Don Boing: Beneath the Music

I was going through my archives and came across the following, which began life as a column in Micro Publishing News before I expanded it. It needs work, but I still think it's pretty funny.

Don Boing: Beneath the Music

This month, Loss Leader Music Ltd. will release “Any Kind of Pain: The Don Boing Anthology,” a six-disc collection of alternative takes, lost recordings, and the greatest hit of the seminal folk-rock singer/guitarist/songwriter/plumber, whose albeit brief career renaissance in the late 1980s came about completely in spite of his exploring new musical technologies. In a music career that has spanned nearly 30 years—give or take a few—Don Boing has seen it all: the dizzying highs, the crushing lows, the humdrum middles. He’s had to fight to make the music he wanted to make, and in the process has been caught in battles with bandmates, embroiled in lawsuits, crippled by contractual disputes, and menaced by otters.

Donald Quincy Ezekiel Boing—pronounced like the aircraft manufacturer, not the silly noise—was born in London in 1940, and again three years later in Los Angeles. Music critics have for years been unable to explain this, but one thing remains clear: Boing was born to play and sing music. Or something. In fact, it is believed that he was even heard humming while still in utero, but such a story may in fact be apocryphal, if not downright silly.

Boing first started playing guitar at the tender age of 33. In interviews, he has said that it was Dylan’s Self Portrait album that first made him want to write songs. He also credits first hearing Paul McCartney & Wings as further cementing his desire to make music. “McCartney has influenced so many musicians,” Boing once said. “I suppose it’s no surprise that I wasn’t any different. The way his bass guitar works with the drums to form a basic rhythm underneath Denny Laine’s guitar playing—brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. That’s why McCartney was hailed as a genius.”

In 1973, he quit his career as a successful plumber and moved to Greenwich Village where he began playing acoustic guitar in subway stations. After only 20 minutes, he was beat up and his guitar stolen. The “Anthology” opens with a home recording he made shortly after the incident. “Bleeding From the Ears” has the raw, pained vocal that would become Boing’s hallmark.

He played this recording to Burton Splunge, the owner of Loss Leader Records, whom he met one afternoon while unclogging Splunge’s sink. Loss Leader, many years from becoming the industry juggernaut it is today, was at that time a small, independent record label whose biggest act was Arthur Hoover and the Vacu-Tones, a four-piece band in which each member played some configuration of vacuum cleaner. Although the Vacu-Tones had a small cult following (they had the number one selling album among the deaf), Splunge had no illusions that they were destined for mainstream commercial success, and he saw in Boing the opportunity to hit it big, or at the very least keep the electric company from turning his power off.

So in 1974, Boing’s debut album—“In Love with Leeches”—was released to almost complete disinterest. In retrospect, Splunge believes that it was simply a question of timing. “1974 was not a year for angst-ridden folk music,” Splunge writes in the liner notes to “The Don Boing Anthology.” “It was really a time for angst-ridden art rock. Had ‘In Love with Leeches’ come out three years earlier, this Anthology would probably be twice as long as it is now. So consider yourself lucky.”

One song from “In Love with Leeches”—the up-tempo folk-rock track “Eating Lumber”—made a slight impression on the underground music scene. The song’s comparisons to Big Star led Alex Chilton to remark, “What? You’re kidding, right?” Actually, it turned out that everybody was, and the song soon sank without a trace. It appears on “The Don Boing Anthology” in three different versions, the original all-acoustic demo, the full-band version, and a version that Boing sang with his mouth stuffed with spaghetti.

It was at that point that Splunge had a brainstorm. Going over the sales figures for both “In Love with Leeches” and “That Which Sucks Merely Blows from the Opposite Direction,” the most recent Vacu-Tones release, as well as what it cost to put out two separate records by different artists, he hit upon the idea of merging the raw folk sound of Boing with the “quasi-techno” sound of Hoover’s Vacu-Tones. The only roadblock was Arthur Hoover himself, but since he was actually only a department store mannequin, he was easily deposed as leader of the group. (Hoover ended up in San Francisco and went on to record several albums for Ralph Records in the late ’70s.)

Discs 1 and 2 of “The Don Boing Anthology” highlight Boing’s work with the Vacu-Tones, including the first fruits of that collaboration, 1974’s “Coat Me With an Ointment,” perhaps the best melding of Boing’s stark vocal and gentle acoustic guitar with the high-pitched whine of industrial vacuum cleaners. It was reminiscent of the drone experiments of the Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed himself was heard to remark, after having heard it, ”What the hell was that?”

The highlight of the “Anthology,” for Vacu-Tones fans, is the extended excerpt from the long-lost “second” album (it was actually their fifth). Recorded in 1974, it was very much a product of its time, that time being 11:58 p.m. on December 17, 1974. The 45-minute album was written, performed, and recorded in 36 minutes, no mean feat, yet was deemed by Splunge to be “far too wretched to be released.” Missing for nearly 25 years, the original tapes surfaced in 1998 when Splunge cleaned out his garage and found them stuffed inside a moosehead.

The centerpiece of the ill-fated album, which appears on Disc 2 of the “Anthology,” is what is believed to be Boing’s first—and mercifully last—attempt at a rock opera, “A Quack One.” The basic plot is convoluted and most of the time is completely incomprehensible, which puts it on the same level as most rock operas. It appears to be about one woman’s quest for the perfect duck—whether for food or amorous reasons is never really made clear. What is important about “A Quack One” is that if you listen to the CD version of the song closely and keep an eye on the counter, at 9:34 you can hear in the background the sound of a Xerox 6500 color copier, which had been introduced a year earlier. Coupled with the repeated refrain “Color my world/I’m so much older/Color my world/How much is toner?” it marks the first appearance in Boing’s work of modern technology, which Boing sought to use more of in his recordings.

This caused tension between Boing and the other Vacu-Tones. Where they were content to build on their by-now outdated vacuum cleaner technology, Boing wanted a more contemporary sound. In particular, he wanted to incorporate keyboards into the Vacu-Tones’ sound.

“Two years ago, IBM introduced a self-correcting version of its Selectric typewriter,” said Boing in a 1975 interview for Rolling Stone magazine, “and it just sounds terrific. Redactron recently came out with a cassette-based word processor which, with a little vibrato dropped onto it, sounds fantastic, especially at 75 words per minute. Multi-terminal video editing systems are coming out—my goal is to start building our new sound around these new technologies.”

So without consulting the other members of the band—or even Splunge—Boing hired three keyboardists from the Loss Leader steno pool, and began work on a new Vacu-Tones album—without any of the Vacu-Tones invited to play on it.

So in mid-1975, the original Vacu-Tones officially left the band, and a long legal battle was to ensue.

“We were the original Vacu-Tones, we had been using that name before we ever heard of Don %@!$#%& Boing,” said bass Hooverist Melman Sklenko in a 1978 interview in American Lawyer magazine. “And we thought that everyone associated the name Vacu-Tones with commercially unviable, tedious, appliance-based industrial noise. So we sued to force Boing to have to keep recording under the name The Vacu-Tones.”

“That whole period in the mid-70s when all the Vacu-Tones were suing Boing, what a nightmare that was,” Splunge’s liner notes explain. “It was a real firefight. I accidentally walked into what I thought was an empty office and was hit by a flying lawsuit. It cost me 10 grand in legal expenses just to walk out of the room.”

All the lawsuits, however, eventually petered out into nothingness when it was discovered that none of the attorneys hired by the Vacu-Tones had ever passed the Bar.

