Clouds, Contrails, Chemtrails, and Cicadas

I'm laying out by the baby pool, reading my book, and begin to feel drowsy. Putting the book down, I close my eyes and hear the couple with their two kids, and the seventeen year cicadas thrumming in the backround. The man dominates the conversation with his wife but listening further I realize that they aren't married by the way they talk to each other. 'She spends fifteen hundred dollars and that's not including tickets but she has her reasons for doing that for the other perks she gets with her athletic supporters, ANDREW I told you once to stop and the next time you're going to time out, do you hear me? anyway she gets all these football and basketballs tickets that she gives away doing business and people remember her when buying real estate I don't see how she comes out ahead she spends money like it's water zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz BARRY! you're snoring...cut it out! I open my eyes and look at the clouds and the contrails.

Charlene once asked me if I ever heard of "chemtrails". There is this person Charlene works with who believes that the U.S. government has been conducting experiments with citizens spreading chemicals across the skies with jets. I came to find out that alot of people actually believe this story. The chemtrails are supposed to cause everything from cancer to mind control, I'm not kidding, I looked it up on Wikipedia. . Some people apparently believe anything they're told.

Later this day I borrow my neighbor's lawn mower to get it over with so I won't have to mow tomorrow after church. My mower has been in the shop for over two weeks now. When I get it back I fully expect it to go from zero to sixty in six seconds flat. After I mow the lawn I go ahead and mow Bill's too as this is the third time I've used his mower. From the looks of his lawn he hasn't mowed in three weeks and in his back yard I felt the need to put on a pith helmet. While I mowed I could still hear the cicadas over the sound of the mower. I read in the paper this morning it's the XIIV brood of cicadas. They come around every seventeen years. Sounds almost biblical. They're ugly little critters. The paper said there are some people that EAT the things and say they taste like shrimp. Yummy, these must be the same people who believe in chemtrails. Hey, maybe the chemtrails are causing people to eat cicadas.

Tristan's Birthday Party

Last Wednesday, May 28th was Tristan's third birthday and we celebrated with a birthday dinner last night at Julia's condo. Tristan was very excited. He especially liked the party favors (those things you blow on to make the paper roll out), and the chocolate birthday cake. The biggest hit was the T-ball stand, ball, and bat that the Lunte's presented him. After a while in the backyard I heard the irrigation heads hissing and suddenly the water started shooting out from them. Tristan and Hailee's eyes got big as half dollars as they scrambled to the porch. Abby's enrolling Tristan in a T-ball league this summer so he'll get a feel for it. I love going to those organized games for small children. The children don't know what they're doing and they aimlessly run around in all directions. It reminds me of a Monty Python skit.

Lost

Charlene and I watched the season four finale of “Lost” last night and it was good but, as usual, it left you with a lot of speculations as to the very nature of the island itself. The plot is so intricate that it’s easy to lose track of where the characters are physically in present time, as well as where the characters are in time. If you want to start watching Lost next season, forget about it. I would recommend renting the CD’s of the first four seasons before the fifth season starts in February. The show has something for everyone: mystery, science fiction, romance, and betrayal. I damn near cried last week when the Oceanic Six were getting off the cargo plane and saw their families for the first time since the plane crashed on the island.

As to my theory about Ben Linus “moving” the island last night--the island didn’t physically move but moved in time to the future and therefore disappeared in a flash of light and sound as we saw….poof! Don’t ask me what to think about anything else because this show is wide open to any kind of speculation and anything is possible. The island has such strange properties it can’t be boiled down into anything black and white.

The Feminine Side Of Traffic Court

It was that time again; it was time to see da judge for my speeding ticket and to my surprize and relief it wasn't the same judge I had last time. This judge was female, about forty years old, and rather attractive to boot. She said she got pulled over by the police on the way to court so she "knew how each of us felt". I didn't believe it, but it had it's desired effect as there were a few yuks from the unfortunate. I thought one of the sheriffs was gonna bust a gut, laughing so hard, I thought he may have had a drink or two before court began.

One of the sheriffs lines us up in the chairs according to last names. To my surprize most of the people plead not guilty. There was one guy who was Russian and couldn't speak English very well. There were so many fricatives coming out of his mouth I thought he might leave a wet spot on the carpet in front of him. Judge Judy assigns him a Russian interpreter for downtown court. He's concerned about the cost of that and Judy says it will be a free service. I thought at least he'll get a little more value out of his 129 dollar court costs.

The court clerk calls "Barry McClain". I stride up the the microphone and a silly thought goes through my head to do some sort of lounge lizard act and croon 'not guilty' into the microphone like Frank Sinatra. I resist. My court date is July 9th downtown. I think since I have to take the day off anyway that I'll just take that day and ride with Ben on patrol. It would be a good opportunity since I haven't done it yet.

