perfidy

The only detail I remember from that night's dream was watching CNN. Tells you what kind of hair-raising shenanigans I was up to in my unconscious that Saturday night, when friggin' CNN was the most memorable piece of it.

The dream basically ended with me reading CNN's ticker. The last item I saw said something along the lines of, "Fans shocked by Howard Stern's apparent suicide". I had just enough time to be surprised and puzzled by this news before I woke up and realized it hadn't really happened.

The next day, Sunday, a friend was over. As we were enjoying potent coffee and putting a dent in my son's absurdly oversized birthday cake from the day before, we were talking about the usual topics- military policy, foreign policy, non-fiction books we were reading, politics, and chicks- and CNN was on in the room. I happened to be looking at the tv when I saw the words "Howard Stern..." start to creep across the screen on the ticker, and I about fell out of my chair.

Holy shit!, I thought, did he really kill himself? Did Howard really kill himself?! And I frakking dreamed about it just a few hours before?! I'm a psychic! A precog! And how do I parlay this into a payday?

And then the rest of it came over "...weds his girlfriend in NYC".

Ah.

Well, suicide after a fashion, I suppose.

I gave myself half-credit and a little more cake.

Two weeks to the traditional tapping of the keg and the start of the 175th Oktoberfest.

That's THE Oktoberfest, not your local beer festival that lamely goes by the same name and serves swilly beer for a couple hours in the park while a band plays Kenny Loggins covers and most of the people around look like they'd rather be someplace else.

Bavaria, friends. Munich. Dirndls and lederhosen. Oktober-fucking-fest.

If you care to see how the world's greatest party is shaping up, look here.

If you care to cry yourself to sleep tonight certain that you will never have that much fun, just remember to cut lengthwise down the vein, not perpendicular.

[wik] Or, you can thank Jebus that the game Herzerljagd, advertised at the above link and which asks, "Can you see those sweet girls on your screen? Maybe you can win their hearts, but at first you have to shoot them", doesn't load right and is unplayable in IE.

At least, I sure hope they do.

Growing up I always enjoyed Scandinavian mythology. To be sure I read alot of Greek tales as well and I found them no less exciting, what with the crazy monsters and the brave heroes and the beastiality. But the Norse tales were, I dunno, edgier somehow. That world was battle, broadsword, and blood on the ice, a far cry from the Mediterranean climes, vineyards, and olive groves of the Greeks. I knew what deep snow and arctic chills were about; I don't think I could have picked an olive branch out of a lineup. While the Norse tales were more challenging, due perhaps to their obscurity relative to the domination of Greco/Roman sources on subsequent publication, their telling always resonated with me in a way the Greek stuff never did. They were both fantastical, but the Norse tales will always seem more...real.

Which brings me to the Ragnarok, the final war of Gods and Men.

As best I understand the Norse cosmology, when men die they go to one of three places: Hel, a horrible place of shadow and icy mist reserved for that sorry lot who die in their sleep of old age, and from which none return; Volkvangr, Freya's hall, for folks who died in violence but not neccessarily in glorious battle, not sure what becomes of these folks in the end; and of course Valhalla, Odin's hall.

Valhalla was reserved for the bravest warriors who fell in battle. Odin's servants, valkyrie, would choose the greatest of the slain (and indeed may have caused their deaths in the first place, by "fettering" or otherwise crippling the hero at the critical moment- there is seemingly some overlap between conceptions of Norse valkyrie and the Celtic Morrigan here), and wing them to Valhalla. There, the spirits of the Earth's mightiest warriors fight by day and feast by night, training to serve under Odin's command at the Ragnarok. And even though Fate has foretold the result and the ramifications of the final battle and the end of the universe, no party- Men, the dread Jotun (giants), or even the Gods themselves- can alter it.

So where does that leave me?

