Leaving the Free Clinic with tears streaming...

The week before Christmas we were rear-ended. No one was physically hurt. The other driver was well dressed, though I think she was driving a Tempo, (for those of you younger than us) which Ford replaced with the Taurus, which has also since been replaced. It was a beater, and had 30 day tags. I felt terrible for her.

The driver said she was looking for an address for an interview she was late for when she hit us, and I believe her.

Unfortunately she didn't have car insurance, or a driver's license (I'm not sure which is worse in the eyes of Johnny Law), but it didn't really matter as she split the scene just before the cops arrived. She did give me a social security card, though it now seems as if it was stolen, the officer who made the report stopped by our house to see if a picture of the true owner of the card was the woman who hit us, it wasn't.

There is a bit of damage that we'll have to eat the cost of repairs for.

I've been fragile lately.

Before I tic, I get a sensation not unlike a charlie-horse in the back of my head. For the better part of this year, when I'm particularly down I've frequently had a feeling as if my skull is quickly expanding inwards in the same place, choking my brain. I can't shake it anyway other than by going to sleep, sometimes a couple hours of napping does the trick, and sometimes it takes a couple naps of that length.

After the accident we didn't have much time before an appointment with my psychiatrist. He may be my favorite doctor ever, and I've had some great ones (Danielle doesn't care much for my story about a young resident telling me I had a runner's body as she put a catheter in, but I'm going to keep telling it until my dying day, and it will only get better as I need a cane, followed by a walker, and finally a wheel chair). I used to see this doctor at the Cleveland Clinic, but I now see him at the free clinic.

The free clinic is really great, pretty much exactly what you imagine socialized medicine to be - far less paperwork than a normal appointment, and you walk out with a pile of medicine having paid nothing. I didn't feel the least bit rushed, which isn't ever the case when a 40 minute appointment costs $480 with the same doctor, just blocks to the west on the same street.

I was at my worst for the appointment, too far gone to talk for most of it. In some ways I'm very thankful the doctor got to see me in that state. He started me on another medication, my third anti-psychotic to go along with a pair of anti-depressants (I'm not taking them all at once). I'm not wild about being on all of these drugs, but the worst side effect of the newest one so far is that it dries me out. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, sure that when I free it, a piece of tongue-skin will still remain there like a scrap of tissue paper accidentally glued to an elementary school art project.

A technical journal of our recording session.

The acoustic was recorded in a shell, with two Royer R-122's (I'm not sure what model within that line, perhaps the active ribbon). The sound I was going for is maybe similar to Neutral Milk Hotel - Jeff Mangum's acoustic sounds on Oh Comely might be the masterpiece of recorded acoustic guitar in my mind, which is to say a lot of bottom end with enough treble to have a sharp attack. I'm really pleased with the sounds we got last night...there are nuances in the tone of the guitar that are absolutely crazy. Things I'm not sure I've ever heard before, and definitely not in any recordings I've done at home with lesser equipment. Someone posted something about a Komet amp on a forum about guitars and tone that I read, saying that a bandmate asked them how a single note became a chord when played through the amp...I had the same sort of experience while recording last night...if I had a copy of just the guitar at all I'd post it, but unfortunately everything I have includes my singing, which I'm not comfortable putting out there in a rough mix state - I'm not crazy about my voice at all, and even though I'm not a perfectionist, I'm keeping the tracks private until a little studio magic can be worked...I think in 4 songs I never did more than 4 takes, and the majority of which were on a song that I kept having to try over because I repeatedly place one word on a beat when I meant to put it on the + of the beat. I didn't expect to do any real vocal takes last night, but I really flew through the guitar parts.




A couple of the songs end with some massive ritards, and I wanted to use a click track for the ease adding more parts at a later date...I ended up having to have the click tracks made for me as I realized my limited software couldn't do what I needed with the tempo changes...I got the tracks to my liking 23 hours before the session, and was only able to practice with them two or three times each...on one of the songs I got separated from the click during the ritard, but ended up keeping the track anyway...there really were some very cool things happening that were unintended...some sound a little wrong-note-ish (and may actually have been), but they sort of seem to be more ghost notes than real notes, so for now I'm planning on going with them (thankfully they are in parts that will remain just acoustic and voice, where a wrong note won't just create much dissonance with another part).



I can't remember all the mics we ruled out for vocals, the two closest to the camera in the picture are clearly Neumann's, they weren't really in the mix. I think the one furthest is an AKG, whatever it was it captured my voice the truest, but the Royer won out again. We did a lot of the vocals in very hushed tones with my nose up against the pop filter...maybe think Elliott Smith. My long term plans for the vocals are a little more involved...we're going to try a lot of things, including running them through the Leslie, and we may toy with some different mics picking that up.

My overall goals for the sound aren't so much dark, but dusk, I guess you could say. I'm not going for Steve Albini by any stretch of the imagination, but maybe a little bit of a Velvet Underground sort of vibe to the recording would make me pretty happy.

