Couple Classical Guitar Pieces I Enjoyed Hearing

The Future Slouches In ...

Saw this in today's paper -- Amazon.com sold more ebooks in the last three months for its Kindle (and other devices that use the software, like iPhones and iPods and such) than it did hardcover books.

Treeware isn't dead, nor do I see it dying any time soon, but the trend toward e-readers is showing a definite rise. And the numbers -- if a hardcover costs $26 and you can get the same content for $14.99 in about a minute from anywhere with wiFi or a phone sig, people can consider the convenience and do the math. Order the hardback, wait three or four days, $26, plus shipping. Run to Costco, get it for $15, plus the drive. Order it online, get it right now, and be able to carry it and a couple thousand others around in my backpack.

Hmm.

I haven't gotten an iPad yet, though it's on my list. But I have downloaded Kindle books to my iPod. Not the ideal choice for a reader, the tiny screen, but since it's on my belt when I'm out, I can sit and read anywhere I have an idle moment.

And oddly enough, the massive sell-through of Apple's iPad -- three million since they came out -- apparently hasn't hurt the Kindle's sales, which have also increased, albeit not as much as Amazon.com hoped. They did drop the price to $189, which certainly helped.

Stand by: The future is lurking just around the corner ...

Slurp Gun

Back when I was learning how to scuba dive, and before I blew out an eardrum and had to quit, I used to read cover-to-cover Skin Diver Magazine. This was in the very early 1960's. The 'zine went -- sorry, got to use this metaphor here -- belly up in 2002, after fifty-one years.

There's an online version, but I don't think it has any connection to the old paper 'zine.

I was always fond of the cartoons drawn by Carl Kohler, "The Fishes." Kohler also did work for some of the car magazines, including being a co-founder of CARtoons. He wrote a column to go along with the toons in SD, and was ever politically-incorrect. I loved his work.

For those of you who don't know, "skin diving" (also called "free diving,") is the general term for using masks and fins and all, but without any breathing gear. You are limited to what you can inhale on the surface. Scuba -- an acronym for self-contained-underwater-breathing-apparatus -- was used to differentiate the two forms of underwater activity. Jacques Cousteau is credited with major improvements in scuba gear, and generally seen as the father of the aqua-lung and modern diving.

Um. Early on, I read an article on how to make your own slurp gun. Which, if you wanted one, you had to do, because there weren't any such things commercially available. Essentially, the device, used for capturing small, and mostly tropical fish, was a large hypodermic syringe.

You got close to an unsuspecting specimen, for which salt water aquarium types might pay a nice piece of change, and you pulled it into the tube, then squirted it into a holding jar.

Back in those days, serious tropical fish collectors had more trouble finding what they wanted, and often, would buy fish by mail and have them shipped from halfway around the world. A diver in Hawaii could snorkel around and collect enough spendy little critters to make a fair living at it. Maintaining a salt water aquarium was expensive, and the fish were only part of the high cost.

I never made the device myself, since in Louisiana, every body of water I ever did any diving in, outside of a swimming pool, was as murky as India ink and full of critters that could maybe eat you -- alligators, gar, and in the Gulf, sharks and barracuda. I felt that a Hawaiian Sling -- a rubber-band powered spear, was more useful in such conditions. A spear gun was better yet.

If you could see your hand at arm's length, that was considered pretty good visibility in some place like False River. I once grabbed a crab-like creature on the bottom in about twenty feet of water -- alas, it got away -- that to this day I am convinced was a trilobite. That would have been a trick, since they've been extinct for two hundred and fifty million years. I'd never heard of such things, but when I described it to somebody, he showed me a picture that looked just like it.

Anyway, you can now buy slurp guns online and at dive shops, so if you are into collecting tropical fish, this post was for you ...

Old Friends

Had lunch yesterday with an old friend passing through town. Guy I've been bumping into for twenty-five years or so, same biz as I, and we even trained together in martial arts for a time.

It was good to see him. He's a likable man -- smart, funny, adept in his work. We aren't really close -- he lives a thousand miles away -- but we exchange the odd phone call or email, see each other now and again. There's a mutual affection and respect.

