Airborne Toxic Event

No, not the shitty band of the same name, I'm LIVING IN ONE!

Some "paint yard" place full of chemicals is on fire right now within ten miles of where I type.

This, of course, competes with the Miamisburg Trail Derailment (1986, and mentioned before herein) and the Sherwin-Williams Piant Fire (1987) for memory space in the files of my mind where it says "Fires, With Visible Smoke Plumes."

If posts dry up suddenly today, it will be because of evacuation!

Which will be great, actually, because it will keep me from listening to this Animal Collective record I've put off checking out since January.

Let's hope the winds are on my side.

Be on guard vs. flu this weekend!

No one in the world cares less than me...

about Leonard Cohen.

No one.

Peace

This may be my favorite baseball card.

When I was a kid, by which I mean, what, 7?, cards from before one's birth/one's collecting age beginning were imbued with a certain mysteriousness...here a couple of things: all the '71 Topps are printed with that strange Technicolor-seeming glow. Wait - I think they all were up til '72...'73 is the first, on thinking, where the players just look like they were, y'know, photgraphed. ANYway...

Also, when I was a kid and got this card in trade, I didn't think that, with the casual smile, he was posing as a guy who had just thrown a fastball so much as flashing a peace sign! Now, typing this, this makes me wonder if that's where the surely godawful jam band Vida Blue (whom I have not heard, I'm not a monster) got their name. "Dudes, he's saying peace..." [wiggles off to huff freon]

[and, oh god, here's who they are: Page McConnell of Phish and included Oteil Burbridge of The Allman Brothers Band and Russell Batiste of The Meters.]

See, my card collecting started at six (1975) and ended ca 1980...maybe '81. So to see something so seemingly iconic as a black guy named "Vida Blue" flashing (to my mind, at least) a peace sign on a baseball card blew my mind. This was straight after 'nam, remember, and Patty Hearst and Hot l Baltimore [?], so there was a lot of "free thinking" around.

And, fwiw, here is the first card that was on the top of my first pack of cards:

A quote for a rainy-ass day/weekend

"The only thing that stops God from sending another flood is that the first one was useless."

Nicholas Chamfort (1741 - 1794)

Warren Street near the end?

The entire last month, maybe six weeks - there have been no cats to speak of at the Warren Street house, a place where kittens and old fleabags alike have been known to loaf and eat food put out by Local Crazyperson. It's where BLINKY came from, for God's sake.

What gives?

The sense of loss I feel is crushing, naturally. Whither Bonny, Carlotta, the Steak, Greaser, Len and all the other kids I've gotten to know better than my own family? I thought I saw a silhouette of a black cat from a distance the other night and on getting closer it was the neighbor's crappy little satellite dish/thingy [or something - ask a teenager].

Maybe they're inside someone's home now. Upstairs, taking a break.

Still, je ne regrette shit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb2PTnFPKRE

M'aidez

Help me out here - wasn't there an episode of Brady Bunch where Peter accidentally ingested a birth-control pill?