This is probably going to be a pretty drawn out project, despite how much was accomplished the first night. The next step was originally going to be drums. A friend of mine from years and years ago (I mean, I've got cassettes of us playing together when bands that barely saw the turn of the century used to do a lot of shows together) is my favorite living drummer (a modern day Keith Moon)...he's been in Europe for the last month and a half with his band, and goes back on the 16th of January...he also no longer lives in Ohio...but his dad does, and he thought there was a chance he could record the day after Christmas in Cleveland...it no longer looks possible, so I looking into him recording in NYC (I'm nervous about the difference in rates!!!), but I'm not sure it will be a huge amount of time, so it may all work out alright.

This recording has been on my mind for a long time...most of the songs were previously recorded with a pretty great home studio set-up...but I've since decided that pretty great home studios aren't for me (too good to appeal to my penchant for lo-fi, but not good enough to be mistook for being professional). I think I could make it work if I had an endless supply of money, but even just the mics we used for the acoustic guitar last night probably cost more than this entire EP will to record, mix and master. I've decided that I'm not going to enter into any sorts of arms race when it comes to studio equipment, from my perspective, it's a losing battle.

The Dreadful Yawns

Someday soon I'll write about this past week. It was a doozy.

I've had my reasons for looking at Cleveland bands this week, and The Dreadful Yawns are my pick of the litter, I'm not sure you can go wrong with them, but Due South and There's No Place Like Home are probably my favorite two songs in their player. Beautiful clean guitar work.

Taking the Easy Way Out

This is my music pick blog, I'm a little late.

Everything in the works has all of a sudden become a bit more of reality in the past week. On Thursday, Danielle and I toured a local studio, the main tracking room was built in the 1940's by a radio station for the era's big bands to perform live broadcasts from. A couple decades later The Beatles played in it.

I know those responsible for designing acoustically sound rooms know a lot more today than they knew then. I'm certainly not one to decry science, nor am I going to expect a better performance from myself given the history of the room. I think in the end, from a production/engineering standpoint, I just like the recordings of yesteryear best. <

I've been a little consumed with recording lately - aside from trying to track down various songs and albums that I want to use as reference points for the sounds I'm hoping for, I've been trying to attend to a lot of other things, from preproduction sequencing of parts, to having a new saddle made for my acoustic, which until this past Sunday was a really crazy adjustable piece of wood that I knew could be sonically improved upon.

So maybe picking a band on Sub Pop isn't completely fitting with the idea for this blog, but here it is. The Handsome Furs Hate This City. It isn't something I'd try to emulate in the studio, there's nothing to read into it, I just like it.

Everything below...

...has been selected from blogs originally posted on myspace. Everything above will be posted on our myspace as well.

Not being alone is happiness

I've seen Bob Dylan three times in my life. The first time was during my junior year of college, and that was the only time what he played had much in common with the recorded versions of the same songs.

I don't blame Bob (I've heard that's what he likes to be called) for not wanting to play forty-year-old songs, or at least keep playing them the exact same way. Danielle and I saw him in Chicago the week before we got married, he didn't pick up a guitar once - spent the whole night behind the keyboard. The time before that he played guitar, but worked the same trick into the melody of almost every song (an appoggiatura for you other music nerds).

I have a love of symmetry, and to that end there is quite a bit quoted from the song just above this one in the play list. I hope to fill out an albums worth of material to put in between.

This is so (158%) Mandy Moore

Now and again I think about shaving my beard. I don't like shaving. When I taught in the ghetto, Danielle once asked one of my students how old she thought I was, the guess was 40. Danielle told her I was 27, and the girl said, "Mr. Baty, you need to start taking care of yourself." I think it was the beard. I got the idea to use the Celebrity Look-A-Like thing to see if me sans beard looked like more or less attractive people than me with it. After this match came up on top, I knew I had to post this:

Watching Vermont

This is the weekly music pick, so keep reading, or just skip to the link, your call.

We were in Cincinnati at this time last year, well, I was pretty much in bed.

I had slipped into my deepest depression, Danielle's parents and her grandparents came to visit for a weekend, I only saw her mom, and not until they were leaving. When they were gone I heard there had been some talk of anointing me with holy water, I'm not into that sort of thing.

A typical day might have seen me out of bed for a couple hours. It's all lost time, and I'm starting to worry I'm losing it again.

Ohio's a crazy state. The southeast is squarely in Appalachia. Without traveling the back roads around it, I don't think it's possible to understand the sort of poverty that still exists there, the sorts of lives people lead there. I couldn't find a date, but this Appalachian picture is recent:



I think I missed a lot of the great things in Cincinnati. We discovered local artist Charlie Harper (his work below), an excellent south Indian restaurant, and maybe our favorite pastry shop in The Bonbonerie, but due to my own depression, we missed a lot of the local music scene, including The Great Depression. Watching Vermont is my pick of the three songs they have posted.



All and all, I'm really happy to be back in Cleveland. I think dying midwestern industrial cities are right up my alley.

