Watching-the-driveway-flow edition.
My coffee maker has a problem. Which means I, too, have a problem.
The problem is this: the coffee maker has about as many functions and tricky settings as a missile defense control panel. However, all it is required to do is make coffee. I don’t want it to guide nuclear missiles to designated targets, as amusing as that might be on a slow-starting morning. I simply want it to heat water, pour the water through a basket full of ground-up coffee, then keep the drippings hot in the coffee pot. A perfectly acceptable, one might even say, laudable mission for a coffee maker. Vital, even — especially in my house.
But the coffee maker evidently yearns for greater things, and it’s developed a bit of a complex about performing what ought to be a simple function. It prematurely stops brewing and flashes “Error” messages above the sludgy oil slick at the bottom of the pot. It beeps and stops heating the brewed coffee while I’m only halfway through my first cup. No machine that really wants to be my friend is going to do that kind of thing.
I’m beginning to imagine the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android every time I pop the cover off that big can of Chock Full’o Nuts. “My intellect, which is capable of solving every known mathematical theorem simultaneously, is instead going to brew supermarket coffee . . .” Marvin the Malcontent Coffee Maker may not realize it, but he’s about to switch roles from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to WALL-E, and not in the starring role.
Come back, Mister Coffee — all is forgiven.
James “Blood” Ulmer plays the hardy perennial “Sittin’ On Top of the World” with backing from Alison Kraus on violin. Though I’ve never really understood the “harmolodic” music theory espoused by Ulmer and his mentor, Ornette Coleman (as with Buckminster Fuller, Coleman’s ideas become harder to understand the more he explains them), I know I usually like what I hear.
Here is Ulmer’s solo version of “Are You Glad to Be in America,” one of his earliest records:
Here’s a showstopper: “First Blood” with Bernie Worrell on Hammond organ:
Check out the lame audience member with his fingers in his ears.
No Harry Potters this year. Lots of Transformers — must have been four or five Bumblebees in The Divine Miss T’s school Halloween parade. Only one Spiderman, but Jedi knights made a comeback after being missing for the past few years. I guess that’s the intended result of George Lucas’ endless recycling and re-releasing of Star Wars.