Sitting outside a fast food place near the interstate, we swapped stories, updated each other, talked about mutual acquaintances we liked or disliked. Nothing major, but it made me realize again that time-in-grade matters. That a history with somebody adds (or sometimes detracts) from a relationship in ways that you don't get in a new friendship. When you've traveled some of the same paths, there is a stipulated aspect to a conversation -- a shared experience that doesn't need to be parsed and explained. Yeah, we remember stuff from a couple decades back because we were both there.

Not to say that new friends aren't as good or better than the old ones; only that, as you can plant a new forest to replace the old growth, the trees aren't the same.

Fiber Optic Knife

Got this link from Nataraj Hauser. I dunno how useful it would be, but it looks cool.

Pistol Packin' People

If you have a valid concealed carry weapons permit in one state, there are other states that offer reciprocity. Somebody has put up a neat little generator here. You put in the state where you have a license to carry and it gives you a quick color-coded map of other states where you can take your hardware. It is possible for a civilian with permits in a couple of states, to travel from the east coast to the west, if you don't mind a crooked route, legally armed with a concealed handgun. And most states will allow you to get a licenses even if you aren't a resident, if you can fulfill the requirements for classes and such.

I don't see the national carry permit in the near future, but if you don't mind the time, money, and effort, you can cover most of the country via the net or snailmail. There are only a couple of states that refuse to issue completely. If you know somebody, you can even get one in California.

Interesting.

Neologistic Sarah

Palin displays her most prominent intellectual talents

Speaking as somebody who has made up words -- I count spetsdöd, holoproj, and spookeyes among 'em -- I have no problem with somebody who deliberately sets out to create new ones. Stephen Colbert's writers have come up with some winners -- "truthiness" comes immediately to mind -- and that one is particularly applicable to the subject at hand.

I speak here, of course, in disrespect to Sarah Palin and her minting of "refudiate."

It seems apparent that she meant either "refute," or "repudiate," so it was a slip of the tongue and not a considered neologism. We all make mistakes and misstatements, of course, but I suspect that most of us aren't angling to be elected to national office.

George Bush the Younger used to be famous for his muddled speech and fumble-mouthed expressions, and maybe that's not the reason he was the worst President since, well, since anybody, but it was always another embarrassing moment when Previous Occupant would stand next to somebody like Tony Blair and suffer by comparison when it came to speakin' the Queen's English ...

Palin, whom long-time readers will recall, does not impress me with her intellectual acumen, epitomizes for me Colbert's "truthiness," which is a conviction that something is true without logic, reason, evidence, or facts, but based on a gut-feeling alone.

Poor Sarah. Her unwed daughter Bristol has apparently reconciled with her baby daddy Levi Johnston, and the two of them are shopping for a reality TV show. Levi has apologized for the, um, unkind words he leveled at his mother-in-law-to-be on national television after the split. In return, Sarah offered a few choice expression about her grandson's father.

You could etch steel plate with what these two bright lights had to say about each other for public consumption, and in private, if you buy any of the insider comments, the language would take out the Justice League, the X-Men, and Spidey before they could blink ...

When you've had an ongoing media argument in which you call each other liars and worse -- after Levi posed nude, Sarah did everything but use the "whore" word in reference to it -- it makes forgiving and forgetting hard, and if insider reports are halfway accurate, Sarah holds mean and everlasting grudges against those who cross her.

Palin hasn't blessed the potential union in public yet, and I can only imagine what Thanksgiving dinner will be like at her place, post-wedding. And here comes the Apocalyptic Turkey and Bile dressing ...

Something about all this reminds me of that episode of The Twilight Zone from so long ago, "It's a Good Life." Dial up the music -- doo-doo-doo-doo -- and watch little Billy Mumy play Anthony, the mutant monster who wishes his created horrors into the cornfield.

Think good thoughts. Or else ...

Moths

Bridge of the Gods, from the western tip of Thunder Island.

Moths -- you can see the foils on the one on its side in the

foreground, and if you zoom in, a couple of the boats planing in the b.g.