I don't have a battle, even a metaphorical one, that would hope to qualify me for Valhalla. And I'm not going to be the guy who tries to get in, you know, by default. I'm not going to tell thousands of burly vikings that I should be included because, yeah, I didn't fight an actual battle but I *DID* improve the database interface between IT, Advancement, and Admissions and got 5's across the board at my last annual review because of it, which was kinda like a battle because Jean in IT is so prickly and it's almost impossible to get a meeting with Janet in the Business Office to finalize the budget.

No sir.

My only hope is that Asgard's army will need administrators. Maybe on some fateful day the valkyrie will come, desperately in need of a chubby douchebag administrator to help do some import and config work so Valhalla's database can talk to Volkvangr's, and thereby contribute to the final battle.

Because unless that's the case, I'm probably going straight to Hel.

I was the first human explorer to set foot on Mars.

The dream began with me stepping onto the planet, so don't ask me anything about the trip, the balance of the team, the mission objectives, or even the mode of conveyance- wasn't there.

The surface had much more terrain excitement than is seen in actual imagery. My dream-Mars was all crushed stone, almost like a carpet of gravel with bits of bigger rock here and there. It looked like the remnants of a long-extinct glacier, or huge flood- possibly two sides of the same coin, I thought. I walked around a bit, quite satisified with my spacesuit, which was very lightweight and not at all uncomfortable; in fact, I may not have been wearing a helmet at all. In short order I found that the landing site was on a shelf, really a titanic mesa, and from the edge I looked down into a huge canyon. I could see the bottom- the ambient light was pretty good, and not nearly as red as prior missions would have you believe-and one edge, but the rest of it went off to obscurity.

That's when I saw the hut.

Further down the mesa's rim I saw a small structure, unmistakably an Earth-type dwelling space. I walked over, perhaps a half-mile (hard to gauge Earth distances on foreign planets, dontchaknow), and walked inside. I don't remember there being a door. The hut enclosed a single space that mimicked my own bedroom, at least in size and the layout of the bed. Yes, the bed- there was a king-sized sleigh bed in the middle of this hut.

Then things got weird.

On the bed, just kind of hanging out, was my stepfather, who has been dead for over three years now. Or so we all thought. He explained that he had faked his death and moved to Mars to just kind of get away. You know, leave it all behind for awhile, and he wasn't particularly excited to see me. I was trying to make sense of that when I realized there were two other people in the room. I think it was one of his brothers and his sister-in-law, neither of whom at this writing is either dead or pretending to be. They knew he had been faking, and had gone back and forth to Mars a couple times to visit.

The whole scene was making me a little uncomfortable, so I went back outside to the mesa's edge. I looked again down into the canyon, and was thinking it would make a pretty good lake if someone filled it. After some moments of indecision, I figured I'd go back inside and try to get some more details. As I turned away from the canyon I saw movement farther down the rim. I could make out two, maybe more, figures slowly walking toward the hut opposite the place I had started, but at about the same distance. In short order I found them to be tourists from Earth, startled to see not just one but several people already there. They had paid a premium for the exclusivity of the destination, and were kinda pissed that it wasn't quite so exclusive.

My stepfather, meanwhile, was getting kinda pissed that all of a sudden all these people had showed up uninvited at his place.

The BBC reports "Fierce fighting in Somali capital", a "battle" complete with

...heavy artillery fire in Mogadishu. Both sides claimed to have won the battle, fought with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, inflicting high casualties on the other.

Sounds serious. And it would continue to sound serious if you didn't read the whole piece. One side says it killed 10 enemy fighters (likely exaggerated); the other side says it killed 21 (likely exaggerated). Another four hapless souls, noncombatants, were killed in the crossfire.

So this fierce battle with heavy artillery exchanges and high casualties actually yielded under 40 dead?

I'm not trying to come across as bloodthirsty here, but I think the BBC is overstating things a bit. By which I mean a lot. I don't have a number of casualties in mind that, once reached, we've left "skirmish" and are into "battle". But if you tell me there was a fierce battle with heavy artillery and high casualties...I'm thinking Verdun and Kursk and Normandy and Inchon and Hue City and Khe Sanh. I'm thinking Mars and Marduk and the right-effing-hand of Satan. I'm not thinking of so much high-explosive posturing.

