Flights of the imagination

Flew Saipan-Guam-Honolulu-Houston-Chicago recently. Not as uneventful as it sounds. After passing through Homeland Security checkpoints in Saipan, Guam and Honolulu, they were almost non-existent in Houston and Chicago.

I was supposed to travel via Newark, but was on standby and got bumped from that flight. Since I was on a "buddy pass", the airline was not required to provide accomodation so my friend and I got on the phone to nearly every cheap hotel and hostel in Honolulu, only to find out there was nothing available. We rented a car and drove around Honolulu for a few hours, and I had the experience of sleeping on a bench in a park on the east side of Oahu. The only things I had to eat were a few tacos from Taco Bell and a burger from Jack In The Box that highly disagreed with me. I had been hoping we would drop by Chinatown and find something decent there, but as I was not the one driving that didn't happen.

The in-flight movie from Guam to Honolulu was some crap called XXX:State of the Union, so I mostly tuned it out and tried to sleep. The Honolulu-Houston flight actually had the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I was too tired to stay up for much of it.

Even though I was sent through Houston, my bags went to Newark so I had to wait an extra day for them to be sent over to Chicago. I've been jet-lagged the last couple of days, especially after the park bench in Hawaii. Bench lagged? Hmm.

There's a mouse in my house

Or at least there was... until she trapped him in the bathroom and buried him at sea. I was trying originally to just shoo him outside with a coconut broom, but he kept hiding. Currently listening to: Larry Norman's remake (1977) of "I Think He's Hiding" by Randy Newman. LOL.

Just spent a few hours yesterday re-tooling my CD, "Don't Look Now" - I was never happy with the way it turned out. It was mostly demos recorded (literally) in my closet in Chinatown, Chicago between 1999-2000. The good thing is, I loaded Audacity on my computer and was able to edit and trim various tracks, as well as cut a couple I wasn't happy with at all. Like the title track, for instance. That's gone. The disc is now titled "Salvation Army Blues", which is also the title of the second track. Now it's a nice, tight 12 songs instead of 16. It includes a jam session with guitar wizard Harry Gore & ska band Pop's Body Shop, recorded at C'stone sometime in the late '90s.
I may post some mp3s shortly.

I'm finishing up the reissue of "Jiving Around", which should include the original 4 songs, a couple alternate versions, and some other early-to-mid '80s stuff. If I ever sign with, you know, Interscope or something, my back catalog will be ready to roll out, right? Sure. Have to buy some more blank CDs, I'm going through these like crazy! I just bought a spindle of 50, and have to buy more already!

The other night, r., l., myself and a couple others had a small going-away get-together for Dan aka Billy the Kid, as he's off to LA & NY for a couple months. He's hoping to get in on a Broadway show. Should be interesting.

TTFN.

anagrams

since r. seems to be so captivate by dumplings of the night, as she calls them, here's a clever anagram for Northern Mariana Islands: Mandarin as harlot sinner.

Dumpling of the night becomes Do the thumping fling.

And so it goes...

Cinderfella

I was hoping to go see the new Russell Crowe film, "Cinderella Man", but have decided to boycott this and all future Crowe films after his choildish outburst and attack of a hotel clerk with a telephone.

Crowe should have to do some serious thinking behind bars. I think the judge should make an example of him, and not be lenient or reduce his sentence simply because he's a "star". Considering he's a foriegn national, I'd consider him a flight risk and demand he turn over his passport.

Only when Crowe makes a truly heartfelt apology to the clerk- HOW ABOUT IN PERSON (and possibly do some community service) then he can get back to 30 Odd Foot Of Grunt or whatever.

Remember, I'm still boycotting Dave Matthews after the Chicago River incident. Did he ever apologize?

Bop Bush!

Get your official George W. Bush punching bag here at http://www.bopbush.com/

Excellent!

