I have no desire to travel outside of the US. I swear that it’s not my fault! While I’m sure there are many, many wonderful places all around the world for me to experience, I just don’t really feel like it.

Trust me, it’s no patriotic “America is the best and freest country in the world, so love it or leave it” rubbish. This has nothing at all to do with nationalism.

That said, I love this country. I’ve been around a great deal of it and have found something good to say about each of the 48 continuous states. I’ve been from Maine to Southern California, from Florida to Washington state and literally everywhere in between.

Even though I’ve been all over, there’s still more out there that I want to see. And many of the things that I’ve seen, I want to see again. The more places I visit, the more places I want to revisit! I’ve done Route 66 from Chicago to LA a total of three times in four years.

I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways. I’ve taken low-paying jobs (like owning a book store) that gave me the freedom to travel as I pleased. I also travel smartly and cheaply. Traveling with a group is always cheaper – you split costs of almost everything. When I’m on the road, I cut back on food for the sake of lowering an expense. I can sleep in a tent just as easy as an expensive motel after a long day of seeing amazing stuff. A state park often costs less than $10 a night. Split that a few ways and you have hardly any boarding expenses! Most importantly, forget about expensive resort and tourist destinations. Those are money traps. Get off the interstates and enjoy the two-lanes and small towns – the journey is your destination!

But you can do all of that in pretty much any country – maybe even cheaper in some. Traveling in America is simple. I know the roads, know the places, the people, the history and yet, I’m still exploring and learning new things, discovering new favorite spots and obsessing about familiar old chunks of highway.

Maybe that’s what it is – I have a place to start. I have a familiarity with the subject, so it’s easy. Maybe I like to travel in America because I’m too lazy to travel outside of America.

I’m pretty fine with that though. Like I said, I have no real desire to backpack across Europe or visit the pilgrimage sites in India. I guess I just don’t care. Maybe I’m small-minded or just set in my ways, but that’s how it is.

Sure, if someone handed me a ticket to Rome or Greece, I’d take it and go (though would probably consider selling it so I could take another trip around this country).

However, no matter where you want to travel, whether it be just around your state or around the US or even around the world, make sure that you do it. Too many people get stuck in their jobs and never get the chance to see things. Some don’t want to travel and that’s fine, I guess. But I have a feeling that most people want to travel and feel that they can’t.

I’ve seen folks with two weeks of paid vacation do nothing but sit at home and watch TV. Sure, two weeks isn’t that long of a time for traveling, but it’s enough to do a couple of thousand miles. Don’t worry about where you’ll go, just grab a map and some friends, get in your car, pick a direction and go. Don’t worry so much about comfort, you’ll get that after your rewarding trip across the country. Just go!

A company known as Motor Simulation, LCC has invented what appears to be the motorcycle simulator we’ve always never really asked for. I’m sure it’s well put together and sophisticated as all get-out, but, as their press release indicates, it steals the bits of your brain typically used for grammar and puts them to work learning the skills you need to take twisties at 70mph. HOT DOG!

Motor Simulation, LLC has improves safety for motorcycle riders. It’s cutting-edge technology and the experience of it’s management team has designed and build a fully-interactive, high-definition graphics simulator with a fully movable, reactive motion base that simulates riding a motorcycle in real-time, base upon the parameters of physics and not a gaming engine. No simulator has ever been built in history that is as advanced or with as much current, up-to-date technology.

They really has improves safety, I have no doubt. It’s management of build is with up-to-date technology.

See it here.

Point of View

Thanksgiving dinner’s sad and thankless
Christmas dinner’s dark and blue
When you stop and try to see it
From the turkey’s point of view.
Sunday dinner isn’t sunny
Easter feasts are just bad luck
When you see it from the viewpoint
Of a chicken or a duck.
Oh how I once loved tuna salad
Pork and lobsters, lamb chops too
‘Til I stopped and looked at dinner
From the dinner’s point of view.

-Shel Silverstein

Well, it’s been about a week since I posted anything. It’s not because I don’t have anything to say. I could go on for hours. But this past week I’ve picked up a couple more hours and it threw me off a bit.

In my free time, I’ve been working on the upcoming Christmas mix. It’s pretty well ready to go. I’ve been messing with the volume level and converting everything to mp3 for downloading purposes (it’ll be posted on Chirstmas Eve). As far as the physical Mix CD, I should be able to mail it out the same time as I did last year’s (first week of December). The packaging is pretty fun, I think you’ll dig it.

I’m also the new proud owner of three of the four first Weird Al Yankovic albums on vinyl. I’ve got his first, In 3-D (with “Eat It”) and the one that nobody bought Polka Party. I had all of these when I was a kid and haven’t really listened to them since then. In 3-D was the one I listened to most. I loved his polka medleys of popular songs. Weird Al is pretty brilliant.

Speaking of nerdy things, I’m going to go upgrade to the new Linux Mint. I’ll probably watch some MST3K after that.

Oh and I’m going to try to write more very soon.

I enjoy discovering good music that I’ve never heard before. Most modern music just bores me, so I usually dip into the late 70s/early 80s for this enjoyment.

A few months ago, I bought a compilation record/magazine called The Recorder. I found it for $2 at Jive Time in Fremont, noticed that there were three live Peter Gabriel songs on it (including a cover) and figured that those alone would be worth the two dollars.

I finally got around to listening to it an while the Peter Gabriel songs were quite fun, the real gem was the three opening songs by a band called Fish Food.

I’m not so good at reviewing music, so I’ll let the band introduce themselves to you…

Fish Food are a band are an aid, first to be the second coming round the mountain Diagram fingers spiced with many flavoured fingers from dressing gown chord sequences, aluminium crayfish savim, monkeys leap from limb to limb for five pence in the RSPCA jungle sale. Step lightly down the street, you don’t know who you’ll meet cleaving an enormous crevasse in a broken heart from which a flower grew, with metals soft as velvet and a colour so rich, deep and beautiful that the insects dared not land on it.

And honestly, that does sum them up rather well.

Fish Food (or Fishfood) was formed by four fellows from Bristol, England (about 100 miles west of London). It features Howard Purse on guitar, Doug White on Bass, Danny Duck on drums, and a local poet, here named only Andy (but it’s really Andy Fairley).

The three songs on this comp are all they ever wrote and recorded. They played a few times around Bristol, opening for the sort of legendary punk band The Slits.

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“Dry Ice Hot” starts us off. It’s been described as “Talking Heads gone in a wonky post-punk direction” and I guess that’s sort of true. The thing that struck me with both are the vocals. Andy sounds nothing like David Byrne, of course, but he is … distinct. You can’t really hear all that’s going on vocally, I think my mind shut out a lot of it – only bits seeped in. “Kind of pinched or squeezed at the corners and edges” was repeated a lot at varying urgencies. I think somewhere in there I fell in love with it.

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The second song “Seventeen Eels” is a short piece about seventeen eels in a red barrel. It describes the scene very accurately. There are seventeen eels in a red barrel. They squirm and bite, etc.

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But the real genius hits during the sarcastic “Modern Dance Craze.” Where the music in the other two songs was chaotic and harsh, there’s a jangly guitar and soft drums over Andy’s urging for us to “do the modern dance craze.” His urging does grow more frequent and you really do get the feeling that he wants us to be “grooving and be-bopping, getting with it and staying sharp, being cool on the scene” while we do this modern dance craze. As we acquiesce and give into this modern dance craze, we are rewarded for our triumph: “Oh that’s lovely, you’re really grooving it and digging it and loving the music. And we’re really having a lot of fun here tonight because we’re doing the new modern dance craze.” Andy even gives suggestions, “Oh that’s lovely, the modern dance craze, shake your butts, yeah.”

I don’t really have much to compare this to. Maybe TV Personalities if they weren’t so influenced by early Pink Floyd would have done something like this. And what’s more is I’m not sure who would like this. I do, of course, but this is something you either think is total crap or you love it to death and wish there was more.

The band broke up shortly after this recording and Howard Purse (who seemed to be the driving musical force in the group) put together a band called Animal Magic. After their demise, Purse got back together with Andy the poet/vocalist, forming the band Birth of Sharon.

