brykmantra.com

Couple of different things:

The Spook tells me that country singer Jake Kellen is backing Ron Paul for President, and has recorded a song (based on one of his existing songs) about how Congressman Paul is going to win in a landslide.

Eventually, it is assumed.

You can check out the song on the Ron Paul 2008 MySpace page.

The reason I mention this is because it gives me a chance to mention that I went to high school with Kellen’s mom, Debbie (who occasionally leaves comments here), and his uncle, Guy, who is also his producer and possibly his management Svengali. Also, it was my best bud from college that bankrolled Kellen’s first album, and it says so in the liner notes.

Seriously, this is the closest brush with fame I’ve ever had. We can’t all have a boss who ran for governor, you know …

Next: My wife likes Steve Zahn and what’s not to like?), who co-starred in the miniseries “Comanche Moon” this week. That gives me an opportunity to mention Zahn’s new movie, Strange Wilderness.

The reason I bring it up is because it gives me opportunity to show this part of the movies trailer — the part that had me cackling out loud:

Okay, okay, so it’s an acquired taste. Anyway, here’s the whole trailer, if you insist:

And finally, via Attack of the Show: Rubber band machine gun!

Wow, I’ve heard about this for years, but I’m just now realizing that I’ve never seen or heard it before.

And it’s much, much more horrible than I could have ever dreamed!

I’m speaking, of course, about William Shatner’s trailblazing version of “Rocket Man”:

I’ve seen and heard The Shat “perform” (some would say “mutilate”) many songs over the years, and seen even more parodies, so I’ve just always assumed that I’ve heard this one too.

But now I can clearly see that this is a horror which I have not previously faced. I didn’t even realized that it was as long ago as 1978; I assumed it was the mid-80s.

“She packed my bags . . . last night pre-flight … “

Now I’m going to have nightmares.

And this is coming from someone who has listened to Shatner’s “Has Been” album all the way through …

I had a long post going last night, but it was too late to finish it … and I just don’t feel like it tonight, so here’s something different: Somebody on Flickr had pictures of dozens of board games he had gotten at resale stores over the years, and one of the games was The Dark Tower.

I thought I had blogged about it at one point in the past five years, since I know I found a flash version of the game online, but I guess I didn’t.

The reason I tried to find it was because a couple of commenters had never heard of the game, and some others of us were trying to explain it.

It was really, really cool: There was a big plastic tower in the middle of the board with a computerized number readout (pretty Jetsons for 1982!), and illustration slides that spun around to show your loot, your inventory, and your attackers. Bonus points: Orson Welles did the TV commercials! (It was a year or so before his death.)

Anyway, I found an even sweeter flash version, so click here to play it!

And speaking of Orson Welles, here’s a bizarre comedy sketch that features The Great Director, Dean Martin, and Jimmy Stewart:

Let’s see how many people we can mobilize.

Assuming you’re reading this today (Sunday, January 13), please go over to Santa’s Blog of the Day, and vote for our good blogging-friend, RennyBA.

(As a bonus, my site will show up as the source of the link, in a live traffic feed … So you’ll be helping me out too! Just make sure you click the link from here, not from Renny’s. Go to his site later, but click from here to go to Santa’s. Got it? Thanks!)

As I write this, the leader has 11 votes and Renny has 7 — a margin that can be easily surmountable! So please go over and vote (multiple times, if you have multiple computers), and help put a Friend of Mantra on the top of the heap!

Darn you, Yay Kim! You’ve got me hooked on the RPM Music Challenge! I keep going back, listening to more of the music, reading their articles … and, worst of all, actually thinking that entering this thing might be doable!

But it’s really not if we can’t figure out the recording of vocals, so I’m probably safe …

Anyway, check out these three videos about the challenge. They’re pretty interesting, especially in the fact that a good percentage of the participants are middle-aged. These days it often seems like everything on the Internet (MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook) is for the young, by the young.

It’s good to know that there are bastions of Baby Boomer encroachment out there.

On the subject of the record-an-album-in-a-month challenges, our good friend Yay Kim has turned us on to another one going on next month: The RPM Challenge.

This one is for only 10 songs, so I’m definitely tempted. But even if you have no intention of signing up, at least go to the site and listen to last year’s entries. I really like what I’ve heard so far in the Pop category (a lot of the stuff there sounds more Alternative than Pop, but so much the better.

I also found other cool stuff, like How-To Articles on HarmonyCentral, cool tips for making music on your computer (which just happens to be “how I roll”), and musicians’ MySpace links, like this one from Gary Fox (make sure you listen to the song “Debutante Blues” — it reminds me of early 70s alternative, except it’s better!)

Okay, we’re going with the “5″ bullets because nothing else has struck me as being worthy. (You DO remember I’ve been blogging for 5 years, right? Just checking …)

Okay, let’s do it:

First off, for Yay Kim: I’m assuming you know about February Album Writing Month — but since you just did this kind of thing, I’m also assuming you’re going to take a pass this time around.

I’m tempted — really, really tempted — but I think for now I need to work on my other projects (there are at least three that need my attention, chief of which is job-hunting.

