In case you’ve missed it, the governor of the fine state of South Carolina, Mark Sanford, has been in the news a little bit over the past couple of weeks. If you need a refresher course, here’s The State newspaper’s coverage of the affair, so to speak.
Quick summary: Governor told aides he was going to hike part of the Appalachian Trail. Turns out, he was with some Argentine tail.
Anyway, Old Man Records is selling a T-shirt to commemorate Sanford’s achievement. It’s $15 and 15 percent of the proceeds go directly to the The Appalachian Trail Conservancy.
Dylan rode with me Saturday to take some trash to the dump, and after we were through, we stopped at a convenience store for a “special drink.”
That’s what Dylan calls it when he and I are out together and we stop somewhere and each get a Coke or a Sprite in the small glass bottle. What was the norm in my childhood is a novelty now.
(Side Note: For what it’s worth, Dylan is hooked on the glass bottles … he’s since kept the bottle and is drinking everything from milk to orange Kool-Aid out of it. I have a strange child.)
I had intentions this day of getting a NEHI grape soda, but Dylan said, “Daddy, there’s big Cokes up at the top for you.”
Sure enough, at the top of the cooler were the bigger 12 oz. Cokes. I almost dismissed them, my mind set on the NEHI, until I noticed something strange. On the bottle of the tall Cokes was the word “Refresca.” Huh?
So I pulled one down and noticed that aside from “Coke” and “Coca-Cola,” all the words on the bottle were in Spanish.
Why would they have Mexican Cokes, I thought? The bottles each had a small white sticker with the nutritional information and the ingredients printed in English (all this was omitted form the bottles of the Mexican Cokes).
It didn’t take much reading to see the difference and to decide I didn’t want a NEHI.
I find it ironic that while the rest of the world gets “The Real Thing” in every sense of the phrase, American consumers get corn syrup because it’s cheaper than sugar.
Forget our jobs, they’re sending all our Cokes to Mexico.
UPDATE: I have since found several articles online about Costco selling Mexican Cokes out west for the past four years or so. And there was a Wall Street Journal front page story from a couple years ago about the high demand for Mexican Cokes.
I recently saw the footage again, and I can’t express exactly how badly I felt for Stevie Wonder when I saw him perform back in March with the Jonas Brothers on the Grammys.
Wow.
It was bad.
For someone as great and respected as Stevie, you’d think they could spring for someone whose voices have changed when they hit puberty. Instead, trying to gain credibility for the boys, they just trot Stevie out there like show pony.
Stop for a second and think, just how much bad music has been forced upon the world because of the lack of taste of teenage girls.
I wouldn’t have even realized it if I hadn’t seen it on ESPN.
Fifteen years ago, today.
The slowest high-speed chase in history.
But you couldn’t stop watching.
It was Sunday, July 17, 1994.
According to the ESPN report, it was actually a pretty big day in sports … Arnold Palmer’s final U.S. Open round, … a big Ken Griffey Jr. HR, … NBA Finals Game 5, … the New York Rangers’ Stanley Cup parade.
But if it hadn’t been the opening day of the World Cup, I may have missed any live coverage of that bizarre day.
What I saw of the slowest high-speed chase in world history I witnessed from a bungalow in the Bahamas. I was on vacation with my girlfriend, Eli, and her family. Her father was Italian and a huge soccer fan. The only reason we watched TV that day was so he could see the first day of the World Cup being held in the U.S.
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
O.J. Simpson on the run. There was no way he did it. Had to be some mistake. He was framed, he was covering for someone. It had to be something else. O.J. Simpson? A double-murderer? No way.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt for quite some time. It was a sad story, in a way. But eventually I joined most sane people at the conclusion that he killed his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and the unlucky Ronald Goldman.
I remember where I was when the not guilty verdict was read, standing with about 50 others, including my friend Tyrone Walker, in one of the lounges in Clemson’s old University Union. A bunch of people cheered. A bunch were angry. A bunch, like Tyrone and myself, simply couldn’t believe what we had just heard.
Our security guard at the newspaper, Mr. Black, and I talked about that trial tonight. It’s amazing the things and people who have become part of the culture as a result of that tragedy. It amazes me how easy it was to list their names. Some were famous before, but most were about to get their five minutes …
Remember how many people covered the trial. I t made Court TV. Cosack and Van Susteren had a show that ran for eight years that never would have come into being if not for the trial. Van Susteren is still on the air.
Did you know, despite leading the police on that ridiculous chase, no charges were ever filed against Cowlings? In fact, O.J. was never charged with evading arrest, either.
It just seemed so surreal. O.J. Simpson running. I mean really on the run. I spent the rest of my week in the Bahamas certain that by the time we returned home, all this would be settled. Little did I know ….
And it all started for me, like most Americans, with those oh-so-familiar film clips of a white Ford Bronco making it’s way down a California freeway.
