My brother’s (NEW) blog is a place for the strange and wonderful, which is depicted below. It has kind of a beach theme, much like my brother.
Archive for July, 2010
Hey Wha Happon
July 20, 2010Work With Me On This
July 8, 2010I’m trying to convince the Twitterverse that Justin Wilson is a star in the new Predators movie.
Honestly, I’ve had better ideas. And there are better uses for my time. But it’s been kind of a crummy day and my allergies are acting up, and it’s kind of a funny idea.
Who is Justin Wilson? He is like Adrian Brody, a cajun and a born raconteur, who was on PBS in the nineties. He also once said, “I ain’t got time to bleed, I gawr-run-tee”.
These are all lies. I encourage you to make up your own.
Real Men Don’t Rehearse
July 2, 2010
A book which contains anecdotes about:
• Vomiting (seemingly) on cue during the 1812 Overture
• A drunk bass section, comprised of grown men, who cannot stop laughing during a high school student’s solo.
• The disadvantages to packing your tuxedo in the same case as your upright bass.
A quick read, and an interesting memoir about the Boston Pops, a group of which I am not a fan.
Happily for me, Locke acknowledges that there are real reasons to not be a fan: the music has been done to death and so the reward of sacrificing years of your life to being a musician is to play “Claire de Lune” over and over and over until you plot revenge on your conductor. The stories of the musician’s struggles and general disobedience are like potato chips – - it’s very hard to stop reading. Less thrilling are the stories about stipends for lunch, but the weaker segments fly by. Beyond the applied mayhem, there are thoughts on leadership and artistry well worth reading.
Biddy
July 2, 2010There is one bodega within a square mile radius of my apartment that has tonic water, and it is home to a mid-size parrot named Biddy.
I first encountered Biddy while waiting in line, waiting for a bunch of people to finish buying lotto tickets. There, sitting on the unattended cash register, was a yellow and gray parrot staring right at me. So I said hello.
The bird let loose a screech that sounded a lot like a dry squeegee scraping a windshield, only much louder, and I decided to break off eye contact with the bird. This did not help – - the bird shrieked again. I guess this was “hello”.
Yesterday I stopped in and said hello to the shop owner, and asked if the bird was around. “Oh yeah,” he said, “he’s over there in his cage. He’s mad at me.”
Sure enough, sitting in an open cage, was the parrot, staring back at me. The shop owner tried to get him to fly over, but Biddy wasn’t interested.
He told me that the bird seemed to have an understanding of just about everything that went on around him. “Just like a person, he wanted to play and I didn’t have time for him,” he said, “Now I have time and he won’t come over.”
Biddy, sounding like a car radio with the volume low, muttered a few things that I couldn’t really hear. The shop owner called to him a few times, and Biddy continued muttering.
Eventually, after much prompting, Biddy flew over and sat on the shop owner’s shoulder. Looking at me, after a long time, almost shyly, opened his beak and let loose another deafening shriek.