Not that I couldn’t take on another project, but the fact is that in the three weeks until the contest starts I would have to become much, much more musician-like than I am at this point in time in order to do the project in February without putting everything else on hold. That’s what I don’t have time for.

Speaking of Chicks with Guitars, I’ve run across some sites and tunes for Rocket, the all-girl semi-punk band that I remembered from The Next Great American Band on Fox a couple of months ago. The reason I bring it up is because they sound a lot better than they did on the show. I really should have looked them up earilier, because I already knew that TV networks don’t know how to make music sound good, especially when it’s musicians performing on reality shows, especially on Fox.

Anyway, check out their site, linked above, and their MySpace site, which has probably the coolest design I’ve seen of any pro musicians on MySpace.

Here’s their music video of “Cougar Rush”, the best of their videos on YouTube:

But if you really want to hear their music, go to their official site.

Speaking of music videos, Boing Boing had some links to lots of old videos today, including one song I had been thinking about for some reason, from the 8th grade year: Green Tambourine — and now here’s the music video that I’ve never seen before:

There was also this one from about 15 years later, the height of the MTV craze:

And now for something completely different, not music or video at all:

This just in: HILLARY IS DEAD!

No, not that one, the Mt. Everest guy.

Yes, my 5th Blogiversary bullet point is working well, so let’s continue pounding it into the ground with this miscellaneous stuff:

Well, Winter’s back, or what passes for Winter in Texas. It had been around 80F for the past three days, but now the temperatures are more seasonal. While it was nice to putter around in the garage — We actually cleared out a couple of paths! We took some old junk to the charity resale shop! — it’s nice for the night air to have a nice little bite to it again, since for most of the year it’s way too warm here. Let’s enjoy the cold while we can.

The Wife did her part by making her special tortilla soup recipte tonight.

Speaking of winter: Even though it was warm, I started geting a hankering for my “Classis Rock Winter Mix” CD, that I’ve been rocking since the Winter of 88-89. The exact song lineup has changed slightly over the years — due in part to what I’ve got available on MP3, as opposed to what I had available then on vinyl — but there are a few unwavering pillars, like Led Zeppelin’s “California” and “Battle of Evermore”, Leo Kottke’s “Bean Time”, Melanie’s “Ring the Living Bell”, ELP’s “From the Beginning”, Steve Miller’s “The Window” and “Wild Mountain Honey”, and of course “Bare Trees” by near-original-lineup Fleetwood Mac.

I hadn’t listened to it as much the past couple of winters, but for the most part the mix has been a huge factor in helping me recover from the post-holiday blahs of the past 19 years.

The problem this year was that over half the songs in the directory where I keep these MP3′s had fallen victim to the Great MP3 Drive Corruption of 2006, and I couldn’t find any of the CD copies of the mix.

Except this weekend I found it in the above-mentioned garage, so everything’s cool now.

Speaking of cool music: I’ve been listening to some older CD’s lately, like “Star” by Belly. You might (or not) remember their (very) minor 1992 (or so) hit, “Feed the Tree”: Here they are performing it on Letterman:

Hey, remember when bands used to do “music videos”? Good times! Anyway, here’s theirs for this:

The whole album is really good, especially for late nights: It’s jangly flow-of-consciousness quirky chick rock, the perfect soundtrack to after-midnight blogging with the headphones on.

And for something totally different: Today was the day of the New Hampshire primaries. And going back to something I said last week, a lesser man myself might say that this was the day that a bunch of sap-witted lobster-jockeys get to dictate which candidates the rest of the country doesn’t get to vote for when our turn rolls around.

But I certainly wouldn’t say it, in part because I happen to like who the lobster-jockeys chose to put in first place, at least on the Republican side.

On the Democrat side: Ever wonder why the Democrats have had such a hard time holding on to the Oval Office in the past 40 years? Maybe it’s because they’re horrible judges of the American public — specifically, in this case they haven’t realized that the only one of their current candidates who could beat the Republicans — pretty much ANY Republicans — in the general election is John Edwards.

Seriously. Nominate anybody else, and they’ve got a tsetse fly’s snowball in Hitler Hell chance.

The only other person who could win is Clinton — BILL Clinton, that is, and there’s that pesky matter of presidential term limits, so Edwards is it.

Need more proof that the Dems are clueless?

I used to think, without knowing much about his policy’s, that Bill Richardson might not be too bad, for a Democrat.

Then he goes and gets Martin Sheen’s endorsement.

And now I have to be embarassed that I could even think that he’s a passable candidate.

Plus, Richardson is mired even more hopelessly in the single digits.

It’s just like four years ago when Howard Dean was just so freaking proud to have Michael Moore’s endorsement …

… an endorsement which just happened to immediately precede the candidate’s massive flameout.

Gee, I wonder why that was.

Let’s see if we can make this quick, starting with re-using my 5th Blogiversary bullet:

I was trying to run a boot-from-disk Linux distro on the computer I keep in the garage, and got this on the screen.

“Ok, booding dhe kebnel.” I thought the computer might be drunk …

Actually, it’s probably a corrupted RAM chip. I haven’t used the thing since last spring, so anything can happen with the temperature extremes we have around here. I’m sure I’ve got some suitable spare chips around here somewhere — what kind of geek would I be if I didn’t? — but they weren’t in any of my garage stashes, so I blew it off for tonight.