To which Splunge quips, “I don’t doubt for a minute that they ever passed a bar. I’m sure they strode up to and drank lustily from each and every one of them.”

His past behind him and full of new ideas and approaches to music, Boing took the tapes of the album-in-progress and embarked on a solo career, his intention being to release it as his first post-Vacu-Tones solo album. But it was then that tragedy struck.

Among Boing’s many problems in the mid- to late 1970s—such as chronic insomnia and his habit of talking to squirrels—was his increasing drug use. Thus his first solo contract with Loss Leader Records was signed while under the influence of allergy medication, which could account for some of its bizarre clauses, such as Boing’s forfeiting any share of the earnings from his albums, being placed on a fixed hourly wage of $2.50, and agreeing to have his mouth filled in with cement. Even more seriously, one of the terms of his contract was that he not actually record a single note for 10 years.

By the time his contract was up in 1987, a lot had happened in music—disco, punk, new wave, Donny and Marie, even a Boston album. Fortunately, Boing had missed all of it, another clause in his contract requiring him to be exiled to a small tropical island in the South Pacific. While there, he befriended the only other occupant of the island, who ran a copy shop and office supply store. This chance meeting would reflect itself in the music Boing would attempt to make when his contract was up and he was allowed to return to civilization. For, as there were no actual customers on the island, Boing was given free rein to play with the shop’s equipment. In particular, Boing was captivated by first the IBM PC keyboard in 1981 and the Apple Macintosh keyboard, introduced in 1984.

“And with the mouse,” said Boing in an 1992 interview for Sheet Metal Worker magazine, “you can get a great maraca sound, especially with the three-button variety.”

“I always wanted to have the latest and the greatest copying, imaging, and desktop publishing equipment,” writes Wendell Xavier Glubb, sole proprietor of Desert Island Copies, in the “Anthology”’s notes. “After all, you never know when an ocean liner or cruise ship—maybe even an oil tanker—is going to come by and need copies or maybe even color graphics for a presentation. Personally, I think our strategy of catering to the passing ocean liner market was a sound one. And I continue to stand by it.” Nevertheless, Glubb’s advertising and marketing strategy of spelling out “Copies 10¢” in the sand with coconuts did not meet with resounding success.
Glubb eagerly began to collaborate with Boing, and confessed to being happy to have someone to talk to and have something to do with his time other than, as he put it, “xeroxing toucans.”

Disc 4 of the “Anthology” highlights some of the material that Boing recorded with Glubb on the island. He got around his contractual no-record clause by simply writing down what he wanted Glubb to play, and having Glubb do the actual playing and recording. Thus it was that Boing’s vision was realized while also not recording a single note himself. It was crafty and, as the selections on Disc 4 show, utterly pointless.

The rest of the “desert island tapes” were sadly lost, and in a controversial manner that still rankles Boing today.

“Around 1986 I was looking for the material we had recorded,” recalls Boing, “and discovered half the tapes were gone. I confronted Glubb, who said that they had been carried off by a pack of roving tortoises.”

It was eventually learned that, short of food during the 1985 monsoon season, Glubb ate the tapes.

In 1987, Boing was clean and sober and glad to finally get off the island. “Glubb ate my tapes!” Boing said in a 1988 interview for Printing News magazine. “The greater part of 10 years’ work—down his gullet. What I was able to recover was completely unsalvageable.” And the less said about that the better.

Boing promptly signed a proper contract with Loss Leader, and decided to try to work with the material he had recorded with the Loss Leader typing pool before his exile. But, alas, those recordings had also been destroyed.

“I’m to blame for that mess,” Splunge confesses in the “Anthology”’s liner notes. “I was in the studio late one night in 1981, and the radio was on. There was this song I really liked at the time—I can’t remember what it was called or who it was by, but it had something to do with cars, and it had this cool synth sound. I really loved it, and I couldn’t at that time afford to buy the record, so I kept waiting for the radio to play it so I could tape it. Well, it came on, and I discovered to my horror that I didn’t have any blank tape. All I could grab in time was what was lying around, which happened to be Don’s album. I really only intended to record—what?—a mere three minutes right up front, but the phone rang, it was my divorce attorney, and by the time I got back to the studio, the tape had been completely recorded over.”

Splunge never told Boing what really happened, opting instead to blame it on a fire in the studio.

“It was certainly more convincing than roving tortoises,” writes Splunge. “But when he reads this and finds out the truth, he’s probably going to kill me.”

Discouraged that more than 10 years of work had been destroyed, Boing turned to drink, spending all his days and nights in a Nyquil-induced haze. After three days, he picked himself up, and checked himself into the Betty Ford Clinic.

“Unfortunately,” writes Splunge, “he was so out of it at that time he couldn’t see straight, and actually moved into the Bethany Ford Automotive Service Center in Peekskill, NY.”

Peculiar stares from the mechanics aside, Boing was able to dry out, and found that he had the clearest sinuses he’d ever had. Completely energized, he immediately charged back into the studio and in one marathon session wrote, rehearsed, recorded, turned on the equipment, recorded, accidentally erased, re-recorded, and mixed his first actual album in more than 15 years—“Liquid Sponge.” In a complete about face, Boing dispensed completely with the sounds of household appliances and office equipment, relying instead on traditional folk-rock instrumentation, most prominently his guitar. After hearing a test pressing of the album Burton Splunge was heard to remark, “Holy shit—it’s listenable.”

Working with noted session musicians Boing had found loitering at the bus station, he included them on the hard-rocking “Pelted with Scones,” a track that was played heavily on alternative and college radio stations in fall 1988. The lyrics were the most personal he’d ever written: “I walk down the street and see through my bones/I often find myself pelted with scones/No no, no more muffins for me/I can see there’s something forming.”

An important song in the oeuvre of Don Boing, Disc 5 consists entirely of alternate takes of “Pelted with Scones.” The first five versions were recorded by Boing at home a capella in the shower. Versions six through 10 show Boing experimenting with different instrumentation, from electric guitar, to flute, to flugelhorn, to accordion, to bagpipes. Versions 11 through 15 show Boing settling on electric guitar and actually learning the chords to it. Version 16 features Boing backed by the London Symphony Orchestra, a take that Boing eventually discarded as sounding “too lush.” Version 17 is the version that was released as a single in Zimbabwe, while the remaining 10 tracks are the various live versions he performed over the years, including one “special version” he sang to his cat.

High on the success of “Pelted by Scones” as well the album, Boing hit the road and went on his first concert tour—ever, really. He took with him his backing musicians and, in a bit of self-deprecating humor, christened the road band “Don Boing and the Roving Tortoises.”

Splunge describes the tour, for which he was recruited as road manager. “I had the brilliant idea of saving money by simply playing at bus stations,” he writes. “That way, we can take a commercial bus line—which is cheaper than chartering our own—and we can avoid travel expenses to a particular venue. All things considered, it worked out great. Except when we tried to go overseas.”

Boing’s tour of bus stations around the country was deemed to be a success, and Boing and company were buoyed by the large crowds that would turn up.

“I didn’t think we had a big following,” admitted Boing in a 1992 interview in Bus Driver magazine. “But the crowds that were turning up were phenomenal. I remember one show—it was on a Friday night before Labor Day, the place was packed. Definitely standing room only.”

Toward the end of the tour of the 48 contiguous states, Splunge decided to try to send Boing and the Roving Tortoises overseas, and several dates were booked at the Budokan in Japan. But the tour would never get that far, and again tragedy would strike Boing’s career.

