The Misanthrope – Sunday’s Lighter Side

A bad neighbor is as great a misfortune as a good one is a great blessing.
Hesiod (lived 8th century BC), Greek poet

Damn Neighbors, the Continuing Saga. Budding tuba player apparently gave the instrument a rest, but instead the family decided to pretend they are living in Baghdad by igniting several strings of firecrackers and scaring the bejesus out of our dog and annoying the crap out of its owner. The Misanthrope hollered rather nicely over the fence to ask them to stop, which of course they did not. The police were called, we’re not sure they responded, even though a blast went off while reporting it, because they called back about 20 minutes later and asked what we knew about the family. We told him the little brat attempts to play the tuba, they have a howling dog that sounds as if it is being tortured, they have pool parties when it’s cold (they never seem to catch cold or get ear infections). We limited the info to the tuba player, which made the officer chuckle, but did little to stop the blasts. When midnight arrived, if we had a bomb shelter we would have gone down there. You’re probably wondering where the hell does The Misanthrope live (some days it seems like hell)? We live in a Southern California suburb where Ronald Reagan was buried, good thing for the former president we are a few miles from him otherwise, he’d never rest in peace.

Rip this Joint II. We finished ripping all our music into the computer and have a bit less than I guessed publicly last week, but far less than what I thought we would have. We have 553 hours of music. I guessed 623 hours, but expected it to end around 700 hours. Finding songs forgotten about over the years has been a delight of this effort. We would not call it rediscovering, more like realizing why the CD was purchased in the first place. We listened to Alvin Lee and Ten Years after on the Woodstock CD. The guitar work on that song is incredible. Elvis Costello has myriad outstanding songs, same for Randy Newman. What a treat it is to listen to Carmen McRae while writing. One of The Misanthrope’s goals over this vacation period was to catalog all our books, but discovering the ease of loading the music onto the computer put the books on hold. Maybe Google will soon find a way for everyone to rip books into the computer.

Incomprehensible. The current president again used the word incomprehensible to talk about the Asian tragedy. If it were incomprehensible, would the United States continue with its generous financial aid? For the record, The Misanthrope never commented on the amount of aid the President Bush offered last week that has since been upped tenfold.