The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-retro-chic.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — retro chic

This past weekend we gave our old record collection to a young friend who’d bought a 1959 Motorola phonograph player powered by a tube amp with a turntable and two detachable speakers that could be separated nearly 8 feet apart  to create stereophonic  sound.  Quite the innovation back in the Eisenhower era!  Her buying this 50 year old vintage electronica was probably the equivalent of me buying a Victrola when I was her age.  Progress marches on……
I’m told folks are going back to vinyl.  Oh ho, right!  And next we’ll return to the magic of 8-tracks.  You bet.  Every album I ever listened to in my lifetime would download on an I-pod and play back through a home entertainment center’s 7 surround-sound speakers, not necessarily a vast improvement over the quadrophonic leap forward of the 70’s, but nicely compact and certainly easier to use than a turntable and its scratch-and-pop aesthetic.
Sure, it was a hard psychic journey deciding to get rid of hundreds of old albums and all that rich cover art, a veritable time trip through our musical pantheon and those many nights, listening with roommates and friends.  Probably the same with our grandparents and their 2 pound 78’s listened to on Edison’s magic invention.  We have lived long enough to be retro chic, sad to say.
Now I’ve got boxes of cassette tapes, VHS tapes and beta movies.   Sure, I could save em.  Beta’s coming back, rumor has it.  You hang onto anything long enough, it becomes a collector item.  I guess that’s why here on the retro chic South End, we keep our cars up on blocks back in the weeds at the edge of the nettle forest.  When the world is ready once again for ‘K’ cars, we got the market cornered.  You want to beat the rush, order now…..  Our operators are standing by.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-ATTENTION-DEFICIT.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — ATTENTION! DEFICIT

We all got such short little spans of attention these days, we’re like deer in the median strip of the 6 lane digital highway.  Used to be we prized skills like concentration, stick-to-it-ness, focus, diligence, all those traits that are long lost to anyone unlucky enough to own a television or a computer.  Now we admire Multi-Taskers, jugglers of e-mail, news crawls, Facebook, text messages and a cellphone conversation while whipping up a dinner for the family between commercials during Fox news.  Call me Old School, put a dunce hat on me and make me sit in a corner, but I don’t buy this multi-tasking one little bit.  I taught school awhile before I took an early retirement and I’ve tried to teach attention deficit kids whose sole operational mode was switching from one thought to six others in the space of a minute.  Trust me —this is a prescription for not learning much of anything, plenty of little.

Deep thinking seems to be a Lost Art.  Down at the South End even Shallow Thinking has taken a hike.  We got computers, TV, You-Tube, Linked-In, all that stuff like you-all, meaning, we got 3 minute max attention spans.  My pals can’t listen to a whole CD — they hit random play and make a radio station out of their CD players.

The world is on constant Channel Surf, snippets of one crummy show, check out the ball scores, click to the news crawlers, bounce through 37 channels of Nature/Food/CNN/chopped liver then start over.  The internet should be banned unless we’re on Ritalin.

I just hope there are people, few though they may be, living in some remote island of the Digital World, maybe its south tail end, who can still Concentrate, who can plan and build — from start to finish without checking their stock quotations — a nuclear reactor or a Boeing 747 or a skyscraper or a cure for brain cancer.

I had hoped to end this on some pithy, humorous, neatly bundled conclusion — I really had.  But … damn if I can remember where we started.  Something about crummy memory, I think.  All I can say is Alzheimer’s should hold no fear for most of us.  We’ve already programmed ourselves for it…..

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-autobahn-to-stanwoodopolis.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — autobahn to stanwoodopolis

We been watching a new trend developing lately down here on the South End:  Biodiesel.  Taking farmlands and using them to grow fuel instead of food.   Now, I don’t know what YOUR rig gets per gallon, but I guess most of us Americans want a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to go shopping in war-torn Stanwoodopolis, don’t care WHAT it costs in gas so long as it’s cheaper per gallon than designer bottled water.

I hear a lot of complaining now that gas prices are at an all time high.  I guess we thought a democratic Iraq would be so grateful they’d give us free oil and we’d ALL be driving full size Hummers.  I even heard an oil company last week complaining they didn’t have the money for any more cleanup penalties from the Valdez spill.  Tough times for all of us, I guess.

So maybe it IS the right time to take food and turn it into fuel.  Gas stations’ll look more like a fast food drive-up.  Tomato diesel, hi octane fryer fat, corn on the cob unleaded, you want to supersize that fill-up, ma’am?

The burger chains are already teamed up with the gas stations on this.  Way ahead of us.  Pump the deep fat fryers into you AND your car.  A full service station means they got a health clinic in back to handle clogged arteries, get you back on the road in no time flat.

Cutting down on the driving or cutting down on the car size or cutting down on the calories just isn’t the South End way, I guess.  If it means cutting down our old growth nettle forests to make biodiesel, by god, we’re gonna do it.  Might as well —  we’ll need the acreage for the new autobahn into Stanwood.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-obits-made-e-z.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —obits made e-z

Some of us old codgers here on the South End Shangri-La are starting to cash in our chips.  After a lifetime of skimming the surface of sinning, it’s finally time, I guess, to face the music.  Oh, a few of us will probably make it to heaven but we’re in no great rush, although this lifestyle of excess and bad habits might make you think we’re on the Fast Track to hell.
Other places, you see folks buying their cemetery plots or ordering fancy marble headstones with a pithy Bible verse as a hedge against being denied entry into the Gated Community in the sky.  They make living wills and put their estates in order, plan the funeral service ahead of time with their favorite music and slides, sort of an MTV for the soon-to-be-departed.  Probably working even now on the special Facebook update and that final Tweet :  Bye, I’m dead.
Down here the boyz have our own mortuarial customs.  We like to put an obituary photo in the local newspaper stating date of birth, date of death, who got left behind and something about going now to be with Jesus.  The grieving missuz writes this.  What we do is pick the obit photograph ahead of time.  Custom dictates that it is at least 30 years old when we still had our hair and didn’t have that beergut, and most importantly it shows us proudly holding a trophy size fish.  Salmon’s good, halibut’s better.  Anything that takes both hands to hold up for the camera is best.  If necessary, a string of trout or a mess of panfish works, but only as a last resort.  The Deceased As Sportsman is the idea here, even if the sportsman’s features are blurry (the photographer was drinking and celebrating too, you see).
No, I don’t know where this custom originated, we just follow the dictums.  Most of us haven’t fished in the last 30 years.  I suppose we all hope Heaven is just one big lake, fully stocked with whopper Chinook and 150 pound halibut.  Hell, I figure, might be the same …. Only we have to clean the catch ourselves.  Until  the missuz shows up.