The first overseas stop was, Splunge later admitted, “a complete miscalculation. Somehow, we never purged our database, and this place was still in it.” It turned out that Boing’s first overseas concert was on the same virtually deserted island he had only recently left.

“Why we were sent there, I have no idea,” said Boing in a 1994 interview in Aircraft Machinery News magazine. We had no fan base there at all. The only one there was Glubb, and he hated rock music and left after the first song. We ended up playing to a family of otters.”

The Roving Tortoises’ bass player, Bonzy Carmichael, grew increasingly frustrated at having only a small, fur-bearing audience, and stormed off the stage. The rest of the band, too, didn’t see the point in continuing. Unfortunately, that set off a riot among the otters, who wanted to see the rest of the set. The otters charged the stage, and a bloody fight ensued. When it was over, Eddy Clankenboomer, the drummer, was dead. The rest of the tour was cancelled, and Boing and Co. returned to the States in defeat.

“If only…” Splunge would lament in a 1990 interview in Pig Farmer magazine. “The tour was going great. The domestic leg couldn’t have gone any smoother. But, we did one foreign date, the drummer was killed by otters, and it just fell apart. I blame myself, I should have known that a deserted tropical island is no place for a rock band.”

Several live recordings from the domestic tour appear on Disc 5 of the “Anthology.” Splunge regrets the poor sound quality of most of the live recordings.

“Loss Leader at that time did not have a mobile recording unit,” Splunge writes in the “Anthology”’s notes, “nor were we able to make any soundboard recordings. Basically, we had a guy standing at the back with a Dictaphone. We had to reuse some microcassettes, which is why if you listen to the quiet songs closely—like ‘Call Me Moist’ or ‘Slivers of Yams’—you can actually hear someone dictating a letter.”
Boing retired from music after the ill-fated tour and turned to acting. He has appeared on many television programs over the years, primarily crime dramas.

“Basically, whenever a cop show needs someone to play a dead body, they give me a call,” says Boing proudly.

The finest testament to his acting ability was his appearance as a dismembered corpse in an episode of “Law and Order.”

The final disc of “The Don Boing Anthology” comprises various home recordings Boing made over the years, such as demos of songs that were never recorded, spoken-word poetry, himself typing long letters, and various answering machine messages he has recorded over the years.

“The Don Boing Anthology” was digitally recorded, then immediately erased and re-recorded on Burton Splunge’s voice mail.

Thursday Thousand

I have decided, after gradually becoming more and more dissatisfied (to put it politely) with my "chosen" career path over the past couple of years, to put more of a focus on my creative writing, which I should have done 10 years ago. Anyway, it's all water under the bridge that you can use to make lemonade (or however those cliches go).

Thus, I will be using this blog more and more to try out ideas and experiments--some will be good, some will be bad, but the effort and the discipline will do me good. It may also be entertaining, at any rate. Hopefully I will keep it up...

The centerpoint will be what I will refer to as the "Thursday Thousand"--that, regardless of what nuisances happen during the week, I will write a 1,000-word story and post it here. And below is the first entry, inspired by a short story writing contest in the December issue of Writers Digest magazine, whose prompt is, "A dairy worker develops the uncanny ability to communicate with livestock." I missed the contest deadline (but perhaps that's a good thing) but it was a fun exercise.

This is by no means a final draft and is more or less a quick "stream consciousness," written in roughly the amount of time it took to type it, with minimal (or no) editing and revision, save for the correcting of typos. Enjoy!

Bossy

I was awakened suddenly by the insistent ringing of the phone. My wife reached over and slurred a groggy greeting, then I felt her jab me in the small of the back with the stiff plastic antenna of the cordless handset.

“It’s for you,” she said. “It’s the cow again.”

I sighed and grabbed the handset.

“What?” I demanded. Yes, as I suspected, it was the usual complaint. “I know the barn is cold. That’s because you always leave the door open. What…were you born in a barn?”

I then got an earful.

“It was a rhetorical question,” I rejoined. “Put on a sweater if you’re cold."

“Or a leather jacket,” I heard my wife mumble.

I hung up abruptly and went back to sleep.


Let me explain. It was only a couple of years ago. I had been working on Wall Street as an investment banker and, not to brag, but I had made rather a killing and, it being one of your more stressful jobs, decided to get out before it killed me. Helen and I drove around upstate at random one spring afternoon and found an old dairy farm for sale. I knew then that I had to have it.

“Honey,” my wife reminded me, “you have never been on a farm in your life. You don’t know anything about farming.”

“Mankind has been farming for millennia. How hard could it be?”

This tended to be my attitude going into any new endeavor and it had always stood me in good stead. Call it the power of positive thinking, if you’re into that kind of thing, but I’ve always found that you really can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it and do enough research.

So within a month, we had left New York City and were ensconced in a pleasant rural paradise only a few hundred feet away from a half dozen cows.

“Have you ever milked a cow?” my wife asked me over our first dinner in the new farm. It wasn’t a beef dish, I hasten to add.

“Of course not.” I said. “But I’ve seen it done and About.com describes the process fairly clearly.”

“Oh, this is going to go well.”

“Besides, I’m sure the cows will tell me if I’m doing it wrong.”

She looked at me oddly. She was used to my blithely ignoring whatever obstacles may exist in whatever path I was set down, but this seemed to flummox even her.

“What do you mean, ‘the cows will tell you’? Are you Dr. Doolittle all of a sudden?”

“Well, I don’t mean in English. I imagine they’ll moo a bit.”

She shrugged and focused intently on her lamb chop.


The next morning, I awoke, if not with the chickens, then certainly with the cows, who were waiting for me. I had my archetypal wooden stool and galvanized bucket, and sat myself down and grabbed a handful of udder. I had seen some videos online of how this was done and thought I was doing it correctly. The only fly in the ointment was that no milk was coming out.

“What do you think you’re doing?” came a voice from above me.

I looked around, and there was no one there. There was just the cow, which animal was indeed the source of the voice. She was looking at me with a bemused expression.

“Honestly, you city folk,” she said.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked.

She then talked me through the process very carefully and clearly and in a short while had dispensed a decent quantity of milk.

“Thank you,” I said. “I am much obliged.”

“Can I go out now? I’m starving and the grass smells good this morning.”

“Hum,” I said. “Don’t you all usually amble out together once I’ve milked everyone?”

“Oh, why be a slave to routine?” she said. “Let’s live dangerously.”

I thought, then shrugged. “That’s a fair point.” So I opened the door and let her out.
Thanks to my bovine friend’s hands-on tutorial (as it were), I was able to make short work of the rest of the milking.


And thus began my initial foray into dairy farming. I should stress that I had no intention of making a business out of it. With the small herd we had, I was able to supply fresh milk for ourselves, our son and his family, and a few of our friends. That was perfectly fine with me.

The morning milking ritual resulted in my bonding, after a fashion, with the cow who was kind enough to instruct me on my maiden voyage. Her name was Camilla, as it turned out, and while she was of a cynical and sarcastic temperament, she eventually began to warm to me, and we began to converse in the most pleasant manner each morning. Curiously, she was the only one of the herd to speak to me, the others I guess being of a more timid disposition.

One morning, my wife came out to the barn while I was in the process of milking, and I felt I had to introduce her to Camilla. I had yet to tell my wife about our budding friendship.

I felt it only polite to formally introduce them. “Camilla, this is my wife Helen. Helen, this is Camilla. The cow.”

