3 Chords & the Truth: A fool for music

Let me tell you about this week's edition of 3 Chords & the Truth before I succumb to sleep deprivation.

It's good. Right tasty, in fact.

 

Let me tell you something else -- it starts out with tractor punk, then moves into disco and doo-wop and '60s pop. And then the Big Show gets interesting.

THAT IS ALL. Except that there may be a little something in there from one fool to another. And if you aren't already a fool for the happeningest musical spot on the Internets . . . what the hell is wrong with you?

I pity the fool who ain't a fool for this here podcast.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

(thud)
 

Conditional adorability

 
Awwwwwwwwwwwww.

That's the adorable word from WECT television in Wilmington, N.C.

Try not to smile after taking a look at this picture!

Shantee Johnson from Wilmington shared her most recent ultrasound picture and you can see her prenatal daughter is all smiles.

3D and 4D ultrasound technology is giving a lot of future parents the opportunity to get a quality glimpse of their children. Johnson got her ultrasound done at Wilmington Maternal-Fetal Medicine. She's due in mid-March, but was induced Wednesday and is currently in labor. She's expecting a girl.

MEANTIME,  "forced ultrasounds" are a Nazi plot against the autonomy of the blah blah blah blahblahblahblah. That's the outraged word from the NARAL Pro-Choice America website:

Imagine this: you're facing an unintended pregnancy. After talking about it with your partner and your family, you decide that abortion is the right choice for you.

You call the doctor, and are told that you have to make two appointments. At the first appointment, you are forced to undergo an ultrasound and have the images described to you. You don't want an ultrasound, and your doctor does not recommend one—but you and your doctor have no choice. Your state has a forced-ultrasound law. 

The Challenge

Many states have some type of ultrasound-related law. Some give women the option; others have forced-ultrasound laws that don't give women a choice.

The people behind forced-ultrasound laws claim they just want to give women more "information." But really these laws make women go through invasive medical procedures against their will.

In a free country, we don't force anyone to undergo medical procedures against their will. Women considering abortion—a safe, legal, and constitutionally protected procedure—are no different. Politicians have no place telling a woman she has to have a procedure she does not want and her doctor does not recommend.

ACTUALLY, ultrasound examinations are absolutely routine for pregnant women as a means of screening for birth defects, as well as the age, position and number of fetuses. Ironically, it's also not unusual for abortion clinics to do ultrasounds before terminating the baby . . . er, pregnancy.

Besides, if this study of abortions at Planned Parenthood clinics in Los Angeles is indicative of what happens across the country, it's not like NARAL Pro-Choice America will be fending off a plague of "unwanted" children. According to the Reuters Health story, when women really don't want to be pregnant, they really don't want to be pregnant.

And in a free country, when women really don't want to be pregnant and others can profit from that, it's absolutely fine to have forced -- legally -- almost 49 million in utero human beings "to undergo medical procedures against their will" from 1970 through 2010.

Which resulted in their deaths.

Because adorability is in the eye of the executioner.

Cartoon of the year, Louisiana edition

Bobby Brady would have been grounded for life had he pulled such a stunt. Maybe Carol Brady needs to have a loooooooong talk with Louisiana Gov. Piyush "Bobby" Jindal, being that the gub'na loves him some Brady family and Mrs. Brady might be one of the few people he'd listen to.

Or maybe she should just ground him for life -- no TV until he learns to mind his manners, and no governoring, either. And you can just forget about running for president right now, young man!

At least Edwin Edwards acted like a grown-up. A horny, crooked grown-up, but a grown-up nevertheless.

I miss Edwin Edwards. Never thought I'd ever write those particular words, but the Gret Stet has found out the hard way that there are worse things than having a felonious horndog in the governor's mansion.

Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman occasionally acts like a 3-year-old, but never in front of the national press. Tender mercies have we cornhuskers when it comes to chief executives.

Why they hate us. And should.

I've seen some repulsive TV ads in my 50-plus years on this media-saturated earth. This ad for Cadillac may top them all.

Combine out-of-control materialism, hubris and a generous helping of smugness, and you have a television-commercial graduate course on Why They Hate Us. This ad is the audio-visual representation of the Ugly American, and when Americans are ugly, we are ugly indeed.

Advertising, as a rule, is the art of selling people stuff they really don't need -- of convincing folks they desperately need stuff they really don't. You don't need a damned Cadillac, and something is wrong with you -- namely, the profoundly broken human condition -- if you think you really, truly need a Cadillac ELR . . . or anything else apart from your health, food, shelter, love and God.

