The Service Elephant is All Decked Out for Christmas

Your love is like   juggling scalpels

 They're not kidding about the major oops with software. Click for a running list of what's been affected and what they suggest.

Today I identify as   a No Parking sign

Reminder to contribute to Team Western Kentucky Tornado Relief Fund. It's an official fund and tax deductible. 

Credit where it's due: the helicopter we sent to Mars is still flying, beyond its expected date, like the Rover. When was the last time America built something that lasted past its expected date? 

• Toyota models 2018 or newer will need a subscription in order for the key fob to support remote start functionality.
• it was also going to charge for turn signalling, but nobody uses those things...
• No, seriously?
• We had remote start on a few older cars. It was nice. Now remote start goes to The Cloud and back down to your car to start it. Unacceptable here.

See Something, Say Something.

Nah, we're just kidding. You'll wind up in jail  

• Stanford Professor Garry Nolan Is Analyzing Anomalous Materials From UFO Crashes
• But... no... no... there are no UFOs, so we don't have any debris from UFO crashes......
• uh-oh... somebody's been lying to us.

Is it possible that lefty isn't the crazy conspiracy theorist he appears to be?

Of course, in the immediate wake of the tornado, people want to know if it is related to climate change.

Flying AIDS News  

COVID-19 Breakthrough: Scientists Discover How the SARS-CoV-2 Virus Evades Our Immune System

Stripped of power, Missouri health depts abandon COVID health measures 

Amid violent threats, lawmaker ditches bill to make unvaxxed pay hospital bills

“The situation is critical”: Minnesota hospitals beg people to get vaccinated

Covid: PM faces big rebellion as MPs vote on new restrictions

NYT Admits Merck’s Covid Drug Could Mutate DNA, Cause Cancer & Damage Male Fertility

Google is threatening to fire unvaccinated employees

In 2021, COVID-19 vaccines were put to the test. Here’s what we learned

Covid: Omicron spreading at unprecedented rate, WHO says

Covid pass starts in England despite biggest rebellion of Johnson era

Omicron is rising rapidly in the US—3% of cases nationally, 13% in NY and NJ

It's been weeks since I was forced to get a Flying AIDS injection.

I feel pretty good.

• The third arm has not proven useful for guitar playing - it doesn't learn well. I suspect it's 'special'
• The facial hair on my forehead, spelling Flying AIDS protected, just makes people point and laugh (moreso).
• I can no longer sing, as half of my mouth droops. Some would argue I couldn't sing in the first place.
• I can't breathe through the second nose, nor urinate through the second penis. Nor does Wife find either of them useful.

I would like to be found in contempt of Congress. 

After all, Congress has been in contempt of the citizens forever.

• Honda wants to use connected cars to identify hazardous road conditions
• What could possibly go wrong? Connected cars.

How to keep some of your Twitter data away from advertisers

Deep Thoughts - by lefty

• how do nudists feel about crossdressers?

Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath's lefty guitarist, now has a fragrance.

This is really too much. We sat through different singers and Ozzy's tv show, but a fragrance?

The only question, aside from how much he's making on it, is what does it smell like....

• guitar strings
• the heat of vacuum tubes in amps
• groupies
• Gwynyth Paltrow's vagina (candle)

If you have an Alexa, and you shouldn't, you need to turn off package notifications, or everyone will know what you ordered when it arrives.

Hey Mom... what's a personal massager?  

• the dog is now hiding her treats. Normal dogs eat or bury. She's now hiding them in my office. I don't know why. But I'm trying to become complacent in my position as ringmaster of this 7 ring circus.
• she will take a piece of bread, carry it around for 2 days. like a prize, then maybe eat it.

I knew it was coming, I forecasted it. A German employee, working from home, slipped and broke his back on the "commute" from his bed to the home office, and it has been deemed a workplace accident.

Personally, I have to watch out for dog toys on the steps.

I pick on Elon Musk because of the Tesla. But check out what he had to say in 2020:

This notion that you can send checks out to everybody and things will be fine is just not true. 

Some people have this absurd view that the economy is like some magic horn of plenty; It just makes stuff. Goods and services? They just come from this magic horn of plenty.

