Well, from those of you who haven't heard from me in a while, hello and happy holidays. I just survived a two week vacation with the in-laws, and I have never been so happy to see the pearly Kodak gates in my life...
Margaret and I spent the last two weeks in Colorado. No skiing, mind you, just Colorado. We shuttled back and forth between Denver (a cool city) and Yuma (a horrendously remote farm town three hours east of Denver, where Margaret's mom still lives), spending about a week at each place. The big news for us was that Margaret's brother and his wife are now proud parents of a baby boy: Benjamin James weighed in at 6 pounds (or something like that) on Dec. 18th. There was a period when they hadn't settled on a name, and my vote of Jesus was quickly overridden. The baby doesn't do much yet, and you all know my feelings toward little 'uns, so I wasn't terribly impressed. Being an uncle ain't so great yet.
The new parents live in Denver, and we got to see as much of Denver as we could while staying out of their way. I saw the capital building, including the exact step at which the elevation is 5280 feet. (Aside: can you join the "mile high" club just by club just by doing it in Denver?) And downtown, which was neat. And some of the mountains to the west, which were very neat. And Golden, which was less neat than the mountains, but neat nonetheless.
The week I spent in Yuma wasn't exactly torture, ... well, actually it was. Seven days is WAY too long to spend in a remote farming town with nothing to do. Somehow, we managed to get record high temperatures during that week and I was able to wander around outside in Colorado in January in just a T-shirt. It hit 72 degrees once! No complaints. We drove into Nebraska and Kansas just so I could get pictures of us in short sleeves standing next to the "Welcome To Nebraska" and "Welcome To Kansas" signs on the highway.
I went to a farm auction in Yuma. That's where somebody decides that he doesn't want to be a farmer anymore and auctions off his equipment and his land. So I got to see lots of farm equipment up close and personal, and if I had a few thousand dollars to spare, I could have even bought some of it. (A fat lot of good that would do me in Rochester...) And the 1/4-square-mile of land went for $250,000. No animals at this auction, fortunately.
It's hard to describe Yuma if you've never been there. It's flat. Completely totally flat. And trees don't naturally grow out there unless they're planted; the natural shrubbery is sort of a wheat-like grass that stands only a few inches tall. It's weird. In the northeast, we get used to trees and green things. In the southwest, we get used to cacti and sand. In Yuma, just weird short grass. Bleh.
The locals aren't much more interesting. I got a laugh out of Margaret's description of a few of her classmates. Apparently, when one particular set of new parents wanted to name their new baby after Earl, the proud daddy, they were undeterred by the fact that the baby was a girl. She has since gone through life with the name Earla, and I can't imagine that she's achieved too much success with it. Likewise for Lloydine.
The big holiday score was an old Risk set, with wooden pieces. Margaret's sister got an even bigger score, with an old Monopoly set. You knew that the old sets also had wooden houses and hotels, but this set was so old that the word "Hotel" was painted on each little red wooden hotel. Amazing.
During my incarceration in Yuma, we decided to see the movie that was playing at the local theater. (Note: "the" movie. One.) We saw "Jingle All The Way" featuring Ah-nold and Sinbad. It was unquestionably the worst movie of the year, and makes "Krull" look like "Citizen Kane" in comparison. Doesn't Arnold bother to READ THE SCRIPTS before he agrees to do a movie??? And toward the end of our stay in Denver, we were reading on the couch with "My Stepmother Is An Alien" (with Kim Basinger and Dan Akroyd) playing on cable on the TV. "My Stepmother Is An Alien" makes "Jingle All The Way" look like "Citizen Kane" in camparison.
Well, 1996 ended, and tradition dictates that I proclaim my favorite song of the past year. Usually, I come up with about twenty, but this past year was a stinker and my list is exceptionally short:
- "In The Meantime" by Spacehog.
The newspapers say that 1996 was bad because there are no dominant innovative styles right now. They say that alternative, gangsta rap, and hip hop are all burnt out, and since nobody's really sure what will replace them, nobody's jumping on any bandwagon, leaving just stagnation. The articles claimed that people were sick of everything, and cited poor-selling albums by Hootie and the Blowfish, the Gin Blossoms, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, REM, Presidents of the USA, and a few others. Since people were sick of all the latest trends, nothing really dominated and stagnation ruled. And since Celine Dion had the biggest selling album of the year (behind whiny Alanis Morrisette, which came out in '95), I agree that blandness dominated the year.
I think the explanation is much simpler. I think that the music industry is so obsessed with trendy product and sales numbers, that they forgot how to write songs. "In The Meantime" contained, in my opinion, the only worthwhile melody of 1996. 365 days; only one good song. Pretty stinky indeed. I don't feel too optimistic about 1997 either, despite upcoming albums by U2 and, heaven help us, Aerosmith.
I see all this as a sign that "Crap From The Past" must become the dominant force in the universe. The timing is right, I have a small but devoted following on a non-commercial station that doesn't interfere with my programming, I have a commercial sponsor (a local club at which I occasionally DJ), and I have the Ethel Merman Disco Album on CD. Yep - I am the god of hellfire and I bring you...
...1997.
Happy new year to all of you from Uncle Margaret and myself. May you claw your own eyes out before you suffer through "Jingle All The Way". And to all a good night... (and feel free to write back).
Ron "Did you see the Simpsons last week? With the hallucinogenic chili? I'm still laughing..." G
