Come on, UPS

I need those new Dr. Seuss books to get here yesterday. My son loves him some Seuss, to the point that even at 10 months old, he's already decided that Green Eggs and Ham is much better than Hop on Pop. And I've never stopped loving the Doc, so I love reading those books to him. But I made a mistake and only bought those two plus Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? Which is not enough Seuss to keep the parents and Mama Dunn from burning out reading the books we have. So I hit up Amazon.com for Fox in Socks, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! and The Cat in the Hat. I'm fully prepared for his turning up his nose at all three, but a daddy's got to try.

Yesterday, company called, and he got played with the company until he got tired and grumpy. Off to the swing for a long nap he went. He usually wakes up the AntiDaddy--happy, smiling, a regular earth-bound cherub. (I'm not what you'd call a real morning person, and I don't suffer morning people very well. Neither did Solomon.) But this nap evidently ended right when he was dreaming he was about to pop the top on a jar of peaches and other assorted fruit, because when he opened his eyes, he went straight to caterwauling. Being the hip dad I am, I picked him up and pointed him at the television, where the NASCAR Texas race was on. (Sporting events are about the only thing you can watch with the sound off while baby sleeps.) Within seconds, he had stopped crying and was pointing at the screen, saying, "Cah, cah." Plus, I think I heard him say "Took the air off his spoiler" and "Needs some wedge to keep from gittin' squirrelly in turn two," but I'm not sure.

This weekend, I reviewed the Neko Case concert, which took place at WorkPlay, a supremely nice venue here in Birmingham. One of the brains behind WorkPlay is original MTV VJ and Birmingham native Alan Hunter, and every time I think of him, I remember when knowing that the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" was the first video played on MTV meant you were a real trivia connoisseur. Nowadays, any young whippersnapper can Google up a world of facts in a nanosecond, all while using their Facespace and Mybook and Twister or whatever you call all that newfangled stuff.

Case, as I said in my review, sings a kind of "country noir," which makes as much sense as any of the other tags, like "alt.country" or "Americana." The turnout was good, but the total gate from the night is probably less than Carrie Underwood spends per day on eyeliner. Rascall Flatts getts morre monney (honestly, the two T's in their name makes me yurp on my keyboard) in spiked-hair royalties than Case will make all year.

That's been on my mind because I made the mistake of watching a little bit of the Academy of Country Music Awards last night. I've been listening to country since my mother played eight-tracks of George Jones and Johnny Cash while driving me to my grandmother's for daycare. I know that country, like all popular music, is always evolving. The overly produced "Nashville Sound" of Jim Reeves and Eddie Albert didn't have much in common with Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. But long about the eighties, country began rocketing off on a non-country tangent that only seems to get more severe every year. I caught Sugarland's performance of some song (don't know, don't care, ain't gonna Google), and it sounded like the second coming of Taylor Dayne. It was as country as Tommy Tune. For the longest time, country was pop with a twang, but now it seems that the biggest stars have even dispensed with that pretense and gone twang-free. Not only did Carrie Underwood look like a crimson Jabba the Hutt in that dress, but her song belonged back on "American Idol," not a country music award show.

Not only has country lost its twang, but it's lost its heart. If the mantra in creative writing is "show, don't tell," the mantra of modern country is "tell, don't show." According to Billboard, the number one country song is Darius Rucker's "It Won't Be Like This For Long." Here's a link to the lyrics. There's a story there, of course, but it's related in a linear fashion. You feel sad, you say "I'm sad."

The number two country song is Taylor Swift's "White Horse," which starts out thusly:

Say you're sorry
That face of an angel comes out
Just when you need it to
As I pace back and forth all this time
'Cause I honestly believed in you

That's not a country song, it's a 13-year-old girl's Facebook post. I spontaneously sprouted unicorns and rainbows just reading it.

Contrast those songs with, say, Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill,
He sounds too blue to fly.

Boom! You're depressed. You feel this guy's pain. You know how he feels, and you're ready to commiserate with him, because that imagery puts you in his place, and we've all been in that place.

Here's George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care."

Just because I asked a friend about her
Just because I spoke her name somewhere
Just because I rang her number by mistake today
She thinks I still care.

