Last day

Rather not talk about the game thanks – it hurt. Also the flipping Marlins took their damn sweet time getting off the field – normally I’d not give a damn but this was the last game at Shea – it was a pretty classless move by a team that finished 3rd.

And after a time they finally started:

First, they listed the folks who couldn’t come.

Then on they came – I remember – first the relatives of the departed – Tug McGraw’s family, Tommy Agee’s Family, then the Shea’s, then Bob Murphy’s family.

Then the players – The Man who started the first game at Shea, then some others who I only had a vague memory of – then Ron Hunt who got a big round – he was the first Met player I really knew about. When I was a kid in 64-65 there was this baseball board game called challenge the Yankees – the idea was that one side took the Yankees and on the other side used various National League All stars I don’t remember if it was a stat based game or you just rolled dice but I remember playing it once or twice and going through the cards to find the one Met to play – Ron Hunt. He played second base and until Don Baylor came along held the record for being hit by a pitched ball in a season. He would stand with toes touching the batter’s box and lean over the plate – he got hit a lot.

Then the players from the 69-75 era, Jerry Koosman, Rusty Staub who was one of my favs back then, Ron Swaboda, Cleon Jones, Wayne Garrett, Felix Mallin – The gawky George Theodore who ran like Groucho Marx , Willie Mays looking so old and frail it hurt to look at him but he came to this day, Yogi Berra who got a nice hand – then the lean late 70’s early 80’s John Stearn who deserved better, Dave Kingman who could hit home runs but little else, Craig Swann who lead the league in era one year – but still had a losing record – George Foster the first time big money signings at Shea – not as successful as they hoped.

The 86-92 era: Wally Backman, Lenny Dykstra, Gary Carter, then Darryl Strawberry who looked surprised he got the Darrrrrrrrrrrryll cheer – (that was a moment that struck me that this was the last time Shea would echo to the sound of that cheer – taken from the Red Sox fans who were trying to get under his skin) then to my surprise Doc Godden who looked okay – Bobby Ojedia, Jessie Orosco, Keith Hernandez, and of course Ron Darling.

From the 98-03 era Robin Ventura, Fonnzie, John Franco who probably would have done a better job than the arsonists the bullpen has now, then Mike Piazza who got a huge hand and finally the one true god of the Mets – Tom Seaver one of the best right handed pitchers in the history of the game, who called what he did an art and when he was on it was an art, I still remember the pitch he made to Reggie Jackson in the 1973 world series a hard vicious slider that when it bit just broke down like it fell off a table as Jackson swung and almost came out of his shoes for strike 3 – the camera flashed on Jackson as and the expression on his face was pure shock – Tom Seaver who I wanted to be when I was a kid.

They all stood around the outside edge of the infield and up in the stands the “Let’s go Met’s Cheer” was heard – less than an hour after a heart breaking loss .

And they left after touching home plate – I’m told they will paint home and the other bases in the parking lot next year so you can take you grand kids or what not and point out –this is were Ray Knight came home in game 6 yadda yadda yadda – and I had the silly thought, well that will make it easer to me to some of my ashes scattered there – so they all left except for Mike and Seaver.

Then Seaver went to mound, Mike got behind home plate and Tom threw the ball for the last pitch at Shea Stadium. After that they walked out to center field – walked through the gates there and shut them behind them – a voice said thank you – the lights were tuned down, then Shea got dark and very quiet.

And we left. Down the ramps for the last time – it was one of my favorite parts of Shea coming down the ramps after a big win. The cheers would echo and echo and echo.

Finally I got to the exit.

At each exit there is a sign that says – Goodbye see you soon .

But No. Not tomorrow, not next year, not any more.

Shea Adieu.

Shea Adeiu -

Words later.

Mucking Fets do it again

At least the Red Sox would wait a few years before choking it away again.

That it all

John McCain as fighter pilot

So now I understand – John McCain has the instincts of a fighter pilot just not the instincts of a good fighter pilot. Which explains the crashes.