And hey not for nothing but if these clowns shoot artillery like our old friends, the Liberian infantry, handle small arms it's no wonder these wars take 30 years to fight.

By the close of FY09, all Ministers are required to own one of these. The expectation is it will be worn at all Ministry functions, in the creation of Ministry content, and at all viking metal shows. This directive supercedes prior guidance regarding the wear of perfidious garments.

In the event of zombie attack or Ragnarok, continued wear is at Minister's discretion.

[wik] Of course no outfit would be complete without a matching purse.

Deutsche Welle's picture of the day for 25JUN:

Am Mittwoch (25.06.2008) wurden in Kerbela, 80 Kilometer von Bagdad entfernt, 115 weibliche Polizisten in ihren Dienst entlassen. Sie hatten in der irakischen Stadt die Polizei-Akademie besucht.

On Wednesday in Karbala, 80 kilometers from Baghdad, 115 female police officers left for their service. They attended the Iraqi city's police academy.

[wik] Dig it- Murdoc found another pic from what might be the same activity. Not sure whether the chador/burqa is ideal field gear, but they seem to have it together in the weaponry department.

AKs and Glocks- like peanut butter and chocolate.

Ha ha that title ought to pull in some perv traffic from Google.

But no really, I saw a big snake today. I'm out with the Li'lest Lethal who, while strictly speaking is no longer sick, he can't go back to school until he's 24 hours fever-free. Since he's feeling himself and it's a gorgeous day out, and he's been up since 5 waiting to do something, around 10 I took him to a nearby conservation area a coupla towns over.

Now Johno and Mrs. Johno suffered one portion of that property, a largish hill (elev ~1250 ft) that we made them ascend one hot and stuffy summer day. You might have thought that when we got to the top, where a chill rain was feeding the blustery wind tearing at the bald top of the hill it might have been a little relief from the relentless sun and heat, but no not really. Just cold. And wet. Oh, and I made Johno pull a Radio Flyer about halfway up too, over the rockiest, most jagged bits.

Where was I going with this?

Oh right, I said that next time we'll do a circuit of the pond about a mile away from the hill. It's easy, no surprisingly miserable local weather patterns, and it's all very Thoreau-ly pleasant. Ha. Ha. Ha.

'Cept for the snakes.

To be fair, it didn't try to bite myself or my boy. We were well off the trail, skirting the edge of the pond. We were gently and cautiously squelching our way along the moss and plants where the water just starts to creep up the fairly steep and rocky slope that describes the whole southern end of the pond.

We had already spooked a few big frogs who had hurled themselves into the water with a screeching "meep!" at our approach, but the Lesser Lethal hadn't actually seen them. I wanted him to see some though, so we kept going. It didn't help that, being not yet 3 years old, my boy finds it impossible to stay silent for more than 3 or 4 consecutive seconds.

When there was a burst of motion from the clump of fern immediately to my right; a bit of black lightning shot from it, straight across where I was about to step, and into the water: thrush rush splash.

From what I could see it was black all down its length, roughly 30", and probably no thicker than half my wrist. And that's about all I got from the encounter. Oh, and that it was frigging fast. Made no effort to warn or fight; went straight into escape mode, and apparently safety to this snake means getting in the water.

I'm thinking it was a Black Racer:

or a Black Rat Snake:

[wik] And I think it goes without saying that, had that been a zombie, we'd'a both been dead. Eh, undead. I'm trying to treat it as a lesson learned, but am still feeling like I failed. Gotta be way more alert and aware than that when the zombies come.

As the capitol of Connecticut, one might be forgiven for associating Hartford with the caricatures of liberalism: lattes, chardonnay, fundraisers at the Bushnell, and a city teeming with bleeding hearts.

That population moved out to tony West Hartford a generation ago.

