after the bats with machine guns had chased our heroes  and their gasoline tanker I mean wagon carrying a water jug down the Death Star trench I mean desert canyon.

The animation is breathtaking. Every fur texture, the hair, the scales, the clothes, all are perfect. The facial expressions and gaits are wonderful, naturalistic when called for and properly exaggerated when needed – for instance when Bill Nighy's sinister Rattlesnake Jake decides to crush someone in his coils.  The landscapes are fine, and the lighting is so good that it genuinely looked as though someone had built and lit the sets for a master DP.  On the other hand, the movie featured so much sudden death, mutilation, injury, roadkill, impaling on cactus spines, being set on fire, guns being handled by children and loss-of-eye-due-to-arrow-through-socket that it made me actually uncomfortable.

(Many spoilers below.)

The main character (voiced by Johnny Depp, as brilliant as usual) is a chameleon (get it?) who has no name (get it?). He lives in bliss in a glass tank (get it?) putting on plays with his pet-toys. On the way from somewhere, in the middle of the desolate Mojave Desert, his tank falls from the family car and shatters (get it?).  Wandering in the desert, the humidity-loving lizard finds a cowboy town called Dirt (cf. 'Earth,' get it?). His blarney impresses everyone in the Star Wars Cantina local saloon and so he proceeds to remake himself, as chameleons do, naming himself Rango (get it?) and setting himself up as the hero by talking up a storm as a bandit-killer. Every town needs a hero and Rango becomes sheriff.

Earlier, on his way from his shattered tank on the asphalt to the desert itself, No-Name-As-Yet meets a roadkill armadillo, midriff squashed flat. The armadillo offers Rango sage advice.  This early disturbing scene rather set me up to hate the movie.  And – it seemed rather abrupt. When wannabe-mythical characters are called from their tanks or other comfortable dwellings to cross the river on their Hero's Journey, they usually wander around and say why me? a lot, and the ferryman who offers sage advice is usually less dead.  All became clear a lot later on.

The various animals who live in Dirt are running out of water due to a Chinatown-style conspiracy. There's a run on the water bank, a classic Western (water) bank robbery,  and all kinds of Western water-related shenanigans all lifted with a fairly heavy hand from other movies. 

Rango wins the heart of a girl called Beans. STB thought Beans was a lizard and that's possible. However her character flaw, or whatever it was, was freezing up and not being able to move for ten to fifteen seconds every now and again, so I thought she was a Fainting Goat. Well, whatever.  Adventures are had, and eventually Rango is exposed as a motormouth actor, not a real hero, and is forced to leave the town in disgrace.

So at the end of the second act, as usual, the hero has lost everything he ever had and there is no hope of return.  Then – suddenly – in a twist from the usual Scriptwriter's Handbook – he meets the armadillo again. This time he's whole and his sage advice makes sense. Rango is given a vision of the Spirit of the West (Clint Eastwood, natch) and then Crosses the Road. This crossing is much more harrowing, as he literally walks across the I-15 freeway, with cars and trucks driving over him and yet just missing him. (I suspect Gore Verbinski has seen The Trip.) 

This is the true crossing to the other side. The breaking of his tank and the task of becoming the hero to a town was actually still the chameleon being a chameleon, and the suspiciously dead ferry-armadillo was not his ultimate spiritual guide.  The hallucinogenic sequences of the spiritual journey in the desert led STB to remark, "Oliver Stone called, wants his movie back."  The initial scene of the talking roadkill finally made sense – the fever dreams of dead animals in the desert calling you on, Oliver Stone's dying Indian at the roadside.

On The Other Side of the Road, Rango learns that the town's water is being piped to Las Vegas (it isn't named but we see its iconic skyline). I couldn't work out if Las Vegas existed in the movie or if it was a metaphor. After all, characters all the way through the film whisper the rumor that "the water is being dumped in the desert".   "Las Vegas" and "water is dumped in the desert" are synonymous in one major respect, but not in many others. It made my brane hert, so I gave up.