Including the current one. This is the craziest thing I have ever seen in a presidential campaign. And of course it turns out he’s not quite suspending his campaign just trying to duck out of the debate.

Then of course, there was president Chicken Little saying that the sky is falling the sky is falling! This mere months and even weeks after him saying that he’s an optimist and that things were fine.

Just a short side note – I utterly despise the cult of optimism. I don’t mean the idea ‘we have problems but we’ll get out of it” optimism, I mean the brain dead Reganite style sunny optimism that says ‘we don’t have any problems the – blank- will fix it” (the market, private charity, what not) the whole idea was that we didn’t as society have to pay any attention to it.

Meantime – Sarah Palin will never be allowed to speak in front of a camera without a script again. I mean when Katie Couric makes you look like an idiot you have a serious problem – Katie’s a softball pitcher of the “how does your faith help you” question variety maybe she was a little tougher than usual but it was not an unfriendly interview by any means.

Stop that infernal barking liberty.

Sorry just channeled Chevy Chase as Gerald Ford – while he looked nothing like Ford it was still a funny bit – well maybe not so funny since the current person is more like an evil version of Chevy’s Ford.

Anyway, it looks or doesn’t look like Wall Street is going to get its 700 billion – with at least some provisions that limit executive pay – at least some things like that. Still there goes health care and bridge and road repair and light rail and money for alternative energy supply research and schools and medial research and well you get the picture. I get the sinking feeling that Obama is going to be coming into the white house to find the cupboard bare, the electricity and the phone turned off, the silverware and TV hocked, the dog pregnant and the roof leaking. And let’s just not talk about the bathroom.

Add further to the files of ‘it’s okay if a republican does it” while there was scads and scads of coverage and commentary regarding Edwards extra-marital doings and heated insistence that this was an important story even though Edwards wasn’t the nominee at the time it broke – the same paper The National Inquirer carries a story about Sara Palin’s affair – even naming the other party in “We dare you to sue we can use the publicity and we’ll win” moment – and there is a thunderous silence.


LATER –
It’s a sense of something. You feel it – like maybe a subtle vibration in the soles of your shoes as you wait for a subway train and somewhere a train is coming, you can’t see it you can’t hear it yet but you feel it coming.

Watching the village this week has been like that, they are panicking – the world they have built up is crashing around them – instead of a future of more and more and more trivial nonsense fretted about by perfumed courtiers and fart catchers they have real problems with real consequences – for them. It’s shook them to the core.

It’s been interesting watching people who have and no doubt will continue to fight against things like universal health care, become born again socialists on behalf of Wall Street.

And the thing is that Wall Street and the banks did this to themselves, no hippies no communists nobody but themselves.

It’s almost funny if we didn’t have to fucking pay for it.

And now John will debate – well there wasn’t much chance that he wouldn’t –but one thing folks have pointed out – everybody at the college now thinks he’s an asshole. So there could be some interesting audience reactions here.

Peace love Look out below!

Midlife or Maybe Ennui and Prid Pro Quo

Well this isn’t what I want.

I guess everybody gets like that from time to time, hell I’m sure even Mick Jagger had a moment or two when he thought – “you know, just being a teacher at a small college somewhere, wife two kids summers off – that would be the life not this damn 24 hour a day 7 day a week freak show my life if these days.”

Fuck that – there is no way in hell Jagger ever thought that.

But Jagger aside and maybe Lemmey Kilmster we all have that as we get to certain age and feel that paths not taken are now shut off to us.

Also there is the frustration that it took me so long to find all this. I love the band I’m; I’m fulfilling so many dreams that I didn’t even dare speak aloud and I’ve played at the knitting factory for Pete’s sake… how cool is that.

Still I just get frustrated thinking – damn – all those years - but I have to be honest and admit that I wouldn’t be quite as well balanced and quite as centered – I may right now be a huge bag o’ neurosis and self doubt but baby you should have seen me years ago. So all things in their time.

Still.

Anyway it seems that Robot Monkey Butt Sex is becoming the new hit of set – I’ll put that down to the chorus and Trafalgar’s utterly wonderful diva turn at the end of the song.