Do you get the feeling he's missing his woman? Do you not identify with lost love, pain, and denial? In four lines, he's made you ready to take off work to keep the poor guy company.

Just one more. Merle Haggard's "Mama Tried."

The first thing I remember knowing,
Was a lonesome whistle blowing,
And a young'un's dream of growing up to ride.

You'd never ridden a freight train before, had you?

On a freight train leaving town,
Not knowing where I'm bound,
No one could change my mind but Mama tried.

And now you're not only on a freight train, but you're traveling with a man who's down because he's done some wrong, even though he was raised right by his poor, long-suffering mother. (NB: If you can listen to "Mama Tried" without crying, you are dead. Please report to the nearest cemetery for interment.)

I'm picking and choosing my examples, of course, and generalizing to boot. But I do think it's safe to say that the songs being lauded today lack the lyrical oomph they used to have.

Now, the rescue: There's good country out there, and I can guide you to it, if you're interested. In no particular order, I'm high on Wrinkle Neck Mules, Reckless Kelly, Robert Earl Keen, Backsliders and Star Room Boys (both now defunct, sadly), Chris Knight (not the one who played Peter Brady), Dwight Yoakam, Webb Wilder (the last of the full-grown men, and he's got a new album coming out!), Southern Culture on the Skids, and Dan Baird (more rock than country, but everything's twang-tinged, and songs like "Julie and Lucky," "Hit Me Like a Train," "Dixie Beauxderaunt," and of course "Keep Your Hands to Yourself" throb with a country heart. Plus, his "Cumberland River" is a slap in Nashville's face). That's just a start. There's plenty more out there. You just won't find much of it touring in a 12-semi entourage, or winning many industry awards. As Webb himself put it, "There's always an Econoline rollin' toward a gig somewhere."

Not that I want to turn this into a music blog, but here's Baird's "Cumberland River" to close out this music rant. Happy Mondays to you.

First Blood

Not the movie, the real thing. This morning, Jacob hurt himself badly enough to bleed, for the first time. I knew it was coming, and it really wasn't much at all, but it'll still send a shot of adrenaline through you to see blood on a pacifier. Wasn't that a Lifetime movie? "Blood on a Pacifier," starring Judith Light and Ralph Macchio. I think it came on right after "Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?" (On a side note, why is there so much hate for Tori Spelling? Because she used her father's connections to get a movie career? As if that never happens in Hollywood, or the real world, for that matter.)
(On a side note to the side note, the best blog name ever was inspired by that movie: "Mother, May I Sleep with Treacher?")

Here's what transpired. Jacob has a small (a square about 18 inches per side) blanket made by Mama Dunn, aka my mother. Linus had only a passing attraction to his blanket compared to the love Jacob has for his. When we put him in his go-to-sleep swing--and God bless the people who invented that--he can't nod off without it. He starts reaching for it with twitching hands like the Skipper used to have when he'd get mad at Gilligan. And now that he's ambulatory, or at least crawlatory, he's taken to carrying it with him when he scoots across the floor.

This morning, I was in the kitchen whomping up some breakfast when Jacob decided to leave the den and join me. There's a child/dog gate between the den and the kitchen, with a brace that runs across the threshold. Since he started crawling, Jacob has never had any problem getting over it. Well, that's overstating it. He's had some problems, but they were more of the temporary slowdown variety. Nothing too serious. But today, the combination of blanket and gate brace was too much, and he did what the X-Games types call a face plant on the hardwood.

"Waaaah," went my son. "You ain't hurt," went the daddy who had seen this happen before and assumed he was more torqued off than hurt. Plus, Daddy has worked in a church nursery, and knows that most of the time, there's an inverse ratio between amount of noise emitted and actual damage done. So I headed toward him so I could comfort him a second and then send him scuttling on his way, when I saw it. (Dramatic musical sting goes here.) BLOOD ON THE PACIFIER!