After the appearance of author Joshua Blu Buhs to answer some of the reviewer’s questions about the book and an interesting post about how we should be willing to challenge what we know and what we believe, things digressed. At one point, one poster claims to out another as a government secret agent sent to discredit any eyewitness accounts of Bigfoot.
Eventually it deteriorates to the point where one frequent poster flat out questions the sexuality of the author.
Huh?
Finally, Switek admonished the unruly poster and closed the thread.
But not before it made my day.
UPDATE: In case you miss his comment, my friend Chris also blogged about this book and the author commented on his post. I’ll presume they didn’t discuss anyone’s sexuality.
In the early 1990s, I spent a lot of nights out listening to live music in the Atlanta area. Off the top of my head, I could easily list a dozen or so bands I saw more than once, and at the same time, there are probably three times as many whose names I can’t remember.
Of all the acts, Michelle Malone, Kristen Hall and Billy Pilgrim got the lion’s share of my attention. I’ve seen them all at least a dozen times in numerous places. Of the three, I’ve seen Malone more than any one else … so much that I no longer have any idea how many times I’ve seen her.
Billy Pilgrim came on late for me. I had seen them several times when they simply went by their names … Andrew Hyra and Kristian Bush. Honestly, they were good, but they were never anything special for me. I never went to specifically see them anywhere. My friend Chris liked them more than I did.
Eventually they got a record deal and took the name of Kurt Vonnegut’s character. They took some of the songs they had performed as Andrew Hyra and Kristian Bush and re-recorded them for their big-label record under the new name, and one of those was a song Bush wrote, “Insomniac.”
“Insomniac” by Krisitan Bush
I can see you, don’t even know you
Falling into the sheets at night
I place my hands flat on my chest
I feel the heart beat back the night
I try counting sheep, and I talk to the shepherd
And I play with my pillow for ever and ever
I sit alone and I watch the clock
I breathe in on the tick and out on the tock
Refrain:
I can hear your bare feet on the kitchen floor
I don’t have to have these dreams no more
Cause I’ve found someone just to hold me tight
Hold the insomniac all night
Dig my head down deep so I can’t hear the cars outside on the street
And the stars are laughing
They get a kick out of my misery
I tried everything short of Aristotle to Dramamine
And the whiskey bottle
Pray for the day when my ship comes in
I can sleep the sleep of the just again …
So thanks to several copies of their second album coming to our student paper (and one into my hands, of course), and a future girlfriend at the paper who knew of them, I started listening to them a little more closely, and “Insomniac” became and still is one of my favorite songs.
While that song lives on for me, sadly Billy Pilgrim does not. Despite a couple more independently released albums and the rumors of another forthcoming big-label deal, it never happened. They split (I don’t know the details) and that was it. A musical crime.
But that story has sort of a happy ending. Bush went on to join the aforementioned Hall and fellow Atlanta singer Jennifer Nettles (Go find her stuff from the Jennifer Nettles Band/Soul Miner’s Daughter and be amazed) to form … a mainstream country act? … Sugarland.
Hall has since departed, but Bush and Nettles have gone on quite successfully and are one of the few groups played on country radio anymore that I can stand.
And I have always wished that Nettles and Bush would record “Insomniac.” I believe a beautiful song (to me) would only become more powerful if Nettles made it hers.
Well, over the past few years, I’ve searched YouTube and the like, trying to find a clip somewhere of Billy Pilgrim performing it. No dice. The only Bush version I can find (at the top of this post) came from a Gardner-Webb University public-access type TV show.
But I have found something bizarre. On a lot of college campuses, there are these big, male acapella singing groups that perform songs, their voices providing all the instrumentation. I don’t know the proper name for these, but at Clemson, the group was know as Tigerroar.
Well, somehow, “Insomniac” has become a staple of these groups. College groups all over the country are performing it. It was a very strange feeling to watch it for the first time. It’s akin to finding your favorite Led Zeppelin song is now being performed at circumcisions, or something even more weird.
Check out the version of St. Louis University’s Bare Naked Statues:
There are tens of high school choirs on YouTube performing the same song. Amazing. On more than half of the clips, in the comment sections, someone wants to know, “What song is this?” or “Who did this song?”
Anyway, nothing newsworthy. Just a strange phenomenon.
Posted in Uncategorized on June 3, 2009 by macmystery
James, our security guard at the Herald-Journal, asked me to call 911 for him about 1:30 a.m. He was having chest pains and difficulty breathing and thought it could be a heart attack.
I called 911, gave the woman all the info I could, gave him an aspirin and the paramedics arrived, worked with him and drove him away about 10 minutes later.
Before he left, Mr. Black, who’s 68 years old, had me call his son and let him know what was happening so he could pass it on to any other family.
A co-worker called and got his replacement here to cover the rest of his shift. I pray that he’s alright.
UPDATE: I spoke with the other security guard, and he told me Mr. Black did not have a heart attack and came home from the hospital the next evening.