Pretty good set at the Trash Bar a little rust and we had two new songs in the set but over all nice set. We have a few sound goofs – mostly from a microphone giving out but we handled it like the true pros we are – we’re not paid like tru pros but we are still true pros . And as Hunter Thompson (and lord do we miss him) said – “when the going get’s weird, the weird turn pro”

Looking forward to playing there again – there is an interesting feature there were at the shows there is an open bar from 8-9 – we went on at 9 pm which gave us a very interesting audience mood. I’m eager to go back with a bigger crowd – we could work up some epic craziness if we put out mind to it.

Speaking of epic craziness – there is the economy – where after being told for months – I mean months things are okay that this is all in our mind, that the market has hit bottom well, things started to fall apart – so much so that the Treasury Secretary has proposed a bail out fund of 700 Billion dollars.

That’s bad enough but the way the bill read was that the $700 Billion would be spent at the treasury Secretary’s discretion alone without any over sight or restrain from congress or the courts.

Guys I don’t think Nero had that much power. Bad enough we are probably going to have to bail these greed crazed mf’s in some manner – the risk of a global down turn on the level of 1929-33 is great enough to require something be done but a blank check for 700 billion? Of our money? To be given to wall street? Without a single quid or pro quo?

Not only no but hell no!

Fortunately it seems that enough folks – including one Chris Dodd are for modifying the proposal a bit or more than a bit. The Bush folks have reacted like one expects ‘No no! no! We’re on fire! Must give us money! No Questions! No!”

And so – still the last time we listened to this we ended up to our armpits in sand in Iraq and wondering what the hell went wrong since all those very important people said things would be fine.

And these are the same people.

They couldn’t be trying to railroad us again would they?

Nah. Never happen they are such a serious bunch of pink skinned men in suits.

Peace Love “Prid pro quo Clarice”

No chance to comment on McCain’s sudden carreen – I think this is why the press liked him you weren’t sure what the hell he was going to do – this is not exactly the kind of personality trait you like to see in a possible president. Still as Obama said “A president has to be able to do more than one thing at the same time.”

Bailout, Russian Roulette and the Wine Dark Sea

As someone wrote – another day another bailout.

AIG American Insurance Group has been taken over by the federal government to the tune of some 85 BILLION dollars.

That’s not a small chunk of change – coming soon after the bailout of Bear Sterns, Freddie and Fannie Mac and the death of Lehman Brothers.

What this is simply the poof that we live in Donald Trump’s world – make sure you’re too big to fail owe more money than the bank can afford to lose (and have right connections) and nothing bad will happen to you.

Otherwise vultures will gnaw your skull. But those are the risks these days. The important thing is if you are a recipient of such largess that you need to hire shills who will endlessly bleat about the virtues of the Market and how capitalism and market forces are the best way to solve anything. As someone pointed out about Milton Friedman – who has much to answer for in regard to this current crisis – while there is no free lunch if you write about how companies are over taxed and over regulated, corporations will buy you lunch on a regular basis.

Well let me got off this damn economist hobbyhorse of mine – I have a deep suspicion of any discipline, especially in the social sciences that in the first place calls itself a science and then sets up a system – pure free market capitalism as perfect.

Capitalism is a human system – involving humans – which means there is no way it can be perfect. Hell science is a human system, which means imperfection is in the very warp and woof of the bloody thing. Science can give us things like nano-technology and genetic manipulation but it really isn’t fit to decide on if we should be doing it or not. (Personally, I’m suspicious of FrankenFoods as they are called – they haven’t really been around long enough for us to know what, well the long-term impact is – not to mention the corporations that make them are acting like thugs to expand market share – end side note).

Anyway $85 billion dollars is real money even by Washington DC standards and people aren’t really sure it’s going to work. Of course, they say that it because the faith in financial circles of positive re-enforcement is quite unshakeable – don’t say things are bad because they will get worse, accent the positive.