I don't know exactly what happened, but I think he had bitten his tongue hard enough to draw blood. And that's no mean feat, because, although he's 10 months old, my boy still doesn't have any teeth. So he hadn't so much bitten his tongue as he had gummed it a really stout whack. It didn't cause big gouts of blood, just a slight tint to his saliva, but you try telling that to the Daddy part of your brain. I'm a lifelong collector of inadvertent cuts and scrapes, and I've been stuck with several porcupines' worth of needles (including having blood gases drawn; when the male nurse got ready to plunge the needle into the underside of my wrist, he laid a deathgrip on it, then looked me in the eye and said, "Hoss, this is gonna hurt." He was right.) so the sight of my own blood barely causes me to pause long enough to apply a medicinal Kleenex. But the sight of my son's blood, well, that's a hemoglobin of a different color.

Luckily for me, my son is a pretty tough hombre. A few seconds of caterwauling and big tears later, he had already noticed the dogwood blooms on the counter, and everything was fine. I know that was just the first of many, many blood-letting encounters, and The Lovely Missus and I aren't overprotective parents, but still, I'd just as soon not repeat that episode any time soon.

Now, here's a real musical non-sequitur: Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend." Hit me with that cowbell, you Canadian rockers you. See you Monday.

Frustrations? Yeah, I got 'em

As opposed to everybody else, whose lives are nothing but one series of unencumbered splendiferous moments after another. But this is all about meeeeeeeeeeee!

It's not all that bad a situation, and, if you apply Dunn's Third World Rule to it, isn't even worthy of noticing. But I've always been more of a preacher than a practicer when it comes to advice, and I'm not correctly applying DTWR. So sue me.

What it is is that I'm having trouble with some domain mapping over at The Other Blog. Since that's where I bring up retro things to snark on them, I used my incredible grasp of the obvious and bought the domain name retrosnark.com a while back. Yesterday, I decided to take the plunge and make that name redirect to TOB. TypePad, which hosts TOB, has an exhaustive set of how-to pages, even if they're not written all that clearly. But I soldiered on, making sure the Buckley eigenvalues were properly calibrated to the molecular rhombus, applied L'Hopital's Rule to the repeating squidget denominator, and of course deleted the Krelmer flange remainder. (That last part goes without saying.)

And lo and behold, everything worked! If you typed dowhatnow.typepad.com in your browser, you got my site. (If you typed it in your coffee, however, no such luck. ) If you typed in www.retrosnark.com, it worked. If you were less industrious and left off the www part, and just typed retrosnark.com, it worked. Blow the gardenias and sound the crumpets! All is well in the cyber portion of Dunnville.

So I dashed off a Tweet to tell everyone that happy days were here again, that we all now had renewed reason to jump out of bed in the morning, and that, no doubt, the economy would soon be thrumming on the head of those demons Recession and Layoff.

At which point, as you've probably already inferred, everything went to a bad place. The old URL led you to a page that didn't display properly, and the new URLs just led you to cyberlimbo. I believe that the Firefox error message said that the problem "would never resolve."

So, it's off to TypePad tech support. A scant SIX HOURS after firing off an email, I got a speedy reply. Using the tips the helpful (she really was) tech sent me, I was able to get the old URL to display properly. While the new ones still don't work, they at least just give you a blank page, instead of the "You are totally hosed, dude" error message they were generating. "Hopefully, that will be resolved today," he typed, gritting his teeth and willing himself not to pound the keys hard enough to melt them. Have I mentioned that TypePad is a paid blog host, not a free one? Because that's kinda relevant.

On a happier note, Jacob has now received his trial by fire, canine-wise, and passed with flying colors. Two trials, actually. Tuesday night, I was taking him for his afternoon perambulation (I love that word) when we approached the yard of a neighbor down the street. Said neighbor, Tim, had his Boston Terrier, Otis, out in the yard. Otis was indulging in his own afternoon perambulation, so to speak, and as soon as he had finished perambulating on the yard, he lit out for Jacob, as fast as his little legs would propel him.

Now, I'm familiar with Bostons, since I used to work with a woman who was as crazy about them as I am about Pekingeses. I know that most of them are friendly, but I also know that they're prone to getting a wee bit too excited at times, and even a 10-month-old raised with 12 paws around him at all times can get intimidated by that much snuffling canine attention, especially when that attention is coming at him at Mach 1. But Jacob didn't so much as flinch. In fact, he leaned forward in the stroller to get a better look at Otis. He's daddy's little canine-loving boy

While this was going on, Tim was of course sprinting after Otis, who only wanted to lick Jacob, not gnaw on him, and caught up with him shortly thereafter, apologizing unnecessarily and profusely. (Personal note to Tim: Hope everything goes well today with the birth of Lydia Grace.)