Special English, fuzz, Revolution Records

I just googled Chinaphile and more than 1,700 pages came up, so I guess it's safe to call myself that. If there's a term that rolls of the tongue more easily, let me know. Well, let me know if that term isn't Chinophile, the first search result for that is a site dedicated to 'leisure slacks'.

I think those three sentences are better than what I was going to have them preface, so I'll just leave it at the latest book I've picked up seems to have been written in special English. I made it one chapter, but I need beautiful wording too much to keep going.

The fuzz from the subject line is about the layer of it I think I want surrounding the next recordings we make.

I think we may be very close to booking studio time for Danielle's and my parts. I've had a few different song cycles (to borrow from art music) in my head for a while, but the most realized are adaptions of Richard Brautigan poems, two of which have been posted here for some time. I made requests for permission to use the words, but haven't heard anything in three or four months, maybe more, but tonight I think I discovered the golden ticket, and hopefully will know what I need to know very shortly.

The songs are important enough to me that I think I'd go into the studio without the rights. I could end up somewhere between Keith Green giving albums away and The Verve being sued by The Rolling Stones, but I'd be happy just seeing the songs through.

I had a little free time on the east side today. My plan was to look for used copies of Elliott Smith's Figure 8 and Sloan's Navy Blues. It would have been the third time I bought each of them, but Revolution Records was closed for a renovation. In particular, I wanted to hear the drum sounds on Everything Means Nothing to Me again, and listen to Andrew Scott's Gretsch, again.

I did end up with a copy of Super Furry Animals' Phantom Power. It's kind of funny how much I obsess over words, yet it wasn't until the 8th track that I decided to listen to see if the album was in English.

Our Spanish Love Song (not ours)

This is me making good on our weekly music pick. This isn't what I had thought I would recommend.

Off and on for the last three hours I've been trying to sleep. I'm anxious as all get out, having compulsions to tap my fingers in very specific patterns over and over again, sometimes on a living thing (thankfully Ramona has been sleeping with us lately). I'm trying to ration my Xanax, I haven't got any refills, or the money to see my psychiatrist.

I started the 33 1/3 of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea last night, and tonight in between failed attempts at falling asleep, read more.

There is a half page devoted to the music that the band listened to while in their van out on tour. My plan was to lookup something obscure and offer it to you, but instead I decided I needed to see if there was a myspace for Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra, which Jeff Mangum and friends all agreed they liked. I didn't find one, but someone put up a space for Charlie, and there is a duet with Pat Metheny there that is wonderful.

I dream of Audiophile 11/17

I'm not sure the guy who wrote the column (on Salon.com) actually liked everything he wrote about, but I don't remember him ever taking aim at anyone. It was always a little unpredictable, sometimes a download of a track yet to be released by someone huge, or sometimes one from an extremely obscure artist, but I always looked forward to it. Taking the dog out, coffee, and on weekdays, Audiophile.

Salon discontinued the feature a few months ago, citing relatively few page views for it. I'm not ambitious enough to try to take its place daily, but I've been thinking that maybe I would try to cast some light on other folks here on myspace that deserve it.

My introductory pick in what I hope will be a weekly posting is Rachel Ries, particularly her song Chicago, which you can download. It may even be better than Sufjan's song of the same name.

I can't say I know her, but we may have stayed in her apartment, and even bed, one or two nights. Before my brother was married, I think they were roommates, if not, she lived upstairs from him with my sister-in-law.

I love you too but I’m gonna mace you in the face

A few weeks ago we had a meal at Udipi Cafe as a precursor to a night at the movies to see The Darjeeling Limited. I went with Palak Paneer, and Danielle had a masala dosai.

I'm not sure I'd try to make another movie after Rushmore or The Royal Tenenbaums, then again, if I was Jakob Dylan I would have become a dentist or a lawyer. I have no negativity towards the film, as always, the music, cinematography and dialog fit together like a puzzle. The plot didn't leave a lot to resolve, but it wasn't a picture driven by plot, and Wes Anderson can develop a character better than anyone I know save maybe David Lynch.

We got there just in time to see the trailers for these promising movies: Juno in which Michael Cera knocks up a girl and Jason Bateman hopes to adopt the baby. We miss Arrested Development so much. Also, Margot at the Wedding, which looks like it might have a redeeming role for Jack Black.

We were married in San Francisco, at City Hall, actually. Maybe that means nothing to you, or

We were married in San Francisco, at City Hall actually. Maybe that means nothing to you, or maybe you remember the month or so during which time the mayor of SF performed and allowed gay marriages in the city despite state law, or much less likely, The Wedding Planner. I'm not sure if J-Lo offers to arrange a wedding there, or gets married there, but there's something to do with weddings and city hall in it. It really is a beautiful place, one of the modern wonders of the world.

We didn't have a witness, but we did decide we should have a photographer. Before the ceremony, she made a little small talk, and at one point offered "I bet you're a sensitive guy".