Other notes, in the elevators in my building there is this feature called captive audience – it’s a little screen that shows things like the stock market, sports scores latest news and what not. Anyway I was going up to work the other day and the news on the screen was that per actuarial tables, Sarah Palin has a 1-6 chance of becoming president in the next four years. They compared it to the odds of pulling a red M&M out of a bag first go.

It’s also the odds in Russian Roulette. Which seems right yes?

Been trying to read over the last few weeks a couple of Colin Wilson’s books The Occult and Mysteries – and I have come to the conclusion that Colin Wilson is utterly full of shit.

Which is somewhat bad because he’s a decent writer and has similar interests in the unusual and odd that I do but he seems determined to filter everything he sees through a complicated worldview and in the process facts bite the dust and the conclusions he draws are the start of another chain of well gibberish.

Quick example – he cites homer’s use of the phrase “wine dark sea” and from that concludes that early Greeks were color blind – saying how could they mistake blue for red?

Look at the water near sunset schmuck – red yes?

And it goes on like this – he has some kind or did have - these are older books – some kind of hobby horse about something he calls faculty X which seems to be a mish mash or artistic or scientific inspiration emotional exhilaration and just breaking out of the day to day and seeing. Satori the Japanese called it I think. Trouble is he layers so many attributes on Faculty X that really loses any meaning.

Some woman named Rothschild is calling Obama an Elitist – she’s a billionaire by the way. Frankly it sounds more like she’s upset Obama doesn’t know his place.

McCain has launched a Spanish language ad blaming Obama for the failure of immigration reform – my only explanation for this is that he thinks Spanish-speaking people are stupid because they can’t speak English.

Enough

Peace Love Wine Dark Sea. .

The Jets, Wall Street, Texas and a Darker Dark side of the Moon

Well so much for the Jets being the “team to beat” in the AFC East.

It had a sense of inevitability about it really – after the missed field goal took all the wind out of the crowd, the next time the Jets were in the red zone (now down 6-0) on 3rd and goal from about the 4 – they ran the ball after running it both on first and second down.

Okay at quarterback is the man who holds the record for the most touchdown passes thrown. Hall of farmer. And last week in a similar situation the Jets ran three times in a row and had to settle for a field goal. I guess the Pats had watched the films because the run on 3rd down supirsed nobody and lost 2 yards.

It doesn’t say a lot good about the Jets coaching staff that they are aren’t willing to let Brett try and throw the ball in the red zone.

Other than stupid I can’t imagine what why they didn’t at least TRY a pass.

Meantime in real life – Lehman Brothers has gone into chapter 11, Merrill Lynch has been bought by the Bank of America and more bad about firms like AIG, Wash Mutual and one whose name I forget fill the finical markets with dread and panic.

This one is a bit different than the other crashes – this isn’t just the inevitable result of a speculative Frenzy – there was one but that’s not what is happening here – what’s happening is that deep and fundamental weaknesses in the existing system is being exposed and the view of the abyss is a pretty scary one. My god important people could lose money.

Meantime the clean up in Texas is just starting. This was a big storm and they still haven’t quite gotten to all the parts affected. Meantime they are evacuating everybody from Galveston Texas for the time being. We are looking at months if not years to rebuild.

I note with some horrified amusement that a major Government bio weapons research lab was located on Galveston. Next time put it over a fault guys.

Meantime I am suffering from a pretty bad case of hay fever – which considering I have to sing Thursday isn’t doing my head any good. Well rest and liquids and drugs.

And sad news has come of the death of Rick Wright at age 65 - the keyboardist of Pink Floyd – as the years went on he wasn’t as much a part of the sound as he had been in some of the earlier albums but he was there from the first days with Syd Barret.

My inadequate sympathy for family friends band mates and even Roger Waters for there loss.

Pictured - actual dark side of the moon.

Peace Love I’ll see you on the dark side of the Moon.

A rare sighting of Pigs on the Wing

Well this is surprising.

After two weeks of watching pretty much everything coming out of Sara Palin’s mouth as being wonderful and just so right and American (in a way that a Democrat could never be) another word is now being used to describe her and her running mate – Liar.

