So I am a Cablevision customer. So are my parents. None of us have any real choice in the matter, as Cablevision/Optimum hold an effective monopoly on internet/television service in our respective communities. Both of these incidents were really annoying and wasted significant chunks of my Sunday and Monday, but by Wednesday everyone in my family had their service up and running. It was still deeply annoying, made doubly annoying by the near-constant stream of condescending and misleading information pushed forth by Cablevision employees. My attempts to find an appropriate place to express my displease at these practices led to an entirely new level of frustration, though.

Cablevision is incredibly secretive about their employees’ contact information; over the past few days I’ve been told repeatedly that management have e-mail accounts available only through their intranet, or that they have phone numbers inaccessible from outside lines. Both of these things happen to be untrue.

My frustration reached its peak with a series of tech support chats last night, which inspired a couple of tumblr posts about their persistent references to legal action and the tortured syntax employed in their exchanges.

One of these posts found its way onto the screen of Jim Maiella, VP of Media Relations for Cablevision, who followed me on Twitter and offered to help resolve the issue. Jim provided me with his e-mail address, and I will respect his wishes not to offer it to the public. But I will say I was able to communicate with him without being on the Cablevision intranet, and there’s something seriously flawed with a company’s workflow when the only way to get a contact address from a massive corporation is to bitch about them on Twitter and hope that one of their vice-presidents notice. What follows is the e-mail I sent him. It’s really long. Did he help me resolve the problem?

TO BE CONTINUED
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Each year a mysterious cabal of sportswriters mash up a bunch of statistics, superstitions and bizarre grudges and decide who gets enshrined in the Hall of Fame. There are many perks to being enshrined in “The Hall”, not the least of which is getting your portrait painted by Dick Perez for the Perez-Steele Gallery. Or I guess that used to be the case, apparently they discontinued the series in 2001. Sorry, Goose Gossage!

I was bored watching the Yankees blow a lead tonight, and started looking at HOF votes and found out there have been twenty eight players who received a single vote for the Hall of Fame. In a way, this is even more amazing than getting voted in: there was one lonely sportswriter in the entire realm who looked at your career and decided, “If Phil Rizzuto can make it, why not this guy?” How does this happen? Do the players and their one supporter end up getting lunch together? Are these votes sincere, or are they equivalent of writing in “Donald Duck”? Are there people out there who just enchanted by perfect games, testicular cancer, homicidal paranoia, longevity, or financial acumen that they think their men deserve a spot in Cooperstown?

We may never know, but thirteen of these men in the One Vote Brotherhood got themselves immortalized by Dick Perez thanks to Donruss Diamond Kings. They are enshrined below:
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June 5th: Obama receives Nomination. Lincoln sez: TWO THUMBS UP

November 4th: Obama wins Election! Lincoln raises but one thumb!

January 20, 2009: Lincoln’s hands are down! Look out, President Obama!

Perhaps Lincoln’s thought balloon of “godspeed” is not a blessing, but a warning that our new President should run, for a giant marble statue is about to give him chase! Don’t laugh, it’s happened in cartoons before!

Be careful!

The Food I Love to Hate

Taken from Stories Galore! by C.R. Eckert. Topeka: American Binderies, 1987 edition. 1/1.

1. Lobster
2. Grapes
3. Onions
4. Ham
5. Frog Legs
6. Lima Beans
7. Green Beans
8. Spinich
9. Apple Sauce
10. Pineapple
11. Lamb
12. Shushi
13. Fish
14. Pear
15. Oysters
16. Cherries
17. Oatmeal (sorry, Gonzo)
18. Liver Oil
19. Prune Juice
20. Cantalope
21. Caviar
22. Hot Peppers (drawn with flames surrounding words)
23. Cailflower

I like to fancy myself a writer. I don’t know what kind of writer, but I write things with some degree of regularity, I think about the writerly craft, I help children and adults improve their writing and I get irrationally angry when professional organizations let the phrase “could care less” into their publications.

All of this bluster and bravado is impotent in the face of this:
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Truckin’ Music embodies all the great conflicts of literature, and Man vs. Machine is no exception. While truckers harness the diesel to do their job, Ol’ Smokey wields technology to hamper them as well.

The dreaded Radar was first used against truckers by the late Officer Leonard Baldy of Chicago, who also pioneered the use of puttin’ Bears in the Air. This particular innovation cost Baldy his life in 1960, though it’s clear his memory lives on in the hearts and minds of Chicagoans.