What I heard Camilla say was “Nice to meet you.” What I later found out was that Helen had merely heard “Moo.” Which could explain why Helen simply stared at me with that expression she so often gives me that seems to suggest “I’ll draw up the commitment papers.”

“Don’t forget we have that appointment with Alan Chambers at noon.

“I won’t.”

She then left, a tad more briskly than I seem to recall her moving normally.

“She’s not very sociable, is she?” asked Camilla.

“It takes her a while to warm up to people,” I said unthinkingly. “Oh, and cows, too, I would imagine.”

“Damn rude if you ask me.”


Over the next several months, my relationship with Camilla began to change—and not in a particularly good way. Camilla had always been somewhat demanding—disgruntled about this, that, or the other thing—and early in my tenure I accepted it as part of the dairy farming process. But as I gradually began to settle into a routine and develop a higher level of competence and confidence, I began to resent being what amounted to a slave to this cow. I had made the mistake early on of acceding to her demands to have her own cellphone, the result being that I was on call day and night. Unfortunately, this also began to gnaw at my wife who was getting tired of the phone ringing in the middle of the night.

It was early January when things came to a head. We had been down to the city at a party hosted by a friend of ours and had returned rather late. My wife was, shall we say, in her cups, and was eager to sleep. As soon as the lights went out, the phone rang. (The phone had since been moved to my side of the bed.) I quickly answered it before Helen could be overly aggrieved by the ringing. (Too late, as I heard her unleash a string of lurid profanity and references to beef.)

“Where have you been all night?” Camilla insisted.

“The Caravellis threw the most excellent party down in the City. You should have come.” I rarely look for a fight and was trying to be amiable.

“Oh, that would have gone over well,” the cow replied.

“You may have a point,” I said after a moment’s consideration.

At that point, my wife rolled over with the speed and force of industrial machinery and grabbed the phone from my hand. She paused for a moment, then said in the sweetest voice she could muster, “Camilla, this is Helen. I think we need to have a long talk to work out some issues. We would love to have you for dinner tomorrow evening—say, six?”

There was apparently some form of reply.

“I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ I’ll see you then.”

Helen then hung up.


I won’t dwell on what happened next. I suppose I should have been more upset, or perhaps have interpreted my wife’s invitation to Camilla more carefully. When I came home from running errands, dinner was just coming out of the oven, but there was no sign of Camilla. Or so I thought.

While it’s true that Camilla had worn out her welcome, she was actually quite tasty.


The following summer, I decided to build my own henhouse and buy a couple of chickens for the purpose of supplementing my fresh milk with fresh eggs. One morning, a few days after acquitting our poultry stock, as I was walking past the henhouse, I heard a voice call out, “A little help in here!”

Don’t tell my wife.

World's Most Unexpected Headline...

Amtrak train was speeding

Not something one sees every day.

iPhone Therefore I Am

Last weekend, while down in Corning, I lost my cellphone. As you could well imagine, I was distraught for well over a nanosecond. Now, I liked the basic idea of the BlackBerry, but the device itself was not well designed and I never really did like it all that much, despite the fact that I relied on it heavily for mobile e-mail access, even if it was a really crappy cellphone (or, in other words, a cellphone).

So Friday morning I went down to Crossgates Mall to the Apple Store and splurged on an iPhone. Leave it to Apple to get me to like a cellphone. It is everything the BlackBerry should have been. It synced up both my e-mail accounts (and uses basically the same Apple Mail application I use on my laptop. It connects to the Internet through an available Wi-Fi network or, if there isn't one, it uses AT&T's network. The Web browser is basically Safari and accesses most Web pages identically to how pages are accessed on a computer. It's a tinier screen, of course, but the zoom feature works pretty well, and if you turn the iPhone horizontally, it automatically flips the display to widescreen. AT&T gets a bad rap, but the people in the AT&T store in Crossgates couldn't have been nicer and more helpful in setting up an account and porting my mobile number over from Sprint. I have had no problems accessing the AT&T network and saratoga appears to be well covered. I was easily able to surf the Web while on the bus, or out at Happy Hour (we were trying to find out what restaurants were participating in Restaurant Week and I was easily able to access the appropriate site.

My only gripe is the onscreen keypad which requires fingers the size of a two-year-old's. But I am getting better at it. In fact, this post was created on the iPhone, and wasn't too onerous at all

In sum, I love my iPhone--losing my cellphone was probably the best thing that ever happened!

EZ Does It

A friend of mine forwarded this e-mail letter to me, which smacks of hoax:

Subject: EZ Pass alert

New York State started a pilot program upstate north of Albany on the Northway to catch speeders using the Easy Pass system. Recording devices were installed at intervals along the highway. Once an Easy Pass equipped vehicle passes, the device registers the account number and the time. Same is again registered at the next "check-point". Based upon the distance between the register points and the posted speed limit, the state is sending speeding tickets in the mail to the guilty persons.

Because every driver does not have Easy Pass , the State is "perplexed" as what to do to impose the system state-wide. The solution has been found. Soon all new vehicle registration stickers will have a metal strip or chip imbedded in same. This will take the place of the Easy Pass system as stated above. When a vehicle passes the registering device, the strip will relay all the information.

This is not fictional. New York State contracted with VERIZON to install the system. The system has already been installed and the entire Bronx River Parkway in Westchester County has been "wired" for when the new system begins. Once the State makes the new program public and advises all motorists of the potential for numerous speeding tickets, it will also reveal that the system has already been installed.

Another reason that will be given for the new system is to enable the authorities to track stolen vehicles, to trace kidnap victims, to monitor and trace suspected criminals and terrorists, etc.

BIG BROTHER IS ALIVE AND WELL.

Pass this along to every one you know.

A Google (and Snopes) search turned up no serious debunking, but certain points make me suspicious:

First of all, they spell out "Easy Pass" when the system is called "EZ Pass"--OK, hardly damning evidence, to be sure, but still...

Second of all, "upstate north of Albany on the Northway" is I-87, which runs from Albany to Montreal (though the route number changes at the Canadian Border). However, there are no tolls on the Northway, and while the point of the system cited in the letter is to catch speeders and not collect tolls, you tend not to find very many people north of Albany who have EZ Pass tags (that is, why would they have them--decoration? status?), so why the state would pick this particular place to launch such a pilot program is a mystery.

And third of all--"New York State contracted with VERIZON to install the system"--I have Verizon (and have endured Verizon Wireless) and they have yet to master basic telephone service, so I'm not confident that any Big Brother technology they could come up with would work anyway.

This is not to say that EZ Pass can't be used to catch speeders. In fact, that very thought occurred to me the minute I heard about electronic toll systems. (I remember this discussion coming up when they started introducing electronic toll roads in Southern California in the 1990s.) And it's a bit less egregious than London where omnipresent cameras photograph your license plate, which is scanned optically, and mapped to a database and if you are caught parking illegally (or not paying the Central London Congestion Fee) you receive a ticket in the mail (which has actually happened to my London friends).

But then again, all license plates are photographed when cars go through New York State tollbooths (which is why the signs say "EZ Pass can be used in any toll lane," and even if you don't get the green light you still get charged--this has happened to me, so I called EZ Pass and asked) so if the state wanted to start issuing speeding tickets based on how fast a car has gone from one tollbooth to the other, they don't need EZ Pass to do it. (Fortunately, at my age, I need to make regular pitstops when taking the Thruway anywhere, which renders this process fairly useless in my case, no matter how much I speed, since the rest stop probably takes more time than I would save by driving fast, throwing off their complex mathematical calculations.)