Modern media has a hard time with the blunt word. And Liar is a very bery blunt damn word – not as blunt as say fucking liar but well these are family newspapers and News Shows and that’s just way out of bounds. At best at usual when a member of the right wing lets go with a whopper “Obama is a Muslim!” at best the networks and the major papers will write/broadcast something like “In response ------ (any Democrat the less well known the better said they are lying”.

But what we have now is low and frickn’ behold people actually using the L word to describe both Shara and McCain. And this is not being presented in the standard he said she said narrative that News folks seem to like best. But in the mode that there is an objective truth out there and if someone repeatedly says white is black even after folks pointing out that it is no such thing, then they are lying.

Good. Of course GOP will shriek and start to play the refs but at least for the moment they are being called what they are.

I honestly wasn’t expecting too much from Shara’s interview with Charlie Gibson – he’s been pretty much of a softball pitcher - but even so the reviews coming out (most with snark variations of a Moose in the headlights added) show that Ms. Palin is completely out of her depth. Especially when spouting out about how we should go to war with Russia if they invade a NATO country (which they won’t – Putin, unlike Bush is not stupid) or countries that we want to be in NATO like Georgia and the like (there is another but I forget what that countries name is)

So for the moment – McCain is being shown up as an unprincipled lair (he had a bad interview with someone in Maine of all places) as is Palin by the normally cynical press corps – I will enjoy this sight of pigs on the wing.

Meantime Ike has come ashore and they are still dealing with aftermath – and even in Galveston there were too many houses too close to the ocean with no protection – considering that the Galveston area gets hit – a lot – by Hurricanes it just seems to asking for trouble to build there without some kind of sea wall – there is a sea wall but it doesn’t cover the whole Island.

And now billions of dollars that we don’t have – we might have if we weren’t pouring money down that rat hole in Iraq but well that’s not a sensible solution I’ told.

By all accounts, the SNL skit with Hillary and Sarah was devastating.

Later if I get the chance – War of the Gargathuas and in a first why I prefer the American version over the original Japanese version. (Heresy I know but I can explain)

Peace Love Pigs on the wing.

This and That and Dwarf Warriors

If anything is ironic in the way I understand what irony is – it was John McCain talking about change to a hockey area full of people who are completely and totally satisfied with the way things are right now.

It’s also not quite clear just how McCain is going to be different from W who was pretty much shut out of the convention. And we have the unusual situation of both candidates for president running against the current holder of the office.

Now we have the news that McCain’s Vice Presidential nominee – A Sprio Agnew with female bits – will not answer any reporter’s questions during the campaign.

Think about that – the Washington Press corps is what they are afraid of – the type that asks questions like “how does your faith help you?” and “do you think your opponent is shrill?” is what they are afraid of? I mean what happened off camera to make the handlers decide she cannot be let out in public?

I also see that she is going to be taking a ‘timeout’ from the campaign trail – which is a bit of a head scratcher after all she just got here. What’s going on?

Anyway thinking about Ms. Palin I have to say I don’t like her – she reminds me of many many smug and angry suburban women I’ve know over the years. Also I see that there is a strain of Nixon level ruthlessness in some of her actions – like firing people that gave money to her opponent – firing – or trying to fire the librarian of the town because she wouldn’t ban books from the library her supporters didn’t like (and again what books were they we want to know) and the whole pregnant daughter thing.

I know nothing about the Palin household – however I think had this been anyone else a pregnant 17 year old daughter would be a sign that things weren’t good. Especially if you’re the governor of a State and she’s doing the beast with two backs with a self described redneck. It’s interesting that the same people piling on the young woman who was on TV who got pregnant citing it as evidence of America’s moral decay. And to a man they are cheering the young lady’s pregnancy and that they are going to marry.

To a suspicious mind like mind – this smacks of mommy deciding that her daughter needed to get married to keep Mommy’s bid as VP alive – and put the screws to the two kids.

Early marriages like this rarely work out – for one thing they are just too young and add the whole mommy’s running for vp I don’t give this much a chance to work. I also feel for the baby who’s coming into this mess.

