Memorable Drinking Songs

Finnegan's Wake - Irish Traditional

Cracklin' Rosie - Neil Diamond

Alcohol - Brad Paisley

Jose Cuervo - Shelly West

Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting - Elton John

I Like Beer - Tom T. Hall

Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo - Tracy Byrd

Im Himmel gibt's kein Bier (In Heaven There Is No Beer) - Traditional

White Lightnin' - George Jones

You'll Never Be a Lawyer 'Cuz You Can't Pass a Bar - Ken Mellons

Cigar Pope?

After having learned that the sister of my grandfather supposedly was the model of many a cigar label, I searched cigar label images and came across the following. Looks like Pope Pius X:

Ponderable

“MacArther’s Park is melting in the dark…”. Few songs more perfectly represent the power of nostalgia to make bad songs good. It's likely if I heard that on the radio today I’d repudiate it and all its works and pomps. Similarly, songs like Billy, Don’t Be a Hero seem good only by virtue of the associations I’ve attached to it (I heard it while my Dad was taking me to a baseball game on my tenth birthday at which I subsequently doubled and homered [editor’s note: the homer might be a writer’s embellishment]. And yet I ask myself why certain types of ‘70s architecture are so distaseful. Why wouldn’t 70s architecture, such as the brown panelling and ubiquitious vomit-inducing flourishes in houses made famous in Lilek’s book on the 70s, be not similarly inspirational?

Untitled Poem Titled 'Untitled'

I'm full of unrequited poetic impulses
Little Dorrits of affectations and
unresolved problem segments
hiding discombulations
‘cuz she’s in Spain and here the rain
falls and falls like Niagra Falls
on automatic timer
and the septic tank fails
(I call it the skeptic tank since I’m skeptical of its quality)
and the sump pump sings a tuneless song
as the piano stands silent.

Like birds to a rookery
I fly to the bookery
where drunk I upon the ink
of a flyleaf signature from 1883
fresh as if writ Thursday
while the signer's bones smoulder
and nothing gives a sense of urgency
like bones that smoulder.

The late letters of Bukowski
prove strangely readable
but I resist for lack of imprimatur--
funny how as impressionable youths we fling
influences at ourselves with insouciance
while guarding ourselves in stolid middle age.

You Tubes

Steven Riddle's recent prodigious amount of YouTubing inspired this post. I'm far more bourgeois though.

Donovan singing Jennifer Juniper in Ireland in 2005:


Rising of the Moon

The Impossible Dream

MacArthur Park

Melt with You

Morningside of the Mt

Deep Purple

Seal's Kiss of the Rose

You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma

You Never Even Call Me By Name

Patti Loveless "Keep Your Distance"

Don't Come Home a' Drinkin'

Week in Review

Well the Bucks game was over nearly before it began. I went to my inlaws because they lived closest to my house and it was a “school night” as they say. The gods of college football apparently cared little about the decreased productivity in the states of Ohio and Florida on Tuesday, at least not when it means m-m-m-money. Plus the in-laws are OSU-crazy, beginning and ending family gatherings with the blessing “Go Bucks”. Their passion is heartfelt and entertaining and I can share it only derivatively. Not being an OSU grad or a Columbus native I always feel like I’m cheating on my wife (my alma mater). OSU, as mistresses go, is extremely attractive and sexy, and given the Bengals and Reds seasons I feel a sense of entitlement.

The Bucks lost the coin toss (John McCain lost a roomful of voters), but that bad taste was quickly turned on its head by an electric kickoff return for a touchdown. Many highfives and hugs later, sobriety returned as Florida methodically returned fire. “Gay-tors” they weren’t. They had teeth. My father-in-law aged before my eyes, disconsolantly saying they always break his heart. But it was just January of 2003 when they last won it all, and I don’t think your team shouldn’t win it all too often lest you become complacent. Once a decade would be nice as well as exceptional given how rarely the average Division 1 team wins a national championship. But all is relative. If Notre Dame is the king of the notoriously overrated, it seems the teams of the Big Ten, this year at least, were princes.

Speaking of the game and game recaps, Ham o' Bone toiled long and hard in his blogratory on this post, calling it his breakthrough 100-comment post, but it appears it wasn't to be. Tough to find an audience these days.

Midwest Writers

Nice Dispatch feature on Ohio writers:

In his afterword to Good Roots: Writers Reflect on Growing Up in Ohio, novelist Mark Winegardner makes a persuasive case for the Midwest being the cradle not only of football coaches but of the country’s greatest writers. The evidence is ample: Mark Twain (Missouri), Ernest Hemingway (Illinois), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Minnesota), T.S. Eliot (Missouri), Theodore Dreiser (Indiana), Thornton Wilder (Wisconsin). And the list goes on and on. Take that, New York. Good Roots editor Lisa Watts asked several writers to contemplate how the Midwest in general, and Ohio in particular, shaped them as people and, especially, as writers. Popular children’s author R.L. Stine wonders: "Would I have ventured outside more if it wasn’t so BORING out there? If I lived in a more stimulating, crowded, cosmopolitan, lots-to-see-and-do environment? I don’t know. But the quiet and normalcy of my little block of our little town gave me the security to stay inside and explore this new passion of mine. "

From Today's LotH Bible Reading

Sirach 43:13-35

For him each messenger succeeds,
and at his bidding accomplishes his will.
More than this we need not add;
let the last word be, he is all in all!
Let us praise him the more, since we cannot fathom him,
for greater is he than all his works;
Awful indeed is the Lord's majesty,
and wonderful is his power.

