A night in Tunisia

A blog that is written in Tunisia and is following the excitement in that country.

Where's your tie

I wrote a new post on the Sixties blog. I think it's great our Congressman are going to do Outward Bound together. I wonder if their valets and butlers can come along.

January grumpiness

In December snow makes us nostalgic and happy about snow at Christmas. Especially if we get a day off. In January snow just makes us grumpy. More shoveling. More lousy roads.

Employers use different methods to tell their staff they have a snow day. One place I used to work used to call workers an hour before they would not normally get up to tell them not to come in the next day. Another job would send the calls out at midnight the night before. Recently I was called for a delayed opening and when I got to work the security guard told me that, in fact, the delayed opening had been changed to closed.

Early January is when most of us de-Christmas our homes. When I was a kid we used to sing Christmas songs backwards while taking ornaments off the tree.

This is also the time when we finally have to deal with our presents that have been sitting under around the living room. A few tips for gift givers. Never give large gifts to people with small apartments. Never think that you can start someone with a new hobby. If they didn't scrapbook before, they're not going to start now, even if they have a huge scrapbooking kit. Most apartments have a shortage of electical plugs and finding a new one for an unwanted gift can make people testy. And if you buy a shirt for someone to wear at work, make sure it has a pocket and is wash and wear. People aren't going to start ironing for the sake of a Christmas gift.

And why oh why don't they clean the snow at doctor's offices and drugstores! Well, enough grumpiness. At least in January you can be grumpy and not be called a Scrooge.

Life

Almost finished Keith Richards' biography "Life". Actually surprisingly literary work from the Stone with nine lives. Anita Pallenberg doesn't come off too well. Mick comes off better than advertised. Of course, the author comes off as an angel with a dirty face.

The part about growing up in England is good reading. The book has gotten good reviews and will now be part of the Stone's literary pantheon. The big dissapointment is at the end. Yes he fell on the beach at Fiji but he never climbed a coconut tree.

Editor's note: An earlier blog on the Rolling Stones. For a more literal story of the early Rolling Stones, try Bill Wyman's A Stone Alone, a good companion piece to Life.

Herkimer, New York

Family trips are often the high points of childhood memories, often increasing in their exoticism and sheer pleasure as viewed from the distant past. So it was with the family vacation of 1958. I was six years old and my father had just bought a beautiful 1958 Ford Fairlane and the family was embarking on a summer trip to Canada. We were headed for Nova Scotia, where there was a road the supposedly went uphill and downhill at the same time. We got as far as Herkimer, New York when my brother remarked to my father that the engine was making a funny noise.

My father said, "Just ignore it, turn up the radio!". Soon, passing a gas station, my father reluctantly turned in to get second opinion on the car.

Being only six, my memory resurfaces the next week where the family stayed at the Hotel Herkimer. Every day we walked through the park and every day my father came back from the garage with bad news. Apparently the family trip to Canada had met with a permanent dead end in Herkimer. The mechanics thanked my family for the watermelon we had left in the car. It must have tasted good that hot August day.

My brother and me were playing at the one pinball machine in the hotel when a man came out and said, "Hey kids, would you like to see a radio station?"

"Sure," my brother said. We walked around the station and the disc jockey, he looked like a spaceman with those huge headphones waved at us. Then the gentleman who gave us the tour gave us a gift of records. I still have the Conny Francis record in my collection.

Finally my father, exasperated by the fate of the car, sent me, my mother and brother to the train station where we took the train back to Hackensack, presumably through New York.

It was my first trip on a train.

The car was finally repaired, but it was a source of constant expense and aggravation during it's lifetime with the family. It was replaced in 1966 with a Ford Falcon, a much better automobile.

The family never made it to Nova Scotia. Thanks to college radio, I got to sit with headphones and wave to people while doing my air shift. The glamorous world of radio.

Anarchists

Just when you think we can't possibly have one more thing to worry about, we find out that anarchists are sending bombs in Italy.

Tin tin deo

Last week, James Moody died. I first heard him when I was in college when I bought a copy of Blue Note Records Three Decades of Jazz, 1939-1949. The last cut on side four was "Tin tin deo". I played it for some of my college friends who, like me, knew very little about jazz beyond maybe Louis Armstrong. Yes we knew all about Jethro Tull and King Crimson and Pink Floyd, but jazz was new to us.

Years later, when I was working in Denver, we had a shared radio on the floor and the radio frequently played King Pleasure's warbling of Moody's Mood for Love.

Turns out he had a long career and recorded and performed widely. And what ever happened with the court of the crimson king.