As seen in the Saipan Tribune, a "Do Not Enter" sign on a street in Garapan. How many months ago did DPW (Dept. of Public Works) let us know about the installment of these signs? Like, never. And do they legally have the right to reroute traffic and disrupt the normal flow of business? According to the accompanying article, it seems DPW believes they have the right to ticket motorists who fail to comply.

Big news here: Japan Airlines is threatening to pull out! Whoa nelly! Say it ain't so! What'll happen to all the hordes of Japanese tourists coming down here to get sunburned, buy stuff they can get cheaper in Tokyo, get food poisoning, and have their rental cars and hotel rooms broken into and their valuables stolen? These are the same tourists who are supposed to go to back to Japan and tell their friends and family what a paradise these islands are. Well, if they're clubbed over the head while at the ATM and their body tossed in a field and their bank account cleaned out, they can't exactly give a glowing report, can they?

CUC (Commonwealth Utilities Corp.) is pulling an Enron by hitting all their customers with a couple hundred dollar "fuel surcharge". Yeah right. We're the ones having to pay our bills every month on time for fear of getting shut off (which will happen if the surcharge, which was NOT VOTED ON, is not paid) meanwhile the government still owes CUC hundreds of millions of dollars! The governor, while declaring things to be in a "state of emergency" still says the economy looks pretty darn good (his exact words). Why not look into William Stewart's suggestion of alternate power generating options? Or Chamber of Commerce president Alex Sablan's comment about cheaper sources of fuel?

Quote of the day

A centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omelette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he tends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That's why it's such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weekend.

-from "The Silver Chair", by C.S. Lewis

new album in the works

Now that I have the ability and software to record on my computer, I am planning a new CD, tenatively available by mid-summer. I already have about 15 or so songs or fragments thereof sitting on my hard drive that I'm planning to include. Most are instrumental numbers and will serve as interludes between other tracks. Some go as far back as 1985! I've been playing around alot with sampling, looping and layering - a drum track from here, a guitar or keyboard track from there, a vocal over the top, etc. Hopefully this will all take some sort of shape in the near future.
I'll be meeting with a few friends as well to hash out some ideas - a tin and wood shack, some cold drinks, buzzing amplifiers, a few mikes and a 4-track machine. Pete will play drums, Virgil on bass, me on guitar, Kaleko on ukulele, Manny on additional guitar, then back to my apartment to load the tapes to my hard drive & overdub (minimal). Hopefully Virgil's parakeets will add to the music. Other participants may include (nothing's definite at this point): John Torres, Felix Sasamoto, Glen Sablan, Rex Borja, Sebastian Camacho, Jerry Alcantara, A.J., Floyd Lim, Mark Lim, Lovely, Suzette, etc. We'll see what happens.

land issues

In a recent Saipan Tribune story, local people are said to prefer land ownership to be held only by persons of Northern Marianas descent, meaning people who are "full blooded Chamorro and/or Carolinian". How do they determine this? Blood tests? See how much SPAM content it has? Or by your Spanish/German/Japanese/Filipino family name(s)? According to cultural anthropologists, the Chamorro race no longer exists, due to centuries of racial mixing. Anyhow, I'm quite sure determining land ownership on the basis of race and/or national origin is illegal in this country.

Another story mentioned a BBQ cookoff. I'd attend, if only they didn't turn the beef into shoe leather and chicken wasn't still pink on the inside.

Some senators recently went on a fact-finding mission to Manila. Any facts they couldn't otherwise establish at the Nagoya Star nightclub in Garapan?

Yaaaaaawwwwwnnnnnnn........hm. 'Xcuse me.

Went to see the Hitchhiker's Guide the other day. Lot better than I expected. Thought it was gonna like, suck. But suck it did not.

I did however worry about the other people in the theater who probably never heard of it and were probably wondering why this was supposed to be amusing. I wonder if Chamorros get British humor? The Vogon ships made everyone ooh and aah, at least, as did the "Heart Of Gold" (the main characters' ship).