Yesterday, same afternoon perambulation (I love...), different dogs. Hoover and Gustav, two Basset Hounds we're familiar with, were out and snuffling around their yard. Neither dog is what you call a rocket, motivation-wise (Hoover's pulse rate is measured in presidential terms, so laidback is he), but they're both good-sized Bassets, and they both had to check out Jacob in his stroller. Again, no problem whatsoever. I love this boy. We're gonna have fun.

This is not good

BlackBerry has launched their App Store. That's bad, bad news for people who are easily distracted by shiny things, and I'm positively feline when it comes to things like that. I bat them with my paws, bite them then turn them aloose quickly, and stare at them, unblinking, for hours. I fear for my productivity, and my wallet.

I know that all the cool kids have iPhones, but I like the feel of those little Chiclet keys when I'm typing out--well, thumbing out, actually--an email or some such. Plus, whipping out a BlackBerry instantly gives you much more business cred than an iPhone. It might be false cred, since you can waste just as much time on a BlackBerry as you can on an iPhone, but it's still cred, and I'll take all I can get.

I'm just not an Apple fan. It's blasphemy, I know, to suggest that Apple has ever made a mistake, or produced anything but the Best. Products. EVER! But I wonder how much bigger a market share Apple would have if its adherents weren't so...how can I put this...zealous? I'd sooner walk into a mosque and start handing out bacon yarmulkes than I would suggest to an Appleonian that Steve Jobs is anything less than deity incarnate. Lighten up a little on the Apple worship, and you might win over even more people to your side.

And, lest ye think I'm a Bill Gates apologist, rest assured that no one has raged against Windows' numerous shortcomings more than I. I calls 'em like I sees 'em, is all I'm saying.

Now, on to other issues. There will be no April Fool's jokery here, or in the Dunn household, because I'm not much of a practical joker. I can enjoy stupid humor with the best of them, and I'm not saying that my inner idiot doesn't surface every now and then and force me to pull a practical joke, but for the most part, I lost interest in them a long time ago. I don't find them funny for the same reason I don't find prank phone calls funny. The whole premise is based on making people uncomfortable, and there's no real humor in that. (To me. Your mileage may vary, as they say.)

To me, real humor consists of pointing out the absurdity of a situation, and making that absurdity accessible to everyone, so that everyone can benefit from its lampooning. Real humor hits a common nerve of recognition in everyone. It gives voice to something that everyone has felt, even if they haven't voiced that feeling, or even known that they were feeling it. Practical joke humor, on the other hand, just hits the common nerve of "I'm glad that's not me."

Yeah, that's a little more pedantic than my usual stuff, but sometimes, I've just got to throw in a changeup. Don't want y'all figuring out my pitches and smacking one of them downtown. I'll be back to the usual pointless drivel tomorrow. Please check out my other blog, follow my Tweets if you'd like, and, if the mood strikes you, drop a penny or two in the tip jar on the other blog. I'd appreciate all three.

Of Tom Petty, Thomas Dolby, and Tommy Shaw

What is it about certain events that so lodge in your mind that you can instantly recall everything about that moment for decades later? Not the traumatic events, like losing a loved one, or the spectacular events, like watching your college team win a national championship. I mean otherwise completely forgettable events that your brain decides to indelibly etch on your cortex?

I've always been a music nut, so I've heard approximately eleventy-brazilian songs in my life. (Estimate obtained by painstaking guesswork; margin of error = plus/minus .5 eleventy.) Why, back in the eighties, I must have logged 100,000 listens of Foreigner's "Juke Box Hero" alone, thanks to the people who WOULD. NOT. QUIT. PLAYING. IT. in the Enterprise State Junior College student center juke box. To this day, when I heard that opening guitar riff, my left eye starts twitching.

