Past Diatribes

I was wrong.

Now I have come to realize my true destiny.

I am the only man in Dublin with a Colorblind James album.

Anyone who listens to the radio for ten minutes will recognize that talent and quality have little to do with who becomes a superstar. Colorblind James was one of the musical geniuses of the twentieth century, but he is almost completely unknown even in his native America.

Think Elvis, if he’d gone west to Death Valley rather than Vegas. Think "Willie Nelson Meets They Might Be Giants." With his Strange Sounds From the Basement and stories of the Kojak Chair, Colorblind James is absolutely marvelous stuff.

I first heard of CBJ back in 1990 when I worked at WCWM, college radio in Williamsburg, Virginia. The radio station was run by a clique of snooty bisexuals. After ten seconds of the circus rock one-two beat, they sneered and pitched "Why Should I Stand Up?" into the trash. Further sealing my unpopularity, I fished it out. Thank God I did. With horn sections, solos and riffs, Colorblind James was breaking ground that acts like the Squirrel Nut Zippers followed only years later. He was Considering a Move To Memphis years before that other stupid Walking in Memphis song. Tubas and vibraphones! This guy was dead on. The quirky lyrics told tales:

      I saw the monster from the bay
      I saw him raise his ugly head
      We spoke for about a half and hour:
      I don’t recall a thing we said.

The humor is only one fuel that drives this "polka band with a gasoline engine." There is raw emotion, strangely enough, that occasionally turns a track into a brief masterpiece. The easygoing Colorblind barely restrains from shouting, on occasions, from teh strength of his belief in these enigmatic creeds. It’s REM-esque.

Over the years, in the strangest of places, I would come across the odd Colorblind James track or two. At a party in Dublin (or was it Los Angeles?) around 1993, I was amazed to find a girl who knew of him from his period gigging around Rochester, New York. She knew him as the man who asked fans to bring canned food for the homeless to his concerts. In the birth of the .mp3 days, there was a "Call of the Wild" snippet- fifty-three seconds long- that came across me on the Internet. Colorblind was still out there, constantly reforming his impoverished band and producing quirky independent albums. I sent his a postcard, once. He wrote back to thank me for rescuing him from the trashcan.

To cut the story short, Colorblind James passed away a couple of years ago, never having found the acclaim that he rightly deserved. An album, humorously entitled Greatest Hits!, collects nineteen exemplary songs from over the years. There’s a track on it called Fledgling Circus which is worth the CD’s $10.00 price alone. With a simple acoustic guitar, Colorblind takes on the persona of a sad and downtrodden circus carny. In a slow, mournful voice, he asks "Well come on, and fight my battles/ Well come on, and play my games/ Well come on, do something to show me/ I’m not alone in this place." The song confesses the misadventures that have doomed him and (consequently) the whole fledgling circus. It’s a song of sorrow, but the lyrics include verses like "I got a date with the woman with two heads/ she’s the only one left who’ll talk to me/ At dinner she makes good conversation/ One head talks while the other one eats." In the liner notes, Colorblind writes "I don’t remember if, when writing it, I was trying to be funny or completely serious...and when I hear it, I can’t tell either."

Man, that’s life down perfectly. That’s life exactly.

Speaking of things that are a maybe serious, might just be a joke... Mick the Carpenter! Progress up in the attic continues.... "The Lair: To Be Completed Soon, for the last two and half years!" Only took me about a year, but I got this set of drawers finished. I started out with ten pounds of white MDF, wound up with eleven pounds of sawdust.

Damn, it takes forever to make a drawer. In all my years of getting dressed, I never would have imagined how long.

Anyway, now all my disks, CDs, spare computer bits and assorted shit has a nice, neat place to be lost in. Speaking of lost....

You and all your computerly data may be lost if you don’t get yourself a firewall. Working at a computer security company like Symantec, my eyes have been opened to all manner of malfeasance. It’s amazing- and scary- how much random hacking goes on out there. Every single day, ordinary people have their machines broken into from the Internet. It’s generally by some teenage "script kiddie" on the Micro$oft-bashing bandwagon. "Dude, Micro$oft is so dumb. Anyone who used Windows is so dumb. Anyone who doesn’t concern their life with Micro$oft’s well-known security holes must be soooooo dumb. I think I’ll break in to their home computers and teach them how lame Micro$oft is.... Ha ha... I am so kEw1! Now, if I could only get a date.... Any date...."

There are also assholes who take over unsuspecting mail servers to send out spam from. (That way, whenever spammed people retaliate, their complaints fall on the confused ears of someone who has no knowledge of how to stop the junk mail.) It’s absolutely scary how much of that stuff goes on. It’s essential to protect yourself.

That’s where the firewall comes in. I use a freeware one called Tiny Personal Firewall. Whenever an address on the Internet tries to connect to my computer for anything other than web pages I have requested, a popup asks me whether or I should allow it. If it’s something that I’ve clicked on (like connection to the audio stream of Phantom FM), I can give it the OK. If it’s not, the firewall develops a rule to block the attempted connection. It’s handy, and it’s free. I think Tiny have started to ask for money for the newer versions of the product.... There may still be a freebie available on tucows or elsewhere. Definitely worth checking out.

Once you have a firewall in place--- or activated the one that comes build into Windows XP--- pay a visit to Shields Up! This site tests (for free) your firewall by trying to get into your computer’s ports. It’s easy, clear and there’s a good deal of information about security posted. Highly recommended!

Just a funny (serious?) footnote, to conclude this over-long rant... you know how those scientists searching Loch Ness haven’t been able to turn up any sign of the monster? Well, they’re looking in the wrong spot. With all the rain Ireland’s been getting, this last year, Nessie decided to get herself some Guinness. This is a photo snapped in November.

Peace

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