Facebook wanted me to share dead link memory to OD; here it is in Normal entries

I’m a little disappointed. Here we face both the end of the world and the end of Open Diary and no one is making book. Sure the odds on favorite for the end of the world is sometime in November right? I’m not going to look it up, but let’s say it’s November fourth. The odds on October 13 would be pretty good; you know someone would bet it. Prostitution, Bunko, Drug traffic, these are the vice crimes with the big media coverage, I think gambling gets the short end of the vice stick.

Wait could that possibly be because most States now run their own numbers? Weird, so the correlation between limited legality and vice crime is that limited legality brings a sort of social acceptance and lowers associated violent crimes? Almost makes a fellow think don’t it? But then it’s not like the state runs help centers for addicted gamblers. No, sorry, yes they do. So, check social acceptability, lower crime and social programs funded. Sounds horrible. It’d be a shame too to free up all those vice cops to investigate murders and things, or take away the mainstay trades of organized crime and small time gangs.

Of course I don’t think the State is going to make book on the end of the world of the End of OD. The end of the world is a suckers bet, how do you collect? The end of OD appeals to a very limited audience. Besides it’s bad form for the State to make book on the closing of business’s unless, I suppose, tobacco is involved. Heh, smoking a cigarette might wind up being the only vice crime left on the books.

The magnolia tree buds are over an inch long, my backyard is bathed in sunshine, half my house smells like a New Orleans whore house the other like cigars or perhaps the poker parlor of a New Orleans whore house. Why New Orleans? That’s the name of the lamp oil New Orleans something something Parfam Maison, diffuser lamp. I’ve been to New Orleans once and through it a few times. The collection of spices doesn’t smell anything like the parts I was in. Any big city I’ve ever been in has a part that smells like pee, often somewhere near the bus or rail station or the river or whatever body of water or public transportation there is. Any city famous for food has an avenue or two that smells like cooking things. Most inner cities smell of gasoline, there is a strip of Beverly Hills where certain stores spray perfume into the air outside the sidewalk, but it dissipates. No, I’ve never been in a whore house, and haven’t been in even less whore houses in New Orleans, but I imagine shy of a spice store, this scent of Lampe Berger is New Orleans only in this respect.

One of the rare and fantastic books I took from my folk’s attic last year and was subsequently et by my bad little dog, was a transcript mixed with exposition of an interview with Jelly Roll Morton. There are fantastic descriptions of New Orleans from around 1890 to 1918. Descriptions of a different kind of segregation and integration, more a caste system than a white/colored type system, and the competition of different bands and the status of music lessons and, though very subjective and perhaps conceited and maybe not true, a description of the birth of the home grown music; Jazz. The best gigs a guy could get were playing the whore houses. There was no suggestion they were illegal, there was a suggestion that New Orleans was a sort of paradise unto itself, left alone by prudish laws and allowed a sort of prurient freedom. Outside of the smell of bar-b-que and frying chicken though there wasn’t a mention of scent. Oh a part of the caste system had to do with the patois you spoke, the more French peppered in the better but the less likely you’d be able to play jazz.

As a child I saw Jean Pierre Rampal in concert. I don’t think there was anything he couldn’t do with his flute.

The book was written by Alan Lomax, one of a handful of folks involved in a herculean but limited task, a profession with a half-life of maybe thirty years. I think Pete Seeger’s dad, who was among this group, called himself a musicologist, and among other things, they were trying to preserve an oral tradition, get music copied that was passed from generation to generation but never written down or recorded. I’m not sure it was all altruistic, but like doing foster care, the amount pay for the amount of work was marginal at best. In the early nineteen hundreds the real money in the music industry, well, the real fame, was in publishing and owning the rights to the sheet music. I like to imagine like today that for the band the real money is still in live performances.

There was a movie a few years back called Songwriter, and though they hollywooded it up with love affairs and such and prides and prejudices it was basically about a woman going into isolated Appalachian hills and discovering old English ballads adapted to hill billy tunes, a sort of amazing anthropological find and rare little piece of musical history. I don’t remember exactly how but the movie ended poorly. I also don’t remember if it was based on a true story or not, but there are certainly true stories like that.

