Carping about Asian Carp (Savanna Sole)

After reading a story about some ignorant youngsters bow-fishing Asian carp in the Illinois River--with one young woman getting her jaw broken by a flying carp, I started thinking about the Asian carp problem more so than usual.

Here's the aforementioned story in Field & Stream: http://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/fishing/2009/08/when-carp-attack.

There's actually an Asian carp fishery in Illinois, in Thomson, which is in the NW part of the state. Here's an NPR story about Israel putting a tariff on the carp that Schafer Fishery sells to factories in that country to produce gefilte fish:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124459181

And here's another, earlier story:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5542199

The Atlantic has a longer, more involved and thoughtful discussion:

http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/03/an-asian-carp-invasion/37597/

I say seize the carp, or Carpe Carp, and make food or whatever else you can from them. Somebody get me Obama on the horn.

Johnny Kaye, R.I.P.

In a message to my friend Jack:

My niece Cheri just sent me an e-mail telling me some old fart I played with in 1985 died a couple of weeks ago just before I went into the hospital with cellulitis. His obit might have read "Furniture Salesman By Day, Bandleader By Night," and here's a link to more about him than I knew.

As I explained to Cheri, the experience was really intense because I had to practice elementary exercises (like your Mel Bay guitar stuff) to get a better, easier feel for piano fingering, plus I had to learn all the finger positions for all the chords in every key so that I was trained enough to recognize a chord on the charts Johnny handed out and immediately know how to play it.

Many times there was no melody line—just chords—so you would have to “comp” the chords (hit them in time to the melody player). (There may be another meaning to “comp,” as in “Play it a few times and I’ll fake it,” meaning I’ll catch on to the dominant chords and hit them while you play.)

I was actually starting to get good by my last gig, but then I got my first full-time publishing job. My view of Johnny Kaye was he was a BIG bullshitter who had a pretty decent show and a loyal audience but was a dick in private life. Still, as I said, it was an opportunity and a big incentive to put my best effort into something and to play in a group. I'm pretty happy to be playing in a band again, and as I've mentioned, there's nothing that sharpens your performance more than playing to a real audience.

This American Life

I used to catch this show on NPR every so often, and there were a few things I noticed about it that I did or didn't like. I did like the fact that some of the episodes were extremely good storytelling. I didn't like the fact that most episodes were narrated either by Ira Glass himself or people who sounded exactly like Ira Glass, speaking in an irritatingly nasal, clipped, and monotonous style. Further, nearly all of the stories were accompanied by sad or depressing or foreboding instrumental music, as if all stories of American life were inevitably bummers or worse--weird bummers.

After talking with a coworker, though, about the pros and cons of This American Life, I started getting the weekly podcast on iTunes and began burning the episodes to disk to listen to on the road. I discovered David Sedaris, whom I was surprised to learn was a man, and a very funny man at that, and I listened to many shows to the point that I felt more and more guilty about listening to the episodes while traveling while not supporting the show and I finally coughed up some money to donate to their expenses. That was just before Christmas 2009, and then they ran what I considered a very cynical, elite Christmas episode and I thought WTF am I doing supporting these arseholes when they are so fricking cynical about American Life?

I guess I'm past that now, only I am not especially disappointed when they air yet another episode narrated by an irritatingly nasal, montonous Ira Glass wannabe accompanied by foreboding "The Apocalypse is near" instrumental music. I just won't feel so guilty about giving these nonvarying dopes some money to continue their simewhat dubious stories.

January 18, 2010: Still alive

Still hard to believe it's a new year. I guess I have the same feeling every year when I notice I'm reflexively putting down the date as the previous year's. Then I think, "Shoot, the past year was just barely here. Now it's another year, and I'm still alive."

"Shit, am I still alive?" brings to mind a time, many years ago, when I was an orderly at the new "Mental Health" unit at Ottawa Community Hospital. This was back in '73 or '74 or '75 after I had worked at DeKalb Public Hospital as a surgical floor orderly. Prior to that time I had had one year of registered nurse's training at Illinois Valley Community College, as well as a year of working as an orderly at an old folks home--Heritage Manor--in my hometown. After a year of on-the-job experience and a year of academic training (my favorite and best class was Anatomy & Physiology), I came into my own and developed into a good, experienced orderly during my year at DeKalb Public. I also had looked into continuing my R.N. training at Waubonsee College in Sugar Grove, IL, and indeed was in line to get a free ride for that second year when I just became jaded with my full-time George C. Scott/Dianna Rigg - type "Hospital" experience and decided to chuck that particular career route and go back to Streator. Coincidentally, the fellow who hired me to work at DeKalb Public aquired a lofty post at Ottawa Community while I was coming to the conclusion that I had had it with nursing, and he pretty much hired me on the spot when I showed up at his office in Ottawa. I worked on the surgical floor in Ottawa for a while, but when they opened up a new wacko ward I was among the first to apply for a job--mainly so I could work the day shift. Among the others who were the first to apply was a real bitch of a woman--a nurse who had married a doctor and who was pretty much averse to doing any work. Of course she became the first head nurse and I the first orderly, and for a while we had no patients, so I mainly hung around the empty ward and occasionally smoked a Camel cigarette while she looked on disapprovingly.

We went through some practice exercises, such as admitting some volunteer "patient" from one of the social-service agencies that might refer nutcases to us. One such fake patient asked me if it was standard operating procedure to pat down the patients when admitting them. We didn't have any sort of training, so I figured patting down the patient was as standard as I could get.

One of our first real patients was a kid from Streator who was busted for drugs but had ended up in the Ottawa E.R. I went downstairs to pick up the guy, and it turned out he knew me from my hanging around the same places in Streator he had--like the pool hall and Squint's Zoo, a popular bar. He greeted me like an old-time pal, and I did the same, though I didn't know the guy from Adam. Since he was accompanied by two Streator detectives, I figured it was best to act like I knew my way around. To add to the unusual scene, the fuzz seemed real happy to see me too.

I eventually left the hospital's employ under my own volition, but not before having encountered two particularly memorable patients. One was a young kid--maybe 19 years old--who had first gotten quite messed up psychologically when he watched "The Exorcist" under the influence of acid. He was brought in by the Ottawa police because he tried to hang himself with a bedsheet or whatnot in the county jail after being arrested for sticking up the Prairie Farms Dairy Store in Streator with his finger stuck in his jacket pocket and a note that said, "Give me all the money or I'll blow your head off." The other was a gal in her 20s who was in an abusive relationship in which her husband would come home and throw a shirt at her and say, "Wash this for me--I'm going out [with another woman] tonight." She took as much as she could stand, then she decided to kill herself with a buttload of some OTC medication like Sominex. She took so much of it that she did sleep for a few days. When she woke and opened her eyes, her first thought was "Shit--am I still alive?"

The first patient, the one who tried to hang himself, ended up with a pretty light sentence for armed robbery (even if it's just your finger in your pocket, if the person being robbed believes you have a gun, it's armed robbery). The gal who tried to kill herself made a real turn for the better, got out of the abusive marriage, and began to take nursing classes. The last time I saw her, she was working in the same ward as she first entered as a patient, and she may have been the head nurse at that time.

I still wonder what became of the Exorcist-hounded kid. He probaby survived and went on to a better life after a year at Sheridan Correctional, but for the Sominex-popping abused woman, waking up and finding she was still alive was just about the best thing that could have happened to her.