Nostalgia sublime: The Right Profile

The death of David Enloe has me reminiscing a bit over the music I enjoyed in college and the years immediately afterward. One band I liked even more than Enloe’s Fabulous Knobs and The Woods was The Right Profile. They got signed by Arista but never released an album for the label. The band’s keyboard player, Stephen J. Dubner, went on to become a New York Times writer and, later, co-author with Steven D. Levitt of the bestseller “Freakonomics.” Its guitarist, Jeffrey Dean Foster, has remained in the music biz although nowadays he earns a living primarily by painting houses, apparently.

Somewhere at home I have a copy of a demo cassette they gave me a long time ago. On one song on it, “Infatuation,” Dubner sang lead. On another, perhaps my favorite, “God’s Little Acre,” Foster sang lead. And here’s another favorite, “‘Til the Sky Turns Black,” which, if I remember right, was supposed to appear on the soundtrack of a film called “Blue Ridge.” It doesn’t look like the film ever got made.

UPDATE: Oops. I meant to credit the Dalai Mama for the song links. Sorry about that.

Nice guy finishes dead

David Enloe, guitarist for the Fabulous Knobs, the Woods and other bands that wowed me back in the ’80s, has died of liver failure. What a shame.

Ohio, Colorado: You can keep your machines. We don’t want them.

The voting-machine industry’s long and mostly unsuccessful effort to prove its products aren’t utterly worthless if not corrupt has come a cropper this week as officials in both Ohio and Colorado are basically throwing them out. (h/t to Fred for the links)

As my friend David Allen has said (and likely would be saying now if his site weren’t down at the moment), how often do we have to be right before the politicians will listen? Touch-screen voting machines are unreliable (if not corrupt), the process that certifies them is riddled with flaws, and there are simpler and more accurate approaches readily available  that will, along with robust auditing and recount policies, ensure the highest probability of an accurate vote count.

12 Days

I’m not a big fan of Indiana University, but I loved this:

He’s a romantic devil, ain’t he?

Daddy (reading): “‘That starry night, Aladdin and Princess Jasmine fell in love.’”

Hooper: That’s not good.

About damn time

Turns out our friend and former colleague Andy Duncan not only has a blog, he is only now letting us know about it after roughly 18 months of blogging. Andy, for those who don’t know him, is a gifted fiction writer with a bent toward fantasy/scifi. Hie thee hence and show him some bloggy love, mmkay? I’d add a link below, but for some reason I don’t have time to track down right now, WordPress is not letting me edit that particular widget.

UPDATE: He’s added now. I was trying to mess with a widget when I should have been messing directly with the blogroll. Duh.

Bad news Friday

Terry Pratchett, co-author of one of the books I would want if stranded on a desert island, has learned he has early-onset Alzheimer’s. “I know it’s a very human thing to say, ‘Is there anything I can do’,” he says, “but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.”

Because it’s been a while since we’ve done it …

… here’s a Friday Random 10:

“What Child Is This?”, Vince Guaraldi Trio
“These Days,” R.E.M.
“Johnny Soul’d Out,” Bus Boys
“City Lights on Mars,” Chris Mars
“One Piece at a Time,” Johnny Cash
“Death of a Clown,” Kinks
“On a Carousel,” Hollies
“Gee Whiz, It’s Christmas,” Carla Thomas
“Where the Cowboys Went,” Pressure Boys
“I’m Against It,” Ramones

lagniappe: “Straight Out of Compton,” Nina Gordon

I’d say Winamp’s randomizer knows more than it’s letting on.

Wife-hunting

I think it was Jane Austen who wrote, “Every man of a certain age and income is in want of a wife.” OK, that’s not verbatim, but close enough. The problem is, if you’re in want of a wife, what do you do about it?

Well, here are the top 15 Biblical ways of finding a wife. I particularly liked “Have God create a wife for you while you sleep. Note: this will cost you.”

