the lineage of innovation

• Wednesdays are fried chicken day at the State Police Cafeteria. If you know me at all, you will know that a civil servant lunch, the kind toward which old men with pensions look forward every day, prepared by prison trustees who have a sweet repartee with the cops and involves fried chicken and green beans with new potatoes and rice and gravy is right where I'm at, spiritually speaking. It at least deserves its own top-level bullet point.

Last night:
Ringo Starr, Very Best Of
T. Rex, Electric Warrior
Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer

Today:
Heaven 17, Penthouse and Pavement
Bush Tetras, Boom in the Night
Fad Gadget, Fad Gadget by Frank Tovey

• I had something really potent to say about Heaven 17, something I sweated out while walking the dog back from dropping Maya off at school, but it's gone now. Just as well. I was playing Electric Warrior for Maya last night trying to sell her on it and she wasn't buying, and then suddenly, I wasn't either. That Malcolm Gladwell book has a great chapter about Ron Popeil and the lineage of innovation and sales inherited from his father Samuel. There is a great vignette of the producers at QVC letting out a cheer when Ron Popeil finishes his record-breaking set. We have an offshoot of the Pocket Fisherman - literally, it shoots the hook out in a capsule-like projectile that becomes the bobber - tangled up in its own line in a corner of the trunk of our car. It was the only thing Maya wanted for Christmas a while back.
  
  
  Heaven 17, "Let's All Make a Bomb"
  
  
• I continue my smittenness with Eleanor Friedberger in this week's Record Crate for 225. After being sufficiently bored shitless with T. Rex, Maya asked if we could listen to that "Inn of the Seventh Ray-ray-ray-ray-ray" woman. Yes. Forever.
  
  
  Eleanor Friedberger, "Inn of the Seventh Ray"
  
  
• Hey! The administrative emails are circulating: I'm gonna be co-teaching LSU's MC 4971 - Special Topics in Mass Communication  with my friend Lance this fall. It is gonna be so special, dude. And topical! Can't wait to read my stellar Hot Professor rating! Jerri had to escort some incoming foreign students around campus yesterday and one of them asked what you call the professors: Dr.? Mr.? Sir?I'm going to have to come up with something!
  
  
• On top of that, I think I actually have now written all the writing my book needs! And just in time, for this incredible  account of Wells Tower traveling in Iceland and Greenland with his dad is making the rounds and holy crap, he's good. He describes a bar named Bar at the opening, and I don't need that kind of competition in the bar description business.