The only bleeding heart left within Hartford's city limits yesterday afternoon belonged to the 78 year old man who was paralyzed in a hit and run in full view of numerous witnesses who continued to go about their business. The link to today's Hartford Courant includes video of the accident and the Chief of the HPD's remark that it's "unclear" whether anyone even called 911; the unit that arrives on scene at the end of the video was actually on its way to a different call and happened upon the guy laying (nearly) dead in the middle of the street.

Aside from the Chief's uncharacteristically candid observations came this astonishingly callous remark from Hartford City Councilman Matt Ritter:

"It's been a tough few days...Most violent acts, the vast majority tend to be targeted, as the chief will tell you, at someone who was up to no good. Then this happens, this spate of incidents where it's random, and that's scary."

What Councilman Ritter has failed to grasp is that when the people who are up to no good are trying to off each other, their horrendous marksmanship makes for stray bullets killing everybody around the target, be they thugs, people sleeping in their beds or kids playing outside. More significantly, folks' first reponse to small arms fire in the street is not typically, "Good! Finally! More gangbangers offing each other. Thank God."

It's not ok, Councilman, to have to live with rampant violence, whomever it may be directed toward.

Some other news of the day from New England's Rising Star Scar:

Man Killed in Drive-By Shooting in Hartford

Hartford Chase Results in One Death

Activist Faces Brain Surgery After Beating

Hartford Toddler Dies of Stab Wound

And in recent news, most of it in the domain of standing headlines:

2 Men Wounded In Shootings

Hartford Police Investigate Shootings

Two Held in Hartford Robberies, Shootings

That's all just since the end of May; summer hasn't even started yet.

The Ministry was seemingly contacted by Bill Murray last fall at a crisis moment.

Expressed as a dream manifestation, the message- a plea for help from Murray- should have come via the Ministry Dreamgate Terminus at Muscle Shoals but appears to have been shunted to the south Asian substation in Karachi for reasons unexplained at this time. There it languished for several seconds before redirection to Byzantium Prime, Domnu-West, and Lytani, and finally going unflitered straight into my cerebral receiver. Had the communication been routed normally through MDT Muscle Shoals, I might have been able to decode, interpret, and react to it properly. As things stand, the misdirection allowed it to become garbled and the message was lost, nested in imagery of golfcarts and college reunions.

A shame, really, because it was the first oppoprtunity to deploy the Ministry's newly-formed Bill Murray High-Energy Reaction/Interdiction Team, formed for just such an emergency.

I've already tasked the Directors of the dreamgates in question to investigate the ethereal messaging in the relevant timeframe. Ministers or minions who have ideas about how this could have happened are asked to comment below.

End communication.

Lately I've been thinking about how I might best avoid the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the event I went back in time 70-odd million years, either by design (time machine) or by accident (CERN's accelerator warping spacetime and hurling me back to the Cretaceous).

Howevermuch 12 gauge ammo you might have managed to bring with you will not be enough. The male T rex was 40+ feet long and every ounce of five tons; females even bigger. It would be like trying to kill a whale with a shotgun- I suppose you could do it, eventually. But imagine that the whale is not trying desperately to get away from you, but is instead bent on pursuing you until you are food. What are you going to do with your shotgun then? Look, when we're talking zombies, shooting your way out can be a valid option. When we're talking about dinosaur survival, I don't think firearms are the way to go.

So now what?

My thinking so far is that an animal as massive as a T rex must have had a similarly massive range. It is not hard to imagine a box 20km on a side, for example, that would encompass enough prey animals to sustain the beast. So that's something right there- you try to be the needle in this haystack, and that's really the natrual instinct of tiny mammals isn't it? Avoid. Hide. Dig. Burrow. Interesting that that's my initial thinking as well. This may be optimistic, but I don't think predators that size would be so hard to stay away from. A critical first step would be in indentifying what T rex liked to eat, and then staying the f*ck away from that.

Another bit that would have to be resolved quickly is understanding their mating habits. When they are in rut or pregnant appetites might be ravenous, even by dinosaur standards, bringing them into areas they may not typically go in their search for food. Similarly, we need to recognize possible nesting habitats, and stay out of those.