A history of LOLcats

I’m only surprised it took as long as this for such a historical, and historic, work to be produced.

Earlier.

(h/t: Tony)

Whither the Wildcats?

Before the season started, the Davidson Wildcats were looking like the next Big Thing, and with games scheduled against Carolina, Duke and UCLA, they were going to have some early opportunities to make an impression on the NCAA selection committee.

They’ve made an impression, all right — as a team that cannot close the deal. The UCLA loss was particularly galling; there’s no way the team should have let an 18-point lead slip away.

This team is good enough that moral victories shouldn’t be enough. Now, the team probably has to win out in the SoCon tourney to go to the dance at all, and it’s probably looking at a 15 seed, at best, if it does. That’s better than a lot of schools do over the course of decades, but this team is better than that. It just hasn’t played that way, and, yeah, I’m disappointed.

Jaguars 37, Panthers 6

I didn’t see this one, either, and it’s just as well. Kiss the playoffs goodbye. The question now becomes what the Panthers will do in the offseason to address the team’s serious problems. There are so many of them that this will not be a one-year project.

First, hope is not a plan. We all hope Jake Delhomme comes back from surgery as good as ever, but if he doesn’t, we need better talent than David Carr or (bless him) Vinnie Testaverde as backup. Is Matt Moore the answer? I don’t know, but with playoff hopes out the window, now might be a good time to start finding out. It’s hard to think Moore couldn’t have done better than 84 yards versus what was supposed to be a fairly porous pass defense.

Speaking of the passing game, yet again we see nobody able to step up as a No. 2 receiver behind Steve Smith, who was held to 44 yards on 6 catches. Drew Carter, 4 catches for 26 yards won’t do it.

And the secondary has been a disaster, on a par with the Doug Evans years. It was particularly bad against the run, allowing Fred Taylor an 80-yard TD score. “The scouting report on those safeties was to just run into them and force them to tackle,” Taylor told reporters. That’s a big problem, and one not fixable overnight.

Last offseason, the salary cap made standing pat personnel-wise a virtue born of necessity. In the offseason to come, perhaps it will make shedding a lot of dead weight a similar virtue. This team needs immediate help, and it will take some hard decisions to get it.

Buttercups 13, three other teams 2

I’ve been meaning to blog about this since it happened and kept forgetting. (You can see that blogging has not been uppermost in my mind of late.) But on Nov. 10, the ‘Cups played three Asheville-Buncombe Youth Soccer Association teams in the N.C. Youth Soccer Association District 5 tournament and festival in Asheville. And they racked up more wins in five hours than they had scored all season to that point.

They beat the Asheville No. 1 team (that was its name, not, so far as I know, its ranking) 4-1 in the first game. They beat the Spider Monkeys 3-1 in the second game. And they beat the Heatwave 6-0 in the third game.

The second game was the tough one — when the game started, I thought the Monkeys’ superior ball control was going to spell big trouble. But the Buttercups were quicker to the ball, and that made the difference.

The competition was not markedly different from that of the Greensboro teams the Buttercups played this season. The difference on this day was that the ‘Cups played their best ball of the season on offense and defense. Their passes were crisper, they did a much better job of getting open to receive passes, and they shot more aggressively — I lost count of the number of shots that bounced off the upright with the opposing teams’ keepers nowhere near in position to have made the save. 13-2 easily could have ended up 18-2 or so.

Victoria got the last goal in the third game. She caught a bloody lip at one point but didn’t stay out for long. One of the teams, and I forget now whether it was the Spider Monkeys or the Heatwave, wasn’t especially gracious about losing: When the teams lined up to slap five as is customary after games, some of the other girls were trying to rake our girls’ hands with their fingernails. Our coach spoke to their coach about it.

After the games, we had a nice team dinner and presented coaches Ricky and Bob with gift certificates to thank them for their hard work. Then it was back to the motel for swimming and hot-tubbing with the kids. All in all, a very nice weekend.

UPDATE: Here’s a picture: