Author: Dick

“I guess you wonder why I called you all here today.”

BARNEY: I’ll take a few questions now.

Q: Mr. First Dog, Rex from Dog World. First off, I would like to know your thoughts looking back on the incident in which you allegedly urinated on Tony Blair’s leg? Was there anything you would have done differently? Also, are you worried that an English dog might urinate on Mr. Bush’s leg in retaliation?

BARNEY: I can’t think of a thing I would do different. As for some dog ever trying to pee on the president’s leg, all I can say is bring ’em on.

Q: Mr. First Dog, Fido from Caninipolitan. What do you have to say to your critics who say you shouldn’t lick yourself in public?

BARNEY: Well, let me ask you this Fido. Do you think it’s improper for you as a dog to lick yourself in public?

Q: With all due respect, sir, I’m not the First Dog. And I am the one asking the question. So it’s not about me. It’s about you.

BARNEY: Okay, so it’s all about me. Hit me in the head with a newspaper! I think that because I am the First Dog, that it gives me the power to lick wherever or whatever I want.

Q: What if you licked a frozen light pole?

BARNEY: (inaudible)

WHITE HOUSE: That’s it. Thank you all for coming.

This is not The Range. I don’t know who these guys are.
I just needed a photo and I found this one.

Last year when I was a bludding bogger, er make that, blodding bugger … Oh hell, you know what I am trying to say. When I started this blog last year I was living temporarily where I am again staying, which is in Allen, a suburb just north of Dallas. One of several positive aspects of returning to North Central Texas is the chance to enjoy once more, a very good radio station that I first wrote about in May 2005. That station is KHYI-FM 95.3 (The Range.) So good is The Range that I have added it to the select company of radio stations listed on my blogroll links, to the right.

The station, which calls home Howe/Plano/Dallas-Fort Worth, bills itself as “hard country” but is also often identified as an Americana station. I admit to being a fan of both. As Joshua Jones, sales vice president for the station, says on the KHYI Web site:

“The Country Music Industry had alienated so many fans by the “Great Garth Cloning Experiment of the 90’s,” that The Range seemed like a breath of fresh air. KHYI brought many listeners back to Country Radio.”

Amen to that and then some.

Actually, country music had taken some wrong turns way before and way after the 90s. So much of what I hear on mainstream C & W stations these days is what I consider pure, unadulterated crap. I thus have long preferred the older country and western performers of the Hank Williams/George Jones/Merle Haggard/Johnny Cash/Marty Robbins and so forth ilk.

Certain musicians in recent years often teetered on the edge of being country but might have been closer to being folk than country. John Prine (“Your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore/They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war.”)comes to mind. Thus when I was sleeping one night, I woke up and there was a new genre known as Americana.

The Range mixes both hard country and Americana very effectively. Sometimes they may even throw in a little blues, or God forbid, rock and roll. And I happen to like all such types of music. I have also discovered some new (new to me) artists that I would probably never heard otherwise were it not for The Range. This is not to say that I like everything they play. They sometimes spin some crappy records of all kinds but I have yet to see a radio station that does not play some music that I dislike. Just to display an idea of the station’s diverse music, consider The Range’s Top Ten this week:

10. Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Page: Rock n’ Roll

9. Johnny Cash: Loves Been Good to Me

8. Chip Taylor: Bippity Boo

7. Lost Immigrants: Judgement Day

6. Trent Summar: Horseshoes and Handgrenades

5. Corb Lund: Trouble in the Country

4. Ray Wylie Hubbard: Rabbit

3. Solomon Burke: Aint Got You

2. Todd Snider: Looking For a Job

AND THE #1 SONG IS………………………………………………………………..

1. Chris Knight: Enough Rope

I would call that eclectic.

The deejays at The Range sound like those of the smaller towns whom I have always found to be one of the more charming aspects of commercial radio. The production is not slick and polished. It makes you think that these people playing the discs are really people and not a machine playing a recording from some high-rise in Manhattan. Why their discs even skip from time-to-time. While that is annoying, it also better than listening to the absurdity of radio detritus such as Walton and Johnson.

Apparently, The Range seems to do well attracting Internet listeners as well as those from the Metromess area. Hopefully more will listen both to the radio and the Internet. I also hope that, for however long I have to stay in this area, that The Range will continue playing its great mix of music that I like.

Awhile back, I promised — to no particular person — that I would look up the origin of “the willies.” I thought it might be interesting to sit down sometime and find out what led the first person to say: “That _____ gives me the willies.” Well, interesting as that might be, I never found out who was the first person to utter those words. But I did unearth a few tidbits.

Before any discussion as to the etymology of “the willies,” one must first define what “it” is. Bill Clinton led the discussion last time and I don’t think we arrived at an answer. But the meaning of the “willies” is, according to “The American Heritage Dictionary:”

PLURAL NOUN: Slang Feelings of uneasiness. Often used with the: The dark, dank cave gave me the willies.

Me too. Dank, in and of itself, gives me the willies just writing it.