Eh.


First rehearsal in a while as we build up to the trash bar – they have an open bar from 8-9 so you nothing else you can get you ass wrecked before we play. Looking forward to this gig the ambiance seems just right.

Again sorry for the light blogging but things are rather tight these days time wise between work and well World of War Craft is just such a time suck .

And let’s just not talk about the Mets – okay?

Peace Love Dwarf Warriors

It's a Train Wreck No! It's a Clown Car. And what next?

Okay – you start to wonder what next?

First there was this whole State Trooper deal – then the matter of her daughter being pregnant – her 17 year old unmarried daughter – which kind of stinks for her since she is a prominent abstinence only proponent - then she claimed that she was against the infamous Ted Stevens Bridge to nowhere, a statement that has turned out to be, well, a lie.

And now it turns out she was the head of 527 committee that supported Senator Ted Stevens as the investigations mounted – again not just a member the head of the damn thing. (as I understand it a 527 committee is allowed to raise as much money as it can in any way it can short of sending teams of thugs into the street to rob passers-by and even that may be okay in some states) – which does a bit cast doubt upon her maverick status. You really can’t suck up to the state’s Boss Tweed and then claim you always hated him. You remind folks too much of Harvey Korman in High Anxiety right after Nurse Ratchet is killed “I never liked her – she never bathed”.

Now it seems that the young man who is the father is going to marry the daughter. On his my space page (which I understand has been scrubbed) he described himself as a “fucking redneck” – no word on his favorite band (I’m guessing it’s not Devo) and as a special irony the my space page said he didn’t want kids.

So with the prospect of a shotgun wedding in Alaska sometime during the race being rather high - we thought we were done.

We weren’t - the freaking woman is a clown car of bizarre and wrong and it looks like we’re just getting started.

It has been confirmed that she was a member of an Alaska Separatist party – let me say that again – an Alaska separatist party. The Alaska Independence Party - the AIP says that wants a referendum on Alaska leaving the Union on a ballot – it seems more like a place where deranged right wing yahoos gather to indulge in a little group hate and revenge fantasies against the Zion .

Now of course the McCain people are saying (and really what the hell else could they say) that she never attended the party’s 1994 convention despite the current president of the AIP Alaska Independence party saying yes they did (and why would he lie? Still I’d like to see some paper on this).

And now – mere days after her name was tossed into the ring – stories are coming out the damn wood work – for example her high school class president has said she never head the offices she said she held in high school.

And, it just does not stop, one of her first acts in becoming Mayor of the little town she was mayor of (I don’t know the name it’s important and the innocent townspeople shouldn’t be made to suffer more than they had) was to force out a pair of city council members and the chief of the towns police. Later she tried to fire the town’s librarian because she wouldn’t remove books from the library that Sarah and some of her more right wing allies found objectionable (no word on what the books were – being mean I’m kind of hoping it was the Harry Potter books and the Golden Compass.

And now of course the whispers have started about dropping her. One of the weirdest spins on all this has been some folks insisting the hand of Karl Rove is behind this – this insist that this is some kind of long term play by Rove to spin the election McCain’s way – why everybody thinks Rove is a genius is a bit beyond me – he took a president with a 90% approval rating, a party that had control of both the House and Senate and in the course of his time in Washington Lost all that to the point were part of McCain’s strategy is to run against Bush’s record. Genius I don’t think so.

Now the latest to come out is that one of her first acts as gov of Alaska was to use her line item veto power (this is okay in states) to slash funds by 20% for a programs that among other things provides pregnant unwed teenagers with a place to live and help with getting back into the world.

As I’m sitting here at about 8 pm – the most recent story out of Alaska is that the State in 2007 shut down a car wash that the Palins were part owners of for non-compliance with the regulations and non-payment of fees.

A car wash – they fucked up the paperwork on a car wash?

I swear to god by the morning they will find out that she was selling information about the Alaskan National Guard to the Russians,

Peace Love Clown Cars