Luckily for Coleman Wilson, not all technology is fatal, sometimes it just puts you to walkin’. There isn’t a lot of biographical details around for Ol’ Coleman, save that he recorded a trio of truckin’ singles for King Records back when the dreaded Radar was young:

1960 - “Radar Blues pt. 1″ b/w “Radar Blues pt. 2″
1961 - “Passing Zone Blues” b/w “Flat Footed Mama”
1962 - “A Green Truck Driver’s First Experience (with Radar)” b/w “Hot Rod Baby”

Obviously, this new device worried the mind of Coleman. His songs aren’t without humor, but they’re not good-time dance numbers; they share that high lonesome airiness with Lonnie Irving’s haunting compositions. “Radar Blues” isn’t even identified as a “song” on the label of the single: it’s called a “Monologue with Guitar”.

Coleman’s brief discography is highly preoccupied with Radar and trucking. Perhaps it’s a pen name for some other musician, or perhaps the perils of Modern Trucking troubled him to an early grave. I prefer to think that the widespread use of CB radio, a phenomenon that began in the 1960s, helped him to overcome his fear of them beartraps, and he lived a long happy life, no longer haunted by the Radar Blues.

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One more song and I promise to drop the “truckin’ music = crack rap” thing. But I can’t get either of these songs out of my head.

But come on!

In 1968, the Harden Trio have a minor hit with “Sneakin’ Things Across the Border”.

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In 2001, Philly’s Most Wanted have a minor hit with “Cross the Border“.

Two styles, one message! Now I just need to find someone familiar with narcocorridos and I can work out my Universal Field Theory of smuggling music. There’s probably some nerdcore song about Han Solo, too.

GLENN FREY NEED NOT APPLY

From tenuous sardine links between “truckin’ music” and “gangsta rap” yesterday, we move onto an explicit link: drug smuggling! No, “pinball” wasn’t drug slang, but you bet your ass “white lightning” is!

Truckin’ pop culture is rife with liquor smuggling, from The Dukes of Hazzard to Smokey & the Bandit, aka the best advertising Coors ever got. I know that sneakin’ beer and moonshine across state lines seems quaint and friendly compared to the crack trade, but witness this old chart, taken from a copy of The Baffler I happened to be reading this week:

With weekend novelties out of the way, let’s get down to business. This week’s theme is Perils of Truckin’. Now, I know that modern day truckers — the kind you see on Trick My Truck have a pretty sweet life, haulin’ load across this country in a rig full of bluetooth accesories, iPods, in-dash DVD players and Web 2.0 mobisodes. It’s like hanging out at your computer all day, but you get paid for it, and get to see this great nation!

But it wasn’t always this way. Back when most truckin’ songs were penned, these world-shrinking portable technologies didn’t exist. The U.S. Postal Service and payphones were your only contacts with the folks back home, and your audio options were severely limited. Today most of us are accustomed to the complete agency a portable music player offers us, but even a cassette tape player wasn’t mass-produced until the middle 1960s, and a trucker on the long haul had, at best, radio reception at the whim of their itinerary.
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It’s a shopworn cliche of my generation: middle class white people will insist they like “all types of music - except for country and rap!” It’s an absurd claim: you can easily conjure a dozen musical styles that most of these people would hate, or at the very least that they’d never heard of. How many of these people do you think listen to a lot of free jazz, gabber, symphonic black metal, zydecko, baroque, gamelan? More to the point, there’s bound to be some country and rap songs these people would enjoy. There’s one category of music I think most people would be justified in dismissing though: country-rap hybrids.

Sure, Alabama 3 uses elements from both, but what have we got besides that? Kid Rock? Some novelty records who take cues from Rappin’ Rodney and Joe Piscopo, believing that rap is simply nursery rhymes over a Casiotone drumbeat? Well, in the 1990s someone decided to take that “winning formula” and apply it to truckin’ music: “Buck Truck, the Rappin’ Trucker”.

TMM is a celebration of truckin’ music, not a mockery. But you take the bad with the good, and when college pal “Matthew Barney Gumble” discovered ol’ Buck a few years ago, he made sure the staff IOPI was made aware of him. We can no more disown Buck Truck than we can C.W. McCall or our church’s reverend or anyone else. So without further comment, here is “Sleazy Weasel”. It’s not very good. We’ll make it up to you tomorrow with one of the best trucker songs ever, a genuine old style tearjerker. Meanwhile, “enjoy”.

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