Pete Seeger Passes But the Songs Hammer On

Yes, the Super Bowl is this afternoon and the State of the Union speech was Tuesday, which will be fine, if the Broncos see their shadow and the Seahawks win, but the big news this past week was the passing of folk singer Pete Seeger at age 94.

Some call him America's Favorite Communist and he had the Contempt of Congress conviction to prove it, albeit overturned on appeal, back when having contempt for Congress was considered a bad thing.

Pete had contempt for Presidents too, and his song Waist Deep in the Big Muddy calling Lyndon Johnson a big fool may have put the final nail in the coffin of LBJ's reelection chances.

He hammered that nail on the February 25, 1968 airing of the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour at the height of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam. The Smothers Brothers were cancelled by CBS a year later.

I remember Pete Seeger as the singer whose albums hung for the 1970s in my parents' stereo cabinet, along with all the Johnny Cash albums, and the soundtrack for Paint Your Wagon. What can I say, my parents are Republicans who weren't fans of LBJ either, and those albums are still there in their stereo cabinet today.

There's more to the Pete Seeger John Cash connection than you might think:



Pete Seeger would have been famous for We Shall Overcome, even if his fellow travelers later claimed the song was theirs and his only contribution was changing the word "Will" to "Shall":



I imagine the old communist made some money too. Peter, Paul, and Mary picked up and made a hit out of a Seeger tune, borrowed from an old cossack folk song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?



The Byrds certainly gave Seeger a good turn covering his song Turn, Turn, Turn (be careful, that's my favorite book in the Bible you're using that spinning wheel to brainwash people with):



Pete Seeger was a great friend of Woody Guthrie, and here he performs This Land Is Your Land with Bruce Springsteen at the Lincoln Memorial:



If Saint Peter has a sign at the pearly gates saying "No Atheist Communists" he'd better have had it printed it on both sides or Pete Seeger is going to get in on a technicality:

"I feel most spiritual when I'm out in the woods. I feel part of nature. Or looking up at the stars. [I used to say] I was an atheist. Now I say, it's all according to your definition of God. According to my definition of God, I'm not an atheist. Because I think God is everything. Whenever I open my eyes."

If Pete Seeger will be remembered for one thing it will be for the hammer song he wrote with Lee Hayes. And it's not just that he sang it but that everybody sang it. If you didn't know it, Pete was ready to teach it to you.



When I say everybody, I mean everybody:



And then there are the everybodys you haven't heard of:



Some renditions go a bit over the top, as did the last one and this next one from the 2008 campaign:



That's a lot of hammering, so just one more, that you'll appreciate if you got this far:



In that regard, I looked in vain for a cover by Joan Baez, but couldn't find one. She reportedly hates the hammer song, and refused to so it even as a special request from Michelle Obama at a 2010 tribute to the civil rights movement. There are other haters to keep Joan Baez company.

Here is a song written as a sort of tribute by neighbor Dar Williams in Beacon, New York:



The last tribute goes to Pete Seeger's old group, the Weavers, singing the Leadbelly classic, Goodnight, Irene.



Goodnight, Pete. I'll be hearing Pete Seeger hammer on in my dreams.

2014 Is Off to a Very Slow Start

The battery in my 1993 Jeep Cherokee has been dead since Thanksgiving, except for an hour on January 3, when I called AAA out to jump start it. I should have run it for 2 hours I guess. No worries, my second car is a ZipCar.

The hot water went out at the office and it took 3 days for the building owner to get that fixed. I suppose if you needed hot water you could microwave it. Speaking of which, my stove-top microwave at home has been dead for a year. I bought it new in 2005, so that's too soon. I may wait until it reaches the end of it's natural life before replacing it. I can hardly drive to an appliance store to replace it.

Then there's my cable box, which has been out of whack since Christmas week. The internet still works, so I've been working my way through Breaking Bad on Netflix. I'm in the middle of the 4th season and they seem to be just marking time. If I don't get the cable fixed, I guess I'll be boycotting the 2014 Russian Winter Olympics.