Of course, the truly paranoid can simply just not speed.

As for the whole "Big Brother" thing--it's really not high on my list of worries. All I can say is that anyone who has the inclination to pry into my life had better stock up on No Doz. I would imagine the same applies to 99% of humanity.

Buffaloed (Not)

Saturday morning, I trekked from Boston to Syracuse to see S.U . vs. Buffalo. With a great sigh of relief, I can say that Syracuse won.

And I will say this. In a world that is constantly changing and nothing is familiar from one day to the next, it's nice to know that Sal's Birdland of Syracuse has not changed their menu, their location, or even any aspect of their interior decor since 1986 (although I think they used to have a pinball machine). (The wings/chicken dinner/Sal's Sassy Sauce are all still as good, too.) We could call, order what we have always ordered for the past 21 years, and get exactly what we have always gotten. The height of comfort food!

Touch the Puppet Head—Live!

Back in 1986, when I first heard the very first They Might be Giants album, I had no idea that a) they would still be around 20 years hence, and b) I would still like them. And yet, here it is, 2007, and They are still going strong, are getting even better, and I still like them as much, if not more, than I did two decades earlier.

So last Friday, I ventured out to Boston to see They Might Be Giants live at the Roxy with Robert and Kristin. (That is, I went to the show with Robert and Kristin, and it was not the case that Robert and Kristin were playing with the band.) I had first seen They back in 1990 at the Beacon Theater in New York, when They had first started playing with a backing band (rather than a rhythm machine). I saw them about three or four times more over the years, as They would often play concerts in Central Park or Prospect Park in Brooklyn. I had last seen They in 1998 at the House of Blues in L.A.

As always, They put on a great show. With the giant cardboard head of longtime TMBG “mascot” William Allen White (a renowned newspaper editor chosen simply because he looked like the quintessential “old guy”), they played most of the new album The Else, a fair number of songs from their previous album (2004’s The Spine) and a smattering of songs from throughout their prolific career (my iTunes lists 349 songs, which includes just about everything they have released).

Almost every album was represented (even the “kids’ album” Here Come the ABCs), except John Henry (my least favorite album of theirs) and No! (their first kids’ album, although “Four of Two” and “Where Do They Make Balloons?” are quintessential TMBG songs and would have fit perfectly in their live set).

The Johns (Linnell and Flansburgh, the core of TMBG) are personable and funny and have always been ones for various onstage antics and weird props. For years, they would have a segment where they solicited requests from the audience, which usually comprised non-TMBG songs (at the 1990 Beacon show, someone yelled out “Le Marseillaise” which yielded a lot of accordion playing and gibbering in something that sounded like French).

This time, they took the audience request segment to a new dimension (literally) and featured “Phone Calls from the Dead” where they channeled the ghost of Ernie Boch, (who was apparently the P.T. Barnum of the automotive world and something of a local celebrity in the Boston area) who requested Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way.” Ernie Boch returned later in the show during a segment called “Ernie Boch vs. Skeleton Arm" that somehow segued into “Particle Man.”

The intro to the song “Drink!” also asked the audience of “interventioneers” to respond to the word “drink” when sung by yelling “No, stop!”. Since we were staked out at the bar, we were a fine bunch to advocate temperance.

Anyway, the complete set list was as follows:

• "The Cap’m" (“People seem to think you can’t be called the cap’m unless you drive a boat”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Damn Good Times" (“I got a friend who’s got a record machine/She acts like David Lee Roth before he turned 21”) —from The Spine (2004)
• "The Mesopotamians" (“Sargon, Hammurabi, Asurbanipal, and Gilgameth”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Take Out the Trash" (“And once you get him out tell him not to come back again”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Don’t Let’s Start" (“No one in the world ever gets what they want and that is beautiful”) —from They Might Be Giants (1986)
• "XTC vs. Adam Ant" (“Even the singer from Bow Wow Wow can’t make up her mind”) —from the horribly underrated Factory Showroom (1996)
• "It’s Not My Birthday" (“It’s not my birthday so why do you lunge out at me?”) —from the B side of the “They’ll Need a Crane” single (1988)
• "Drink!" (“I’ll take back my pinata, it’s wasted on you”) —from Mink Car (2001)
• "Alphabet of Nations" ("Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, Egypt, France, The Gambia, Hungary, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Libya and Mongolia, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Russia, Suriname, Turkey, Uruguay, Vietnam, West Xylophone, Yemen, Zimbabwe”) —from Here Come the ABCs (2004)
• "E Eats Everything" (“A hardly has an appetite and pokes at food too long/and B can barely bother because all the food is wrong”) —from Here Come the ABCs (2004)
• "Upside Down Frown" (“Black is white and the rainbow has a beard”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Memo to Human Resources" (“I’m searching for some disbelief that I can still suspend”) —from The Spine (2004)
• "I’m Impressed" (“I’m impressed, I’m impressed when that gorilla pounds his desk”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Mammal" (“So the warm blood flows/with the red blood cells lacking nuclei/through the large four-chambered heart/Maintaining the very high metabolism rate they have”) —from my favorite TMBG album Apollo 18 (1992)
• "Mr. Me" (“So take the hand of Mister Me and mister, make him glad/To swim the Mister Misty Sea and cease the Mister Mystery/That mister, made him sad”) —from Lincoln (1988)
• "Ant" (“One day that ant, he will grow up to be president”) —from the “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" EP (1990) and remade with a full band and new arrangement on the “Indestructible Object” EP (2004)
• "Museum of Idiots" (“If you and I had any brains we wouldn’t be in this place”) —from The Spine (2004)
• "With the Dark" (“My mind naturally turns to taxidermy”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Withered Hope" (“Today withered hope saw the very sad sack and she tried not to catch his eye”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" (“If you’ve a date in Constantinople she’ll be waiting in Istanbul”) —from Flood (1990)
• "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" (“It’s just a hummingbird moth that’s acting like a bird that thinks it’s a bee”) —from The Else (2007)
• "Dr. Worm" (“I’m not a real doctor but I am a real worm”) —from Severe Tire Damage (1998)
• "Particle Man" (“When he’s underwater does he get wet/Or does the water get him instead?”) —from Flood (1990)
• Maybe I Know (unreleased)

Via the latest cutting edge cellphone technology, Robert was able to use his cellphone to capture small video snippets, including the "Ernie Boch vs. Skeleton Arm" segment of "Particle Man"...


and half of "Dr. Worm":

Teed Off

Despair.com's new Despair-Wear T-shirt tells it like it is.

iRob

I have some questions about this:

The Urban Institute, a research organization based in Washington, has released an interesting report that suggests that the proliferation of iPods helps account for the nationwide rise in violent crime in 2005 and 2006.

The report notes that nationally, violent crime fell every year from 1993 to 2004, before rising in 2005 and 2006, just as “America’s streets filled with millions of people visibly wearing, and being distracted by, expensive electronic gear.”

Of course, as any social scientist will tell you, correlation and causation are not the same thing.

The report’s authors, John Roman and Aaron Chalfin, acknowledge in the report that “rigorous empirical tests” of any theory for the two-year-old rise in violent crime “are not possible.” But they offer three tantalizing observations.

First, the recent increase in robbery has been disproportionately greater than increases in other economically motivated crimes, such as theft and burglary.

Second, the recent increase in robbery has been greatest among juvenile offenders, among whom iPods “are highly valued as a status symbol.”

Third, robberies increased in particular from 2004 to 2006, the very period when iPods entered the mass market and became ubiquitous among consumers.

