My favorite album ever was Pet Sounds . I first discovered it in my uncle Paul’s record stacks. The moment I heard it, my whole idea of what a song could be changed. This was not that big of a deal, as I was only five or six at a time. The standount feature of this album was its staying power. The album has held the top spot for almost 40 years now. For those of you who dismiss the Beach Boys as music about cars and girls, I urge you to give Pet Sounds a listen.

While I generally don’t take kindly to people covering songs from pet sounds, this is a special case. While the recording and performance seem a little shaky, the idea is all there. Michael Penn and Aimee Mann are two artists I came of age with. To see them perform this together is infectious.

I just saw that Calexico has a new boxed set out, and I immediately took a listen. I have always been of fan of the sparse southwest twang of Calexico’s records. Lately, I have been giving some serious thought about playing with the guitar again. Not really playing guitar, but playing with it. If I had to pick a sound that I would like to play with, this would be it.

This track is sparse and lonely, like all good road trips tend to be.

I was one of the dorks who went to see Death Proof on opening night. One of the things I was really anticipating was the soundtrack. This sound track did not let me down. Those of you steeped in music dorkdom, will remember this as a Serge Gainsbourg song. While I normally think of this as cheating, I am a fan of April March and would probably give her a pass on whatever she wants to do.

Give it one listen, and see if you can’t get it out of your head the rest of the day.

If there is enough interest in this, I will start generating playlists for these songs.

Why I love it

This is the one of the greatest road trip songs ever. Road trips make you yearn for three things: the road you’re on, the place you left, and the place you are headed. It’s a three way tug of war on where you are supposed to be.

• Whenever you see a group of people running, you have to fight the urge to yell “La Migra!”
• You know at least one blood relative of paper hat.
• When you were a kid and one of your classmates came to school with a new haircut, you asked them if they got it at Huesca’s.
• When a kid in class got new shoes, you asked if their mom took them to La Judia.
• You know the real name of the cave in the barranca over by cemetery road.
• You know who the Char Man is.
• You had story hour with Mrs. Spencer.
• You baked your own pizza from Pandy’s.
• You played on the airplane at Glen City School.
• You know what the Pop Shoppe was, and what happened across the street from it.
• Wherever life takes you, and whoever you’re with, when you see a movie with Santa Paula in it, you have to point it out to the whole room.
• Whenever someone mentions Steve McQueen, you inform them that he lived in Santa Paula.
• You are not freaked out by snow cone flavors like tamarindo and leche.
• You’ve seen the giant pot of chile verde at the chili hut.
• You remember when a double scoop at Thrifty’s was a quarter.
• You never had a snow day or a heat day at school. You’ve only had “get your butt to school days.”
• You TOTALLY know that the Glen Tavern is haunted, and you know at least on person who has seen the ghost.
• You honestly believe La Llorona lives in Santa Paula Creek
• Whenever some other place claims to be the citrus capital of the world, you’re ready to throw chingasos.
• If you close your eyes and think about it for three seconds, you can imagine the smell of Tia Babe’s.
• Your grandparents talk in terms of “before the flood.”
• You go through a bottle of Tabasco or Tapatio sauce a week, but you have the same bottle of ketchup in your fridge that you bought a few years ago.
• Whenever you bring anyone to your hometown, you show them the SP on South Mountain.
• Your ice cream truck played mariachi music.
• You knew at least a little bit of lore about Teague Mansion.
• You learned a whole new shade of vocabulary from the graffiti carved into the tables at Mill Park.
• If you lived on the north west side, you remember the Haunted House on Anacapa Terrace.
• When your parents saw your high school class schedule, they had half the teachers on that list too.
• If you have moved far from California, you miss REAL oranges and apricots.
• If you have moved, you can’t understand why no one is celebrating Cinco de Mayo.
• You had at least two kids in school who had an uncle or an aunt in the same (or close) grade.
• And most of all, you realize that while you may not have appreciated it at the time, Santa Paula was one of the best places to grow up. Ever. You also know that anyone who read this and got a chuckle, no matter if they were stranger, friend, or foe in the past, you are now bound to them by your shared memories.

Last night, I was talking to my son about how things were much different things are when I was a kid. Not just differences here and there, but major whopping differences that completely changed the way (and speed) at which society worked.

I should mention that while we were having this conversation, I was cleaning up my record collection downstairs. I ran across an old cereal box record in the collection. He asked what it was, and would not believe what I was telling him:

Yeah, you cut it out, punch a hole in it, and throw it on a record player, and music comes out.

He could not believe they had something as cool and interesting back in my day. Initially, I took the concept totally for granted. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this really was one of the coolest things ever. I used to collect them (especially the ones with spooky stories). I am sure my old ones from childhood are lost, but I had to go and do a quick search as to which ones were out there.

if you want to see a really neat collection of this, check out:

1. WFUM.org
2. 70′s Child – These guys have a bunch of neat cereal box things i remember, including terrariums!

Okay, so life was much different back then. In some ways, it was just a little bit cooler, and full of tinier, but more plentiful surprises.