This ad -- which ran over and over and over again during the Winter Olympics, during which the United States famously underachieved -- takes it a step further and tries to do so while convincing you all those other inhabitants of the earth who aren't citizens of the United States are, in fact, losers if they don't sacrifice heart, soul and all those things money cannot buy to the great god Greed. In Cadillac America, the 1 percent are demigods because they have done just that, and if you don't aspire to material wealth at the expense of all else, you are, too.

SO GO out there and give yourself an ulcer, leave little Johnny to shift for himself while you're putting in 80 hours a week at a job you probably hate not for food, shelter and health insurance, but instead for an effing luxury vehicle. Which you will spend hours in while commuting to that 80-hour-a-week job to which you've offered up your soul . . . for what?

Your wife may rarely see you, your children may not know you -- who may, indeed, loathe the materialistic bastard who's thrown them to the wolves of neglect -- and all this wreckage you have left in your wake for . . . a Caddy? Screw you, and screw the America that's made this sort of materialism the sum and summit of it's earthly existence.

This America deserves whatever may befall it. And will, in time.

But at least we'll be going to hell in not a hand basket but, instead, in a really sweet ride. Right?

For the America of stuff, hubris and over-the-top arrogance, that will have to do as small consolation. No, you can't take the Cadillac ELR with you when you go to your richly deserved reward (or richly deserved lack thereof) but perhaps you can be buried in the damned thing.

The "losers" of the world will be greatly amused at that.

3 Chords & the Truth: Beats shoveling a giant Icee

This edition of the Big Show didn't turn out too badly, considering right beforehand I was shoveling the World's Largest Icee out of our driveway before it could freeze over tonight.

The World's Biggest Icee is what you get when it snows hard when it's above freezing. A major case of This Sucks is what you get when you're shoveling slush.

Let's just say this week's 3 Chords & the Truth is a big improvement over that. I mean, what would you rather do? Shovel tons of a flavorless, melting slushie spilled across the landscape by a meteorological 3-year-old, or sit in a warm diner, listening to the best jukebox in the world?

HEY, KID! If you don't know what a jukebox is . . . come on in and get educated. The coffee's fine and the music's better.

Yep, come on in to the Big Show. It beats the hell out of the alternative.

Especially when the alternative is shoveling slush in February. (Really, the show's exceptional this week. And every week. But especially this week.)

IT'S 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

Party like it's 1959

This is your audio-geek moment for Thursday, Feb. 20, 2014. Today, we'll party like it's 1959.

Above, the 12-inch, Electro-Voice full-range speaker of -- more or less -- that vintage. I got it via eBay, the best Internet friend of vintage-audio geeks like yours truly. The last part of the previous sentence, I suppose, also could be written sans hyphen and be just as accurate.

Anyway, this "Wolverine" driver from the venerable company is what folks bought when they embarked upon building themselves a "hi-fi" speaker. Basically, it's a woofer, mid-range and tweeter all in one.

Folks back then often got fancy and added a "crossover" and separate mid-ranges and tweeters just like what prevails today, but I'm lazy. Besides, a speaker enclosure with just a good  full-range "coaxial" or "triaxial" speaker was pretty common back then.

Combine something like that with a vacuum-tube amplifier, and that's what you call "vintage sound." I do love me some vintage sound -- probably because I'm a vintage audio geek. No hyphen.

BUT TO GET a vintage speaker for my vintage tuner and vintage amp, I needed an equally vintage cabinet. One, it must be noted, that wouldn't permanently disfigure our checking account. (You'd be surprised at how much a nice, half-century old hi-fi speaker can monetarily disfigure.)

Hello, eBay!

And hello to a Wharfedale W-60 speaker cabinet that's about the same age I am, sans guts. Or a woofer and tweeter, to be technical about it. Fifteen bucks . . . plus some rejuvenating oil, a black marker, a little wood stain and some elbow grease, which turned scuffs and worn-away veneer into gorgeous "character."

Of course, with old speaker enclosures like this, the only thing that's meant to come off is the back. That's bad when the screws that hold the speaker in are too short . . . and in the wrong places for the new-old Wolverine you bought to go in that box.

I had to do something that wasn't pretty . . . but it worked. And nobody will see it, so who cares?

Breakage of particle board and application of duct tape may have been involved.

Is what I am saying. Don't judge me.

AND VOILA! The finished product, voicer of "vintage sound" from my vintage hi-fi setup.

I think it's happy. See?

Pearls among the online swine

The Internet is a land of treasures and trash. Mostly trash, it seems, most of the time.

Slutty trash. Angry trash. Snarky trash. More angry trash. More snarky, angry trash.

Seems to me that living life online as we do today can be like eating Gummy Bears for breakfast, lunch and supper -- it might be rather satisfying at the time, but. . . .