Spent a couple days in the Gorge, wherein we got to see the Moth boats race. These are small sailcraft, not much bigger than sailboards, if that, rigged with hydrofoils. Running before the wind, they climb out of the water onto the narrow foils maybe a foot and a half high, and they whiz along like gangbusters.

Where I grew up, sailboats were rare. No room on a bayou to tack about, and not much good for fishing on a pond or small lake. I'm familiar with bateau and pirogues and bass boats, ski boats and other such powered craft. I'd never seen one of these moths before, and it was a hoot to watch. More so, maybe, because of the drama.

Come race time, the wind on the river was too strong, so they delayed it. For like eight hours. It was six p.m. before they started, and even then the wind hadn't died down enough.

The Moths don't do big wind -- only one guy onboard, and not enough weight with him hanging way off the platform to keep the boat from tipping over on the turns when it's gusting to fifty. You could have sailed holding up a hanky between your hands.

Within ten minutes, the power boats working the course had hauled three of the Moths back to shore. Two of them had broken masts and one had lost a hydrofoil. As nearly as I could tell, the sailors, dressed in wetsuits, all fell at least once. Nobody hurt.

But it was fun to sit and watch until the dogs got hungry and started getting frisky.

Listen to Me Now and Hear Me Later ...

Finally got a copy of the audiobook for The Musashi Flex, from Blackstone, via my agent. The unabridged edition -- ten hours, on eight CDs. Kind of amazing that a book a fast reader can essay in a couple hours takes all a work day and overtime to read aloud.

The vox-actor/reader is Joe Barrett, and he does a good job. Dry, clear, and mostly he gets the pronounciation right -- though when I was writing it, I heard "Lazlo" with the European long "aah" sound "Laahz-lo," and he uses the American version with the shorter "a," (as in "lab.")

Interesting to hear your work read aloud, where the emphasis is put, the cadence and all, and that it isn't like you'd do it. I noticed this years ago when I was writing kidvid, how the actors would offer their versions, and I learned pretty quick that if I wanted it a certain way, it was best to write it out phonetically the first time it appeared in a script. I once stuck "Dirisha" into a script as a throwaway name for a character the audience didn't see. It's pronounced "Duh-rish-uh," no accent. The actor read that as "Dee-reesh-ah."

Sometimes in audiobook pre-production, they will call or write and ask about some of the sci fi terms, sometimes not.

Nice cover illo.

Running Out of Names

Daihatsu Naked (Really)

Back in the day, automobile companies tended to name their models, when they bothered, after things I recognized. Animal names -- Impala, Bronco, Cobra, Jaguar, Mustang, Panda, even a Beetle and Spyder. Thunderbird, Firebird, Falcon. Cougar. Viper.

There were ships, places, fish, Indian tribes, plants, weapons, vaporous states of being: Corvettes, El Dorados, Yukons, Stingrays, Barracuda, Apaches, Cherokees, Cutlasses, Javelins. Continentals, Regals, Diplomats, Stealths, Mirages, Shadows, Ghosts, and Phantoms.

Saw one the other day named after a hot pepper: Cayenne. Sad.

Apparently, all the names have been used up. Now, car companies pull them from ... somewhere, and they don't mean anything to anybody. I drove a "Miata" for a long time. Made-up word, doesn't mean anything.

"Lumina?" Or "Alero?" "Reatta, Achieva, Astre, Fiero, Prius?"

Bleh.

(I like the Daihatsu model "Naked," though.)

So, to help them out, I am offering the car companies some real-world names that might more accurately evoke what their cars are really like ...

Squat. Squint. Stubby. Sardine. Guzzler. Impotent. Whiner. Stall. Lemon. Gutless. Shrimp. Turtle. Death-Trap. Misery. Penis Envy. Hopeless. Sissy. Thud. Wiener.

If you are an automobile company executive, please, feel free to use any of these you want. In the interests of truth in advertising and all ...

Great Space

My wife got a service award this morning -- ten years into a project she thought might take as long as three -- and it was held at the Chinese Gardens in downtown Portland.

Lovely place, serene, inviting, beautiful on a bright summer morning. There was food, Chinese musicians playing in the b.g., and the awards, which ran from ten to thirty years, with a few retirees invited back because they left before the ceremony. Company president and directors called the employees up, gave them certificates, shook everybody's hands.