I admit, I have yet to read the report, but two questions immediately spring to mind. The first is, is there perhaps a demographic reason for the increase in crime? For example, declines in the crime rate in the 1990s were largely attributable to a decline in the overall number of people who were of prime crime-committing age (teens and 20s) at that time.

I would also ask if there were similar increases in crime rates when, say, the Sony Walkman was introduced in the late 1970s. Or the mobile phone, for that matter. (In the early 90s, whenever Steven's parents visited him and Amy in Brooklyn and left their carphone--they were early adopters--in full view on the seat, the car was broken into and the phone stolen.)

I'm willing to concede there may be some causation in the proliferation of the iPod and an increase in crime, but I think there needs to be more rigorous investigation. Plus, I'm not sure that finding any significant connection really tells us anything we don't already know. Hmm...hot, hip, electronic consumer items are likely to be stolen. Huh. Who would have guessed?

Ad Nauseam

How, you may ask, could cellphone be even more annoying? How about if you had to watch a commercial before you could make a call? Here is the very definition of hell:

Google Inc. has developed a prototype cell phone that could reach markets within a year, and plans to offer consumers free subscriptions by bundling advertisements with its search engine, e-mail and Web browser software applications, according to a story published Thursday in The Wall Street Journal.

Google is showing the prototype to cell phone manufacturers and network operators as it continues to hone the technical specifications that will allow the phone to offer a better mobile Web browsing experience than current products, the Journal said.
...
The move would echo another recent product launched by a phone industry outsider, Apple Inc.'s iPhone. But Google's product would draw its revenue from a sharply different source, relying on commercial advertising dollars instead of the sticker price of at least $499 for an iPhone and $60 per month for the AT&T Inc. service plan.

Negotiating the fairest way to split those advertising revenues with service providers could be a big hurdle for Google, one analyst said. Another problem is the potential that consumers could be scared off by the prospect of listening to advertisements before being able to make phone calls, said Jeff Kagan, a wireless and telecommunications industry analyst in Atlanta.

Look, I admit that I'm a cheap bastard, but I will gladly pay for things I like and use--and be happier for it than having to deal with annoying ads every time I want to do something.

It's funny: Google is taking over the world by making everything free but ad-supported. What happens if everyone expects everything to be free and ad-supported? Who will then want to buy the things the ads are promoting? And then why will any advertiser want to support ad-supported technologies? Norman, coordinate!

Computer Bugs

Uh oh--another reason to fear our computers! Says PC World:

A computer keyboard can be a dirty thing, often filled with crumbs that help make it a reservoir for disease-causing germs. Ironically, keyboards have been identified as vehicles for spreading diseases inside hospitals, in particular.

But now, there seems to be increasing interest among IT vendors in doing something about the plague of dirty keyboards.

For instance, Aten Technology Inc. in Irvine, Calif., this month said it has begun applying antimicrobial nanocoating to its KVM switch devices, which are commonly used by multiple IT workers in data centers. The KVM switches --- the acronym stands for keyboard, video and mouse --- lets users control various systems from a single unit.

I'm sure this is true, but, you know, before I turn into Howard Hughes 2000, I think I'd like to see a single study that provides evidence of someone getting even remotely ill from a keyboard. After all, I commuted to work on the NYC subway for more than seven years, and I find it hard to believe that any given keyboard could be filthier and more disease-ridden than any surface in the subway. And let's not even get into the whole "doorknob" issue.

Walkies!

Thanks to everyone who sponsored me in last Sunday's AIDS Walk in Albany. Because I raised
more than a certain amount, I got a free T shirt and sweatshirt. Sweet! More importantly, though, local organizations that provide help and counsel to those living with HIV and AIDS
got that much more to continue their important work.

I am told this was the 13th annual Albany AIDS Walk and boasted the highest participation yet. And the weather could hardly have been better.

Odd though: I was having severe beverage problems that day. They were selling water at the event, but when I tried to buy a bottle (I was thirsty!) I was chastised and told that it was for after the walk. So then I walked over to the Dunkin Donuts at Lark and Madison to perhaps get some coffee. I stood at the counter for a few minutes whilst the clerk tidied up the crullers; another clerk ambled over, asked if I was being helped, I said "No, not yet," she said "OK," and then both clerks disappeared into the back, never to be seen again. Well. Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink!

PowerPoint of No Return

As a public service, I present this handy guide to navigating Microsoft PowerPoint's UCU (Utter Contempt for the User) interface. Here are some common commands and what they do:

Paste--When used with copied or cut text, changes all fonts, point sizes, and text colors to those that the user has never used anywhere ever. When used on copied or cut graphics, randomly changes the size and position to only the most undesirable.

Paste Special--The PowerPoint equivalent of a slot machine. Randomly changes text characteristics to ones that have never been specified by anyone anywhere ever. Las Vegas oddsmakers have put the odds that the pasted text style will in some way resemble that which the user specified to be 5 quadrillion to 1 against.

View Master--Lets you format all the slide title and bullet styles, background images, etc., that will be ignored when creating slides.

Save As--Lets you save your presentation in any of a variety of file formats that will be unreadable by any other program.

Format > Font--Lets you spend a great deal of time selecting all the type specifications that will then be ignored.

Format > Bullets and Numbering--Applies bullets or numbers to slide text in a manner that in no way reflects user intention.

Tools > AutoCorrect Options--Turns ordinal numbers to superscripts, URLs to hot links, and other thoroughly undesirable text "corrections." Turning this feature off requires the sacrificing of a goat at the exact moment of the vernal equinox.

Insert > Text Box--Creates a frame in which text can be typed, and then placed only at random, unwanted locations on a slide.

View Show--An easy way of seeing all the things in your presentation that you will need to fix.

Help--Contains an online link to the American Psychiatric Association Web site.

Mime Type Not Found

Marcel Marceau has quietly passed away.

Marcel Marceau, who revived the art of mime and brought poetry to silence, has died, his former assistant said Sunday. He was 84.

I could make a very tasteless joke about an invisible box, but I don't think I will.

Trivia buffs and fans of ironic humor take note: in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, the only actor that speaks is...Marcel Marceau.

Ugh?

Well, check that last post. Today's news brought word of quite the upset indeed:

SU Beats No. 18 Louisville

Andrew Robinson threw for a career-high 423 yards and four touchdowns as Syracuse stunned No. 18 Louisville 38-35 on Saturday.

Taj Smith caught four passes for 173 yards and two touchdowns for the Orange as Syracuse ended Louisville's 20-game home winning streak by dominating the listless Cardinals.

I guess I was a bit too quick to write them off!

I should also add that since this is only Andrew Robinson's fourth game ever, phrases like "career-high" are a bit meaningless.

Ugh

Now I really need to go to grad school, just to find a new college football team to support. We went out to Syracuse last weekend for a game. Never again:

The University of Illinois cranked up more heat on embattled Syracuse coach Greg Robinson, his staff and his team by rushing for 378 yards in a 41-20 rout of the Orange before 34,188 at the Carrier Dome on Saturday.

SU is now 0-3. It is entirely possible that they could not have a win all season; Illinois is probably the "worst" team they'll play all season. We were going to go to the Rutgers game...I doubt we could bear the humilation of that.

Despite the "official" attendance (32,000+) there was no way even half that number in the Dome. Local hotels and businesses that depend on sports fans coming out to games are starting to hurt; we went to Chuck's (the near-campus bar that was a hangout back in the day--their cheddar fries are just as good as they ever were) and it was pretty dead. Usually the place is packed on game day.