Rango gets some magic plants-of-burden to work on reversing the pipeline, rushes back to Dirt, gets the girl, saves the day and inundates the town with water.  All's probably well with the world, except that previous scenes have shown that the town is in a dry lake bed, so they'll all have to build arks. Maybe that's being saved for Rango Part II: Waterworld.

Comic-Con day three or two or four

This is certainly an education. I get up out of bed and queue for a while and get into a room where Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson are discussing the new Tin Tin movie with the fans, and showing a couple of clips.  Then, time with Kate Beckinsale and others to discuss the new Underworld movie (it's in 3D!), and then a half hour with the folks behind Attack the Block.

Comic-Con doesn't actually give an individual fan access to a meteoric director (except for the fan this morning who wore a t shirt begging for a chance to shake Spielberg's hand, which was picked up by the cameras, so he did get the chance) but it does bring us all into actual contact with the people who make the creative decisions.  A director who normally gets his (it's always 'his') only clues from box office receipts now gets to hear a roar or a laugh or baffled silence from a live audience of 6,000. (No baffled silences today.) That's got to be a good thing.

As well as a thousand Steampunks, Stormtroopers and Alice in Wonderlands, today a guy is wandering around in a mouse mask, like Deadmau5. The mask is covered in LCDs, so when someone stops him to talk, his habitual blue grin reacts to their presence - commonly by swirling clockwise and then rocking until it goes back to a grin with a mouth at the bottom, but often by blazing into red and yellow sweeps of information like those a squid will spill over its body in its instances of communication.. At a SIGGRAPH the fellow would have his own installation. Here at Comic-Con, where about 5% of the 120,000 attendees like to dress up, he's just one person. He certainly caught my eye.

Comic Con visit

I'm spending the next few days at Comic Con in San Diego.

I've never been before - always been more of a Worldcon person, but the last time...Denver, I think...I felt I'd rather go to somewhere well-attended enough to draw big names and generally be splashy and oversized and colorful.

Comic con crowds by STB

Well, Comic Con is certainly all of those. It's easy to see the relationship between the dour and ernest fannish Worldcon and the much bigger media convention. The same types of people are there, but instead of six thousand at best, there's well over a hundred thousand. About the same proportion are dressed in costume, which means there's a LOT of people in costume, and the major difference is I've no clue who all of them are. Presumably anime characters I've never heard of. Highlights today included not getting into a Harry Potter fandom panel because the vast room was filled before the line even started moving where we were and then listening to Jon Favreau (with Guillermo del Toro) in a vast cinema hall talking about Cowboys and Aliens and showing a long clip of a very cowboy movie indeed. With, as advertised, aliens. And then we went to see Penn and Teller. Teller is not actually mute. Hmm. My world is turned upside down.

Oh, and lots of people on panels use lots more profanity than at SF conventions. Oh, and I got to teach STB the "Yo dawg, I heard you like [Y] so I put [X] in your [X] so you can [Y] while you [Y]" meme.

Good times.

Jimmy Page Dot Com

Jimmy Page recently opened a website. A day late, you might think, but not a dollar short. The site features a "This day in history" section which - for 24 hours only - showcases something Page did on that day. Sometimes it's something I've seen before - recently the 1977 Seattle Superdome Noise Solo was featured. Truth be told, I already have that on Very Slightly Unofficial Video.  Today, it was a completely unheard before, 1961 Jimmy Page track, called "Jet Black" by Neil Christian and the Crusaders. (It's a take on Jet Black by the Shadows.)

Jimmy Page Dot Com says that none of these "this day in history" pages will be archived. They are up for that day and not available after that. Obviously, the clever and or motivated will be able to archive them, as I have with the rather-astonishing-for-1961-Jet Black. But to experience them in the first place, you have to go to Jimmy Page's website, and sign up.

Have I posted these before?

Jimmy Page (for it is he) playing with the Black Crowes last week:

13-Jul-11

[Edited for broken links]

Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes, 2011

Here is Jimmy Page playing with the Black Crowes last week.



And Jimmy's hotly anticipated new website jimmypage.com came on line at the same time.

Is Jimmy about to do something? I mean two gigs in a month and now a new website?

Probably not. But I have all the music going back fifty years to listen to. I can't argue if I don't have something to listen to tomorrow.