Anyway: “Gelcome do dhe KNO@@IH life Lineh-on-CD!” Click here for an easier-to-read view.

The reason I was trying to use the outside computer is that it was unseasonably warm today, probably close to 80F, and at least 20 degrees higher than the high yesterday. I finished raking the leaves in the back yard as my exercise (since my tendonitis was killing me from the fitness center treadmill yesterday). After I was done, it was still so nice out that I decided to sort out some of our (my wife’s) endless boxes of Christmas stuff in the garage so we could actually WALK out there, what a concept.

And by the time I was finished with that, the ABC News/Facebook debate was in full swing on TV and Thistle and Shamrock was starting on NPR, and since it was still a nice night and all that was still not enough stimulation (not that I have raging ADD or anything), I decided to boot up my “live” Knoppix games disk, since unlike some other distros I’ve got (like Ubuntu) it would work well on the 256 megs of RAM on the garage PC.

But alas, it was not to be.

Molly & Bristol “helped” me rake the leaves, and I got to show them off when a guy down the alley brought down his little girl who had begged him to take her down to see the two barking dogs. As a bonus, I also got some footage of Bristol bouncing like he’s spring-loaded as they were walking toward the yard, and it might be enough to make it worth editing a little and posting to YouTube. That new little Olympus of ours can do amazing video, as long as there’s enough light.

About 10 tonight we heard a police siren give a couple of blasts, like somebody was being pulled over, and it sounded very close. Then Molly started barking at the front door so I thought I’d check it out.

There was a fire truck, all its lights flashing, in the middle of the street in front of our house, an ambulance in front of it, and cop cars both in front of and behind those. Cars on both sides were forced to turn around and go back down the street from when they came.

It turns out that all the action was focused on the house to the east of ours, the family from Mexico. We never did figure out what was going on, but I’m going to ask around on our community bulletin board, because you just know there’s always got to be a Nosey Nellie monitoring the police scanner to be up on all the juicy goings-on.

Don’t you just love the Internet.

And finally some sad news today: I’m always mentioning the World’s Greatest Dentist, Dr. Mary; today her mother-in-law passed away. My wife was taking the news hard since her dad and Dr. Mary’s husband’s dad were friends from way back, and the families new each other well.

Sorry to end the day on a bummer note, people, but sometimes that happens.

It worked out so well on the previous two nights, so let’s continue celebrating my Five-Year Blogiversary by posting more random chatter:

Tomorrow is the day of the Iowa Caucuses. Someone who is not as civilized, polite or considerate as myself might say that tomorrow is the day that a bunch of bucktoothed cornshuckers tell the rest of the country who they can’t vote for.

But I wouldn’t say that, because I’m too nice.

Seriously though, you know that I love every creature on God’s green planet, and I have nothing against Iowa. But let’s face it: Every election year, after Iowa and New Hampshire get through voting, half of the candidates of both parties are dropping out before the most populous states like California and New York — and yes, Texas — get a chance to have a say in the matter.

Not that I would probably like the candidates that would be hand-picked by the Big Apple and Wackyfornia; and the candidate I was rooting for in 2000 actually won in New Hampshire.

But it’s the prinicple of the thing: People in 48 of the states have to watch their favorites get plucked out of the race like feathers off a dead chicken, and these limited choices are dictated by these two tiny states (population-wise, anyway) that aren’t representative of America (not that any states are a microcosm of the whole nation).

And I think that at least one of my blogging friends might agree with me, since her candidate has been about 2% in Iowa.

Anyway, I’ll have more to say when all this is over.

The late night talk shows are back! The writer’s strike isn’t over, but the shows have either struck private deals, or figured out how to work without writers.

Letterman did fine during the strike of 1988, using what he called “Network Time Killers”, like a fountain that he would fill with various liquids, like milk or Scope mouthwash; he called in The Dancing Waters, until he discovered that someone else was using the name, and he changed it to The Prancing Fluids. Another NTK was the Del Rubio Triplets.

Anyway, I mention Letterman so that I can also say: He has a beard, a big gray bushy beard, and it looks awful. He looks like he just climbed off a package of old-timey cough drops.

Leno is trying to make it without writers, and it’s going about as well as Letterman beard looks. It’s a total amateur hour.

But at least he had the new Jibjab cartoon, and his first guest is Iowa front-runner Mike Huckabee, and my wife is actually interested in a candidate in the first time in all the years I’ve known her.

Anway, it’s good to have the talk shows back with new material; I know we can’t be the only ones with this end-of-the-day ritual …

One day this past weekend, when it was fairly warm, I raked half the leaves in our back yard; I would have raked more but I had completely filled our trash tote plus a 30-gallon paper leaf sack, so I figured that would be a good place to stop.

There was better weather to rake in a month ago, but all the leaves hadn’t fallen yet.

And finally: I’d like to welcome the newest addition to my blogroll, Kristie from Norway, a friend (or at least a reader) of RennyBA’s blog.

Welcome to the insanity, Kristie!