WELL, this ain't that. Pete Seeger's mid-'60s, low-budget show, taped in glorious black and white at a little UHF station in New York, is a treasure lurking amid the trash. It's meat and potatoes in a Gummy Bear online world.

How can it possibly get any better than sitting around the kitchen table with Johnny Cash and June Carter, swapping stories and playing music? How can it possibly get any better than sitting in the living room with Revon Reed, keeper of Louisiana's Cajun culture and the French language when the odds were stacked against it amid a tide of assimilation at les mains des americains just as Seeger was a keeper of American culture amid a rising tide of materialism and superficiality.

And not only that. Irony also comes a' callin' in the meeting of Messrs. Reed and Seeger.

YOU SEE, one of the saviors of Cajun culture in south Louisiana was, by profession, an English and chemistry teacher. Cajun music and his weekly radio show from Fred's Lounge in Mamou, those were his hobbies. The keeper of what was most authentically American, meanwhile, was blacklisted for years for allegedly being "un-American."

Uh huh.

Eventually,  the forces of "Americanism" left Pete Seeger alone after growing bored by red-baiting. Eventually, they moved on to more fertile fields . . . like doing their part to f*** up the Internet.

3 Chords & the Truth: The canon of Pete

This edition of the Big Show starts with a big set -- which is just a small portion of the Canon of Pete.

And the canon of the late Pete Seeger is a big part of the lexicon of American popular music . . . and American folk music . . . and American protest music.

Or, to be succinct, American music.

Period.

I knew that first long set would be good. What I wasn't prepared for was how good it is in the actual listening. I mean, you know, but then you hear what you've pieced together and . . . you know.

NOW, there's lots of other good stuff on 3 Chords & the Truth this go around, but I think I'll just let you listen to find out what that might be.

I prefer not to think of the Big Show as just a music program on the Internets. I prefer to think of it as what it really is -- and what radio ought to be, once was and rarely is anymore -- and that is an adventure.

I think Peter Seeger would have approved of that.

It's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.

No shelter at all

This was the view Friday of the homeless camp just off Omaha's Keystone Trail.

Sometimes, a crude shelter is no shelter at all -- no good against the cold and worthless in the snow. It looks like whoever was camped here is long gone . . . thankfully.

THE HIGH on Friday was 13. That was a big improvement over Thursday, which started out at 10 below.

If this is all the shelter you have, there's a word to describe you. That would be "dead."

Still, consider there are folks out there . . . in the cold. In rough camps not much better than this. It's what they call "home."

Ours is a society of cracks, through which "the least of these" fall, much like the snow through the gaps in this lean-to.

Lord, have mercy.

Frozen in time

When it's this cold, "frozen in time" isn't just 

another expression. Just so you know.

Disappearing in plain sight

This is the Keystone Trail, right in the middle of the middle of Omaha.

You'll find yuppies and bobos and DINKs and hipsters and bikers and joggers and slackers and workers and old folks up and down its paved pathway beside the Little Papillion Creek whenever the weather isn't totally unfortunate.

Sometimes, you'll find idiots like me there even when the weather is unreasonably unfortunate. Not today, however. Too much snow, too damned windy and cold.

Some things . . . some folks whom you might find there, you'd probably rather pretend aren't there -- there right under our reasonably affluent noses. But evidence is evidence.

Like this. Right under our noses.

IT'S QUITE easy today to routinely ignore what's right under our noses. In our society, we all live in our own little worlds, and we all live by those whose worlds are a lot like our own.

No longer are we forced to exist cheek and jowl with the great unwashed, so we don't.

And they become invisible, even when they're in plain sight. Or, as the case may be, tucked just into the tree line.

Would that all our failures were as out of sight and out of mind as the homeless, some of whom -- beset by mental illness, addiction or whatever -- never come in out of the cold. Even when it's snowy and 10 below, like it is this harsh February night in Omaha.

I hope whomever this encampment belongs to gave in to the siren song of central heating at a local shelter. A lean-to this crude can't keep out the snow, much less the subzero cold.

MAYBE WE fail to notice what's right under our noses -- or pretend we don't notice what's right under our noses -- because we're just overwhelmed. We are so overwhelmed by our own problems and clutter and, yes, demons that we figure we can't afford the luxury of contemplating or acknowledging those whose problems and clutter and demons have left them wandering through the Nebraska deep freeze.

As opposed to merely being distracted and stressed out.

Me, I don't know. I'm just spitballing here.

Whatever is the case, the evidence is clear that none are so blind as those who will not see. "Those," of course, being you. And you. And you.

And, by God, me.

Even Russia has a Mississippi

Иван пропустил Darwin Awards от это много.

(Translation: Ivan missed the Darwin Awards by this much.)

How, oh, how did I miss this when it appeared a couple of years ago?