Working For A Living

Quotation of the day: Oscar Wilde -- Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

As you probably know, i -- for my sins -- make my living as a cook.  I've been doing it for a long time, in lots of different eateries, from greasy spoons to high-class French restaurants to my current job at a chicken joint.  I used to like it.  In fact i still like it, but i've reached the point where it's all so easy it's not like work at all and a certain je ne sais quoi has set in.  Not boredom, certainly (i don't really understand the concept of boredom), but it isn't really fun any more. It used to be.

But!  Yesterday, i was reminded why i do love doing what i do.

Apparently there's a baseball tournament in town this weekend.  I discovered this when two teams showed up at the chicken joint fifteen minutes before opening time.  My morning heart attack. And then, fifteen minutes later, another team arrived.  To make it worse, the other cook arrived looking a fetching shade of green -- so hungover he could barely stand up.  He gave it a good college try but he couldn't make it, he had to go home.

So there we were: the place was almost full at 11:30, most of the waitresses don't start 'til noon; Saturdays haven't been that busy lately so i didn't have an excessive amount of chicken in the ovens, and the kitchen was short-staffed.  It was a great laxative.

But do you know what?  We pulled it off.  Sometimes i amaze even myself la la.  It was hard work, i admit (nothing wrong with that, of course)  and we all were drenched with sweat when it was over, but, running on pure adrenalin and with each of my hands doing the work of two, we did it.

And ... it is the most satisfying feeling in the world

A Message To The Music Industry

From Rolling Stone magazine. 'Nuff said

Just As I Always Suspected

Music History 101

At my work, we have a satellite muzak feed, usually tuned to an AOR channel but occasionally management, in its infinite wisdom, shifts it to the 60's channel. Whoever progammes this channel, though, needs a lesson in remedial music history.  I was there, i know this.

In music history, the sixties did NOT run from 1961 to 1970. The sixties didn't really begin until 1963, when Elvis Presley went into the army (and that was when The Fifties ended) and The Beatles exploded onto the scene -- and that was when the 60's began.

But our programmer seems quite oblivious to this;  thus we get horrors like Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon and Neil Sedaka (the latter being possibly the smarmiest singer it has ever been my misfortune to be subjected to) (and whose song "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen" is close to being a paean to statutory rape) (not that i expect anyone in 1963 understood that) sandwiched between The Animals, The Yardbirds, The Hollies and The Byrds.

It's a truly painful experience....

Spriggsblog Goes To The Movies

Has anyone seen John Hillcoat's post-apocalyptic nightmare vision "The Road" -- Viggo Mortensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Charlize Theron?

 

I watched it last night and although it's not exactly what you'd call light entertainment -- it's unremittingly bleak -- it's quite brilliant.  Viggo Mortensen is superb and although normally i detest child actors, young Master Smit-McPhee, as his son, is very good.  The supporting cast -- Charlize, Robert Duvall, Guy Pearce -- all have very small parts; this film belongs to Viggo & Kodi, and they shine (in a film where there is no sunshine).

 

Very highly recommended.

The Dance Of The Demon Daffodils

I ordered this CD about ten days ago and it just arrived in my mailbox on Friday.  John Kirkpatrick is an English accordeonist who has played on some of my all-time favourite albums by the likes of The Albion Band and Steeleye Span -- purveyors of traditional English folk-rock (one of my favourite types of music).   But this is very different -- it's solo squeezebox music.  Very nice, but not to everyone's taste, perhaps.  (But, as Barbara remarked to me recently, if we all liked the same thing there'd be a world-wide shortage of haggis LOL -- and, as John K. himself sang on an earlier solo album, "here's your harp, welcome to heaven; here's your accordeon, welcome to hell.")