I got some nice pictures. The lotus blossoms were in bloom, and while I usually associate bonsai with Japan and not China, that's where the idea came from originally. Apparently the Chinese term was penzai. There were several beautiful examples of those on display.

Portland has outstanding greenery in general, and world-class Chinese and Japanese gardens. If you get a chance, check them out.

Space: The Final Frontier

My wife's employer has built a new building for their HQ. They've been moved in for a couple of months, and I finally got a chance to take a short tour today.

It's gorgeous, in its way. It's cutting-edge. Lot of glass -- stand next to a window on one wall and you can pretty much see out the windows on the far wall. Open, airy -- well, the windows don't actually open, those have been gone from office buildings for a long time -- higher floors extend a bit past the ones below, plenty of light. Big, multi-story atria here and there.

Most of the work space is communal -- waist-high cubicles, and not offices. The big conference rooms are glass-walled, and while there are meeting rooms with actual walls and doors, they are small -- privacy is not a premium. Walk down a hall, you see what is going on, who is doing what, transparency in operation.

Lights and AC brighten and hum to life on when you enter a room, dim and run slower when you leave it.

Cutting-edge, and green, too -- there's a carpet of plants on the roof, and it uses recycled graywater. There's a kitchen, tables, chairs, the usual, and nearly as much stainless steel throughout as glass. Art on the walls, some of it modern, some of it animated, some of it impressive.

Be a great setting for a science fiction movie. The building is a real showpiece of a work- environment, designed to foster a communal shoulder-to-the-wheel attitude. I suspect it hits all the politically-correct bases, and I also suspect that the techno-mechanico look and feel gets good reviews from younger employees -- wifi, all the bells and whistles, clean, shiny, and efficiently-done. A walkway, underground, takes you to a mall, with food courts and shops, and you never have to go outside.

To me, it felt rather like an operating room in a big hospital after everybody has scrubbed up. Spotlessly clean and perfectly functional, but no warmth to it.

I'd rather work in the Bradbury Building myself ...

Guess that shows I'm getting old. And so glad I don't have to go to an office every day, no matter what its configuration.

Very Superstitious Writings on the Wall

We are a superstitious species, we humans. We believe in all manner of things supernatural, for which no rational, reasoned explanation can be made. (Supposedly, the term is from the Latin, supersisto, which means "to stand in awe [of God]."

We believe in luck, fortune, good and bad, and it is rare to find those among us who do not truck with such things in any way. I think even the atheists have trouble avoiding the little magicks, so prevalent are they. Spilled salt, bread-and-butter, stepping on cracks, black cats and ladders, broken mirrors, not saying aloud the name of the Scottish play, wishing fellow actors broken legs, rabbit's feet --the list of good, bad, and terrible goes on and on. (I always like the lucky rabbit's foot notion. Wasn't lucky for the rabbit, was it? Else you wouldn't have it mummified on your key chain and think about what a civilized species from the stars would think of that one ...)

Ghost, goblins, fairies, the fey. Demons and devils and how best to pray. Witches, warlocks, werewolves and vampires. Friday the 13th, seventh son of a seventh son, cross your fingers, wishbones, picking up pennies. Talismans, four-leaf clovers, touchstones, lucky coins and charms. Crystal scrying, spelling spiders, don't speak of the devil because that will draw him. Blessings, curses, words of power, shazam! Ju-ju, gris-gris, mojo, sharks' teeth, tiki idols and St. Christopher medals. Medicine bags, dream-catchers ...

There are encyclopedias full of these, with more coming into being as technology changes: Good luck to have an airplane's shadow pass over you; bad luck to ignore a Facebook friend request -- I just heard this one.

Don't steal from Pele, bad luck to wear opals -- both of these were started on purpose. The first, to keep tourists from leaving rocks on the bus; the second, by London diamond merchants losing business to the Australian opal dealers ...

Not superstitious? Look around and see if that's true, or the difference is only a matter of degree ...

Terrible, But ...