I am a sensitive guy. A few weeks after Danielle and I first kissed, I started having weird convulsions after kisses. We had doctor's orders to make out during medical tests, and at first it seemed that kissing Danielle had an electrical impact (seizure activity) on my brain, but that later proved not to be true.

I'm sensitive to a lot of things, as far as setting off the tics (they're more related to Tourette's). I think in order of discovery, it was certain physical contact, not just lips, but also having my feet touched by a balding emergency room doctor with slurred speech. The sound of fingers snapping, watching someone's eyes blink, standing next to appliances giving off heat, sitting under air conditioning vents, the smell I associate with frat boys (walking past an Abercrombie & Fitch), the smell of chemical cleaners, getting into a car that's sat in the sun, and so on.

I'm not sure where all of this started, at times I suspect it is related to a chemical spill near where I was born, when I was in elementary school. I've spent sleepless nights researching the spill recently, the Ohio EPA has no records of it, though I could find articles about it on the Washington Post's website.

This isn't really going where I thought it would, I wanted to write about Whole Foods' body wash. It comes in a few flavors, we always bought peppermint, but recently got a bottle of citrus. I was skeptical that it would send me twitching, but it didn't. It also doesn't take upwards of three hundred years to biodegrade like some other shower gels. The citrus smells a little like the taste of a mouthful mismatched Jelly Bellies, I recommend it.

My troubles with twitches really started with a new job a few years ago...I had been teaching in the inner city of Cleveland, I split time between two schools, of which I had a love/hate relationship. After two years, I decided I had to get out of one of them, and talked the principal of a new model small high school to create a position for me. For the first year, I taught instrumental music with a dry erase board, and in the second year, I got instruments for a third of the kids I would see, which happened to be about the same amount as would fit in my room as class sizes went from being capped to 15, to as many as 47 in my case.

In the words of my overly effeminate former student who was shot in the elbow at school today, my brain went from being lightweight crazy to the super heavyweight champion of the world while working there, and I lay most of the blame on the place. It offered few opportunities for feeling successful, despite being horribly misnamed SuccessTech (I once accidentally sent an email cleverly calling it SuckcessTech to all my colleagues, principal included).

I'm not sure what I really think of the situation today, a lot of the school district's short comings were highlighted, or rather, will be soon when it's discovered that the metal detectors that the students don't actually pass through don't even pick up things like the handfuls of music stands I've carried past them...that despite the number one stated goal of the district being the students' safety, the district moved the building's only security guard from the floors with hundreds of students, to the floors where a handful of low level administrators worked, despite parent petitions urging the district otherwise.

Ultimately I'm thankful all the injuries were all superficial save the shooter (I had his older brother and fellow Dennison Street Boys gang member in class), but maybe even more, I'm disappointed that there will be another discussion of gun control, with no steps taken to get handguns out of the hands of a 14 year old kids.

So it seems I'm a bastard

It's my mom's birthday, and she's now of age to receive my father's social security benefits. Part of the application process involves sending in a copy of their marriage certificate.

My mom is a full-fledged librarian, and every bit as organized in her home life as she is in her job, making it a little surprising when she couldn't find the document. She did what ladies her age do, and wrote a letter to the records department of the appropriate county to request a duplicate. The county's response was they had no records of the marriage.

My brother and I are bastards.



Our cats are crazy for guitar strings, and not long after I changed a set recently, Woo (the one at the head of the bed) started missing tuffs of hair on her chin. Strings can be prickly, and hard to throw away without making a real effort, so we thought maybe she had been digging them out of the trash and obsessively stabbing herself with them. Things took a turn for a worse, and after Googling ringworm images, we decided we had to take her to the vet. It turn to be bad case of feline acne. Who knew cats had awkward adolescences too?

And finally, Danielle added a lot to her etsy store. Below is a barrette, there are similarly styled necklaces and brooches.

Mattel & A September 4th Miracle

I'm reading Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present (amazon link below) right now, and despite the somewhat academic sounding title, Hessler is actually a journalist and former Peace Corps volunteer in China. A couple months ago I read his River Town, sort of a journal of time teaching English at a teacher's college in a remote Chinese city. In this book he's back in China and among other things, including stepping into North Korea, he visits a few former students, of which one lives just outside the gates of a Shenzhen, one of the special economic development zones that seem to involve millions of young Chinese kids living ten or more to a dormitory room and making cheap jewelry or lead-painted children's toys for eighteen hours a day.

This morning Danielle caught a story on the national news about how a Barbie doll that sells for twenty dollars at Walmart costs less than $.35 to manufacture in China. This really isn't anything shocking or new, but I was a little surprised that it was on ABC and not just PBS.

The greediness in this country is unreal.

In other news, a few months ago I had an accident with our camera (which is in part responsible for so few blog posts), I was taking pictures of a guitar that I had decided to sell, and as I moved to close the case, the wrist strap on the camera snagged a tuner and the camera was pulled from my hand. It fell not more than a couple of inches, but that was enough for a dark spot to show up on the display and in every picture that was taken from then on.

