Crowded House

May24

I grew up in a crowded house, but one of the things I could always count on for an escape was music. There was a huge console stereo in our living room. It was a beautiful piece of furniture. The wooden box with hand-carved scrollwork had been around as long as I had and I polished it weekly with Lemon Pledge. So, that meant it belonged to me. Its huge hinged lid was the escape hatch to a radio and turn table that gave the world to me. AM/FM, The Moody Blues, Steppenwolf, Simon & Garfunkel. I had it all!

When I was older, my parents had one of those Columbia House memberships where you could get any album on 8-track for a penny. A tape deck was added to our state-of-the-art sound system. Now I could pop a penny’s worth of Barry Manilow into the tape deck and dance like a Vegas show girl. It was indeed a true blue spectacle – a miracle come true!

In junior high I would go into the room I shared with my two sisters, shut the door and crank up I-95. It was THE rock station. They had a contest one summer where listeners could call in and win a hundred dollars for each time they said I-95 in one minute. I never called in because it was a long distance call. One time a DJ got stoned or something, locked himself into the control booth and played Blondie’s The Tide Is High over and over until the men in little white coats came to take him away.

I love music; all kinds. I did swear off Country because I know every word to every classic country song EVER recorded thanks to my grandmother. That’s all she listened to, well, that and anything performed on Lawrence Welk. This year has seen big losses of talented musical icons. This week the band Crowded House lost former drummer Peter Jones to brain cancer. He was only 45.

Crowded House is one of my absolute all time favorite bands. Their song Don’t Dream It’s Over made a mark on my heart when I was a young(er) woman. Every word of it is true.  I tried to find a video of Crowded House performing on You (have to watch crap ads to pay for this) Tube and since I don’t want to advertise sneakers, here is the very talented Sixpence None The Richer performing the classic instead.

I love this song. Peace.

Who Do They Think They’re Fooling?

May23

Changing gears, sort of, today I was listening to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ You Don’t Have To Live Like A Refugee and pulling together some photos I thought my dad would enjoy. Even though I am a corporate refugee, I don’t live like one. I am surrounded by beauty and am fortunate to have time to pursue my passion. It may seem that I am too comfortable making observations from the sidelines. I may sound snarky and cynical sometimes. I really haven’t given readers who don’t know me personally any reason to believe that I know what I’m talking about. After all, anyone who can read can formulate opinions about business or politics. Plenty of people know much more than I do about these and other topics.

End of disclaimer.

My observations are honest assessments and, at least to me, humorous. People don’t need to see my résumé to know I’ve been around the block, so to speak. I really do try to follow the advice “judge not, lest ye be judged.” Most of the time I can laugh at absurd things happening in the world with a knowing that I too have believed in things that turned out to be too good to be true. I am familiar with the saying, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. I understand the meaning well and would add the refrain, fool someone I care about and you’ve gone too far.

Now to me, scammers and spammers, for the most part, are just a damn nuisance. They try to reach me in every way possible. Caller ID is a great feature that I rely on to keep them from bothering me. WordPress bloggers are fortunate to have excellent protection that captures junk for us. Thanks WordPress for taking steps to do that!

I do wish email hackers and data miners could find a better line of work. I guess being a low-life scum-sucker pays well because every time I turn around, there seems to be more and more of them. Today one of the lying scam bastards cold callers, claiming to be a representative of Microsoft, called my dad claiming to be checking into a computer problem my dad had reported. You know when you have an issue and a dialog box pops up that says, “send report”? Well, my dad had done that several months ago and thought maybe Microsoft was finally getting around to catching up on their work and took the caller at his word.

The waste of human flesh directed my dad to a website that allowed this scam scum to take remote control of the computer. He spent some time trying to demonstrate where the ‘problems’ were and in the process tried to convince my dad to pay a fee for a service that would fix the computer. Of course, my dad didn’t buy anything, but who knows what information was extracted by the malicious terrorist.

I know it doesn’t hurt these creeps to call them names, but they are malicious terrorists and should be run over with a cement truck punished. This is a worldwide scam, by the way.

If there is ever an IPO for a company that invents a super-sonic laser-pingback that fires a shit storm at them, that’s where I’ll invest my money. Aren’t these classic vehicles awesome?

What The Flim Flam?!#@

May22

Gone are the days when a vital message can be relayed by a carrier pigeon alighting on a castle window sill or a guy on a horse dashing around lighting lanterns. How did the civilized society survive before the information age? Today’s news of last-ditch efforts to squeeze a few more drops of blood dollars out of investors followed by technical glitches is not surprising, but it does beg the question, “What should you expect when you give your money to a guy in a hoodie whose philosophy is The Hacker Way?”

Pummel is a bit harsh, don’t you think? I mean really there was a wedding to prepare for. Oh wait, that’s right, we don’t hold the head of publicly traded companies accountable when something goes wrong, do we?

Nevermind.

What do you do when the next big thing gravy train turns out to be the chuck wagon? Ask any mortgage-backed security trader and they will tell you. You batten down the hatches, ride out the storm, package up the debris and sell it to the scrap yard, hoping to get enough to cover attorney fees. That’s how it goes in the stock market. From pork bellies to junk bonds, to scratch and dent mortgages, it’s all the same shit just a different day. At the end of any given day you may find yourself sitting on a guard rail, hungry and disillusioned, hoping someone will just give you a ten spot. That’s the new 401K.