So, if somebody has more stuff than somebody else it is just because they took more from this magic horn of plenty.

Let me break it to the fools out there: If you don’t make stuff, there is no stuff.

We’ve become detached from reality. You can’t just legislate money and solve these things. If you don’t make the stuff, there is no stuff... Obviously.

He's right. Right?

So morning was way too early when I started up the computers for work.

My system's HDMI connector bit the big one. The local Yellow Sign Place didn't have the cord I needed, but did have a cheap hub. That completely refused to function, much like the store.

Then I noticed the second monitor on the work system was much more black than I prefer, in the way it was totally and completely black. The system still recognized it, though.

I thought perhaps the systems would come to a gentleman's agreement to fully operate if I left the office and sat with Wife, who was naturally watching one of those Judge Obnoxious shows. "Mr. Smith-Oowawa, the baby is...... [commercial]..... the baby is.....[envelope rattle]..... YOURS."

As it turns out, the computer systems continued to mock me by remaining in a largely broken state. Just for fun, I substituted another VGA cord and HELLELEUJAH(!) - it worked!  And when I say worked, I saw stuff on the screen. And when I say I saw stuff on the screen, it was pretty much all blue. What are the odds I'd pick up yet another funky cord? In my house, almost even.

But I just don't have the heart or energy to find a third video cable, so the screen will be blue until after my fourth cup of coffee or I go blind from Overblue Syndrome. I ordered a video cord for the other system, next day. As things go, I just don't have much hope it will arrive, next day or forever.

What I did see is a tree ornament with 2021, but the 1 is the middle finger of the Grinch. I ordered a bunch of  them for the family.

To put a period on this verbal explosion, Wife tells me I was singing a Joe Cocker song, in my sleep, at 5am. I've always entertained in my sleep, but this is the first time we could figure out what I said. I know you're consumed with quizzicality.. it was The Letter (my baby, she wrote me a letter). So now that we spent actual time on figuring this out, I can finally call the doctors to reveal one of the noises I made while asleep. What in the universe could it mean? That I like to sing Joe Cocker? That I need to send a letter? That I'm not getting enough (live performing or the other thing)? Well, that's what we pay the doctors for. It's good that I sing Joe Cocker - it proves I have good taste. I hope it proved I can sing it well... I'm not known for my singing. Or the other thing.

Dear Microsoft Teams:

There's no reason to bing and boing me to death about the meeting I'm IN. Yes, I know someone commented - I'm looking at it. Sometimes I can't mute it.

I am glad, however, you chose to implement my suggestion to put a timer on the status, so you don't have to remember to set your status back after lunch and look like you're away the entire rest of the day. Do I get an Suggestion Fee for that?

Joe Has Just Left the Building

Joe Cocker died, age 70, from lung cancer.

It was the 1970's. I remember it well, which is interesting, as I remember very little. In the front of the house, next to the air conditioner, my mom kept a stack of albums [shut up] against the wall. One had a white background and a picture of some strange looking guy who seemed to be in pain. With a cover like that, it had to be good. I was a youngster so I didn't know any better but I knew what I liked. I wore the damn album out and collected more and more. 

Yes, my mother turned me on to Joe Cocker. Turnabout is fair play: I introduced her to the Allman Brothers and took my parents to their first Little Feat concert.

I only saw him once or twice in concert, although I had video and audio. You can catch a lot of his stuff on Youtube but I recommend Mad Dogs and Englishmen, a documentary of his tour in the very early seventies. Leon Russell was his musical director. My, how things have changed.

There are certain songs that never fail to get an audience going. As a result, my bands always played Feelin' Alright. Also The Letter. No matter how poorly we played it, the audience got up and danced.

Jimmy Page was a session guitarist way back then and played on 'With a Little Help' and 'Bye Bye Blackbird'. Page also played on Tom Jones' 'It's Not Unusual' and a fair percentage of the music coming out of England at the time.

When I was doing musical comedy, I did a Cocker parody. While I can do a decent imitation, I cannot really sing (like most singers today, I never let that stop me).