Okay, I know it's bad form to pour water on a drowning man, but this mash-up of Bale/Gibson is too good not to share. (B.G. -- both men have been recorded melting down. Somebody blended the two recordings together. The original is busy, so this is a mirror. Rated a hard-R for language -- if threats and the f-word bother you, don't watch it. And turn the sound down. Really.)

Experience

I had occasion to hear a well-known spiritual teacher speak recently, a man adept at both medium and message. I found it interesting on several levels. This fellow, who has been in his discipline for sixty years, was a direct student of a world-famous guru who began a movement in this country that has been slowly gathering steam since the 1920s.

It reminded me once again of the difference between feeling something and telling it.

If you are one of the people who have felt a connection with the cosmic all -- been touched by the hand of God -- then you cannot really convey that to anybody who hasn't experienced it directly. You can tell them what it felt like, but words are the map and not the territory. Zen is personal, and it can't really be gotten save by direct contact. All that stuff you know is yours and while you might be able to get people nodding when you tell it, they won't really know it.

And vice-versa.

Lot of people have tried. One of the best explorations and descriptions I've ever found on the subject of cosmic consciousness was by Dr. Richard Maurice Bucke (photo above), who was also the man who coined the term. The book is in the public domain, has been digitized by Google, and can be found here. I find it fairly amazing that this was written in 1901, long before New Age hippies started talking about the colors, man, the colors ...

The world is full of religions that attempt to convey the way to find God. The yogi offers his breathing and his asanas; the Christian minister his Biblical sermon; the Zen master his koan. Maps, all. They can help you to find your way there, but they aren't the there you want.

Even if you were listening to Jesus or Buddha or Mohammad personally, you only got it second-hand. If you were listening to one of their direct disciples, third-hand. A thousand, two thousand years later, you are listening to somebody only distantly related to that original experience. If the guy who did it can't pass it along, how can you expect somebody a millennium away to do it?

And yet, now and again, there is a believer who hears at a far remove the message and somehow internalizes it, makes his his or her own, and gets it. Plenty of sinners, but also the occasional saint.

What are the percentages? Not a clue, but certainly not large. I've met holy people, those who shined with a supernal light most of us don't achieve, and they came out of disciplines that were designed -- in theory -- to get them there, being taught by folks who mostly haven't made it themselves. It does happen, if not very often.

Maybe they are all crazy. Maybe they are deluded. Or maybe they have something real they got because the ground was fertile when the seed was planted.

You can't give somebody your direct experience. You wish you could -- people who have children offer, and suffer from not being able to gift their children the experiences that will help them through their lives. Look, look, here is this perfectly good wheel!

No, thank you, I will invent my own ...

So when it comes to offering your pearls, a lot of folks won't be able to see the value. Nature of life, so it seems.

If you are going to learn or teach, you have to work from what you have. And you need to constantly check yourself, to make sure you aren't as deluded as you probably think most people are about these things. Always the trick, to get the skinny on that one. (You do have to look and take care -- the road to Truth and Knowledge snakes through the plains of Hubris and if you stop to pat yourself on the back about how wise and clever you are, you'll play hell moving on.)

Sing It Funny

Singer/songwriter Ray Stevens (nee Howard Ray Ragsdale, b. 1939) started writing, singing, and recording in the 1950's. He did serious work -- "Everything is Beautiful," in 1970, was a big hit and won him a Grammy, but he is mostly known for what are usually called "novelty songs."

First one of these I can recall came from the late 1950's, "Sergeant Preston of the Yukon," based on the radio, then television drama, about a mountie and his faithful dog, Yukon King -- "On King, on you big husky!"

There was "Ahab the Arab," "Harry the Hairy Ape," "Santa Claus is Watching You," Jeremiah Peabody's Polyunsaturated Quick-Dissovling, Fast-Acting, Pleasant-Tasting Green and Purple Pills." And "Guitarzan." "The Streak," based on the fad of running naked in public, hit #1 on the pop charts in the U.S. and U.K.

He was an A&R guy, country singer, TV star, and while most of his songs were apolitical, he likes Sara Palin -- he wrote and performed "Caribou Barbie," in which he takes potshots at the "liberal media."

I bring this up because I caught "Harry the Hairy Ape," on the radio recently, and had to laugh at the total silliness of it. The gist is, Harry escapes from local zoo and hides in the bushes at the park, where he jumps out and scares passersby. One of these is a near-sighted local DJ who thinks Harry is a rock musician (from his ape-grunts). Don't worry man, the DJ tells Harry, I'mon play your record. Scares Harry so bad he runs back to his cage.

And the lyric: Well, the DJ played Harry's record/

(What record?) Shut up!

It was a hit and he became a star ...

Got to love that total flouting of reality ...

Still at it in his seventies, and while his politics are a bit on the conservative side for me, you have to think he's had a successful career, much of which is based on silly songs. Worked for Roger Miller, and (see below) Weird Al Yankovic --



Worse ways to make a living ...

Polanski Skates

Roman Polanski was freed by the Swiss, who refused to extradite him to the U.S.

As long as he stays there, or in France, the U.S. can't legally touch him. I'd guess he won't be doing any travel to anywhere that is apt to bust him and send him back to California.

I wrote about the case here, and while there are a bunch of folks who will undoubtedly celebrate this as a victory of some kind for the arts, I don't see it that way. He wasn't arrested because he was a bad director, because he was -- and is -- top-of-the-line good at that. He was busted for plying a little girl with booze and ludes and raping her.

Just another example of how the laws are different for the rich than for the poor.

Medical Term

There was a short piece in yesterday's paper on the passing of Denny Moyer (1939-2010), who was, the article allowed, probably the best boxer to ever come out of Portland, Oregon. He was an AAU champ, won three titles as a pro -- beat Sugar Ray Robinson once -- and had a 98-38-4 record.

He died, the article said, of complications from dementia pugilistica.

Now there's a term. Not exactly the same as what Ali has -- that's Post-traumatic Parkinson's -- but grim enough.

Smart Martial Artists

A follow-up to the martial artist post a couple back, regarding what I consider a smart player.

There's an old saying amongst those who fly aeroplanes: "There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." (I also like the hang-glider's saying: "Never fly any higher than you'd like to fall ...")

These sentiments go to pushing the envelope in ventures that already have more inherent risks than sitting in one's easy chair and reading the Sunday paper. Sure, you could die in an earthquake doing that. You could get hit by a bus while you are crossing the street. All life carries some risk, but some activities start with a better chance you'll die if you screw up. You can go base-jumping or solo cave-diving dozens of times without incident, but the odds are more likely that you'll croak doing those than a whole lot of other things. Climb Mt. Everest? Guide, oxygen, everything? One climber in twelve, by count, doesn't survive the trip. Lot of corpsesicles up there in the cold heights.

You like those odds? I don't. I expect most of the climbers who died didn't think they'd be the one of a dozen.

Walk into the local biker bar on Saturday night and allow loudly as how all the gentlemen therein are witless and engaged in incestuous relationships with their mothers? That blows right past "bold" into "plumb stupid" -- unless this is part of a fiendishly-clever plan to kill a particular biker and then somehow make your escape in the confusion. And if you were that clever, you'd probably have come up with a better way to off the guy and spend your remaining time among the living. Like plinking him from five hundred meters with a rifle.

As Rory Miller offers about matters of potentially-crippling or deadly mayhem: "If you can't be absent, run early and run often."-

Can I get an "Amen?" To me, this is just common sense. Nobody can whup up on you if you're not there.

I think a goodly part of martial arts usefulness lies in giving the player a sense of self confidence. Yes, yes, we can argue about reality versus fantasy, what you think you can do versus what you really can, but -- a lot of fights get started because the combatants feel the need to prove something, either to themselves or somebody else. This desire arises often from a feeling of insecurity. A fear that someone will think badly of them, that they will be viewed as cowardly. If you believe -- however rightly or wrongly -- that you can take out the biker bar, then a lot of that insecurity disappears. You don't feel the need to demonstrate something you believe, and it allows you to avoid the event. It's mental more than physical. I don't have anything to prove, and certainly not to this yahoo.

Thinking I can take you out isn't the same as being able to do it, of course, but it might be enough to let me walk away without giving it a go.