The sources I checked out, all one of them, were pretty unanimous in their contention that the origin of “the willies” is not known. However, “The Word Detective” said one dictionary traces “the willies” to:

” … the slang expression “willie-boy,” meaning “sissy” — presumably the sort who would be prone to the “willies.”

Hmm, from obscure to abstruse to downright enigmatic.

The passage went on to say:

“The ‘willies’ in the ballet (‘Giselle’) take their name from the Serbo-Croatian word ‘vila’ (in English, ‘wili’ or ‘willi’) meaning a wood-nymph or fairy, usually the spirit of a betrothed girl who died after being jilted by her lover.”

Thus, the writer deduced that spirit “willi” became the “willies,” or feeling that something weird is happening.

That certainly sounds logical to me. I thought that it might have something to do with Willie Nelson, but I don’t know for certain whether he’s ever been to the Balkans. So, case closed.

Taco Bell did not purposely poison diners with E. coli. We apologize for the error.

No, no, wait! The above is not an apology because I never said anything about Taco Bell and a connection with E. coli. But a lot of people ARE heading for the border.

Actually, I corrected the headline that I wrote today. The headline has been corrected, I think. If not, sorry about that. I tried. Or in the words of the poet, Merle Haggard: “That leaves only me to blame ’cause Mama tried.”

Note from the proprietor: The lovely tacos above are courtesy of Jane M. Sawyer who graciously shared her photos on morguefile.com. I doubt that they are tainted either though I am not a U.S.D.A. inspector, so what do I know? Anyway, thanks Jane.

(Foreground)Mr. Mailer, left, explains to Mr.Daemon how to return e-mail to senders thus driving users insane.

Saturday evening a couple of friends and I decided to watch on TV the 2004 thriller “The Bourne Supremacy.” One of my friends made some remark about Harrison Ford playing Jack Ryan, the CIA officer character, in movies based on Tom Clancy’s novels. Keep with me, the two sentences are related.

I remarked at the time, erroneously I later realized, that the guy playing Jason Bourne in the movie we were watching and someone whose name I could not recall at that time (we had a few drinks earlier) also played Jack Ryan in “The Sum of All Fears.” Initially, I even thought “The Bourne Supremacy” was “The Sum of All Fears.” (See parenthetical remark above)I quickly realized, however, that the movie we were watching was “The Bourne Supremacy,” which I saw when it was first released.

As for “The Sum of All Fears,” I had not seen the movie in its entirety. I watched about the first 20 minutes of the film in a 99-cent movie theater in Waco, Texas, until the film broke and that was that. Later, I had seen most of the remaining parts of that movie.

By Sunday, I still could not remember the name of the actor playing Jason Bourne, not that the inability to recall his name consumed me all day. But the name returned in an instant last night while watching David Letterman, who was talking to his guest, Matt Damon. (forehead slap) I did a Google search this morning which led to my remembering that it was Ben Affleck who played Jack Ryan in “The Sum of All Fears.” I’m glad we have that settled.

So the obvious question is: “Is Matt Damon related to Mailer-Daemon?” Or, “To whom is that question obvious?” I thought about the name homonymity when an e-mail I sent out yesterday morning was returned and marked “Mailer-Daemon.” Oddly enough, I thought about Matt Damon’s name but didn’t think about it at the time that he was the actor whose name I could not remember for two days. So the obvious question is: “Have I lost my mind completely?”

I remember seeing a “Pearls Before Swine” comic strip in which Pig had struck up e-mail correspondence with a new pen pal. Apparently Pig had figured the new acquaintance must have really liked him because he had sent him so much e-mail. The strip’s Rat, asked Pig the name of his new friend and the clueless Pig answered: “Mailer-Daemon.”

So the obvious question is: “Who is Mailer-Daemon?” Perhaps more obvious a question than previous questions assumed to be obvious. Well, I did a quick search on the Internets (invented by Al Gore and made famous by Gee Dubya Bush) and found this explanation from Webopedia:

“Daemon. Pronounced DEE-mun or DAY-mun. A process that runs in the background and performs a specified operation at predefined times or in response to certain events … Typical daemon processes include print spoolers, e-mail handlers, and other programs that perform administrative tasks for the operating system. The term comes from Greek mythology, where daemons were guardian spirits.”

Mailer must come from the e-mail tasks for the OS. Maybe? Probably? It’s named in honor of Norman Mailer, who wrote “The Executioner’s Song” about Gary Gilmore? No, it can’t be.

Okay, then the obvious is question (give it a rest will you?) is: “If it a guardian spirit, why is it returning my e-mail undelivered?” And, “Why do I confuse Ben Affleck and Matt Daemon?

On the first obvious question, I have no answer. As for the second, it might be that Affleck and Daemon were best friends and co-wrote “Good Will Hunting.” It might be that or it might just be that I am a very confused person. Chances are the latter would be the obvious question. That is, if it was a question at all. Ohhh, I think I’m getting a headache.