The success of the avoidance plan hinges on the things being solitary, and there's no way to be sure until you get there. It's possible they could operate as a team, or at least tolerate other individuals in close proximity at certain times of the year or under certain environmental conditions, the way crocodiles can. If that's the case, and you're hiding not from one scary monster but several, that's a more complex problem that I am not prepared to address at this time.

I had inherited my mother's house and property. It's a decent-sized house on about five acres. But the house is in general disrepair, and in my dream I didn't have the inclination to get it all fixed up. What I did instead was have the house razed, with the intention of building a kickass underground structure on the same spot, using the existing foundation and cellar as a template. I had in mind part bunker/catastratorium, part cozy hobbit-hole.

So with the upper structure demolished, I began cracking though the concrete in the cellar. In my dream I was alone doing all this, which is utterly ridiculous for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I have zero training on any tool or construction principle and the most sophisticated bit of toolery I ever did was installing a cat-flap in the door to my basement.

But none of it mattered in the end, because as it turned out the earth beneath my mother's cellar was already inhabited.

A wizardly-looking fellow sort of appeared, surprising me as I was just taking sledgehammer to concrete. He looked like Gandalf if not quite so imposing...rather dumpy, really...and explained that he had been living in his own underground building for quite some time now on the very same spot, and would I please knock off trying to crash through his roof. After some back and forth, he ended up giving me a tour of his place, and it was pretty impressive. There was a very deep...shaft, I guess, but not a cold and drafty and sooty shaft, but a bright and interesting shaft, with little niches here and there with tasteful if uninspired bits of art in them. Think the inside of a very deep well, with the big stones and the curved surfaces everywhere, but without the panic that comes with falling down a deep well however tasteful the art inside may be.

We finally reached the bottom, although now I'm not sure how. I don't remember stairs now, and I think we may have been just falling very gently. As it happened, the bottom level of his place ajoined a largish chain bookstore. I thanked him for the tour, and went to poke around the store. I ran into someone I knew inside...all I remember is she was a she...and we browsed together for a bit but ended up separating. I wound up buying a copy of The Green Berets.

This is what was waiting for me in my mailbox Tuesday night.

When my wife asked me what it was, I strode with great purpose into our living room, positioned myself in front of the television, and gestured toward my 2 year old son as I answered,

"This is the core of a bonding experience between father and son that will last the rest of our lives. This is airplanes, aliens, spaceships, ray guns, and giant fighting robots. Often, thank Deity, all five at once. This is the moment when our little boy becomes a...ah, no ok he remains a little boy but this is the moment, the precise moment, when his imagination could begin to see the possibilities of aliens and giant fighting robots, and leave the boo-boo kissing to the mommies of lesser seed.

"This is Robotech.

"This was also a contributing factor in keeping daddy a very lonely young man".

Never one for a straight answer, myself.

And with my brief oration, I put in disc 1 of Robotech: The Macross Saga, Legacy Collection.

I'll have you know that I went with the Legacy edition over the competing boxed collections (of which there are at least three, each purporting to be the "complete" series) because the Legacies are the closest to what I watched in 1985: original sound, original animation, original voices. If I could've ordered a set that came with original smells- overheated VIC-20s, Dorito residue, Raid flea bomb, and shame- I would have.

One must be cautious when using the word "original" here, though. These are original in the sense that they are how I first came to them; one must be cognizant of the fact that the American series is/was at least two steps removed from the original Japanese productions- first, by marrying three distinct and unrelated original shows into a single story for us roundeyes; and two, dubbing Engrish such that the new tri-fold program made some kind of sense. The redone effects characteristic of the other collections, with their surround sound this, updated graphical that, and en-spiffened other, are not for the man who wants to see these episodes, just one last time, through his little boy eyes.