And the vast majority of those song listenings has been as forgotten as "Pink Lady and Jeff" or Coy and Vance, the scab Dukes on "Dukes of Hazzard." But last night, while working on scanning up some retro badness for TOB (The Other Blog), my computer served up the MP3 of Tom Petty's "Refugee" in my wireless headphones. Instantly, I was reminded of the Thursday night I stayed home from band practice (whether it was during Mr. Pinyan's or Mr. Bolich's reign as band director at Samson High School, I can't rightly recall). No excuses, just flat-out played band hooky, which was odd, considering how much I loved band, but sometimes, you've just got to be a rebel, I reckon. I watched "Buck Rogers" on NBC--oh, what Erin Gray did to my flaming adolescent hormones, then went outside to...I don't know, really. It's not like there was a lot to do on the family farm in Hacoda, Alabama, on a Thursday night, or any other time, for that matter.

But for some reason, I ended up outside, rocking the $20 speakers and FM converter in my '74 LTD to Petty's "Refugee." And that's an event that my brain decided needed to be filed between "tying your shoelaces" and "not biting your tongue when you eat." I suspect that when I'm old and gray (yesterday, in other words), I'll still be able to recall that night.

The PC jukebox also served up "Blue Collar Man," by Styx. (That's where the Tommy Shaw part of the post title comes in, in case you didn't know. The news that Styx is playing Birmingham's City Stages music festival, without a single original member, is particularly disgusting for me, a longtime Styxphile.) Even though "Pieces of Eight," the LP that contained "Blue Collar Man," wasn't that great an album, I vividly remember buying the LP in the record shop (my son, in a few years: "What's a 'record shop,' Daddy?") located in the underground section of Northside Mall in Dothan, then staring at that album for what seemed like hours while my mother shopped. And the woman on the album was middle-aged, so it's not like I was ogling Erin Gray.

Also, if I never again hear "Renegade," from that album, I'll die a happier man.

Finally, I'll never hear Thomas Dolby's "She Blinded Me with Science" without thinking of the time I helped (kinda; Robin was a technical genius on such matters, so I pretty much just stood around) my friend Robin Powell install some new, supremely bad Bose speakers in his classic Camaro, then shook the south Alabama ground with "Science," from the cassette "The Golden Age of Wireless." I recently linked up with Robin on Facebook after too many years of non-contact, and he tells me that he remembers that day, too. He also says that his daughters looked at him like he was growing an antler out of his forehead when he told them what a cool song that was. Is. Cool song that is, dangit.

Jacob's only 10 months old, so I doubt he's formed any kind of musical memories like that, but I'm sure they'll come. You can already tell that he likes some Dr. Seuss books better than others, however. "Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You?" is good, but "Green Eggs and Ham" and "Hop On Pop" really tickle his innards. "Ham" is even better when Daddy gets to emote to the heavens while reading it, and also reads certain sections like John Moschitta. (In case you missed it, I coined a new word yesterday: Seussphonia. The inability to speak in anything but rhymes after prolonged periods of reading Dr. Seuss aloud.)

So he's already formed some opinions, and his tastes are being shaped. I just hope when he's my age and reminiscing on his blog, he doesn't post, "I remember the first time I heard 'Poker Face' and 'Right Round.'"

Forgot to add this: Here's "Refugee," in memory of that long-ago Thursday night.

Grits pie: Don't knock it 'till you've tried it

I know it sounds bad, even to my Southern ears, but lemme tell you. Grits pie is really good, especially if you take a blowtorch and melt a layer of sugar on top, like the fancy cooks do with creme brulees. Which is what I did last night. "Any time you can combine cooking with the use of a miniature flamethrower, take it" has always been one of my guiding principles of life. Recipe for the grits pie, which is like an egg custard but with a little more body, courtesy of Paula "More butter on that butter, please" Deen, bless her heart. You'll have to purchase a blowtorch and experiment with melting the sugar on top of it, if you want to "Dunnify" it.

I actually purchased the blowtorch to insta-roast some barbecued marshmallows, which is something else you shouldn't knock until you've tried. The sugar coating on the pie was just gravy. So to speak.

Moving on.