I heard also that the scalpers are having a bad season, too, although I am decidedly less sympathetic.

Oh, well...college basketball season is coming...

Water, Water Everywhere

A couple weekends ago, I drove down to Corning, as Ken and I were planning to head south and tour a Civil War battlefield. Alas, I had to go to Chicago the following Monday for Graph Expo (curse this vile "working" nonsense!) so we only had time to do something closer to home. So what did we decide? Niagara Falls, which I have vague recollections of having visited when I was a kid.

The drawback to this being a spur-of-the-moment trip is that we made hotel reservations on the Canadian side the day we left--but I had neglected to bring my passport with me. How strict would they be? We stopped at the visitor's center on the American side and "Dotty" was, true to her name, fairly clueless (odd that that question had never come up before). We checked with the hotel, and they said that a passport wasn't necessary, and, in fact, we picked up one of those guidebooks which explicitly stated that a passport was not necessary--my question, of course, was, "Is this a legally-binding instrument?"

As it turned out, the guy at Customs gave me grief and an attempted guilt trip, but it was essentially no problem. Odd thing about the Canadian side--Ken christened it "Nutsville" as it was more reminiscent of the Vegas strip, with casinos, Ripley's Believe It Or Not, The Guinness Book of World records Museum, lots of flashing lights and loud noises and generally psychotic behavior. The American side was a beacon of quiet dignity in comparison.

After a weekend there, we pretty much had enough of falling water. We did the Maid of the Mist (hmm...that sounds odd), the Cave of the Winds, and the Journey Behind the Falls. We stood on the American side, we stood on the Canadian side, and we pretty much saw the Falls from every conceiveable angle. I think it's safe to say, I don't need to see Niagara Falls again for a very long time.

Getting back into the U.S. was a lot easier than getting into Canada (oddly), and I suppose it's fortunate that I decided against trying to use the souvenir Maid of the Mist photo as a photo ID (I would probably end up in Gitmo).

Here Comes the Humvee

The latest video from They Might Be Giants (in Boston on October 19th!)--"The Shadow Government." Enjoy!

Anarchy in the UK: Part 8: Homeward Bound

Alas, Saturday morning I had to prepare to head back home. I can always tell the extent to which I enjoy a vacation by how much I am not looking forward to returning. And here’s the killer part: Saturday was the first beautiful, sunny day in London since I got there. Doh!

Steven drove me to Heathrow (taking another scenic route through London since there is no easy way to get from the East End to Heathrow), well in time for me to catch a 2:30 plane. Check in and security were actually much brisker than I was expecting and I thus had two hours to kill. I wandered through a few W.H. Smith’s (I had this urge to buy a Dickens novel, but they had none, strangely). I ambled over to a Harrod’s and bought some souvenirs, and still had a few pounds left. I found a pub (it was after noon), and had a couple pints of liquid courage.

The flight back was just as uneventful as the one over, although I fortunately had an aisle seat this time (although the guy in the middle seat was a member of a species that evolved into just elbows, as he was writing something in a notebook for the entire seven hours and kept jabbing me in the chest with his elbow. I did some reading, actually slept a bit, and then watched the movie Hot Fuzz (by the makers of Shaun of the Dead), which I liked a lot. I also became obsessed with the little readout that tracks where the plane is.

After circling Newark for 15 minutes (traffic was backed up, apparently), I began humming an appropriate Fountains of Wayne song:

Seatbacks and traytables up
Stow your newspapers and cups
We’re about to touch down
Midwestern town through the haze
Customs a massive expanse
And I’m digging into my pants
Is this Oklahoma
I remember this place
Trade one town for another
Delayed, now why did we bother
An X on the calendar square
New city, same stuff
Seatbacks and traytables up
Seatbacks and traytables up

We landed at about 6:00 p.m., and immigration and customs were actually quite brisk. It was the baggage claim that took rather a long time. Another Fountains of Wayne song came to mind:

Michael and Heather at the baggage claim
Tired of playing the waiting game
Every bag has got a different name
Michael and Heather may never get home again

Michael and Heather at the lost and found
Looking for luggage that's soft and brown
“Sir, I’m so sorry, it's just not around”
Michael and Heather are glad to be on the ground
...

I caught the ironically named AirTrain, a monorail that goes from the terminal to the New Jersey Transit station. I had just missed a Penn Station-bound train, and, it being Saturday night, it was quite a long wait until the next one. And, man, was it hot and humid—I was used to cool British weather. I had tickets for a 9:45 train back to Albany, but had hoped to make the 7:45 one. Nothing doing, alas. Arriving at Penn Station, I decided to have dinner at Houlihan’s (I had time) and finally the train was ready for boarding. And was I tired (still on British time, it was basically 2 a.m. as far as I was concerned). I really just wanted to go home but, Amtrak being Amtrak, we sat in the station for 45 minutes while, as the announcement put it, the conductor was upstairs “filling out some paperwork.” Oy. I had been pretty mellow throughout my travels, but I was getting decidedly cranky at this stage.

I ultimately got to Albany about 1:30 a.m. (6:30 a.m. to me) and drove back home. I collapsed almost immediately and slept in much the next day, although I did hunker down and spend an hour or so going through the 1200 e-mail messages I had (99% spam). Despite this article from the WSJ, I have to say, I enjoyed very much the fact that I was incommunicado for a week. (My mobile didn’t work overseas—heck, it barely works here. And I didn’t feel like trying to hook up my computer to Steven’s network.)

Were there things I wish I had done in England? Of course; I didn’t make it to The Village (a five-hour train ride—one way—requiring a pricey overnight stay, really, and more advance planning than I am into these days). I did want to get down to Stonehenge (I was told it was overrated) and/or the White Cliffs of Dover. And I would loved to have walked the zebra crossing on Abbey Road (but I forgot where it was).

At any rate, a great trip, many thanks to my gracious hosts (and to Audrey for popping by to make sure my house was still standing while I was away), and I hope to get back over there sometime next year.

Anarchy in the UK: Part 7: Tower of Power

Towers of London
When they had built you
Did you watch over the men who fell?
Towers of London
when they had built you
Victoria's gem found in somebody’s hell

Amy had Friday off, so this was her turn to take me around. First off, a trip to a caf for a fry-up, or a traditional English breakfast. We walked the mile or so to Bethnal Green (happily it was not raining), only to find that the caf that Amy had in mind was closed. Doh! So we found one that was probably just as good. And what a meal—bacon, eggs, sausage, chips, and beans (no Spam, thankfully). Over the course of the week, I was used to the very small-ish portions they serve in Britain, compared to the supersized portions they serve in American restaurants (which could explain why the British are a comparatively svelte people, from what I have noticed). But this fry-up was immense; I’m glad we had walked there.

After breakfast, our next stop was the Tower of London, one of the things I had been looking forward to all week.
Amy loves the Tower and was a font of information—she admitted that the official guided tours tended to propagate myths and untruths (so says she).

Oh, but first, she had to send a text message to her cleaning woman.
While we’re waiting, some more of XTC’s “Towers of London”:

Pavements of gold leading to the underground
Grenadier Guardsmen walking pretty ladies around
Fog is the sweat of the never never navvies who pound
Spikes in the rails to their very own heaven

OK, so we bought tickets (£15—yikes; talk about torture...) and entered. We walked past Traitor’s Gate—the water entrance to the Tower, so-called because a number of prisoners accused of treason (such as Queen Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More) passed through it.
The oldest parts of the Tower date back to 1066, not long after William the Conqueror’s victory at Hastings. Even then. London was the heart of the country he had just conquered, so he immediately went there and had himself crowned at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. He then set about building a fortress to control, as it was put at the time, “the numerous and hostile inhabitants” of the city (one of the drawbacks to being a Conqueror, I should think).