People often ask about non-guitar players influencing your playing.  Joe opened me up to new kinds of music. He made me want to play. He also made me want to sing (my poor audiences). Fortunately his songs and style are well-documented and will be with us forever.

My first black rescue cocker was named Joe Cocker Spaniel. He, too, was a legend in his area.

We aren't left with a lot in his wake. We still have Gregg Allman, Delbert McClinton and Sass Jordan (who did a duet with Joe).

Man, I'm getting old.

SIR Jimmy?

Coming to us from the Daily Telegraph is an article about Jimmy Page being mentioned for knighthood.

Sir James Page would join luminaries such as Sir Elton and Sir Paul.

I'm voting for this, in spite of the fact that I'm an American.  Over here, we vote wisely, vote often.

If you've read this far and still have that scrunched up quizzical face, Jimmy Page would be the guitarist/writer/producer of Led Zeppelin fame.  Prior to Zeppelin, Page was an in-demand session musician.  That's Jimmy on Tom Jones' "It's Not Unusual" and Joe Cocker's version of "With a Little Help from my Friends".

You Call That Sh-t Music? [or I'm Turning into My Parents]

The good news is that I'm carpooling to work now.  It's uncharacteristically green of me, I know.  One does what one can (especially when it saves lots of gas).  When your Hyundai doesn't do that much better on gas than your land yacht Lincoln, you realize maybe you should have researched further.

The other good news is that I'm carpooling with a real sweetheart (who's sort of my niece-in-law, twice removed).  I'd be hard-pressed to find a single flaw with this arrangement.


And of course when I say I'd be hard-pressed to find a single flaw, there is one single flaw.  Just a tiny one that, if anyone else were typing, wouldn't amount to an anthole.  I'm speaking, of course, about the choice of radio station and (alleged) music.

This was inevitable.  She's twenty-one and I'm... not.  Let's just say I'm more than twice her age.  Her boyfriend, my nephew-in-law (twice removed), has pretty good taste in music, having gotten at least some of it from me.  He does love the guitar players, being one himself.  His dalliances into the thrashy stuff can be forgiven.  In fact, I can forgive most stuff.

Except what I have been hearing from the HOT HITS station.

To call this stuff music is a grievous error, punishable by death. Even if it's on quietly in the background, it agitates me.  We have an occasional third carpool member who's older than me by a few years.  I sometimes watch his eyeballs look at each other and spin like slot machines when the stereo is on.  He is way too polite to verbalize his feelings.  I, however,  have no such impediment.  He dares not talk too loudly because some of his music sounds like someone strangling a saxophone.

Every generation tortures the previous generation with its choice of music; it's probably written into the genetic code (somewhere past the serial killer gene).  I can't bear to think back to what I did to my parents (although I picked up Joe Cocker from my folks and traded them the Allman Brothers and Little Feat).  The intro to Hendrix must've come as a bit of a shock, though.

"Turn that down - that's not music" was a constant refrain.  And now that I have uttered those very words, I realize how horrible they sound.

Your honor, I have a few things to say in my defense:

• When we played a song, it required a certain number of musicians to perform, not dancers.
• We used to carry around a dumb piece of equipment called a drummer, as opposed to the dumb piece of equipment called a drum machine.  Subtle but substantive.
• Hats - not hair extensions.
• The only person who stood with his arms crossed, trying to look intimidating, and randomly said `HEY' was the road manager.
• We were generically off-pitch and proud.  Autotune?
• No headset mics, unless you want to hear me cursing at the band between songs.
• Backup singers, not backup dancers.

I don't remember the source of this but it is said that a song is no good if it can't be reduced to a piano or acoustic guitar with voice and sound great (what, no beat box?).

Being late to the party (or chronically never arriving), I just realized this is what `the kids today' are listening to.  It's really sad that they have to refer to this as their music.  This probably explains why my nephews like to listen to a lot of the stuff I do.. they tell me there's nothing there for them in recent music.  We shall never see another Led Zeppelin.  Or Frank Zappa, for that matter.


Sadly, the phrase `lonely as a guitar player at a rap concert' comes to mind.