Where will you get your music?

Technology and Music

In 1988, as I was preparing to move to North Carolina, I sold my large Sony reel to reel tape recorder.  For years I had longed to have a reel to reel, a sign of a true audiophile, only to realize it was a pain in the ass. I spent hours taping albums to reel to reel only to never have occation to play them.  But it looked damn good in my rack!

At the time I had hundreds of vinyl long play records.  As a fourteen year old, I worked at Bill Post's APCO station for $1.25/hour.  Over the next three years I would spend every dime on records.  It started in 1968 at Clark's Discount in Shawnee, Oklahoma I bought my first real, non-cut out*, album, Bob Dylan's "John Wesley Harding."  I would go on to own his entire catalog, both in vinyl and CD.

While living in North Carolina, in 1990, vinyl records of new releases were becoming hard to fine.  I was a stick in the mud, resisting the switch over to the compact disc.  Once the decision was made, I drove to Spartanburg, South Carolina to a new discount electronics chain, Leshmires, to buy an Onkyo compact disc player.  My first compact disc was Bob Dylan's "O Mercy."  Then began the long process of replicating my entire vinyl collection into CD’s.

I eventually decommissioned my $400 Hardin Karmon turntable.  An expensive piece of audio equipment when bought in 1984.

Over the next twenty seven years, I would acquire over fifteen hundred compact discs.  During my music travels in the mid-nineties, I would be able to have over one hundred autographed.

Recently, our last two compact disc players gave out.  You can't buy a single disc player these days.  You can go on EBay and shop vintage stereo audio equipment, which I did to replace my AM-FM tuner.  I am still old fashioned running a total component system, with a Carver amp, NAD preamp and Phase Technology speaker system.  But AM-FM tuners are no long made.

I have one of the best Texas Songwriter and Americana collections and no way to play them.  Not to mention, it's become a pain to sort, play and refile CD's.  How lazy we've become.

Now we see the reemergence of the LP vinyl.  I do own a PROJECT turntable.  A wonderful piece of German engineering.  Since I got married, having all my audio equipment in the living room has been forbidden.  So it sits in the garage.

So on to the next technology.  I set up a Pandora account.  Once I had set up all my "stations" for all the artists in my collection, I bought blue tooth relays for the stereos in the house.  I now get a random selection of my collection without running to the stereo very sixty minutes.

So what's next?  In my life time I have gone from AM radio and 45 records to LP vinyl and FM radio to a brief period of cassettes and the romance of 8 track tapes to compact disc’s and now to total digital.  How will we get our music in the future?  Somehow, I suspect Apple will play a role.

*cut-outs records were album that either didn't sell or had flaws and they'd cut a notch out of the cardboard sleeve and discount.  The first album I bought off a cut-out rack was "Hums of the Lovin' Spoonful" which I still have to this day.

A Dog's Life or is the Pope right?

2006-2015
Rest in Peace
Sir Willow aka Willie

Growing up, we weren't a "dog family."  My parents, having grown up in the Depression, deemed a dog a luxury.  When I was 5 or 6, we lived in a country parsonage in Western Oklahoma and a stray German Shepard came to live with us.   Our section of the county was popular with city folk abandoning their unwanted dogs.  This dog became my sister and mine constant companion, despite my parents reluctance.  Then one day the church treasurer came by to pay my preacher dad and this German Shepard had the treasurer cornered on the porch for over an hour.  The next day, a old black man from town came to get our best friend and take him to his new home as a junk yard dog.  "We's like 'em mean."  I am convinced that dog would have died for my sister and I.  I suspect he would have killed for us too.

I went dogless until I bought my first house in 1980.  I got a Beagle pup.  The Late Great John Garfield was his full name.   Just happened to be the song I was listening to as I was trying to think of a name.  I had Garfield for 8 years.  Once, he and the neighbor's dog got out; the neighbors dog was hit by a car and killed.  When my neighbors found their dog, Garfield, as any best friend, as standing guard over the dog's lifeless body.

On another occasion, I was out of town on business.  My dad came over to feed Garfield and make sure he had water.  He called me one night to tell me someone had dumped little female dog in my back yard.  When I got home a week later, my neighbor, Roy came over to tell my about my backyard visitor.  Roy laughed and told me, "Garfield's front paws haven't touched the ground in two weeks."

After Garfield, I moved a lot, lived in apartments.  I never thought that was the right environment for a dog.  Dog's need space to run, things to chase, ground to dig.

Chaco, painted the Christmas before he died.

Eleven years ago I met and married my wife.  She had two Labrador Retrievers:  Chaco, a Chocolate Lab and Kaila, a Black Lab.  Two of the smartest dogs I had ever known.  Chaco warmed to me from the start as I'd scratch is tail bone until his heart was content.  Chaco was a gentle soul.  When we first got Willie, he schooled him well.