It came up in a discussion recently about the placebo effect -- Being brave or pretending to be brave can have the same effect, can't it? (And something else came out of that conversation I hadn't thought about before: Not really any way to do a double-blind study of the placebo effect per se, is there? What do you give somebody instead of a placebo to test it ... ?)

Back to the confidence thing. Having it helps you avoid the choice between walking tall or walking at all, if you aren't worried about being viewed as using a white feather to scratch the yellow streak down your spineless backside. Living well is the best revenge, and living at all beats the option most of the time.

I think the attitude is along the lines of, "Well, if we do this dance, somebody is gonna get seriously hurt. I'd hope it's you, but it might be me, and I'm applying Kenny Rogers from "The Gambler:" You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em/ know when walk away and know when to run ...

Yet -- no matter what any expert tells you, there will be times when running is simply not an option. Two off the top of my head: Somebody comes at you while you are strolling with granny and the toddlers. You can't run until you do something to slow the attacker down below Granny's cruising speed. The slower she is, the more you have to do.

Somebody is assaulting the little girl next door under the rhoddy in your front yard as you step outside to collect the mail? If you run from the first or ignore the second? Doesn't speak well of you, does it?

You might have enough good fortune to never have to deal with such choices. But if you do? Then what?

Is my self-confidence faulty? Maybe. Maybe vitamins don't really make me feel better, I only think I feel better. I'll take that, thank you.

Telstar

In 1962, the British pop group The Tornadoes, released the instrumental "Telstar," named after an AT&T communications satellite orbited to relay radio and television signals. The instrumental, which featured an electronic device, the claveoline, that sounded rather like an anemic roller-rink organ, shot up with a bullet to become number #1 in the U.K. and the first record by a British group to hit #1 on Billboard's Top 100 in the U.S., a precursor of the British Invasion led by the Beatles a couple years later. Other British groups had hits in the U.S., but "Telstar" was the first trickle of the eventual flood from the U.K.

The Telstar satellite was launched in July, and the record hit the stores five weeks later, in August. Fast turnaround in those days.

Written and produced by Joe Meek, who was reportedly tone-deaf, the novelty tune was meant to evoke the new space age, and welcome to the future. Meek, a workaholic producer, tried to turn The Tornadoes into The Shadows, another U.K. group that was hot at the time, and considered the only British group worth listening to, according to John Lennon. The Shadows had a lot of hits in the U.K. and are probably best known in the U.S. for Jørgen Ingmann's cover version of their guitar instrumental, "Apache."

The Tornadoes didn't make it. "Telstar" was the only song the original group had chart in the U.S. though they did have a couple moderate hits in the U.K., and they broke up when the bassist, Heinz Burt, embarked on a solo career. (Meek had fallen in love with Burt, dyed his hair white and tried to make him a rock star, but couldn't pull it off.)

Burt apparently lived with Meek for some years. Meek was in the closet, and Burt always claimed there was no physical relationship between them, and his family denies it -- he married a woman, didn't he?

Vernon Hopkins, who was for a while Tom Jones's bassist, says he didn't know Meek was gay until he saw Burt naked in Meek's bed.

Burt died in 2000 following complications from a stroke.

I thought "Telstar" was the cat's pajamas and the bee's knees when I heard it, that would have been the summer I was mostly fourteen. (I have worked up a fingerstyle version of it on my own guitar I've almost gotten down.)

Joe Meek, who had been a radio engineer in the military and something of an electronics wizard -- he hand-built one of the first TV sets in the country -- was also dyslexic, and prone to depression. (One of his productions for The Tornadoes, "Do You Come Here Often," is touted as the first openly gay record, with a dialog between two queens toward the end of it, following what sounds like a-couples-only-skate number at the roller rink.)

Meek was sued by a French composer, Jean Ledrut, for stealing the tune for "Telstar," and royalties were tied up. The suit ended with the judges deciding there was no intentional plagiarism, but that those four bars did seem the same. Ledrut got 8500 quid. But by then, Meek had been dead for a year.

When the Beatles came along and rock music changed, Meek was unable to keep the hits coming. He did produce "Have I the Right?" by the Honeycombs, a one-hit-wonder group known for having a girl drummer. After he was arrested while "cottaging," a term used for secret trysts by the gay community, his reputation suffered.

