Some Random Thoughts

KEXP Great Music!!

Oatmeal Box Pin-hole Camera web site.

This is just an idea that occurred to me, and these are my thoughts of who I'd like to hear remake some of the Beatles hits. There are certainly others that would be good.


Beatles One Take Two
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Bare Naked Ladies = Love Me Do
Gwen Stefani = From Me To You
Jessica Simpson = She Loves You
Britney Spears = I Want to Hold Your Hand
Dave Mathews Band = Can't Buy Me Love
Avril Lavigne = A Hard Day's Night
Jack Johnson = I Feel Fine
GreenDay = Eight Days a Week
Franz Ferdinand = Ticket To Ride
U2 = Help
Nora Jones = Yesterday
David Gray = Day Tripper
ColdPlay = We Can Work It Out
Wilco = Paperback Writer
B 52's = Yellow Submarine
Crash Test Dummies = Eleanor Rigby
Moby = Penny Lane
The Eagles = All You Need Is Love
Jewel = Hello, Goodbye
Alanis Morisette = Lady Madonna
Heart = Hey Jude
Beck = Get Back
REM = The Ballad of John and Yoko
Madonna = Something
Pearl Jam = Come Together
Sheryl Crow = Let It Be
Sarah McLachlan = The Long and Winding Road

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mr. Ed. I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.
I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative.
I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds.
I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.
I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it. "

Samantha Black Crow from "American Gods" by Neil Gaimin

Montana Sweetgrass Soap
www.montanasweetgrass.com
Bigfork, Montana


Cherish's Country Store
www.cherishscountrystore.com
Thompson Falls, Montana


Authentic Creations
www.authenticcreations.net
Missoula, Montana

And Todays Tunes of the Day

Glass Onion - The Beatles
Magnet and Steel - Walter Egan
Harvest - Neil Young
Badge - Cream
All About Mary - Jeff Jones Band
Brandy - Looking Glass
California Dreaming - The Mama's and the Papa's
Foggy Dew - The Chieftains with Sarah McLachlan
Forever and Ever Amen - Randy Travis
Third Rate Romance - Amazing Rhythm Aces
A Boy Named Sue - Johnny Cash
Good Hearted Woman - Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson

Cool websites
Threadless T-Shirts Cool T-shirt Design site, with design contests and t-shirts for sale.

NaNoWriMo National Novel Writing Month

Todays iTunes
Luka - Suzanne Vega
Year of the Cat - Al Stewart
Miss You - The Rolling Stones
Turn, Turn, Turn - The Byrds
Don't Let Me Down - The Beatles
Without You - Nilsson
Angel in Blue - J. Geils Band
Father and Son - Cat Stevens
Heart of Gold - Neil Young
Father and Son - Johnny Cash and Fiona Apple
Another Day - Anna Coogan and North19

Cherokee Bend - Gordon Lightfoot
Sweet Seasons - Carole King
Come Monday - Jimmy Buffet
Delta Dawn - Helen Reddy
Downtown - Petula Clark
Dancing In the Moonlight - King Harvest
Losing My Religion - REM;
God Shuffled His Feet - Crash Test Dummies
All About Mary - Jeff Jones Band
She's a Jar - Wilco
Mind Games - John Lennon
We Can Work It Out - Heather Nova
Whatever Gets You Through the Night - John Lennon
Jesus Etc, - Wilco
Layla - Eric Clapton
Samba Pa Ti - Santana
Norwegian Wood - the Beatles
Black Dog - Led Zeppelin
The Long and Winding Road - The Beatles
Wild Horses - The Rolling Stones

Am I a Montana Writer?

I've recently been reading a lot of "Montana Writers", and I wonder if I'm a "Montana Writer"? I've never been a student of writing, I've never taken or taught any "Western Writing" workshops. I never studied or drank with any elite literary figurehead who claims to be the start or continuation of some Western literary movement.

I'm not from back east or California, and I didn't move to Montana because I was a yuppie fly-fisherman or I wanted to "be a rancher" on 20 acres, or because I love wolves. I'm not a hunter, but I don't love grizzly bears and wolves. I like trees and wilderness but I also like loggers. I'm not some out-of-state'r who moved to Montana because "its beautiful", or I thought it would be neat to live "out west". I'm not a hard-core logger who wants to cut all the big wood, I'm not a rancher who wants to kill every wolf, coyote, or gopher that I can. I'm not a tree-hugger to wants the whole world in wilderness areas. I'm not an "environmentalist" who thinks its ok to hurt people to save a squirrel, or that its ok to vandalize stores in the name of
"free trade".

I was born in Montana, my parents were born in Montana and half my grandparents were born in Montana, and all my grandparents are buried in Montana. I don't live in Montana, I was forced to l eave to find work. I didn't move to Montana to live on my inheritance or the killing I made from selling a house in the bay area.

I'm part of the real Montana, not the yuppified fly-fishing tree-hugging wolf loving neo-nazi extremeist crap that some people think is Montana, "The Big Sky Country". I have family there, I have roots there, not just people that I play cowboy with, or go RV'ing on the weekends or for summer vacation. Its easy to love Montana when you have an trust fund or an inheritance to live off of. Its easy to love, enjoy, or laugh at the weather when all it means is that you might have to sell some of your stocks or mutual funds to buy feed for your registered horses or llamas. Its hurts a little more when it might mean a third mortgage on a farm that has been in your family for four generations.

Will this ever be published? Almost certainly not, why on earth would any sensible editor or publisher ever publish an article so negative about his craft or chosen style or subject matter? No sensible publisher would, but a publisher with guts might, and a real Montana publisher probably would.

I really don't begrudge these so-called Montana or Western writers their stories, they're only writers telling stories or describing people or places or things, doing what writers and story-tellers have been doing for hundreds of years. They're writing about what they see, what they know, who they are and how they feel. What I do begrudge them is that its not the whole story, and its not the only story. Montana is too big, there are too many stories, some good, some bad, some happy, some sad. There are many sides to every issue and most if not all are at least in some part based in truth, honesty, decency,
and good intentions. There are the sad stories, stories of greed and lust, of hatred and dishonesty, we all know those stories and we try and we'd prefer to forget them but we remember. We've been used and abused, trampled on, forgotten, ignored, and taken advantage of, and we still feel the pain. Most of the wounds have healed but there's always the scars. These "western" writers are trying to tell their story, describe things they've seen or felt, but they can only tell one single tiny side of the story, and there are other stories to be told, stories that need to and should be told. Some big stories and lots of little stories, but definitely not something that should be lumped into or labelled as "western literature", not that anything about Montana can really be lumped or labelled.

In many ways Montana is as much a state of mind, a philosophy, a feeling, or a way of thinking as it is a place, so in many ways no matter where you are, whether its Seattle, Singapore, NewYork or North Dakota you can still be in Montana. And conversely there are probably lots of people in Billings, Bozeman, Missoula, Livingston, Whitefish, Bigfork, the Bitteroot, the Northfork, Butte, and Helena who are not in Montana; and there is a lot of writing that is done in and about Montana that is not one bit Montana.

Todays Tunes

Anna Coogan and North19 Glory is the name of the album, here's one of my favorites, Another Day

Some more new (at least to me) artists that I kind of like.
Anna Nalick
The Killers
Snow Patrol

Josh Simpson Glass Art
Very cool and interesting blown glass art, I especially like the "planets"!!

Megalithic UK
Very cool site with lots of information and maps to many many megalithic sites around the UK; standing stones, stone circles, barrows, etc.!


William Gibson - Pattern Recognition

Sustainable Ballard

Greenmap Seattle

I'm creating this blog as a way to post different things, thoughts, text, pictures, images, ideas, web-sites. Not sure what direction it will take or where it will go.