At our wedding, we feared Chaco had a stroke or other malady.  Turned out he was drunk from everyone putting their drink cups on the ground,  A few years later, Chaco developed an inoperable tumor on his spleen.  It would not be the last time I had to sit on the floor of the vet's office and say goodbye.

Kaila didn't warm to me, but damn she was smart.  One night before Pat and I were married, Pat's Shetland Pony coliced.  I agreed to stay, and we took 2 hour shifts checking on Speedy.  At about 4 am, Kaila woke me and sure enough Speedy was down.  Kaila knew something was wrong.

Painting of Kaila and Willie taking a break.

When we first bought our home in Corrales, we had no front gates.  Chaco and Kaila never left the property, until that spring when the acecia ditches filled with water.  Sure enough, Kaila couldn't resist taking a swim.  Frosty, our local animal control officer caught her and off to jail she went.  I had to go to the police station and pay an $85 fine and proceeded to the dog pound.  Kaila, who never was fond of me was never so glad to see me.  She ran and jumped into the pickup, sat close to me shaking from her incarceration.  She was now my buddy too.

Isabel with the newly arrived Willie.

"'I want a Labrodoodle,'" Patricia said, "and I found one in Amarillo, we're meeting in Santa Rosa to get him."  I can tell Billy Joe Shaver, there was one good reason to go back to Amarillo.  Thus Willie arrived.  His head was too big. His paws were huge.  When he got excited, he'd pee.

Willie loved to play with Chaco and Kaila.  He too was fond of swimming in the irrigation ditch water.  Willie is one of the best Frisbee dogs around.  Willie has withstood several major health issues, 3 major surgeries, all of switch he handled with grace and gentleness.  He was also a stud, fathering 3 litters.  His son, Mojo is still with us and our Rez Dog, Charlie.

Willie and son, Mojo

Kaila developed cancer in her jaw.  It was hard on my wife as she had birthed Kaila.  Kaila thought Patricia her mother.  When we had to put Kaila down, Willie laid in the drive all night and into the morning waiting for her return.

Willie recently had surgery to remove a polyp from his colon.  We dodged a bullet when it was benign.  Yet he continued to have difficulties with pooping and peeing.  This past Friday, we took him in again only to discover he has bladder cancer.  The prognosis is weeks to just a few months.

As I sit here and ponder all the moments with Willie, there are so many.  When my parents were alive and in the nursing home, we'd take Willie and Mojo with us.  Almost every patient in the home wanted to pet Willie; the joy he brought those folks was heartwarming to see.  "What kind of dog is he?" Or the first time we bred Willie, we locked him and the bitch up on the family room.  The next morning our daughter Isabel questioned the presence of all the "goo" on the carpet.  That carpet came up the next week.  In the heat of summer, Willie sneaks off to jump in the shallow horse tank to cool off.  He begs carrots from Janet, our horse boarder.  When you get the leashes out he gets so excited to go for a walk.  He takes his own leash in his mouth and walks himself.

Willie once saved our lives.  My son had left a gas burner on filling the kitchen with gas.  Willie went to Patricia's bed side and barked and barked until she got up to fine natural gas smell filling the house.

Last night, our vet Dr. Helper came to the house.  Willie always got so nervous when we took him to the vet that he'd shake like a leaf.  We didn't want his last moments on this earth to be filled with that anxiety.  We all surrounded Willie, petted and held him as he passed.  It was time and I think he knew it too.

I guess what I remember most his just his gentle presence.  Always there to pet; snuggle up to you in the bed; greet you at the gate, tail wagging.  Damn, he'll be missed so.

Unlike Johnny Cash, I picked Cotton.

In the late 1950's and early 60's, we lived in a farm community.  Hester, Oklahoma.  When we moved there it was little more than a KATY Railroad spur to the abandoned cotton gin.  We lived in a church parsonage next to Hester Baptist Church.  The church was a concrete block WPA school converted to a house of worship.  The kids in the area had long since been bused to school in Mangum.

We were surrounded by cotton fields.  At 7 or 8, I hoed cotton, I picked it.  It was nasty back breaking work.  You put the cotton in a long cotton sack you drug behind you.  It was then weighed and you were paid by the pound.  The cotton hulls would cut your hands, and if you weren't a "clean picker", you got too much leaf and hull in your cotton, you got yelled at.  My folks insisted I work in the cotton fields.  I guess it was to let me experience life should my scholarly efforts fall short.

In those days, Mexican families still came up from Mexico to harvest crops, beginning in the spring and following whatever crops needed picking as they moved north.  My dad taught Spanish at Martha School, so whenever there was a problem, farmers sent them to my dad to translate.  During Cotton harvest, it was not unusual to get a knock on the door in the middle of the night with a woman giving birth.  Farmers in the area had shanty villages on their farms, used only at harvest.  Some farmers cared about the workers, had nice accommodations while others didn't really care.  The good farmers attracted the good crews year after year.  Some farms hired the same families for 20 years, knew the children, their grandchildren, mourned the patriarchs passing over the winter.