I liked actually that there were parts of the movie that Douglas (Adams) wrote specifically for it, and that it was not strictly a by-the-book exercise. John Malkovich was guite interesting. And the guy that played Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox had some good lines, especially the "freedom and democracy and all that stuff" and "there are parts of my brain that just aren't presidential material". Good W. impression.

Updates again...

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens tomorrow. There's a 10:30 am showing, something which our one theater here has not done in years. Must be expecting a big turnout.

Got my computers back yesterday and have been trying to get thenm back up and running. So far my collection includes the Pegasus PC with the 80gb hd, 128 mb ram, and windows 2000; as well as the Samsung notebook w/ windows 98, open office, and some other neat little programs. I'm relly taken with the tiny notebooks made back in the '90s, before people decided they needed 20' monitors for dvds, gaming etc. A friend told me today HP is going back to making small laptops. Me, I always thought HP was a steak sauce.

A funny moment at the computer shop the other day: I kinda freaked cuz the Samsung didn't have Solitaire installed. No fancy hardware, software or applications for me, eh? Just a deck of cards. Got it. Sweet!

Later.

news of the criminally insane

This just in:

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says: "I think we're definitely winning. I think we've been winning for some time."

Sure about that? You wouldn't want us to get our hopes up now, would you? Or would you?

More updates

Just found out from a friend/business associate that a trip in June to India, Bangladesh, and Vietnam (business, mostly) is a definite possibility and we should know for sure pretty soon. Also, another business trip, this one to the Philippines, is on around the same time period. Maybe I'll get to drop in on Nic in Hong Kong, on the way... Sweet!



I have to go back to the computer place tomorrow and get some work done. I believe my sound card is toast. Windows2K was not properly installed, so there's little files (clipboard, sound mapping - wait, those are important!!!) that keep giving up the ghost on me, usually in the middle of something important. I installed SoundForge and Audacity but cannot use either one as I keep getting told by Microsoft's digital gnomes in my cpu that the sound mapping file is in use by another aplication. According to task manager, there IS NO OTHER APPLICATION RUNNING!!!

I keep jumping back and forth btw Mozilla Firefox and IE 6.0. I like some features on one and some on the other. I only use Thunderbird for e-mail. I've been using MS Word, Excel and Access for various things but they were not properly installed and even Windows Installer was not properly installed. I found a free open source program called Open Office - all the same functions (word processing, spreadsheets, html coding, database access) and the ability to save as .doc or.xls files. One day I'll be completely free of the Redmond gnomes, just you wait and see (insert Dr. Evil laugh here.....)

Apart from that, I need to get more RAM installed (only have 128 mb). Have an 81 gb hd, and a brand spanking new LG 52X32X52 CD-rw drive (thanks to Mr. Lee at Tic Toc Internet). Just got a really nice pair of comp speakers, too - small, but nice (some Korean brand, made in China... ?!).

Look for some new CD projects, coming your way soon at www.aaughrecords.com (as soon as I get things sorted out - soon, hopefully!)

-Rick

About freakin time for an update...

I know it makes no difference but I selected Arial as the font for this because Times New Roman drives me absolutely up the wall. We're talking gecko time here.

Anyhoo, China did not happen. I was all set to go, plane ticket, hotel reservations and then she talked me into staying. For us. now that I'm actually staying, she's talking crazy, splitting up and all that garbage.

I'm like whatever. As Napoleon would say, "Gosh! IDIOTS!" and stalk out of the room.

Last night hung out at Hamilton's (again) and watched some bizarre (of course) documentary on ESPN about Bobby Fischer. Then r. dropped by and we discussed Fischer, Beatles, Allen, strip clubs and etc. just like usual.

Then an odd thing happened. The gov walked in, sat at the bar, and ordered mexican food, as if he's a regular. He acted really surprised to see an old business card on the bulletin board, from when he was dc rep. That's when i noticed the ag's old business card was missing.

