Voices in My Head

So hnorthrop.com has a new look and feel. Considerably less cluttered and my god, a zillion times easier for me to manage. At first, Martha didn’t like it but after a week of looking at it, she’s starting to come around.

A few things:

There is still a Photo of the Day, which is more or less, every day.

The elephants, (which is all Martha was concerned about) are on the links page

My blog, Voices in My Head is in a totally different place, on a totally different server and all of the past four years or so worth of posts are located here, although it is currently broken. I will not be adding to that archive as I have moved my stuff over to WordPress. MT was just too much of a drag to deal with and I am all about eliminating things that are a drag.

I am still working on the blog part and probably for the next week, it will appear buggy. The link is at the bottom and tops of hnorthrop.com. The link for the old blog will always be located on the right. If you give a shit, update your bookmarks and change the RSS feed.

Many more dental issues last week. I’m walking around with a temporary crown on one side and a problem on the other. Not only did I have to go to the dentist for more torturous drill work, I had to go to the doctor for a sinus infection thing. While there, she started bugging me about getting the follow up CT scan for my lungs, just to check on my nodes.

Jesus Christ, every one needs to take a step back.

I don’t want to get a CT scan. I’m not coughing nor do I have chest pains or trouble breathing. How about we focus on the shit that we can fix and that might actually be wrong; sinus infections, rotting teeth, you know things like that.

Martha finally had the Prius looked at and the recommendation is to take it to an Auto body shop and have the whole back hatch replaced. Nice. At this very minute she is driving around without the fin and there is duct tape covering the holes. I’d like to point out here that duct tape was the short-term solution, that I had mentioned earlier.

Lux Interior of The Cramps died last week. This makes me very sad. I don’t know how many times he stood in front of me screaming his fucking lungs out while wearing nothing but red pumps and the skin that god gave him, but how ever many times it was, it wasn’t enough. The Cramps appeal was overwhelming, as was evident in their live shows and even Martha liked them. The Cramps changed the way I listen to music.

And how did this happen?

Ladies and Gentleman, that was not Mr. Rogers.

An interesting example of how music can totally make the day turn into an awesome waste of time.

I was listening to WFMU and things were going along just fine when out of the blue, Joe Belock plays Radio Free Europe. My instinct was to turn the volume down, but here is the thing; it sounded great. Not just great because I haven’t heard it in over two decades but musically great. I remember reading that they had re-released a digitally remastered Murmur and I’ll be damn if that song didn’t sound great.

I turned it up.

Now the funny thing about Radio Free Europe is that while the song was a huge hit with the strangest of people; i.e. your average 1980’s Boulder Colorado chick; everyone I knew loved the rest of the album for reasons other than how fucking gorgeous Michael Stipe was.

But anyway, so listening to that made me look up the album on Amazon, preview a few songs, listen to the outtakes, download four songs from the outtakes and then as if that wasn’t enough, troll around on YouTube for old clips.

So this whole Cramps/REM thing is connected by more of a timeline issue. I was listening to both, pretty aggressively from 83/84 to when REM dropped off my play list around 88’. That is when Green came out. I wanted to like it but the only thing I could stand to listen to was Turn You Inside-Out. I wasn’t even a fan of Document for many reasons but the reworking of The One I Love into something different than the angry madness that they had been performing it, combined with the retarded mass culture assumption that the fucking thing was a love song, drove me crazy.

(I refuse to embed the clip.)

But there is something so laughably painful about this:

Ladies and Gentleman, that was not SoulTrain.

In more weird/sad news Heads Together is closing. If you know anything about Pittsburgh, you know about Heads Together. It’s been there forever and over the years has been many things, to many people, all of which are related to a certain lifestyle. All the best Dee.

When I was in college, I think I bought a bong there. I said to Martha.
Didn’t everyone? She laughed.
Not you.
You don’t know, I just might have! I did buy a waterbed there.

Speaking of bong hits. Oh Michael Phelps so sorry that you were naive enough to think that no one would take a photo of you hitting a bong. People are assholes. But really, what are you apologizing for? Fuck it. Be proud to be located in the stoner isle at CVS.

By the way, how great was it to watch Brian Williams say the word ‘Bong’?