And it is the last time, because once they've been watched as an adult they will have been spoiled in a way. Our awareness of the advances in animation in the last 20+ years is enough on its own to undercut the series' impact, but the death knell is the decades of intervening real life that crush the ability to enjoy these shows again. The most we can do is keep the weight of adult consciousness off our senses for a bit, to be 14 again if only for a half an hour.

And at the very least, I can expose something fun and interesting to my son, but be there to teach him that with great animation comes great nerdiness, and it is a path to tread cautiously.

Yeah he's still a little young for all that other noise. But he's certainly old enough to express preferences, and now when I hear him say, "Daddy I wannawatch spaceships", I believe I am doing right.

...seems it's never too early to, you know, get my preferences out there.

I figure if everyone at the Ministry kicked in merely half of their economic stimulus money, you could all easily swing this for me.

And I can't tell you how much that would in turn stimulate me.

This morning, not 30 minutes ago, I helped a nun up a flight of stairs.

The facilities people who clear the snow-n-ice didn't clear the steps to their edges, meaning that she couldn't reach a handrail. Poor thing didn't want to risk going up unsupported, which is entirely understandable as she is just this side of 90. I happened to walk out when she needed a hand coming in, so there you go. I also confided to her that I almost took a digger this morning on my very own steps, so as not to let her feel any more frail than she already might.

So here's my question: which specific act of evil in my long career of prickiness might now be negated? It seems that in life's equation, I just got a +1 that ought to cancel a -1 somewhere else.

Maybe I can be made right with Vishnu for all the ants I torched with a magnifying glass. Maybe I can even get off the hook with the little green plastic god that oversees little green plastic army men; lord knows he'd want a piece of me. Then again, what if G-d is a god of war and conflict, for which there is a fair amount of evidence. This act today, then, might actually bring me backwards.

Does anyone in the Ministry circle care about the shocking, *shocking* revelation that the comically bemuscled 45-year-olds who were breaking records were hormone junkies?

If so, why?

I had organized the first annual Ministry Million Dollar Carnival.

It was a large-ish, open-air affair with all manner of booth, contest, and confection. I was walking around the carnival, half-surprised that everything had gone off as planned. There were legions of people in attendance, and all appeared to be having a good time. Even the weather was nice. Well, nice according to the aesthetic of most folks.

So after a bit of all this, someone...I'm not sure who, but someone from the Ministry circle...might've been a Minister, or possibly Murdoc...came over and pointed out that we don't have a million dollars to give away, or even a million dollars' worth of merchandise; the whole thing was basically a sham. I thought that was odd, and started to argue that that was entirely irrelevant, but decided to finish out-processing from the Marine Corps instead.

As a former soldier I *have* had dreams about people I knew and units I was in, but I never once dreamed of being in another service branch.

So I walked over to the admin building and found myself explaining to a retention officer why I wanted to leave the Corps. As I recall now, it was a famous actor...Jeff Goldblum, maybe?...who was the officer in question. I said that I had done my time and it was just time to get out, to move on, that sort of rap. We finished the paperwork, shook hands, and I walked out to join a waiting expedition to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

We made the summit in rather short order, only to find that the peak was actually just level with a little, scrubby city and the fact that it is among the largest natural features on the planet really is just an accident of relative observation and associated physics. In short, after cresting the mighty mountain I was rewarded not with an astonishing view of Earth's grandeur but an eye-level view of a rather shabby and dark empty parking lot that I could step onto from the peak.

So I looked around a little, but went back to our camp just short of the summit and told everyone what the deal was. Then I noticed that my cat had actually followed us up the mountain and was being a pain in the ass in the tent, so I bitched at him for a bit.

I went to visit Johno and the lovely and talented Misses Johno.

I was by myself, and had a rental car because I didn't want to take my warwagon so far. Because, in my dream, they lived in Texas, I think...maybe Arizona. Someplace scrubby.

So I got down there, and they had a sweet place. It was a big second-floor apartment. It was new, but had alot of interesting spaces and unexpected nooks characteristic of older, re-purposed accomodations. The net effect was very positive. Johno even had the space to have his whole baking set-up the way he (mostly) wanted.