I’ve not been able to find anything on them, though a reviewer says they sound like “Gang Of 4 trying to have fun.”¹

ITunes seems to have both The Recorder and a split download compilation of Fishfood and Birth of Sharon. Being on Linux, I can’t really access the iTunes store and really wish people would either stop using it or provide an alternate, cross-platform and nonrestricted way to legally download songs.

These were put up by the (digital only?) label Bristol Archives Records, which plunders the vaults of the old Bristol scene, releasing the gems they find. It’s a great service, so thanks bunches, but what’s with the iTunes only thing?

Get Fishfood ripped by me right here.

Technical Information:
Media Used:
Vinyl LP from my personal collection.

SoundConverter 1.4.1
-Converted WAV to 320kbps MP3

1. The reviewer mentioned is this guy. [↩]

This whole thing seems so needlessly drawn out.

It’s been over a month since the doctor has released me to go back to regular duty (I was on “light duty” due to my finger being crushed and the joint destroyed). A position opened up and it was offered to me, but I had to get off light duty to do it. I was fine with that since it was a desk job with even less lifting than I was doing on “light duty,” so I asked the doctor to release me.

He checked me out and agreed and I was released.

So I took the paper into work, gave it to human resources. I told the manager who offered the job to me that I was ready to start, but he told me that someone else had to be offered the job because I wasn’t released. Of course, I told him that I was, but he said that there’s more to being released than the doctor – the insurance company paying the bills has to release me. That may take some time.

Now, it doesn’t make much sense why the insurance company would be dragging its feet. You’d think that the sooner I’d be released, the sooner they’d be able to stop paying for me.

A month went by and I was told that “it takes time” and “it’s up to the insurance company.” Getting a bit fed up, I called the insurance company and asked them what was the big freakin deal. They said that, yes, I was released and should be able to go back to full duty as of a month ago. I asked them why I wasn’t and they didn’t really have an answer.

I related this to human resources and they said that the insurance company still needs to fax some paperwork to them.

Someone is dropping the ball here and it’s not me. I don’t think it’s human resources, really, because they want me to be out of the light duty job so that another worker (who actually needs it) can take it. But they can’t move me out of it until I’m fully released.

So it appears that the party with the least amount to gain from me being on light duty is to blame. Odd that the party with the most to gain was fine with releasing me right away.

I’ve got two more doctors appointments. One is a final medical check up and the other is some assessment that they do for the Dept of Labor & Industry. They rate my permanent damage and award me some BS “settlement.”

There was some interesting insurance company stuff going on here (as there was prior to the surgery), but I’ll save them for a later date – after everything is completed.

As for the permanent damage stuff, my finger has more movement in it than the doctors thought it would have, but it’s far from being back to normal. They say that it might get better over the next year or so. It also healed at a strange angle. When I make a fist, this fifth finger angles off to the side. Fun, no? No. Not really.

But everyone seems very surprised that I healed as well as I did. Even the insurance company was saying how severe of an injury it was.

That’s it. More about all of this when I know more about all of this.

The Deckard 7″ was the first vinyl released by people who were really close to me. Up to that point, it had been demo tapes. The history of how this all happened is something that I think back to often and remember just how amazing that time in my life was.

It all culminates in the Deckard 7″, but the road getting there was a fun one that, probably more than anything in my life, made me who I am today.

I guess it all started when I was five and in Kindergarten. There was a kid there named Chris Murrary. One day, for Show-and-Tell, he brought in the record of the “Good Ol’ Boys” Theme song for the Dukes of Hazzard. This was 1980 and the Duke boys were pretty much all we thought about.

From then on, Murray and I were very close friends. Through elementary school and middle school, we’d hang out, go to Knoebles Grove (an amusement park where we’d drop a ton of quarters playing Contra) and were generally great pals.

By the time high school found us, we had drifted a bit. Murray made a new friend – a greasy kid I saw once in awhile. He was usually getting yelled at by teachers or skipping out on class. His name was Todd Fogel and he was sort of a legend at Mifflinburg High.

The summer before my 11th grade year, Murray dropped by my house and asked me if I wanted to be in a hardcore band. I had a vague idea of what hardcore was, though mostly I thought it was metal. I was into The Cure and Anthrax – some rap too. Hardcore wasn’t a huge leap in a different direction, but I still didn’t really get it.