For quite a while, The Lovely Missus and Mama Dunn have been saying that Jacob is growing up so fast you can see it. But I couldn't see it. If I looked at older pictures of him, ("People say, 'This is a picture of me when I was younger.' Every picture is a picture of you when you were younger." The late, great Mitch Hedberg), I could see that he'd grown in girth and length, and that his head is in better proportion to his body now, but I didn't get that, "Holy Moses, what happened overnight?!" feeling. Until this weekend. TLM took Jacob to visit her folks and some friends Friday night, then returned yesterday afternoon. This morning, I got him out of bed, and I started to check for birthmarks to make sure he was mine. Whence comest this gargantuan baby, who's aged from 10-month-old to post-adolescent in a weekend's span?

Honestly, he acts suddenly and disproportionatly older, and looks suddenly and disproportionately older. I'm accustomed to looking in the mirror and shrieking because my visage has been surreptitiously replaced by that of a much older, much less hirsute, much wrinklier man. I'm not accustomed to my infant boy looking like he's about to say, "So, what about that stimulus package, Father? Is it a crucial boost to the economy, or just FDR-esque floundering that will only worsen and already untenable situation, vis-a-vis the dollar?"

Did he enjoy the weekend?

Yeah. A little.

It's Friday somewhere

No, no. Not gonna turn this into a "Weeee-hooooo, it's party time post." I'm just saying that, owing to the vicissitudes of time zone distribution, it's already Friday not more than an hour or so east of me. Ergo, I'm posting some stuff for Friday.

As noted in Thursday's post, I have the bad teeth in the marriage, a fact that I consider so very much unfair. The Lovely Missus has white, sparkling teeth. Mine are tetracycline-stained, and make me look, shall we say, exotic. The kind of exotic where people have gray teeth, if there is such a place. Of course, The Lovely Missus never gets cavities.

Furthermore, The Lovely Missus has great gums, even though she wields her toothbrush with a pulsing vengeance while I caress my gums with the loving touch of a Swiss watchmaker. She has excellent gums, and of course mine are racing my hairline to see who dies first.

Life ain't fair, I reckon.

Where do you look, when you're being "spreeeeeeeeeened" and "graunnnnnnnnnnched" and "slurrrrrrrrrrrrrppppppppppppppped" in the dentail chair? If you do as I do, and pick a point in the room that prevents you from having to look the dentist and hygienist in the eye, then you get a lot of, "You doing okay?", as if they're worried you're catatonic with pain. And if Ilook them in the eye, I get the feeling that I'm disconcerting them, perhaps to the point of anger and dentyn destruction.

I had a root canal about a year ago, and those people knew who to throw a dental pulp throwdown, lemme tell you. I sat back in the chair, settled in, and what to my painful eyes should appear but a television in the ceiling! Hallelujah! While the endodontist did his palliatory work, I sat back and watched some Discovery show on sharks. Happy? I could have died.

Side note to those who hear "root canal" and feel its worse than death: I've had two, and neither of them was hard at all. Plus, they give you that sweet, sweet release from the pain. Pain caused, by the way, by the necrotic tissue in your tooth releasing gasses, which push against the nerve tissue. Now, run along and eat your cream of wheat.

Getting back to the dental work I had done, it was on the bottom front teeth, which mean that my bottom lip wouldn't have passed a blood-alcohol test in Moscow. I could barely keep from drooling on myself, and I couldn't say some words very well. Take a look.




Jacob is dealing better with the fact that I sometimes come and go with, to his thinking, no rhyme or reason. Of course, I still have to stop and pick him up sometimes, even if it's just for a minute or two. And, once things are slowed down for the evening, I get in the floor with him and my three four-legged children for a free-for-all. Jacob mostly sits back, watches the fur fly, and squeals with glee. More and more personality emerging, too, like the sly smile he knows can get him out of anything. Here's the bad news--I think he's gonna be like his dad and be a few bubbles off plumb when it comes to humor. Pray for my wife.

Finally, Friday ain't Friday without some weirdness, so here are Karen and Richard Carpenter attempting to communicate with aliens. Seriously. It's "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft," also known as "The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day." (Had you deduced that this was from the seventies?) You can read about it here, and listen to it here.