Yes, it’s another edition of Radio Free Dogpatch!
Month: November 2013
Meanwhile, word from the Group W bench …

… is that you can get anything you want at Alice’s Restaurant, kid.
Happy Thanksgiving and/or Hanukkah to thee and thine. And don’t forget to pick up the garbage.
Screen saver

I’ve committed a grave crime against capitalism.
My old ViewSonic monitor started acting up a while ago. It wouldn’t reliably wake from sleep, and sometimes I had to turn it on and off a half dozen times to get it to work more or less reliably.
A consultation with good old Mr. Google found that monitors from a wide variety of outfits have been getting sideways due to bum capacitors. A competent electronics type probably could have cracked the case and fixed it himself, but we’re talking about me here.
So, rather than bundle up and camp outside the Best Buy in hopes of knuckle-dusting my way to a new one at a door-busting, unbelievable, rock-bottom, low, low price, I hauled the old one over to Voelker Research and had it fixed.
I feel so … dirty.
The Salon Back East

Herself and I were briefly patrons of the arts this week.
We had rented the House Back East™ to a gent name of Colm Ó Ciosóig, who was coming to town for an international film festival. Herself wondered how his name was pronounced — and so did I, being fluent only in American, Filth and Drunkard — so I looked it up.
Turns out Colm — a very pleasant fellow indeed — is the drummer for and one of the founding members of the band My Bloody Valentine, which recently concluded a yearlong world tour in support of its latest album, m b v.
• My Bloody Valentine’s YouTube page
Colm is also a film aficionado who shoots many of the backgrounds for the band’s shows, and he wangled a freebie to attend the TIE-Alternative Measures festival by agreeing to DJ at the closing soirée.
But it seems the festival endured a few hiccups and finally ended badly — some class of a dispute pitted the artists against the organizer — and come Sunday evening Colm popped round to inquire whether he might host a gathering of filmmakers next door. We were invited to join them.
We said sure, and before long there were a couple dozen artists, musicians and filmmakers from around the globe crowding the tiny house, merrily chattering away over barley pops. They were all quite delightful, and included us in their conversations, asking about the States and Bibleburg and complimenting the House Back East®. Marv’, the old saloon musician, would have had a wonderful time.
It was amusing to note that a thirst for Pabst Blue Ribbon is apparently not just a proletarian pose adopted by Yankee hipsters, because nearly everyone in attendance brought a suitcase of the stuff (we contributed a bottle of Bushmills). But perhaps the altitude affected consumption, because there was more than quite a bit left over after the party ended — about three and a half suitcases worth. A gaggle of journalists would have gargled the lot and eaten the cans.
So Monday afternoon, after Colm and the others had departed, I decided to support another class of artist — I hauled two suitcases down to Old Town Bike Shop as a gift to its long-suffering mechanics, who are always giving me freebies on annoying bits of work when by rights they should be charging me double.