He introduced me to Todd Fogel, our drummer. Except that he didn’t have drums. We also didn’t have a place to practice. But Todd had been in a band before. He was in the seminal Lewisburg hardcore band Bound By Reason. For some reason or another, his time with Bound was over and he was looking to move on.

In no time at all, we became Reality By Choice. A very straight-edge sounding name, which is odd since both Murray and Todd smoked. But in central PA circa 1989, that was all you needed to claim the edge. We had four or five songs with some pretty shaky lyrics (“Heading down a one way street, going nowhere – try to face reality, you can’t escape!”).

Murray sang/yelled, I played guitar and Todd drummed (he got a very used set off of Lunacy’s drummer, McKinny). We practiced in my parents’ basement and played one show for a girl’s birthday party. That was probably horrible.

The band broke up, but then we got back together under the name “Blank Space” – so named because Todd would record every session and wanted us to leave a “blank space” before starting the song. We moved to Todd Fogel’s basement and added Casey Murray (no relation to Chris Murray) on bass and became The Foreseen. Somewhere in this, Todd moved to bass (or guitar) and we got a drummer named Russ. He was a pretty scary guy who drove a Camaro or something.

Through a lot of this was a freaky kid named Mike Sullivan. His goofiness is still one of my top five favorite things ever. He wasn’t a member in the band or anything like that, he was just always there, cracking jokes and making up parody lyrics. A Bound By Reason lyric went “Always stepping in another man’s tracks, trying to make tracks of your own” and Mike changed it to “Always stepping on another man’s cats, trying to make cats of your own!” I still can’t listen to Primus’s “Too Many Puppies” without hearing “I won’t eat a wet potato!” during the verses.

During the next summer, Murray’s time with us was through and Mike joined the band. We became Lawn Dart Casualties, named after an Ed’s Redeeming Qualities song. From that point on, it came together (as much as a garage band can). We played a bunch of shows, including two at The Unisound in Reading.

While Lawn Darts was going on, a few other bands were happening too. Some were even practicing in Todd’s basement with us.

After Bound By Reason broke up, they sort of became Sunblind. Sunblind was a mass of chaotic fun with oddly tuned guitars and Zim, a hairy guy who was often grumpy. Bryan Lippincott was in Sunblind. He and I became fast friends. Through him I met Brian Broadt.

It’s around this time that things get a little fuzzy. I’m leaving out quite a bit, I know that. A lot of this is because I finished high school and went to college for a semester. That put an end to Lawn Darts. The summer before college and every weekend when I was in college, I’d be at Bryan, Murray and Todd’s house on Chestnut Street in Sunbury. Brian Broadt may have lived there too, but I can’t remember.

Somewhere during this time, Bryan and I started a zine called The Re-Activist. There was also a zine we all did called Accelerator.

They started a band called Fullerton (named after a street they saw in New York City). I think they needed a bassist or something. I filled in. We played one show in State College (or Williamsport).

Here is where things get even more fuzzy. Fullerton broke up, but Todd kept the name and became Ed Fullerton, country radio station host. I hung out with him a lot during this period. I don’t think anyone was doing anything musical now. I could be wrong though.

Around this time, I moved to Columbus, Ohio. Deckard may have formed a little before that. I remember that I had their demo and saw them a few times. Their demo was amazing. Their live show was even better. Broadt screamed into the pickups on his guitar! That pretty well thrilled me.

Deckard played Columbus and crashed on my floor. They also played Erie with Brother’s Keeper and Prema. I went to see that show too.

By the time I moved back to central PA and reconnected with them, the Deckard 7″ had already been released. Deckard may have even broken up.

So, you see, I don’t have much memory of the Deckard 7″. I can’t even remember how I got it.

Nevertheless, here you go, the Deckard 7″ – a piece of my youth that I could never place.

Deckard – Just Plain Ordinary 7″
1) Exclusionary
2) Velocity

Listen here…

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Go ahead and get it here…

Technical Information:
Media Used:
Vinyl 7″ from my personal collection.

Artwork Scanned from Original @ 72 dpi with XSane .996
Edited and Restored Using GIMP Image Editor 2.6.6