As a child, I was fascinated by the crop dusters as the daredevil pilots did acrobatics under power and telephone lines.  I played in the irrigation ditches, sometime trapping fish in the channel grids.  I once brought home a dozen such fish in a cardboard box.  Filled a wash tub, with water, placed the fish in the fresh water and ran in to get my mother.  We returned and I was proud to show her my catch, only to discover the feral cats had eaten all of my ditch fish.  Being a preacher's wife, mom was always worried a lady from the church would come by and the house would be dirty.  Surrounded by cotton fields, with the western wind, the tractor plows, I think it drove mom crazy as the dust was inescapable.

As we debate immigration today, I am reminded that we once had a migratory worker program in this country.  Families would load in caravans and head north following the crops. Once winter came they headed back to warmth of Mexico.  Below are some notes from Wikipedia about migrant works from that period.  The history is little known today.  It is interesting to me that this issue seems to be never solved, and politics make strange bedfellows.

But they too picked cotton.

The UFW during Chavez's tenure was committed to restricting immigration. Chavez and Dolores Huerta, cofounder and president of the UFW, fought the Bracero Program that existed from 1942 to 1964. Their opposition stemmed from their belief that the program undermined U.S. workers and exploited the migrant workers. Since the Bracero Program ensured a constant supply of cheap immigrant labor for growers, immigrants could not protest any infringement of their rights, lest they be fired and replaced. Their efforts contributed to Congress ending the Bracero Program in 1964. In 1973, the UFW was one of the first labor unions to oppose proposed employer sanctions that would have prohibited hiring undocumented immigrants. Later during the 1980s, while Chavez was still working alongside Huerta, he was key in getting the amnesty provisions into the 1986 federal immigration act.<sup>[22]

The Bracero Program was initially prompted by a demand for manual labor during World War II and began with the U.S. government bringing in a few hundred experienced Mexican agricultural laborers to harvest sugar beets in the Stockton, California area. The program soon spread to cover most of the United States and provided workers for the agricultural labor market (with the notable exception being Texas, which initially opted out of the program in preference to an "open border" policy, and was denied braceros by the Mexican government until 1947 due to perceived mistreatment of Mexican laborers[1]). As a corollary, the railroad bracero program was independently negotiated to supply U.S. railroads initially with unskilled workers for railroad track maintenance but eventually to cover other unskilled and skilled labor. By 1945, the quota for the agricultural program was more than 75,000 braceros working in the U.S. railroad system and 50,000 braceros working in U.S. agriculture at any one time.</sup>

Art Linkletter and the five penises.

Some of you will have never have heard of Art Linkletter, 1912 to 2010.  He was a stable of daytime television when I was a child.  He once wrote a book "Kids say the darnest things."  Some of you may remember that Bill Cosby picked up the mantle with his show in the 70's.

My son says the darnest things too.  When he was 4 or 5, my wife was trying to answer questions about where baby's come from.  She was using all the clinical terms.  A baby is formed in the uterus, then comes out the vagina.  I told her, "You sure you want to do that?"

Time passed.  One Sunday afternoon we were in my wife's home office.  She was at her desk and I was laying on the sofa.  My son comes in and asks my wife, "Show me your china."  My wife is puzzled, why does our son want to she her mother's china dishes.  He says it again, this time placing his hands on her knees.  I got it and I fall off the sofa laughing.  My wife is still puzzled.  Then he says, "Show me your china, I'll be you best friend."  My wife got it.  I then said, "Hun, I bet that's not the first time you heard that."

Once on a family trip, the silence was broken when out of the blue my son asks, "Do all girls have a universe?"  Yes, son they do and they know it.

I have been teaching my children to shoot.  I have stressed safety and gun handling rules.  Treat every gun as though it is loaded and never point a gun at anything you don't want to destroy.  Recently there was an article about a 18 year old Florida boy, Michael Smeriglio, who shot off his penis and testicle while "Cleaning" his gun.  I printed out the article and took it home to drive home the lesson.  My son pondered this story for sometime, then asked, "How will he go to the bathroom now?"  To which I replied, "I guess he'll have to sit like a girl."  There was a puzzled look on his face as he pondered his next question.  He then asked with a certain sense of surprise, "Girls have to sit to pee?"  "Why?"  To which I replied, "Plumbing's different, go ask your mother."