In February, 1967, after an argument with his landlady, he took a shotgun owned by Heinz Burt, murdered the landlady, then killed himself.

It was the eighth anniversary of the death of Buddy Holly, one of Meek's musical heroes. Bad day to ask for the rent, apparently.

Couple years back, somebody did a movie about his life, Telstar: The Joe Meek Story.

Instrumentals rarely make it to the top of the Billboard pop charts. In fifty-odd years among thousands of songs, only nineteen instrumentals have hit #1:

Billboard Hot 100 #1

• "The Happy Organ" – Dave "Baby" Cortez (1959)
• "Sleep Walk" – Santo & Johnny (1959)
• "Theme from A Summer Place" – Percy Faith (1960)
• "Calcutta" – Lawrence Welk (1961)
• "Wonderland by Night" – Bert Kaempfert (1961)
• "Stranger on the Shore" – Mr. Acker Bilk (1962)
• "The Stripper - David Rose And His Orchestra (1962)
• "Telstar" – Tornados (1962)
• "L'amour est bleu" ("Love Is Blue") – Paul Mauriat (1968)
• "Grazing in the Grass" – Hugh Masekela (1968)
• "Love Theme from Romeo & Juliet" – Henry Mancini & His Orchestra (1969)
• "Frankenstein" – Edgar Winter Group (1973)
• "Love's Theme" – Love Unlimited Orchestra (1974)
• "Theme from 'S.W.A.T.'" – Rhythm Heritage (1976)
• "A Fifth of Beethoven" – Walter Murphy" (1976)
• "Star Wars Theme/Cantina Band" – Meco" (1977)
• "Rise" – Herb Alpert (1979)
• "Chariots of Fire - Titles" – Vangelis (1982)
• "Miami Vice Theme" – Jan Hammer (1985)

Billboard Top 20 Instrumentals

• "In the Mood" – Ernie Fields Orchestra (1959) #4
• "Green Onions" – Booker T. & the MGs (1962) #3
• "Out of Limits" – The Marketts (1964) #3
• "A Taste of Honey" – Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass (1965) #7
• "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" – Hugo Montenegro (1968) #2
• "The Horse" – Cliff Nobles (1968) #2
• "Classical Gas" – Mason Williams (1968) #2
• "Soulful Strut" – Young-Holt Unlimited (1969) #3
• "Hawaii Five-O" – Ventures (1969) #4
• "Hang 'Em High" – Booker T. & the MGs (1969) #9
• "Time Is Tight" – Booker T. & the MGs (1969) #6
• "Theme from Love Story" – Andy Williams (1971) #9
• "Theme from Love Story" – Henry Mancini (1971) #13
• "Scorpio" – Dennis Coffey (1971) #6
• "Joy" – Apollo 100 (1972) #6
• "Outa-Space" – Billy Preston (1972) #2
• "Popcorn" – Hot Butter (1972) #9
• "Dueling Banjos (Theme from Deliverance)" – Eric Weissberg & Steve Mandell (1973) #2
• "Also Sprach Zarathustra" – Deodato (1973) #2
• "Hocus Pocus" - Focus (1973) #9
• "The Entertainer" – Marvin Hamlisch (1974) #3
• "Tubular Bells" (Theme from The Exorcist) – Mike Oldfield (1974) #7
• "Rockford Files" – Mike Post (1975) #10
• "Nadia's Theme (The Young And The Restless)" – Perry Botkin, Jr. (1976) #8
• "Theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind" – John Williams (1978) #13
• "Feels So Good" – Chuck Mangione (1978) #4
• "Music Box Dancer" – Frank Mills (1979) #3
• "Theme from Hill Street Blues" – Mike Post Featuring Larry Carlton (1981) #10
• "Hooked on Classics" – Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (1982) #10
• "Axel F" – Harold Faltermeyer (1985) #3
• "Love Theme from St. Elmo's Fire" – David Foster (1985) #15
• "Songbird" – Kenny G (1987) #4
• "(Theme from) Mission Impossible" – Adam Clayton & Larry Mullen (1996) #8
• "Sandstorm" – Darude (2000) #15