Gillian Welch

The first time I heard this song I bought it and played it over and over. Gillian Welch writes “Primitive” Country music. Her music has a haunting, old timey sound. She also writes Gospel songs. This is “Elvis Presley Blues” She distills Elvis Presley down to a fictional folk hero in hypnotic, dream-like quality.


Elvis Presley Blues

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
Just a country boy that combed his hair
And put on a shirt his mother made and went on the air
And he shook it like a chorus girl
And he shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby
Like you never seen

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
How he took it all out of black and white
Grabbed his wand in the other hand and he held on tight
And he shook it like a hurricane
He shook it like to make it break
And he shook it like a holy roller, baby
With his soul at stake

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
He was all alone in a long decline
Thinking how happy John Henry was that he fell down and died
When he shook it and he rang like silver
He shook it and he shine like gold
He shook it and he beat that steam drill, baby
Well bless my soul
He shook it and he beat that steam drill, baby
Well bless my soul, what's wrong with me?

I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
I was thinking that night about Elvis
Day that he died, day that he died
Just a country boy that combed his hair
Put on a shirt his mother made and he went on the air
And he shook it like a chorus girl
He shook it like a Harlem queen
He shook it like a midnight rambler, baby
Like he never seen

The Police

The Police are a three-piece rock band consisting of Sting (birth name: Gordon Sumner) vocals, bass guitar, Andy Summers (guitar, vocals) and Stewart Copeland (drums, percussion, vocals). The band became globally popular in the early 1980s, playing a style of rock that was influenced by jazz, reggae, and punk music. Their 1983 album, Synchronicity, was number one in the UK and the US and sold over 8,000,000 copies in the US. The band broke up in the mid-1980s, but reunited in early 2007 with the announcement that they were undertaking a world tour. The tour was scheduled from the middle of that year on until mid-2008. They performed at Churchill Downs last summer and I would have seen them but the tickets were a tad bit too pricey for me. To date The Police have sold over 50 million albums worldwide.

One of my favorite songs by The Police is Walking On The Moon. Here is a live performance of this song from the 1984 Synchronicity tour in Atlanta, Georgia. I seemed to always sing this to myself while I’m walking around in the pool.

Allison Krauss

Allison Krause has been around for almost 30 years making mainly bluegrass music. She's won 21 Grammy's and she sounds every bit as good live as she does in a studio with her voice like a bell and drop dead good looks. She's a consumate fiddle player and as a young girl won several fiddle playing contests. Recently she made a record and went on tour with Robert Plant. Who would have thought the lead singer of the former heavy metal band Led Zeppelin and Allison Krause would pair up? They did and they are good! This is Allison Krauss and Union Station the song Restless.

Drive By Truckers

Jason Isbell is the singer/songwriter for the band called Drive By Truckers, an alternative country band. This song is called "Dress Blues" and everytime I hear this song on the radio it makes me feel a different way through either the lyrics, the music, or my particular mood that day. It's not pro-war, it's not anti-war, but the sentiment is just purely American. I really like this song and I fully intend to buy the CD which came out recently. I should note that the Drive By Truckers also had a song called Decoration Day on their previous CD. I couldn't find a studio version of this song to pirate. This is a live version of Dress Blues.

Horse Hockey

Judy and Tony George have lived in a home in Anchorage since the early 70’s. Yesterday we drove to their home to literally shovel the shit. The George’s have owned several horses over the years and Judy, when mucking out the horse barn, saves the manure. Like Charlene, Judy’s an avid gardener, and has gardens that spread out in several directions on their property.

It’s interesting to note that their house occupies the former property of the house called “The Anchorage” which was built by retired riverboat captain, James Goslee, to be his final anchorage, hence the town was named Anchorage, also known to some people as “Snotville”. Whenever I’m in Anchorage I try to keep in mind the tenth commandment. If we should ever win the Power Ball I’d buy a house there in a heartbeat.

The George’s are anything but snooty though, having worked hard all their lives, raising three daughters and a son. Tony George is a semi-retired general surgeon who now works a forty hour week compared to the eighty to 100 hours a week he used to work.

They have added onto their home over the years and walking through the central hallway with rooms branching from either side, it seems to go on forever. The first time Judy gave us a tour, I was half expecting to discover a dark wood-paneled wall that flips around to reveal a secret passageway, huge ancient portraits with moving eyes that seem to watch you, and a grandfather clock sounding its gothic midnight gongs… What the hell… I’ll throw in a raven who screeches “never-more!”

