Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   hold your nose blues
Wednesday, March 9 2011
We hadn't cleaned our house since Gretchen's birthday (about six weeks ago), during which time it had grown rather nasty, mostly from the accumulated crumbs and crud of life with two dogs, five cats, three cat litter boxes, a garage full of sawdust, and a woodstove fed a diet of junk mail and salvaged firewood. Particularly because of the sawdust and nuggets of cat litter, the carpets only take a few days to become noticeably unclean. By six weeks, they were disgusting enough to actually discourage any remedial action as hopeless. This is what is known as passing the point of "hoarder criticality," though we have a few anti-hoarding counterweights, the most powerful being Gretchen. Today after she got home from a staff meeting, she initiated a cleaning jihad. Unlike all other such jihads, this one was not motivated by the imminent arrival of guests. She was cleaning simply because the house needed it. Perhaps the spring was the guest whose arrival she was anticipating. I quickly joined in, focusing mostly on sweeping and vacuuming while Gretchen cleared and scrubbed surfaces. [REDACTED]

Tonight I was a little sick of my new music and waded back again into my old collection of classics from early in the evolution of my musical tastes. I found myself listening to "It's Up to You" from the Moody Blues' 1970 album A Question of Balance. That's probably my least-favorite classic-period Moody Blues album, but the song is just so good it compels me to listen to it again and again. There's just something about the sincere-yet-breezy stroll of the instrumentation combined with the rich creamy melancholy of Justin Hayward's voice that makes for mid-tempo rock and roll perfection.
One additional thing I noticed when listening to the song tonight is that the rhythm guitar keeps trying (almost menacingly) to rise up into something approaching electric blues, but keeps being held somehow down in the warmer, safer world of electric folk. It's a kind of "hold your nose" blues. Now I'm not normally a fan of the blues, but occasionally the British manifestation can be amazing, reflected as it is off their white sidewalk bubblegum, through the craggy stumps of half-rotten teeth, and into and out of a plate of fish and chips.


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