We've been having one of those cold snaps that can only be caused by global warming. Not Minnesota or Wisconsin cold, but cold enough for the mile walk to and from work. That reminds me,  I ordered a Clore jump starter battery from Amazon.com that is not legal in California or Oregon. I forgot to stock up on incandescent lightbulbs before they became illegal on January 1. The fluorescents don't really work in my dimmer-switched sockets.

I decided to bypass Windows 8 and bought a Mac Mini, which I can't figure out how to use. My pictures are on there somewhere but I can't find the files to upload them. About 1% of my iTunes library disappeared in the transition, another 6% lost the album titles, and some unknown percentage lost their cover art. I could painstakingly fix all that, I'm not going anywhere.

The Windows laptop I use for work says I should consider replacing my battery. OK, I'm considering it. I watered my cactus.

I'm looking at my 2013 To Do list. If you don't sweep your stairs for a year, they begin to resemble the stairs to a hay loft. And if you don't pick up your guest bedroom, it begins to resemble a tool shed. That's the bachelor life. Glamorous. My late grandfather once asked me, how do you feed yourself?

I grilled a nice tenderloin steak tonight, along with grilled onions and zucchini. The steak reached it's expiration date 4 days ago. You should never grill a steak before its time is up. Aged beef, it's what's for dinner.

I will not be taking down my Christmas decorations until Valentine's Day. Happy Holidays. Sorry, no picture. I did have an epiphany earlier this week, but it passed.

Three of my favorite shirts have worn through the elbows. Why, in the internet age, can't you go back to the same shelf in the same store you bought your favorite shirt 10 years ago and get another one just like it? Well, one or two sizes bigger.

My brother-in-law in Beaverton found a great pair of ecco boots he liked and bought a second pair to have on hand when the first pair wear out. They are great boots, I bought a pair too. Six weeks later and I can't find them on the ecco website.

My kitchen sink garbage disposal, which is no older than my microwave, occasionally leaks under circumstances that are hard to pin down, not that I'm trying to pin them down, you understand. The drain in my bathroom sink is also slow, unless I pull out the drain stopper, which solves that problem.

The flavor bar on my Weber tabletop grill has after a decade or so begun to rust through. The model has been discontinued by the manufacturer.

And there you have it, a fine beginning to 2014.

2013, The Year That Jumped the Shark

I spent New Year's Eve watching the made-for-TV movie Sharknado. I could explain the 86 minute plot, but here's the two minute version:



I started writing this post 6 days ago, but then got lost watching Breaking Bad episodes. That's all that was deserved for 2013, the year that jumped the shark.

Gold jumped the shark in 2013:



That may not be a bad thing, if it cures us of the insufferable gold bugs. King corn is down too. But Wall Street is up, so there will be no crying about gold or corn.

Hillary Clinton jumped the "guys out for a walk one night" shark at the beginning of the year:



Barack Obama jumped the "I am sorry that they are finding themselves in this situation based on assurances they got from me" shark at the end of the year.



But don't cry for them either, Gallup says that at the end of the year, Barack and Hillary were the most admired man and woman in America. Shark jumping is only fatal if you fail to jump the shark.

Even a partial list of 2013 shark jumpers is quite impressive:

Fiscal Cliff
Lance "The Doper" Armstrong
Domestics Drones
Bradley "Chelsea" Manning
Edward Snowden and the NSA
Anthony "Tweets His Junk" Weiner
Miley "Twerking" Cyrus
Federal Government Shutdown
Legalized Marijuana in Colorado and Washington
Toronto Mayor Rob "One of My Drunken Stupors" Ford
Nelson Mandela funeral sign language interpreter
Phil Robertson's Duck Dynasty anatomy lessons

Not all of these shark jumpers made it, some landed in the shark pool and were eaten, others are still in the air. More than a few of them did make it, and most of us got over 2013 unscathed too.