We've had the camera for a couple of years, and were a little disappointed with a few aspects of it, so while it hurt to be in the process of selling something and having an unexpected expense come up, we didn't take it too hard. It's been a fiasco ever since, and I've come to hate Sony even more, but that's not the story today.

At the end of the summer, on the last day that the Lakewood Park pool is open, you can take your dog swimming. We'd never gone before, for some reason the date or time never worked out for us. We wanted pictures, and decided that maybe we could crop out the spot, but when we turned the camera on the spot was gone. It still sounds a little as if there is gravel in the body, but it still took these pictures:

You've a romantic streak

We saw Once on the cheap at The Cedar Lee last week. I've had my share of anxiety attacks in movie theaters, strangely, Danielle's dad has too, and hasn't been to a theater since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, but I try to keep calm and carry on, and only had a few restless moments during the movie.

I feel a certain affinity to Glen Hansard, maybe it's our red beards and curly hair, penchant for acoustic guitars, or my Irish stock, I don't really know.

Brothers from other mothers?:

It's not the band I hate, it's their fans

Aside from farming cucumbers, I spent summers in high school playing Mario Kart in a friend's basement. There are certain conversations that took place there I can remember having more than once, and one of them is about the idea that concerts are sometimes better as memories than they were the first time around.

I'm still mulling over the Built to Spill show from last Monday. As per our usual, we ended up on the side of the stage, which is often a disappointing vantage since the soundman has no idea what is going on over there. For Built to Spill it wasn't too bad, the vocals were low in the mix as they always are, but I was their for the guitar work.

The other thing about the side of the stage is the people watching. We ended up sandwiched between some real squids, the type of guys that you see talking on Conan O'Brien for a second or two before the screen freezes and a big red 'Ass' gets stamped on the picture. The first dude came in making some sort of backhanded apology to his friends for being late while bragging about having just gotten to second base, it was 'tight'. Another salvage of note was wearing flip-flops, polo shorts, and some sort of track jacket style long sleeve shirt. He often had a 24oz. Pabst in each hand and one foot off the ground. He did a lot of air drumming and a little talking about his days of playng JV Baseball. I really regret not getting him to pose for a picture.

In general there were a whole lot more backwards baseball hats than I could have ever imagined.

We didn't get any good pictures because our camera doesn't like the dark. The best I could do was with a really slow shudder speed.

3 pictures

Pistol Packin' Grandpas

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Even at 69 years old, Russ Geis has enough vitality to bike through Stark County's remote nature trails.

He said the .380-caliber handgun on his handlebars will ensure he's doing it at 70.

Geis is among a growing number of seniors licensed to carry a concealed firearm. Because of the way the state collects such information, it's hard to determine exactly what portion of concealed-carry permit holders are 60 or older. However, some local permit data and anecdotal information indicate they have steadily packed heat since the state's concealed-carry law passed in 2004.

"You are out in a park, riding a bicycle trail and all of a sudden you're confronted by a drug addict who would kill you for $5," Geis said. "Are you going to sit there and say, 'Boy, I hope the police show up?'

"Having a concealed weapon today is more to my advantage than it perhaps would've been when I was 30 years old."

About 12 percent of all concealed-carry licenses issued since 2005 by the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Office have been to people 60 and older.

I think America was a better place when old people watched Matlock instead of CSI.

I've heard you say many times...

That you're better than no one
And no one is better than you.
If you really believe that,
You know you got
Nothing to win and nothing to lose.
-Bob Dylan

I promised a blog about Bill McKibben's Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age some weeks ago, but it never really materialized. I'm making the effort today.

The book boils down to an argument that in some areas technology has reached a point where it would be dangerous to push beyond, with those areas being genetic engineering and nanotechnology.

McKibben is accepting of a number of areas of genetic engineering, such as in somatic therapy (where genes are inserted by a retrovirus to a person's genetic code so that they will produce something they didn't previously, or fight something they couldn't before, or some such thing), but he strongly cautions against germline genetic engineering, in which an embryo is altered in a manor in which it will pass those modifications on to its offspring.

The concern is that people (in the extremely near future) with have the ability to engineer their children to have enhancements to any number of qualities, musicality, mathematical ability, or more or less, whatever their parents desire them to have.

I'm not sure I completely buy into McKibben's point of view though. One of the cornerstones of his objections is that it will create new classes of people. He poses questions such as how parents will be able to love their children equally when one has been engineered (or engineered with better technology) and the other has not. Do parent's of special needs children love them any less? He wonders about what the meaning of running a marathon would be if you were created in a test tube to be a long distance runner...

I'm not sure 'maintaining' a classless society (can we really call ours that?) is the strongest case against genetic engineering.

The middle section of the book, before a return to genetics, concerns nanotechnology, microscopic robots able to perform any number of tasks, often involving deconstructing atoms and rearranging them into something new and desired, spinning straw into gold, essentially. Besides the dangers of scientists getting in over their heads, their is a danger of nanobots (which often seem to be able to reproduce) being able to be created by rogues much the same way as computer viruses.