The past few years, my wife has had a both at the state fair.  We trailer our Welch pony and miniature pony and she uses them to introduce equine assisted psycho therapy to the public.  I took the opportunity to take my son through the livestock barns.  The baby lambs are always my favorite.  We go to the dairy barn.  There, folks of all ages are washing and brushing there show bovine.  The barn has a fully equipped milking room, as these dairy cattle still produce milk, even when being shown.  We walk up on a very nice lady who engages my son and begins to tell him about her Jersey cow.  She points to her udder and teats and then was left speechless when my son exclaims, "Look dad, 5 penises."

Magazine Drives and Transvestites

Each fall our children's elementary school PTA has a magazine drive.  We buy our fair share of magazines and then twist the arms of aunts and uncles to do their part so our children can win copious amounts of cheap Chinese crap.

One year our daughter won a 3/4 mile limousine ride to our local pizzeria for selling the most subscriptions, 60.  I think that is still a record.  A few years back, our son won and committed one of the most selfless acts I have seen a child do.  First prize that year was a life size cut out.  You could select from any number of pop culture icons.  Our son chose that Canadian music icon, Justa Beaver.  He kept his choice secret as the school had to order it.  After a few weeks, I took him up to school and with great secrecy he claimed his prize.  We took it home where he surprised his sister with the live size cut out of Justa Beaver. 

I got so tired of looking at the image of that silly dork.  I once hid it in the furnace closet only to scare the crap out of my wife when she opened the door.  I was going to hide in the tack room once but was a afraid my wife or a horse boarder would have a heart attack and die.

As I said, we buy our fair share of magazines.  I always get "Texas Monthly".  I like the magazine, and it cheeses my wife off as she eschews all things Texan, except cowboy boots, cowboy hats and this author.  While thumbing through the latest issue, I discovered an advertisement in the back that brought me consternation about my beloved birth place.  An advertisement for fashions aimed at cross dressers.  Suddenlyfemstyle.com.  If you google it you get 6.7 million results.  Suddenly fem style.com takes you to crossdresser.com.

For some strange reason my mind wondered to the Llano County Courthouse square of the 1960's with its mixture of Civil War, World War I and II statures, plaques and heroes.  There under the live oak trees, sitting on the red granite benches the spit and whittle club met.  Old men in their worn khakis and sweat stained Stetson hats chewing  tobacco and testing the sharpness of their Case pocket knives on the fallen branches.

Not a scene one would associate with pantie hose and silicone breasts.  But then again, the odds say one of those old cusses had occasion to put on his wife's girdle..

Shoe on the other foot thoughts...

What if the 2nd Amendment stated?

"The right of a woman to have an abortion shall not be infringed."

What if the following happened?

The Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd Amendment is a individual right but the government can make reasonable restrictions by a 5 to 4 vote, and you are one vote away from abolishing it.

There were reams of writings by the founding fathers explaining the foundation and importance of the 2nd Amendment and politicians and legal scholars all ignore it putting their own uniformed interpretation to it.

Abortions were banded in all the world except the United States and Switzerland. Every household must have at least one abortion in Switzerland.

Returning veterans are denied abortions because the government has determined they aren't mentally stable enough to have an abortion, despite no diagnosis or evidence reflecting this determination.

Major newspapers published a map showing the names and addresses of every women who had an abortion.

You had to register with local authorities before having an abortion.

You have a bumper sticker that reads, "If abortions are outlawed, only outlaws will preform abortions." And "I will give up my abortion when you pry my dead cold fetus from my hand."

Editorial pages in major newspapers called for the president and executive director of Planned Parenthood be killed.  The killing of all members of Plan Parenthood was advocated.  The razing of Planned Parenthood's headquarters and the salting of the ground was advocated.

The government's own statistics showed that unrestricted abortion actually showed it saved lives in the long term.

The National Rifle Association received half a billion dollars a year from the public treasury.

Piers Morgan held a week of shows dedicated to abolishing the 2nd Amendment, calling representatives of Plan Parenthood women's rights and abortion advocates "Stupid."  Guests advocate a late term abortion for radio host Ed Shultz because he is a proponent of unrestricted abortions.

Local governments placed exorbitant taxes on abortion equipment and facilities.

All abortion clinics and doctors must have a federal license and pay a fee to operate.  They are heavily regulated by the Department of Human Services.

Illegal gangs and criminal organizations will not close their clinics.

All the talk of restricting abortion let to millions of women getting pregnant so they can exercise their right to an abortion, creating a nine month backlog at clinics.

Joe Biden is put in charge of commission to limit the 2nd Amendment.

A conservative president decides he can't get legislation or a constitutional amendment to prevent the killing of the unborn and decides to act unilaterally, through executive order to make reasonable restrictions to the 2nd amendment, no abortions after 30 days, a national registry of woman who had abortions, background checks for all women who want an abortion, a limit to one abortion a lifetime. 

And if you say to yourself, guns kill children, you lack a sense of irony.

There are just some thoughts with the shoe on the other foot.