Charlene and I wheeled a large cart up to the manure pile beside the horse barn and we shoveled it full. I struggled to wheel it back to my truck where Judy had put two ramp thingies on my opened tail gate. I pushed the cart up the ramp and the wheels got caught between the tail gate and bed. Judy asked “are you hung?” I couldn’t resist one this easy and Judy probably immediately realized what she had said. I said “I’m huge!” Charlene said “you’re shoveling the shit in more than one way today.”

Decoration Day

I always thought "Decoration Day" was a southern synonym for Memorial Day. Decoration Day came about after the Civil War. The following is from Wikipedia:

Following the end of the Civil War, many communities set aside a day to mark the end of the war or as a memorial to those who had died. Some of the places creating an early memorial day include Charleston, South Carolina; Boalsburg, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Carbondale, Illinois; Columbus, Mississippi; many communities in Vermont; and some two dozen other cities and towns. These observances eventually coalesced around Decoration Day, honoring the Union dead, and the several Confederate Memorial Days.

According to Professor David Blight of the Yale University History Department, the first memorial day was observed in 1865 by liberated slaves at the historic race track in Charleston. The site was a former Confederate prison camp as well as a mass grave for Union soldiers who had died while captive. The freed slaves reinterred the dead Union soldiers from the mass grave to individual graves, fenced in the graveyard & built an entry arch declaring it a Union graveyard; a very daring thing to do in the South shortly after North's victory. On May 30, 1868, the freed slaves returned to the graveyard with flowers they had picked from the countryside & decorated the individual gravesites, thereby creating the 1st Decoration Day. Patriotic singing and a picnic followed a parade with thousands of freed blacks and Union soldiers.

Many of the states of the U.S. South refused to celebrate Decoration Day, due to lingering hostility towards the Union Army and also because there were very few veterans of the Union Army who lived in the South. A notable exception was Columbus, Mississippi, which on April 25, 1866 at its Decoration Day commemorated both the Union and Confederate casualties buried in its cemetery.

Noelle's 38th Birthday!@#%***

Today's is Noelle's 38th birthday which makes me feel kinda old. It makes EVERYONE feel old.







Abby turned 32 last October. Ah to be 32 again!






Who said Noelle and Hailee look alike?



Peonies always in full bloom on Noelle's b-day.






















We had to have police presence at the party so things wouldn't get out of hand.

Random-ness

I have a confession to make, if you haven't already guessed. The little essays that I've put with the last few music posts are actually bio's that I've copied from Wikipedia. For whatever reason I find hard to write about music and musicians so I take the lazy way out. There...I feel cleansed. As a kid I liked randomly flipping through the World Book Encyclopedia. I was a geek that way, and according to Charlene, I'm a geek to this day. Now I randomly click through Wikipedia web pages.

Last Wednesday I spent the day at the hospital for Dad's surgery. Three weeks before that I spent the day at the hospital for my mother-in-law's surgery. As most people know, it's a tough thing to do. You sit around, walk around, stare out the window, drink coffee, and pee. Sometimes you see a crying family and sometimes YOU are the crier. Sometimes you get to see your sissy brother reading "Today's Woman" magazine. I bet his employees would love to get their hands on that pic.

Last summer we bought a flat screen TV for our bedroom. Charlene's upstairs watching The Young And The Restless she tivo-ed as I type. When I was at home recuperating from my foot surgery I watched Y & R most everyday because I was a captive audience. I confess I did get into it. I love watching hi-def tennis. Soon, we're going to buy a fifty incher for downstairs. We're waiting for the price to come down but I hope we get it before Wimbledon starts. Lord, I can be shallow.

I bought my first $3.99 per gallon gasoline and still felt fortunate to be an American. I bought only two and a half gallons. This Sunday, after church in Simpsonville, I'll fill it up for around $3.90 per gallon..whooo-hoooo what a bargain!

Joni Mitchell

Mitchell's singing began in small nightclubs and busking on the streets of Toronto in her native western Canada subsequently became associated with the burgeoning folk music scene of the mid-1960s in New York City. Mitchell achieved fame in the late 1960s and was considered a key part of the Southern California folk rock scene. Throughout the 1970s, she explored and combined the pop and jazz genres. Mitchell has amassed a body of work that is highly respected by both critics and fellow musicians, with the influential All Music Guide going as far as stating that, "When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century". Mitchell is also an accomplished visual artist. She has, through photography or painting, created the artwork for each of her albums and, in 2000, in an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, described herself as a "painter derailed by circumstance". A blunt critic of the music industry, Mitchell had stopped recording over the last several years, focusing mainly on her visual art, but in 2007 released Shine, her first album of new songs in nine years. Mitchell has won nine Grammy Awards as well as The Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

I listened to this song for the first time in years and it reminded me of Janet. It’s most likely because I’ve been reminiscing a lot since Janet’s death and this song is all about reminiscence and Janet looks alot like Joni Mitchell too. In the song, Joni Mitchell’s childhood recollections are told. She blends the Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody into the song which she used to listen to at a Chinese Café as a youngster.

