In 1995, my Dad’s second wife gave birth to a son. Later that year, in a job interview, the following exchange actually occurred between me and the interviewer/potential employer:

The Potential Employer: So, do you have any brothers or sisters?

Me: No.

The Potential Employer: Ah.

Me: No, wait. Yes. Yes, I do.

Despite this weird answer and the resulting convuluted explanation, I got the job. But this is what life is when you spend 28 years as an only child and then life hands you a sibling. Thus it is that, at 39, I have a 12-year-old kid brother.

One of my goals over Thanksgiving was to plant the seeds so that he might worship properly.

You see, both he and I have been reared with the same basic religious background: None. I remember the first time I went to Sunday School with my childhood chums, who were Christian Scientists, and the lady was telling the story of Noah, which was familiar to them but for me it was the first time I’d ever heard of it, and I could not figure out why this old bat was gibbering to me about this Noah character. No, I grew to worship another deity—music. Now, like me, my young brother was born tapping his toe. But once you start into the pooberty, music becomes an altar, at least, it did for me. And don’t get me wrong, he’s doing pretty well for his age. He can bang out the “Iron Man” riff on his guitar and he’s already uttering the names of obscure bands that nobody else gives a crap about, which is essential. He’ll spend hours watching guitar acrobats on the YouTube, and he can quote line and verse from the most important rock movie ever made. Unfortunately, he has yet to come to the front of the church.

I hope to guide him there. I kept the SkyFi2 set to XM59 all weekend. And let’s just say he’s going to git a little something in his stocking this year. Hey, man. This shit is important.

The problem with Spoon’s “The Underdog” is that you can’t get it out of your damned fool head, not even with soap and water. It’s a good song, though I wish these groups these days if they’re going to bother to use horns would really USE them. Make them wail. Write them some charts. Do something with them besides “dah dah dah dah dah dah” or “dah dah dah.”

I watched a cute documentary called “Rock School” that I’m going to have to make everyone watch over the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s about this fella what teaches kids how to play the rock and roll music. It’s very impressive because the kids end up playing Zappa’s “Inca Roads” at a Zappa festival in Germany.

I’m in some agony this week because I’m on a self-imposed Howard restriction. I know the man’s going to be on vacation and in reruns next week when I’ll be in an automobile for ten hours wanting to listen, so I’m having my trusty Stiletto record the shows and saving them for the trip. But it sucks having to listen to Cenk Uygur in the morning instead.

Now through May 2008 on XM59.

Details at Orbitcast, from where I swiped (but did not hotlink) the art.

I was invited today to sit in on a webinar regarding crisis management for the trade association. It was very informative.

I don’t know if my co-webinar-participants felt the way I did about it. I just couldn’t help but feel ironically immortal somehow. I just wanted to grab my balls and say “nine eleven this, emm-effer” and walk out. It’s sort of like this: Since I was a zygote, there’s been this thing called the “emergency broadcast system,” which interrupts your television viewing and annoys you with a weirdly extraterrestrial “boop” for a minute and then goes away, followed by a reassurance that it’s “only a test,” and that, “had this been a real emergency, it would not have been a test,” or some such pulled pork. You know what I’m talking about. The Emergency Broadcast System. You’re familiar with it. Right?

Was it utilized on September Eleventh?

Did you turn on your radios or teevees that day and hear that annoying booooooooooop followed by the announcer coming on and telling you that it was NOT a test, and that, oops, I just crapped my pants, excuse me?

No. All those years and years and years of preparation and baiting by the Emergency Broadcast System, and we had a real live emergency and it was as useful as a cowpie in a 400-meter relay. I arrived at my office, I learned of the attacks, I left my office and walked over the Roosevelt Bridge to Arlington and was able to see the Pentagon Smoke to my left. And I was not motivated to do so by some weird extraterrestrial boop I’d been hearing all my life. I was motivated by someone saying they’d lit the Mall on fire somehow.

So it was like that. I can have flashlights in my desk. I can re-certify in CPR. I can store a private parachute in my file drawer. But I was here and witnessed and survived the September Eleventh attack on Washington with no prior training. I couldn’t help but giggle and make a few jokes through the presentation…

It is a shame but seems to be true that the Saturday Night Live requires the right guest host to be good. The last truly sublime episode I can remember until last night featured Hugh Laurie of House. Last night’s episode, featuring NBC Anchor Brian Williams, was terrific. Key moment: Williams in a room explaining to many of the Democratic candidates that the media had already decided that Hillary was the nominee. Incidentally—following his bang-up interview with George Suckamuckagus this morning, it’s official: I’m a John Edwards guy.

I have a few posts ago discussed a recording artist called Marnie Stern. This is now more than a passing fancy. It is full-on obsession.

You can’t just pick up “In Advance of the Broken Arm” and listen to it and give up. You have to take it up and swish it around a little and spit it out first. After a while, it will evaporate into your head and will cause a new fold to grow into your brain. Once your cranial capacity has been adjusted adequately, you will begin to crave this, not so much like one craves a drug; more like one craves very good soup.

Go sample some at the Marnie Myspace. » File under “mythic and weird, but mind-expanding.”

Scent of a Führer »