October 31, 2023
A member of Talkbass.com sent me a message: Finally I got to see Scott Thunes live! Hi Tom Last night I was fortunate enough to see Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels being performed at the Royal Festival Hall in London - the full BBC concert orchestra plus a huge choir. Before the show, Scott, Gail Zappa,…
October 31, 2023
Got an e-mail. What are you so upset about? All parents die. Indeed. All humans die. However, there are different ways of dying. Would you rather die in your sleep at the age of eighty-five, or would you rather be flayed alive at the age of thirty? I’m upset at the manner of my parents’…
October 29, 2023
In my youth I was apolitical. After 9/11 I became very politicized. I am now apolitical again. Don’t get me wrong; I still read about politics every day and vote in every election, but I invest no emotion in any political party or politician. Now, we can see more clearly than at any time in…
October 29, 2023
I belong to a very small club. A one-man club. Actually, I belong to several: I’m the only person to be screwed by five Web designers in a row when creating one Website; I’m the only person to have had a spontaneous recovery from total hepatic failure; and I’m the only person in the world…
October 28, 2023
Strangely enough, the author of the stupidest thing you’ll read all day is Oliver Stone: As Samuel Huntington aptly reminded readers in a statement of particular relevance to the United States, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence….
October 28, 2023
Dave, The Best Therapist in the World, told me that my situation was similar to a person afraid of learning to swim. It wasn’t water that scared me but emotion. Feeling deep emotions was terrifying. I was raised to think that genuine emotions were dangerous. This was a tradition on both sides of the family….
October 28, 2023
The Germans are great at coming up with words to describe the complexity of human existence. Schadenfreude. “The humor one feels at another’s misfortune.” Laughing when someone’s pants fall off in public, for example. Backpfeifengesicht. “A face badly in need of a fist.” Someone who’s got the kind of face you just want to smash….
October 26, 2023
I wrote before about the theft ring in the U.S. Postal Service. It’s based in New York. Postal workers steal valuable postcards sent from Germany and sell them to collectors. Nobody will do a thing to stop it. Not the Postal Service, not Congress, not the FBI, and not the Germans. Nobody cares. Well, it’s…
October 26, 2023
It was a very hard night, the worst since Mom died. I listened to people on the radio discuss their experiences with evil spirits, being possessed, having demons make them look like old women, and all manner of meretricious claptrap. The host had that super-earnest quality, like he was trying his damnedest to get across…
October 24, 2023
Today I learned about optimizing the Website. The reason my Website is invisible to search engines is because certain things have to be done to make search engines happy. Why? “Because that’s the way it is.” As a child I got that answer from my father whenever I’d ask why we had to do something…