The White Tower is one of the original structures. It has been worked on over the years; the turreted roofs were added in the 16th century, the window and door surrounds were added at various times in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The wooden staircase was built in 1973.

The original purpose of the White Tower (the original “Tower of London”) was defensive, residential, and ceremonial. A beautifully preserved chapel (the Chapel of St. John the Evangelist) shows off the original and intact Romanesque architecture of the Normans.
The White Tower wasn’t completed until about 1090 or so, under William Rufus, son of William I and his successor as King of England. The first major expansions of the Tower were undertaken in the 12th century by Henry I (younger brother of and successor to William Rufus) and Henry II.
In the 12th century, King Richard the Lionheart enclosed the White Tower with a wall and had a moat dug around it. Odd as it may seem, the moat was not successful (though it doesn’t seem like a tough concept to grasp) until Henry III used a Dutch moat-building technique in the 13th century. (In the 19th century, the moat was filled in, for the very sensible reason that for centuries it had been, um, where the Tower’s loos--called “garderobes”--emptied.

The Tower complex was more or less completed (and is the layout that survives) by Edward I in the early 14th century. Needless to say, the Tower has been noodled with endlessly ever since, particularly by the Tudors and the Victorians.

There had at one time been a royal menagerie at the Tower, but all that remain are the ravens, which have lived at the Tower for centuries (not the same ravens, of course). John Flamsteed, the Royal Astronomer (remember him?) apparently complained to Charles II about the ravens and their getting in the way of his observatory. Charles instead had the observatory moved the Greenwich. No one messes with the ravens. As story goes, Charles was apprised of an old legend that has it that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, the Monarchy and the entire Kingdom would fall. So the ravens stay to this day; there are eight of them, and their wings are clipped to prevent them from flying away, no one taking any chances with the legend, apparently.
We repeated variations on this legend over the course of thwe day--"when the pigeons leave the courtyard, the Monarchy will fall"; "when the tourists get out of the lavatory, the Monarchy will fall..." etc.

Anyway, the Tower remained a royal residence until the time of Oliver Cromwell, who demolished the old palatial buildings. Bloody Puritans.
The most popular story about the Tower concerns the Two Princes. That is, toward the end of the Wars of the Roses (the battle between the houses of York and Lancaster for the throne of England), Edward IV (of York) recaptured the crown. Henry VI (Lancaster) briefly overthrew Edward, but in 1471, Edward was back and Henry was dispatched. The spot where Henry VI died is commemorated in the Wakefield Tower. It was said, probably incorrectly, that Henry got a dagger up the strap by the Duke of Gloucester, the future Richard III. Yeah, this is all really confusing, so let’s all thank Henry Tudor for putting an end to the whole business.

Anyway, when Edward IV died in 1483, he was succeeded by 12-year-old Edward V. The Duke of Gloucester, who was Edward IV’s brother, stepped in and decided to become “Protector” and had Edward V confined in the Tower with his younger brother Richard (part of the problem is they’ve all got the same bloody names). Gloucester then declared himself King Richard III and for the details of that I recommend reading the play. As we all know, in 1485, Richard III, after pledging his kingdom for a horse, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth by Henry Tudor (not Edmund Blackadder), descendent of Edward III. Henry took the throne as Henry VII and established the Tudor dynasty.

As for the Two Princes (Edward V and Richard), no one is entirely certain what happened to them. They were last seen alive in 1483 and were murdered at some point after that. The bodies were hidden away and not found until 1674, when a 12th-century forebuilding on the White Tower was demolished and the “bones of two striplings” were uncovered. The central question is, who ordered them murdered? Richard III (Edward V laid claim to the throne)? Or Henry VII after he took power (Edward V laid claim to the throne).

In one of the exhibits, you can vote as to whether it was Richard or Henry that did them in; my vote was for Richard (even though I accidentally pushed the wrong button).

Many other people were imprisoned in the Tower over the years, and many were executed, including Anne Boleyn, who was tried for treason and went to the chopping block. One particular execution was Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, and the daughter of George Plantagenet. As the story goes, she was tried and convicted of treason, and on the morning of May 27, 1541, she was scheduled for the block. She refused to confess to treason, but nonetheless was taken from her cell to the chopping block. There were about 150 witnesses, and by some accounts, Margaret, who was 67 years old, frail, and ill, was dragged to the block, but refused to put her head on it. The executioner’s first blow hit her shoulder rather than her neck and she was able to leap from the block and run away, pursued by the executioner. She had to be struck eleven times before she died. So much for death with dignity...

Other prisoners were kept in various rooms, and with little else to occupy them, carved graffiti on the walls, which is quite striking.
Sir Walter Raleigh was also a prisoner in the Tower, convicted of being involved in a lot against the life of King James I. Despite being held in the “Bloody Tower,” he actually had a rather nice room and it was here that he wrote his History of the World (later made into a movie by Mel Brooks).
Thomas More was also a prisoner there until his own execution.

During World War II, Rudolf Hess was help prisoner in the Tower for four days, and the last prisoners of the Tower were the Kray brothers, held for a couple of days in 1952 for failing to report for national service. (That would be the least of their indisrcetions...).

But...what about torture?

Despite the Tower’s reputation, there really wasn’t much actual torturing done there, although there was a major exhibit on the topic. (Oddly, on one of the walkways is a large, person-sized plushie bear in a Beefeater outfit, whom I thus dubbed “Bloody, the Torture Bear.”) Anyway, we walked up a stairway and saw, off in the distance, lurid crimson lighting, a sure bet that something cool was there.
There were really only three basic devices used for torture at the Tower: the rack (no, not the one used in the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition sketch), the scavenger’s daughter (sort of the reverse of the rack, a compression device), and the manacles (sorry, no comfy chair). All told, less than 100 people were ever tortured at the Tower, and for the majority of them, I suspect the gift shop was more to blame (the Tower has four gift shops, all of which have different items in them, which makes it difficult to buy cheesy souvenirs you’ve seen at one shop and then can’t find at another). Oh, and the lemonade we bought, which tasted of onions—onionade?

Anyway, while we wait in line at the gift shop, the but the crypt, here is the last verse of “Towers of London”:

Bridges of muscles spanning so long and high Merchants from Stepney walking pretty ladies by Rain is the tears of the never never navvies who cry For the bridge that doesn’t go In the direction of Dublin

Speaking of bridges, the Tower also gives you a good view of the Tower Bridge (often mistakenly called London Bridge, which is another wholly unremarkable bridgerfurther down the Thames), which I think is very cool looking.
We spent a good four or five hours at the Tower and about 3:00 headed go the Tube to head to a pub that Amy had always wanted to go to: Blackfriars Pub, which was a very good pub indeed. Only very slightly peckish (despite all the walking, the immense breakfast was still with us), we had a couple pints and split an order of nachos, which were quite respectable.

By the time we were done it was getting on to about 5:30, so we headed back to Hackney to pick up the chillun. Rather than take the bus (Bella screams when she’s on the bus), we walked back about two miles from the nursery to the house. The kiddies went almost straight to bed, and I think we all pretty much passed on in our various chairs not long after.

And, sadly, I had to fly back home the next day....