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Vintage Hohner Accordion
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: For Sale
- Hits: 3569
Playable, generally makes a braying noise like a dying donkey but I'm not sure if that's the instrument or the way I'm playing it.
Now the kid want's an electric guitar for Christmas, and you, the loving and doting parent, are contemplating buying it for him.
Probably the electric guitar is your way of apologizing for the lack of time you spend with him, you rationalize it by saying that maybe he'll do well and learn to play and be the world's next Kurt Cobain or John Lennon, but let's be real, he probably won't. Maybe he'll play it a few weeks, maybe, if he's determined, he'll learn to play the first few bars of "Stairway to Heaven" or "Smoke on the Water" before getting bored with it and putting it in the closet, to be dug out and sold at a loss at next years garage sale.
Or maybe he will do well at it. He'll take 1/2 hour lessons every week ($35.00 per lesson, $1470 per year...) and in a few years be hanging with the popular kids at school, smoking crack or pot, drinking, getting piercings and tattoos and fathering illegitimate children all over town while you work even longer hours and see him even less because there are that many more mouths to feed ("and where does the money go?" you wonder, but he's gotta pay for that drug habit somehow) and you just want to help out while the kid gets on his feet. finds a job or a band and makes his way up to becoming a famous rock star.
At night, you'll poke your head in his bedroom, there will be the Jim Morrison or Marilyn Manson posters over the futon on the floor, dirty laundry everywhere, blackened sheets or a Union Jack hung up over the basement window but he won't be there, he'll be in jail or at the bar and so you'll just have to say "I love you, son" to an empty room.
And it'll all be because you bought him that Electric Guitar.
Or maybe you could buy him an accordion.
Alexandra David-Néel
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 1593
OK, the Travelers Tales Tibet book wasn't a COMPLETE waste of time (close, though). One story piqued my interest - by Alexandra David-Néel, a Belgian/French woman who made her way into forbidden Tibet in the 1920's, and wrote a variety of books about her experiences. Which look to be very interesting, although I now have to bide my time while they're delivered (an early Christmas gift to myself, what can I say...).
Read more about her here: Wikipedia on Alexandra David-Néel or take a peek inside Magic and Mystery in Tibet on Google Books. A bit of searching might even find you a .pdf version of it, but really, who reads books that way?
Travellers' Tales Tibet, 101 Most Influential People who never lived
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1622
101 Most Influential People who never lived
It's purpose "to provoke debate and discussion."
It's real purpose is to fill what the authors perceived as a publishing niche with things like "academic" discussions of the importance of such characters as Kermit the Frog, Charlie Brown and Tom Sawyer. Absolute rubbish, best read on the toilet; probably, in fact, written with that in mind. A shame, there is a market for a dictionary or guidebook to fictional characters in literature. This isn't it. Note to publisher: Print next edition on Toilet Paper.
Travelers' Tales Tibet
There's something about Tibet that spurs the imagination. That used to spur the imagination, I'm only half through this book yet I'm beginning to feel that I've had one too many Yak-Butter Teas, and I've never been. The multiplicity of points of view are homogeneous, most of the writers going out of the way to get off the beaten track, record their adventures, and yet somehow there's a dull repetition in it that accords badly with their mission. What was I looking for? I don't know. Tales of levitation, of enlightened monks and hidden monasteries and esoteric manuscripts and teachings, not another soul-searching trekker, mountain biker or land-roverer talk about how bloody cold it was and how it's not how it used to be and how bad China is to have taken them over. I wondered about this - I mean, how can you write a boring travel article about Tibet - and then it dawned on me. There are no Tibetans in the book. I mean, there are the stock descriptions - the "Color" that serves as a background to the western searcher's spiritual awakening, but there are no Tibetan characters.There are some good writers - Heinrich Harrer, Wade Davis, yet it just doesn't come together in a way that makes for a great or riveting read. And the format of the book, with the little inset quotes and blurbs (designed to look like a travel guide, presenting you with factoids and other author's opinions, always as boring as the author your currently reading...). Give it a miss. There are much better travel books out there. And if you're going to Tibet I'd request that when you're done you please don't write about it. Or if you absolutely have to I challenge you to see if you can do it in an intelligent way that doesn't make the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan cause the backdrop of your spiritual journey, I challenge you to do it without talking about Yak-Butter Tea or how cold it is or how badly you're feeling the effects of altitude sickness. It's all been done, we know.
Cockroaches in Manhattan
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1623
I'm on a ferry or boat with a bunch of people I don't know. They look like a cast from a movie, or survivor audition. We're heading over to an island, not a tropical one but something more like Manhattan, I think we're in New York.
On the island we begin to go down a long flight of stairs. It's like the entrance to a subway, a long metal tube plunging into the earth, and as far as we go there's still farther to descend. It takes all day.
At night we come up. We're being held here by these creatures - aliens, maybe? that operate out of a corner store, and we go and smash the windows of it, then run back to our subterranean lair. After we smash the windows someone says that we should call pest control, and looking back at the shop we can see this black ooze coming out of the window, there's no sign of the aliens or malevolence that's keeping us hostage, I expect to see a flood of cockroaches pouring from the building but there's nothing....
There's nothing we can do, if they catch us they'll kill us, or worse, but if they don't catch us and we live with them we'll live forever. We just want to be free.
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