Signed up for the postal exam. Have to see how that goes. A lot of hiring here on island is by racial preference or just plain idiocy or favoritism (or maybe just plain autism). Hopefully since it's a federal job and the p.o. mgr is from guam, it may be more even (he was, after all, the one who told me about the opening).

later.,

Goodbye Saipan, hello Suzhou

I leave for China on April 11th, 2005, Continental Airlines, 6:30 p.m. I travel first to Hong Kong, pick up my visa there, then cross the border into China and continue by train to Shanghai.

Suzhou is only a short distance away from Shanghai, 45 minutes by train. I kind of had the impression that Suzhou was a sleepy, quaint little backwater. Turns out there's a major industrial park there, thanks to the people of Jordan and Singapore. They make computer hardware, Air Jordans and the like. Suzhou also has, not one or two, but THREE Starbucks locations. And McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, etc. Not sure if that's good or bad. Shanghai has an IKEA....

Movies, etc.

SEEN RECENTLY ON DVD:

• Tae Guk Gi - very emotional, dramatic rendering of the Korean War, filmed in Korea by Koreans! Quite powerful but violent too, kinda like Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List.
• Zhou Yu's Train - comeback role of sorts for Gong Li (Raise the Red Lantern); a story about a woman raised by a train-conductor father whose sole purpose in life, besides painting intricate designs on porcelain bowls and vases, is riding trains, mostly to visit a lover in a far-off province in China, but mostly, just for the sheer heck of it.
• Napoleon Dynamite - Hilarious. Brilliant, really. "What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?" "Whatever I want to. GOSH!!!!"
• IHuckabees - BORING. Really wanted to like it but this was one of those like the Royal Tennenbaums I had an extremely hard time sitting through and had to turn it off midways.
• Beijing Bicycle - Really good story about bike messenger in China & his bike. Liked the side story about the "rich woman" in the window. Also the bath house.

LOOKING FORWARD TO:

• Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (May)
• Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith (also May?)
• Chronicles Of Narnia - Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (December)
• new Doctor Who series from BBC Wales - if we ever get it stateside or islandside.... the assistant's a TOTAL babe.

First post on new blog

For older posts, go to (2003-2005) or (2001-2003). More to come soon!

New book and CD in the works, due out this spring (I think).

Possible titles: Back Porch Blues (book), Tropical Depression (cd).



Stay tuna for more updates...

Feeling a little detatched from the Iraqi conflict this holiday? Put a human face on the stories here:



A Baghdad girl's diary



Thanks to habibi for the link.

Hail To The Thief, indeed....

Radiohead Frontman Protests Bush Visit To London

(LAUNCH, 11/20/2003 5:00:00PM)







Radiohead vocalist Thom Yorke is at the forefront of protests surrounding President George Bush's visit to London this week, with Yorke calling Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair "liars," according to NME.com. The singer emailed NME after learning that London police were planning to create a three-mile "exclusion zone" to keep protesters away from Bush, because of concerns over alleged threats of terror attacks against the American leader.



When asked why he chose to speak out, Yorke said, "To make Blair squirm over his decision to take us into a illegitimate war (in Iraq) and follow this religious lunatic (Bush) toward a dangerous future for the whole planet...both of these men are liars. We have the right to call them such, they are putting our children's future in jeopardy. They are not controlling the terrorist threat, they are escalating it.."



Yorke said he was enraged that authorities were using "the threat of terrorism to suppress whatever they choose, intimidate and arrest whoever they wish."

Yorke concluded by suggesting that members of the British Royal Family protest Bush's visit as well, saying that "now is a good time to remind Blair that he's on very very very very very very very very thin ice."



Members of other British bands, such as Blur and Travis, have also spoken out against the President's visit to London and both leaders' stance on the occupation of Iraq. A protest march is scheduled for today (November 20) in London.