One of McKibben's weaker arguments was that nanobots could reduce the workload of people of the world, as a potato, shoes, or anything you wanted could be synthesized on the spot, and that people would suffer from not having meaningful work. It seems to be a bit of an out of touch comment from someone who draws their paycheck from a university on the grounds of being a thinker - I can't think of too many people who justify their existence by a 9 to 5, especially in our increasingly service oriented society.

There are some really crazy anecdotes, a vignette about an artist in New York who had a rabbit genetically engineered with DNA from luminous deep sea creatures to have fur that glowed...and from that standpoint I don't regret reading the book; however, the quality of the writing was a little lacking, and often he seemed to discredit ideas and scientists by quoting their often outlandish views on completely unrelated topics - for example, Rael, who some of you might remember as a former sports writer from France who claims to have been abducted by aliens and later vowed to produce the first cloned human, is often cited when discussing cloning.

Rhinoceros

Here's the last of the zoo pictures I'm going to post here, and it's one that I'm really happy with. If you want to see the rest of the photographs from our trip to the zoo visit our flickr page.

Informal : hooligan. Slang : goon, gorilla, hood

And my personal favorite:

God Bless the Lemurs, All of Them

If you're a Cuyahoga county resident, you can get into the Cleveland zoo for free on Mondays. We'll be posting pictures over the next couple of days of our most recent trip. Today, it's all about the lemurs.







I'm not wild about this last picture in terms of anything but the content. These pictures were all taken indoors and through glass, and the lighting made things difficult for our camera.

Yes, boy, I could sure go for some beef stew and a chicken bone. That's it.

The last words of Ohio's latest execution victim.

In other Ohio news, Sherrod Brown voted for the Iraq funding bill, I'm a little disappointed in him for that, but I suppose it's only funding the war through September.

Also this week, a reverend who has served time for armed robbery and manslaughter was found guilty of stealing $1.4M from the state for reporting a charter school he founded had more than four times as many students as were actually enrolled. I guess you don't have to pass a background check to found a school that is funded with public money in Ohio, which is strange because my mom had to have one when she served as a consultant to the library at the catholic high school in my home town.

As a former public school teacher, in a district that has lost 20,000 students in the last decade, many to charter schools, I have to say this isn't really shocking. I know there are great charter schools, but on a whole they underperform the public schools in the same neighborhoods, and have a history of corruption. The state of Ohio still allows charter schools that receive public money to operate for profit.

A Covert Class War

I spent a part of the morning in the parking lot of the United Labor Workers office. Danielle is a finalist for a job there that offers experience in all aspects of non-profit administration, we should find out in the next day or two.

I didn't think about taking a book until I was nearly out the door, and didn't go back for one. A couple years ago Danielle ran down our car battery while I was in an interview, and weary of doing the same, I only sporadically listened to NPR. The discussion was immigration.

I have to say, of all the issues that are dominating politics at the moment, this is perhaps the one I know the least about, or rather, I know the least about why people have such strong feelings against immigration, and why amnesty seems to be such a dirty word.

What I've gathered is that a lot of people don't like the idea of having to pay for a public education, or health care for immigrants. What I don't understand is why they would rather pay for the public education and health care of a citizen performing the same work at roughly the same pay (I realize that illegal immigrants are often taken advantage of).

I also don't understand how many of these people so angry about immigration are also opposed to a minimum wage increase, or making companies who have profits in the billions every year treat their employees responsibly.

I guess if a class war is taboo, then these are the lines that it will be fought on.

Some real whack jobs

When asked what they would do should a suicide bomber targeting an American shopping mall be apprehended, here are the responses of a few of the Republican presidential candidates:

"I would tell the people who had to do the interrogation to use every method they could think of. Shouldn't be torture, but every method they can think of." Giuliani

"I don't want them on our soil. I want them in Guantánamo where they don't get the access to lawyers they get when they're on our soil. I don't want them in our prisons. I want them there...some people have said we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is, we ought to double Guantánamo." Romney

McCain actually sounded the most sane.

This Goes Out to All my Baby Mamas

Lesya Ukrainka, poetress & Other pictures

The three of us decided to skip the YMCA today and spend some time walking up and down MLK Blvd. We've been wanting to take the camera over to the east side for a while, but have been putting it off until the flowers were in full bloom, but the weather was too nice to delay any longer.

For those of you who aren't Clevelanders, MLK connects a major highway with University Circle, which is home to Case Western Reserve University, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Severance Hall (The Cleveland Orchestra), The Cleveland Institute of Music, The Cleveland Institute of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Natural History and a number of other cultural and educational institutions.
The MLK cuts through some 50 acres of Rockefeller Park, which was donated to the city by John D. Rockefeller.

Here are some pictures we took:

Guns

From Salon's Tim Grieve:

Asked today whether the incident might cause the president to rethink his views on gun control, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino expressed horror over the shootings but then said: "As far as policy, the president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed. And certainly, bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting numbers -- I don't want to say numbers, because I know that they're still trying to figure out how many people were wounded and possibly killed. But obviously, that would be against the law and something that someone should be held accountable for.

I'm really curious as to how you hold the dead accountable.

Tying a man named Hooky's tie & Carson Daly

Danielle and I went to Massillon yesterday afternoon, her parents are dogsitting Ramona for us while we go to Chicago this weekend to see my brother, his wife, and Olivia - who made us an uncle and an aunt last fall.

Danielle's mom was home when we got there, and one of the first things she said was that their neighbor Hooky (who's given name is actually Homer Ronnie) was getting ready for a job interview and needed help tying a tie...and that she had offered my services. When she called to say we had arrived, and he could come over, Hooky told her he had figured it out, but he still needed help ironing a pleat into his pants...I declined.

After a brief stop at Taco Bell, we made it home for the last couple minutes of Conan...Carson came on immediately afterwards as he always does, but I've never understood why (or for that matter, why he wears tennis shoes and and ankle socks with a suit)...I'm not sure his reputation had anywhere but up to go with me...but goodness...

Another food blog

Among our errands today, Danielle and I did a little shopping at the West Side Market. We try to be socially responsible with our shopping, we buy local when we can, our coffee is always fair trade, we use canvas grocery bags.

We spent most of our food budget at Whole Foods on Monday. I'm torn about that...I respect Whole Foods, they pay their hourly employees well ($15 an hour on average + benefits). The store in Cleveland (University Heights, actually) hired 14 of Cleveland's Lost Boys of Sudan...I want very much to support them, but I still feel as though we should do the bulk of our shopping at the WSM. For those of you not from Cleveland, you probably wouldn't know that it's the largest indoor market in the states, or at least it was up until very recently...I haven't heard otherwise. Also, my cousin has a booth there, she's Cambodian, and sells many many Asian spices, sushi mats, and related things.

Here are a few pictures from today:





For more pictures, check out Danielle's blog.

A McBlog

"What goes on the tummy isn't as important as what goes in the tummy."

I guess McDonalds seems to think everything they list as an ingredient of Chicken McNuggests belongs in a growing child's belly, including (from The Omnivore's Dilemma):

"...McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but form a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed food possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road. Listed first are the "leavening agents": sodium aluminum phosphate, mono-calcium phosphate, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and calcium lactate. These are antioxidants added to keep the various animal and vegetable fats involved in a nugget from turning rancid. Then there are "anti-foaming agents" like dimethylpolysiloxene, added to the cooking oil to keep the starches from binding to air molecules, so as to produce foam during the fry. The problem is evidently grave enough to warrant adding a toxic chemical to the food: According to the Handbook of Food Additives, dimethylpolysiloxene is a suspected carcinogen and an established mutagen, tumorigen, and reproductive effector; it's also flammable. But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill."

Below is the complete list of McNugget ingredients...which according to Pollan's book are 56% derived from corn.

Chicken, water, salt, modified corn starch, sodium phosphates, chicken broth powder (chicken broth, salt, and natural flavoring (chicken source)), seasoning (vegetable oil, extracts of rosemary, mono, di- and triglycerides, lecithin). Battered and breaded with water, enriched bleached wheat flour (niacin, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, bleached wheat flour, modified corn starch, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, dried whey, corn starch. Batter set in vegetable shortening. Cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or sunflower oil and/or corn oil). TBHQ and citric acid added to help preserve freshness. Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an anti-foaming agent.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price

Information about the documentary, as well as the sources of the facts that we're presenting can be found here.

WAL-MART Drives Down Retail Wages $3 BILLION Every Year

WAL-MART Costs Taxpayers $1,557,000,000,00 to Support its Employees

In Texas it is estimated that WAL-MART cheated workers out of up to one hundred and fifty million dollars in unpaid wages

Wal-Mart Managers delete time from workers' timecards

Wal-Mart currently faces lawsuits in thirty-one different States for wage and hour abuses potentially involving hundreds of thousand workers.

Wal-Mart is facing a class-action lawsuit for discrimination against 1.6 million former and current female employees.

WAL-MART SUBSIDY NATIONWIDE: $1.008 BILLION

Currently in the U.S. there are 26,699,678 SQUARE FEET of empty WAL-MARTS

1999: All new WAL-MART construction halted in state of PENNSYLVANIA due to Environmental Violations

WAL-MART Imported $18 BILLION from CHINA in 2004

Cost for WAL-MART Factory Worker to Assemble (a toy tractor): $0.18
Retail cost at Wal-Mart: $14.96

Average WAL-MART Hourly Sales Employee Earnings: $13,861

HELEN WALTON: $18.0 BILLION
ALICE WALTON: 18.0 BILLION
JOHN WALTON: 18.2 BILLION
ROB WALTON: $18.3 BILLION
JIM WALTON: $18.3 BILLION

The WALTON FAMILY Has Given LESS THAN 1% of Their Wealth to Charity
Bill Gates has given 58%

The WALTON FAMILY received a federal tax cut of: $91,500.00 per HOUR in the 2004 tax year

A WAL-MART Worker may donate money from their paycheck to the CRITICAL NEED FUND, a program to aid other employees in times of crisis, like a fire or tornado.
In 2004, WAL-MART Employees gave OVER $5 MILLION to help fellow workers, The Walton Family gave $6,000

Too far Under the Radar

Under the Radar surveyed bands like Calexico, The Decemberists, Mates of State, Mercury Rev, My Morning Jacket, and more with the following questions. We'll answer them too.

What was the highlight of 2006 for either you personally or for the band?

Everything in Cleveland had been complicated for a while. I used to teach music in the inner city. My district laid off about a quarter of the teachers over the course of a couple of years, and my position went from one where I could really impact kids' lives, to one where I was basically supposed to contain kids in a room, because there was no where else they could be. For the last two years I worked for CMSD, I taught at a model small-school initiative highschool funded in part by the Bill in Melinda Gates Foundation. By the time I left, I had three times as many students as instruments, more kids each period than the fire code permitted in my room, and almost no students who had had instrumental music in middle school, usually not in elementary either.

In 2006 I interviewed for positions in Seattle (The Lakeside School, where Bill Gates graduated high school from, and now sends his children), Chicago (Lake Forest Country Day School), public schools outside of Boston and Amherst Mass and Burlington Vermont among others. I ultimately took a position at Cincinnati Country Day School (if you saw Traffic, that was the school). It wasn't the interviews that were the highlight, so much as buying music for the trips, and the travelling. We kind of did an Ivy League tour, spending time at Harvard, Yale, University of Chicago and Northwestern - and usually eating delicious Indian food (actually, we just discovered Udupi Cafe in Parma, Ohio - a rare Indian restaurant serving food from the south of the country - Danielle can't get enough of their dosas.

What was the low point of 2006 for you?

A couple years ago I started going into convulsions, sometimes lasting minutes, and as frequently as a thousand times a day. The doctor at the emergency room, and my GP, suspected a seizure disorder, and the first neurologist I saw diagnosed (after an EEG) me with Epilepsy. I was put on increasing doses of three different anticonvulsants over the course of nine months - in the end I had allergic reactions to two of them, and none of them stopped the convulsions. Finally Dr. Lederman at the Cleveland Clinic realized that it wasn't Epilepsy, but a very unusual variation of Tourette's Syndrome. After nine months I was finally on the right drugs (neuroleptics, which are also antipsychotics), and allowed to drive again, but the drugs had horrible side effects. I became so severely depressed that I would sleep 23 three hours a day. One of the neuroleptics I was on is strongly linked to cancer. After we moved to Cincinnati I found a neurologist that placed me on a different class of drugs that controlled my convulsions, without the depression. Nothing in the medical world seems to move very quickly, and in the end we decided it was best for me to resign my position at Country Day and move back to Cleveland (our house in Lakewood never sold). The whole fall of 2006 is lost to me. If only it worked like the beginning of Amelie, and I could stay up for the rest of 2007.

What are your hopes and plans for 2007?

I'm in the process of forming a nonprofit to provide arts education to Cleveland students now that the schools don't (can't) do it effectively. I've done my research, and shortly I'm going to be looking for other people to sign on to the Board of Directors. If you have a music or visual arts background, and you're interested, message me. I hope to make this my work for now, doing everything from finding qualified teachers, scheduling programs, and doing the financial development. I don't think anyone else should be thinking about this as a paycheck just yet (except the teachers of course), but I believe in the mission, and I think it will be meaningful for all involved.

Danielle is waiting on one more letter of recommendation from an old professor, and then she's sending in her application for graduate school. She's found a really cool Master of Interdisciplinary Fine Arts program. She's also just set up studio space in our attic, and is taking on projects from printmaking, to painting, to sewing. Hopefully soon we'll announce her Etsy store.

For the PFOC, we hope to finish our Paul Klee project, and record it. I'm really eager for everyone to hear the Brautigan recordings we made with Chris Bober and Bob. I hope we can record the same way (in our living room using Logic on a Mac), but Bob is in Japan indefinitely, and Chris is looking into grad school out of state.

What do you hope to hear more of in 2007? Less of?

I'm really looking forward to the collaboration of Wilco and guitarist Nels Cline. Cline has been a favorite of mine since his work with Mike Watt. Seeing them together on Austin City Limits has me squirming for more.

As far as less of, there are just so many bands. But probably what I want most is less NEOCON spin.

If the world were ending in 24 hours, what would you do in those 24 hours?

We'd eat a whole cheesecake, and take our golden retriever swimming (but not for half an hour), maybe watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and listen to Revolver.

If you could be one fictional character, who would you be and why?

I don't know about Danielle, but I think I'd want to be Ziggy Stardust. Despite some musical successes, and degrees, I've never felt like I was a particularly talented person. I've always just felt like I was smart enough to understand how music works, but not necessarily adept at it. It would be nice to be a glamrock star from when glamrock was cool. And it goes without saying it would be nice to have god given ass.