Chinese Cafe/Unchained Melody

Steely Dan

Steely Dan is a Grammy-Award winning American jazz fusion/rock band centered on core members Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. The band's peak of popularity was in the 1970s, when it released six albums that blended elements of jazz, rock, funk, R&B, and pop. Their music is characterized by complex jazz-influenced structures and harmonies, literate and sometimes obscure or ambiguous lyrics filled with dark sarcasm, and their adroit musicianship and studio perfectionism.
The group toured from 1972 to 1974, but in 1975 became a purely studio-based act. They disbanded in 1981, but have since reunited. They had two reunion tours in the summers of 1993 and 1994 and new studio releases in 2000, Two Against Nature, and 2003, Everything Must Go, with accompanying tours. They have sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.

This song is from the album Two Againt Nature titled What a Shame About Me.

Some Photos And A Hailee Lunte Production

Hey bud, you have a taco stain on your shirt









Tricia and Scott Arthur on Christmas Day 07









Tricia, Scott, and Jackson










Who is this mildy retarded looking guy?










Ripping and running









Lambs End Farm, Simpsonville, KY

































Tristan time machine.
























I wish my complexion were this good.











She's the delovely, delightful DeCharlene
























A coveted house in Anchorage

Frank Zappa

Frank Zappa was a musician with a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa established himself as a prolific and highly distinctive composer, electric guitar player and band leader. He worked in various different musical genres and wrote music for rock bands, jazz ensembles, synthesizers, and symphony orchestra. In addition to his music recordings, he created feature-length and short films,music videos, and album covers. Although he only occasionally achieved major commercial success, he maintained a highly productive career that encompassed composing, recording, touring, producing and merchandising his own and others' music. Zappa self-produced almost every one of the more than sixty albums he released with the Mothers of Invention or as a solo artist. He received multiple Grammy nominations and won for Best Rock Instrumental Performance in 1988 for the album Jazz From Hell. Zappa was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. In 2005, his 1968 album with the Mothers of Invention, We're Only In It For The Money, was inducted into the United States National Recording Preservation Board's National Recording Registry .Politically, Zappa was a self-proclaimed "practical conservative", an avowed supporter of capitalism and independent business.Although many assumed that he used drugs like many musicians of the time, Zappa strongly opposed recreational drug use.

This song was one of my favorites from the 70's called "Son of Orange County" from the album "Live From Roxy and Elsewhere". My brother will remember this song very well. This song contains one of my favorite guitar solos. 'Ol Frank may have been on the wierd side but he could play the guitar like no one else. You'll have to excuse how the end of this song is cut off at the end, as it leads into another song called "Penguin In Bondage" and whoever converted this to an MP3 didn't fade it out..... I would post Penguin In Bondage too, but it's kinda X rated, as you might guess from the title, and I want to keep it clean.

The Roof Story

It was on Christmas Eve, 1998 or so, and we were having a slight leak showing up in our living room ceiling. I was going to get up on the roof to see if I could see were it was coming from and put some pitch under the offending shingle(s) to save the day. I got the ladder and set it up and made the critical leap from the ladder to the roof. I hadn't noticed before that there was a rime covering the shingles, and there I was, on my hands and knees, scared to move one iota. Then I slid about two inches and stopped. My heart went to my throat and I thought Oh $hit, I'm going to break my neck on Christmas Eve. Somehow I got down on the ladder, and then to the ground. I was shaking like a leaf. Ever since then it's a real struggle for me to go up on the roof unless it's absolutely necessary. Last week was one of those days. I put my cell phone in my pocket just in case I fell off and was still conscious enough to dial 911. I also took the camera to take some shots. I must've looked like an idiot up there with a leaf blower, taking pictures, but what the hell, I'll do anything for my blog.

Bustin' Out All Over

Another Oldie

Harry Nilsson wrote Everybody’s Talkin’ in 1968 and he won a Grammy for it. It was part of the sound track in the movie “Midnight Cowboy”. The song is one of those timeless classics which sounds like it could have been written yesterday.

Hailee's Birthday

Hailee eighth birthday was May 11th and we partied down at the Lunte's. In the video Hailee's singing to the new Wii "High School Musical" Ben and Noelle got for her birthday. The girl loves to sing!

Here are a few more Hailee birthday pics.