If you want to see one of these cereal box records actually play, check this out:

This got me to thinking. Pretty much everything in my life has a soundtrack associated. There is not much that goes on that I don’t associate songs with. Motorbikes are no exception. I have never been a huge fan of the normal motorbike songs, a la “Born to be Wild.” For me, riding on a motorbike is a much more full experience than portraying an image. It’s a bonding. A oneness with a machine.

It’s a relationship of trusting in a machine to take you 3,000 miles from home, get you back in one piece, and do this all while keeping your body completely outside. There’s something about that.

So, without further rambling, here are my to 3 motorcycle songs.

John Cougar – Thundering Hearts

Things have changed a lot since this song came out.

1. I no longer ride a Harley Davidson – Yeah, I know. I have heard every possible crack about riding an off brand motorbike. I have never been a fan of rules, including exactly how I should go about living without them. I ride what I ride. When you have as many miles under your ass as I do, we’ll talk.
2. John Cougar Changed his name – Yeah! He did. No big deal, but I still file his records under “Cougar” in my record collection. Some habits die hard, I suppose.
3. Riding is more of a necessity than a passion now – When I was younger, I rode because I liked all the ideas about riding motorbikes. All the things it represented to me. Now, I ride because I have to. I need to clear my head, and there isn’t much else that does it for me. And there is no way in hell I am going to go see a shrink.

Billy Idol – Blue Highway

Yeah! Who doesn’t like Billy Idol? This has always been a favorite of mine. I have never wavered from it, and things haven’t changed much since I first fell for this song. I do remember I was out in the city the night that Billy stacked his motorbike. I heard the report on the radio. They gave a vague description of where it was. I heard the description, and realized I was only a few blocks away. Unfortunately, There is no way I can remember where it was now. Dam

When the Night Feels My Song – Bedouin Sounclash

The weird things is. When I was younger, I always lived in the moment of motorbike travel. I hated the idea of having to go home. To the same four walls and silly job that I had to hold, just to feed my motor addiction. Now that I am older, after a long trip, I find I like coming home. Where all my stuff is easily accessible. Where I know where everything is.

I like the idea of putting a head stirring with new ideas and possiblities down on my own pillow, in my own bed. Yeah, things have changed a little bit.

Let me know if I left your favorite song off the list.

just in case anyone has had problems connecting to national city bank with GnuCash, i have found a fix to this…

you have to trick it into thinking you are running a later versions of quicken.to do that, you need to go to the AqBankingWizard, go to user configuration, and in the OFX tab, change the APPVER value from <blank> it defaults to 1200, to 1800.. this will let it rip.

if you not gotten this far with the national city bank setup, you probably need to find the values to enter for OFX. rather than duplicate them here, where i might forget to update them, go to their wiki pagemach-zehnder on it to find the info.

1. asset management system – where i work, we have about 12 machines. each has software that has licenses, and we sometimes
   transfer those licenses around. it’s a good idea for us to keep a
   track record of what employee has which machine, and any
   permutations of that information. although this would be totally
   easy to do with pretty much antyhing, it would be a good candidate
   to try with seaside.
Pharmacy blog


2. rhapsody scrobbler – i use last.fm like crazy. i also use rhapsody like crazy. unfortunately, they don’t mix. what you listen to in
   rhapsody does not count on your last.fm scrobbles. so, i decided to
   fix this. i wrote a library of functions in ruby that take the xml
   feed from rhapsody and scrobble it, all the while keeping track to
   make sure there are no repeats. by adding a multi user interface to
   this, i bet some folks out there would like to have something like
   this.

Site map


3. amateur radio log – yes, there are millions of them, but i think it would be fun to make one that uses google maps and calculates
   distances, etc. it could be run locally, or on a multi user
   server. it might also incorportate LOTW i would imagine. i dunno
   how crazy i will get with this, as i currently use paper and pen
   for logging, but it would stil be a good exercise.

the only thing that i wonder about is how the multi user and multi role systems will work. i tried this before, and seemed to have some
trouble with it, but i will keep you posted.

Site map

• Seaside – this is a really neat web app framework built on squeak smalltalk. a few months ago, i read a whole bunch of the tutorials,
  and did a bunch of them. i spent some time getting the gist of
  squeak, but i really didn’t have the time to get a complete grasp on
  it. i was considering it for a project i was working on, but i
  wasn’t able to find the libraries to make it fit my needs. i
  finally used rails for the project. now, i would like to give
  seaside another shot.. doing something fun.. and learning
  smalltalk. not that smalltalk will be terribly transferable to other
  projects, but it would just be fun.
• Google Web Toolkit – this is google’s offering in the ajax arena. my
  only worry is that this will not interface well with a database. the
  other thing to consider is i haven’t worked seriously in java for
  four years or so. i figure i can read a book and get up to speed
  pretty quickly, so i am not too worried about that. i have also
  wanted to get back up to speed with java to learn to program the
  blackberry and tivo platforms. i am also totally interested in the
  debugging possibilities with running jruby on rails.

while i really really think the whole idea of smalltalk and seaside sound interesting as hell, i still can’t make a decision on what to
obsess on next. if smalltalk/seaside catches on, i will be way ahead
of the game, and have lots of fun. java is probably not going
anywhere, so this would be a good option also.

what do you guys think?