The original shark jumper was Fonzie in Happy Days season 5, episode 3:



That was 1977, and Happy Days ran for 7 more years. That will bring us up to the end of this decade. Sharknado 2 is already in the works.

Merry Christmas 2013 from Cambridge, Mass.

Church of Saint Peter, 100 Concord, Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nelson Mandela, the Lion Sleeps Tonight

In the jungle, the mighty jungle
The lion sleeps tonight

President Barack Obama called Nelson Mandela "the last great liberator of the 20th century" at the memorial service for him in South Africa today. And who among the assembled world leaders was going to stand up and say, "No, no, I am the last great liberator!"

South Africa is a nation of great wealth and beauty but many problems. While our President was cheered, they booed their current President. That is the lot of Presidents. It's quite likely many wanted to boo John Adams at George Washington's funeral.

The one problem South Africa no longer has is Apartheid. Mandela spent 27 years in prison for treasonous acts and conspiracy, but what possible claim of allegiance could the racist and manifestly unjust laws of Apartheid South Africa hold. From the speech he gave in court at his sentencing:

"During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, My Lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."

Ultimately, Nelson Mandela was the symbol of the moral suasion that prevailed in South Africa. He did one of those profoundly great things. He accepted the surrender of his political foes magnanimously, served one term as President, and then retired.

Near the village, the quiet village
The lion sleeps tonight.

There is only one fitting musical tribute. Perhaps you'd prefer the Happy Hippo Disney version, The Tokens pop version, or The Weavers folk version, but the final tribute goes to the original South African version by Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds:



Linda died in October 1962, the year Nelson Mandela was arrested, 51 years ago.

Waiting for Godot, I Wanted to Steal Gogo's Shoes

I saw Waiting for Godot at the Paramount in Boston last night.

I thought the play was over when the curtain dropped and the lights came up after the first act. All that was left on stage was Lucky's hat and Gogo's shoes. I wanted to steal those shoes, and the hat too.

A few people got up, but a lot of people stayed seated. I stood there puzzled, and spent a good half of what turned out to be the intermission waiting for the others in my row to get up to let me pass.

In the front lobby, a large man was holding forth before a small group struggling with their coats about how they were following the example of the mass exodus of the audience at the 1955 London premiere, except that those people were exiting in protest while their little group just had another place to be and had gotten a good taste of the experience.

Two thoughts then occurred to me. Those London audiences probably thought, like me, that the play was over. There was a second act still to come. I went in search of the bar. Three thoughts.

It's probably just as well that I didn't find the bar on the second floor until just after the call to return to seats. Getting liquored up would have opened me up to getting rolled by the drunks under the moonlight and the almost leafless trees of Boston Common on the walk back to the subway for the ride home. Samuel Beckettt, though, would have been proud.

Cambridge Breaks Out the Rulers in 2013 Election

You really haven't voted until you have voted in a Cambridge municipal election. Our proportional voting system lets you rank every single candidate, which means in this year's election you could vote for all 25 city council candidates and all 9 school committee candidates. That requires two dense ballots:



You will need an official voter pen:



A ruler, conveniently provided in each voting booth, comes in handy if you exercise your right to vote more than once. You see, you can vote only once per column and once per row, so you may need that ruler to ensure you haven't spoiled your ballot. Two people did need new ballots while I was voting at my polling station, and only six voters were there, a failure rate of 33%.

I vote at the Cambridge National Guard Armory, a sign at which informs "guests" that the building, despite principally containing a basketball court, is a military installation. I swear I did not move while I took this picture:



The system has two interesting quirks when it comes to incumbents. It's very hard to target a particular incumbent for defeat, as you'd have to lock up over 83% to 91% of the electorate to prevent the incumbent being reelected. At the same time, all the candidates run against all the other candidates, so interesting newcomers can end up pushing less interesting incumbents out of office.

This year, 2 incumbents on the city council were defeated and 2 seats were open, so 4 newcomers were elected to the 9 member council. Leland Cheung, the candidate who got the most votes and should be the next mayor, is also a relative newcomer.