Lift up your voices to glorify the Lord,
though he is still beyond your power to praise;
Extol him with renewed strength,
and weary not, though you cannot reach the end.

Golden Age?

Manishevitz but I just caught The Office and that show is just flat out hi-larious. The killer moment was when Phyllis asks how this guy's wife is doing and he shows a picture and she's got the same buffant hairdo as Phyllis & her co-worker had just had done. Ah but you have to be there. Yesterday's Friday Night Lights wasn't too shabby and of course 24 begins next week. Julie of "Happy Catholic" writes:

Heroes? Prison Break? Friday Night Lights? Studio 60? House? (Lost is on the edge ... we'll see how they go with the return from the winter break ...)

Homer: When will I learn? The answers to life's problems aren't found in the bottom of a bottle. They're on TV.

Some of the best drama, whether for excellent writing about the human condition (House, Friday Night Lights) or just excellent story telling (the others above) is on regular network TV. As a commenter pointed out here, this is another "golden age" of television.

Ave Maria

A week before Christmas I heard soprano Renée Fleming's angelic rendition of Schubert's Ave Maria, and the song has been lingering in memory ever since. Wow can she sing.

Through the miracle of YouTube I found it again:



There are other renditions here.

Link:

The Ave Maria was composed in about 1825 by Franz Schubert (1797-1828) when he was twenty-eight years old and filled with devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was written for voice and piano and first Published in 1826 as Op 52 no 6. The words most commonly used with Schubert’s music are not the words that the composer originally set to music. Franz Schubert actually wrote the music for an excerpt from the poem “The Lady of the Lake” by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), which was translated into German by Adam Storck...

The composer died young at the age of 31. After his death Latin lyrics were replaced on the song for performance in a liturgical setting. The composer’s name was Franz Schubert, and “Ellen’s Song Number Three” is known to us today as “Ave Maria”.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum;
benedicta tu in mulieribus,
et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus [Christus].
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei,
ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Ave Maria, Mater Dei, Ora pro nobis peccatoribus,
Ora, ora pro nobis, Ora ora pronobis peccatoribus,
nunc et in hora mortis, in hora mortis nostrae,
in hora mortis, mortis nostrae, in hora mortis nostrae,
Ave Maria.

Commenting on Corner & Drudge Posts

A few stream o' conscious thoughts about various & sundry Corner & Drudge links (click to enlarge):



It's sort of amazing how politicians are able to stab someone in the back and then the next day be smiling in an "it's not personal" sort of way. I'm reading John Ashcroft's book and Teddy Kennedy did everything but accuse him of child molestation in front of the cameras while behind the cameras solicitiously offering a cloakroom of some sort to Ashcroft's family.




This is "comedic genius". Simply hi-larious. One of those posts you say, "wish I'd have written that".




Strong stuff coming from a Republican senator. If he's not up for election in '08 then it's really strong stuff. Hard to disagree.



Proof again that there is a God. Or at least that some people have a spine. I was greatly cheered by this.



I thought Johnny Carson was dead?

A Quote from The Other Paper

"There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you." - Woody Hayes

An Eastern Catholic...

..sent me these charming photos from Jakubany in Slovakia, the village in which his great-grandfather was born:

O'Rourke on Wealth

P.J. O'Rourke on C-Span's In Depth said that the main economic error we make can be summed up in two words: "zero sum". As in "zero sum" game. As in wealth is like a pie and every slice you get is one slice I don't get. It isn't true, at least not anymore. He said it was once true and so it is understandable so many people get this wrong. It was true when land=wealth because there was a limited amount of land. But the Industrial Age changed all that and now wealth is not finite.

I'm often puzzled by those who are resentful of the rich and who are bothered by disparities of income. Disparity is minutiae, what counts is how much the poor have, whether their needs are met, and that the "floor" be as high as possible.

I suppose that for those of us living in a democracy disparity is intrinsically bothersome. We want everything "even-steven". Moving to the spiritual sphere, one of the Thomist's least popular positions is that God loves some more than others, i.e. those who he has predestined in a special way (such as the Theotokos). The disclaimer is that He loves everyone more than they could ever love themselves but it was interesting to reading commenters discuss/recuss that on Pontifications blog.

Divine Mercy, Divine Justice

That mercy/justice post reminds me how Fr. Groeschel, on his Sunday Night Live show this past week, mentioned that he's a big proponent of Divine Mercy. He joked that some folks are prophets of Divine Justice, but he stays the hell away from that group. Says he knows which end his bread his buttered on. Amen brother, er, Father.

His comments reminded me of reading Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie many, many years ago. I read with great surprise how he (Steinbeck) longed to find a Christian church that preached fire and brimstone. He wanted fire and brimstone! I thought at the time: why would anyone want that "mean God" preached? But now I understand it better. As you creep into middle age the tendency is towards complacency. Youth is many things, but it's not usually marked by complacency or lethargy. Middle age usually means you have a family and a more comfortable income, more stability, and that tends to induce tepidity. Of course, the fire and brimstone sermons are probably not helpful to those prone to despair, but that's a horse of a different color. In the end one can see how we need lessons of both justice and mercy, primarily because both are true.