We may be through with the past but the past ain’t through with us — Magnolia

My brother threatened to send me cigars. I got some of the mailing stuff to send some back to him, and I spend maybe fifteen minutes a day for the past week imaging how to mail these so they arrive unharmed. The collection I have now more than half were bought with the idea of sharing them with my brother. For his daughter’s wedding, maybe the second or third last time I was in LA, his friend, Mark, I’m pretty sure (though he reminds me of mark twain, he has that soft southern accent and a large moustache) sat out by the fountain after the reception smoking long Cuban Montecristos and talking about life and other shit that was good. I’ve watched many a sunset over the breakwaters from my brother’s old deck smoking his cigars. It’s not an obligation of debt I feel but an exchange of good will and good smokes.

I have a grand Nephew now in LA, so there’s still a good excuse to go there. LA is my favorite big city on earth, though I have fond memories of London it’s been almost forty years since I’ve been there. I do love Fenway Park, but Boston itself is not a place I’m dying to return too. Don’t much care for any of the Burroughs in New York City. I sort of like Detroit and Chicago, but I really have become a west coast guy. I like San Francisco but not like I like LA. I’m sure my love for LA would wane if I lived there though. I am in the center of the universe now and it’s a fine place to be. It’s not the geographical center, I’m sure; it’s more a personal center.

If ever I’m asked why the Scots are beguiled
I’ll lift up my glass and I’ll toast with a smile
“Fortune dealt Scotland the wildest of Cards”
Oh the roving dies hard — The battlefield band

My shoulder is ok except when I sit to watch television, the fancy la-z-boy, I believe, designed for poor shoulder posture, so I type some more, pretend it’s therapeutic, though, from what little I understand of bursitis it’s likely not. I just know it doesn’t hurt to type and it does to watch TV. It also seems like the sling shouldn’t do shit, in lay terms, as best as I reckon, it’s an inflammation of the bursa, little packs of liquid that let the joints move smooth.

On a sort of related note, the shoulder is very precisely related to what it means to throw like a girl. I think it’s probably cultural as I have taught girls how not to throw like a girl, well, women, who hadn’t been taught that before. It’s not because I’m a better teacher, it’s because no one bothered to ask or offer. There is a small bit of anatomy that prohibits women from throwing like a pro pitcher, that’s why the really fast female softball players still pitch underhand and in this manner can achieve the same sort of speed as their male counterparts, does take more of a windup though, harder to be covert.

Throwing like a girl means using all forearm and bicep. A pitch, or a strong throw, doesn’t come from the forearm or bicep’ it comes from the shoulder and the trickiness comes from the wrist. What girls aren’t taught, for the most part, is how to cock the shoulder. It’s like saying foreigners are stupid and can’t read when you put a book in front of them written in English and they’ve never studied the language. It’s not a question of ability so much as a question of being taught. Young boys who haven’t been taught to cock their shoulders are usually bombarded with homosexual slurs. A throw from the forearm does look pretty dang effeminate. One could conceivably throw a baseball well, if not gracefully, that way. There’s no way of getting any distance with a football like that though.

If you aren’t allowed to touch the girl you are teaching for whatever reason, an analogy that involves the cocking of the hips works, like hula hoops or dancing. I’m not sure you can teach either of those without touching but why would you? I mean that’s the point of those, touch. It’s really sort of difficult to teach someone a golf swing, bat swing or how to throw though without standing behind them and guiding the arms. Not impossible, but difficult. Though it seems less complicated and considerably duller, the golf swing is the hardest of the three and yet the one most likely taught to a young lady. The use of arms, shoulder and hips in precise co-ordination is the key to a golf swing. In a bat swing you adjust for the position of the ball, in a golf swing the ball is static. In a bat swing you get as much shoulder and hip into it as you can, in a golf swing you use just enough to place the ball. Granted as baseball gets more competitive (meaning you’ve left the sandlot for a place with stands) placement becomes an issue too, but still it’s dependent on how the ball comes at you.