I guess we hung out through the night...I dunno, or maybe I just got down there really early in the morning. I got a hankerin' for a McDonald's breakfast sandwich, which is odd for several reasons, and I was astonished, even in my dream, that Johno wanted one too. I don't think I ever left to get any though, because I couldn't retain his directions to the nearest one. We ended up playing pool on the huge red felt pool table that dominated his living room that I guess I hadn't noticed before.

But by then Misses Johno was trying to sleep on the little daybed nearby, and kept yelling at us to stop making so much noise. I was trying to puzzle through how to play pool quietly, then realized they didn't have a bedroom at all but slept either on or next to the pool table.

In a previous incarnation of itunes, Hendrix/Band of Gypsys followed Coltrane's "Love Supreme". They worked pretty well end-to-end, better than I would've guessed, and I would never have put them together on their own. It was pretty cool the first time they played all the way through.

Nowadays, in my current setup, Dave Brubeck follows all my Danzig.

It's not really working out.

Back in September Lady Lethal, the Li'lest Lethal, and I went to a coupla local town fairs.

You know, peach harvest festival-type stuff. Petting zoo ("Behold the esquilax!"). Balloons of every shape, color, and stripe *except* pornographic. Cub Scouts hawking some widget or other as they aspire to be Boy Scouts, who in turn are preparing a surprising variety of doughy foods, as they wait to be old enough to enlist at the Army's recruiting booth, and ultimately wind up in one of the sausagenpepper sandwich carts run by opposing factions of veterans groups. There were even rides operated by drifters and gypsies. And sight was overwhelmed by smell, as the competing aromas of deep fryers, hay, body odor, and vomit (from children who ate sausagenpeppers and went on a ride tended by a drifter or gypsy) filled the air and settled in your clothes.

It was as authentic a slice of 21st century Americana as it's possible to cut.

Each fair also had a band. Each singer howled something like, "HELLO TOWN FAIIH-YUH!" every so often (which made me laugh for hours afterward). Each was similarly competent, yet similarly lame, because they played pretty much the same set list. "Brown Eyed Girl"; "Takin' Care of Business"; "Bad Case of Loving You"; and such like.

Not knocking Van Morrison, or BTO, or the other guy.

Mmmm, ok, not knocking Van Morrison.

Just sayin', is all...I mean, if you're going to go through the trouble of getting a rock band together, and learn a bunch of songs, and market yourself, and get paying gigs, how about playing some music that maybe is even better and almost as well known?

If it were me, I would do like this: have everybody in the band write up a dream sheet of 10 standard rock songs they want to play out at, say, oh, the town fair. Then we collect everybody's list, which can yield enough material for at least 90 minutes. You look them over, eliminate any duplication, then burn them- vigorously, enthusiastically. Then you make better lists. With better songs.

Here is my proposed set list for my new project, Generic Town Fair Rock n Roll Revue (the preferred name of the band is Killbot Factory, but for PG-rated gigs we're going with Generic Town Fair Rock n Roll Revue):

-Search and Destroy (Stooges)

-I Want to Take You Higher (Sly and the Family Stone- sax player takes harmonica bits. Did I mention that Killbot Factory has a sax player...?)

-Big City Nights (Scorpions)

-Working Man (Rush- some sort of abridged version)

-Can't You Hear Me Knockin' (Stones)

-One Step Beyond (Madness- we can unspool this and jam for a bit if we need the time)

-Hey Hey, My My (into the black) OR Cinammon Girl (N Young)

-Bloodfeast (Misfits- if we can slip it in without anyone noticing...)

-Nighttrain (James Brown)

-Ziggy Stardust OR Moonage Daydream (Bowie)

-What Do I Get? (Buzzcocks)

Keep 10 or 15 Ramones tracks in your back pocket just in case you need to fill 5 minutes at the end, and we're done.

Now, assume you play in the band- what's *your* dream sheet? Uh, assuming the one you submitted the first time has already been burned.