Who loves you?

Captive ball loves you, that's who.

Sometimes they come back

Some old warehouses near downtown are being torn down and old ads that were painted on the inside walls are seeing the light of day for a little while once again. I stopped and took pictures of these two:

Mystery solved

I wondered what was behind the rash of bad parking jobs in my town.

So I did some snooping and I came to the conclusion that those who are parking badly are also partaking of the dreaded 'SPECIAL DRINK' from Vision!
Damn upscale nightclubs, pray they never come to your town. Pray you'll never run afoul of those who have been imbibing in Happy Hour 3.8!

I don't usually follow TN State politics...

...because the state house and senate are filled with asshole reactionary Republicans who think that they don't have to listen to anyone but themselves, their minister, and their lobbyist pals. But this is just too good to pass up. It seems a moderate Republican who doesn't cotton to every loony right wing conservative talking point has become Speaker of the TN House with the help of all the Democrats in that same body.

Maybe between them, the Democrats and the new moderate Speaker, they'll beat back the tide of reactionary legislation that's brewing in Nashville. Maybe they won't enact laws that let people carry concealed weapons into our state parks and that let corporations get away with murder. And hopefully things will go back to normal and we won't be the laughingstock of the country and Alabama and Mississippi can duke it out for that honor.

Teh cute

I was trolling the side streets of my fair city one Saturday afternoon not long ago and I happened upon a store that I had never been in before because it was always closed during the week. It had a sign outside it that screamed in big letters GARAGE SALE so I went inside.

I looked around at all the crap the store owner had in boxes that rested on a series of long tables. As I looked at some used books in a box the owner said, "I got a bunch of books in the back that are all two for a dollar." Well kids, that was music to my ears to hear that books could be had that cheaply so I walked to the back of the store.

On my way back there I saw two little kids, one about 4 and the other about 7, who were playing Tekken 3 on a video game system. The older one had some kind of severe disability because he was breathing with the assistance of some kind of oxygen delivery device. The oxygen was piped into a mask he wore over his little mouth and nose. It broke my heart to see him tethered to that machine but I knew without it he'd probably die. His little brother, I noticed, had enough energy for ten kids but he was holding back so that he could hang out with his big bro.

I stood and watched the kids interact as they played the video game.
The little kid, that's him in the orange shirt, just sat there with his eyes wide watching the game unfold all the while pressing all the buttons on the game controller indiscriminately. After one of the fighters in the game whipped the other one and the victorious fighter stood over his vanquished foe, the little kid would say in a triumphant voice, "Yay! I won!"

His brother, who I could tell actually knew what he was doing, would correct his little brother by saying, "No! I won." They went on like that for about 5 minutes and I just stood there watching them. It was possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen.

(I took Sparky by the store yesterday but the boys were not there. However the books still were and we bought a Gunter Grass novel, a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a copy of The Orchid Thief, and a few more books, all of them brand new. I'm guessing they were the remainders of remaindered books.)

Speaking of movies

Our film festival is this weekend! That's right boys and girls, the SOAPIFF (a name which I hate by the way) is happening this weekend!

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It kicks off tonight with a gala reception where winners in various film festival categories will be announced, food and wine will be consumed, and schmoozing will be done. Then Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings many venues across this great town of our will host many screenings of many films of all sorts. I'll be hosting the Socially Conscious Film Series at the Acoustic Coffee House so if you're in town or passing by drop in and see some of the fine films we got for this series, I highly recommend Abel Raises Cain, it's a wickedly funny documentary and we'll be screening it on Saturday night around 10 PM.

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If you live in the east TN/sw VA/nw NC area and you love film then get off that dead ass of yours and come see all the free movies at this years film festival.

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Click here for venues and film schedules.

End of season special

I don't know about you but I'm willing to let sleeping wakeboars lie, no matter what brand they are.

Up your apples!

Yesterday we decided to escape all this house buying and selling business and get out of town for the day, so we went over to the 62nd annual Apple festival in Hendersonville, NC, North Carolina it turns out is the 7th most apple producing state in our nation and most of those apples are grown in the Hendersonville/Henderson county area. This was the first time we've been to the festival, we usually go to the beach around Labor Day but since we're in the midst of all this real estate business we decided to stay home this year.

So off we went across the mountain to the fruit based fete in the little, yet growing, town of Hendersonville. We like Hendersonville's downtown area and luckily that's where the festivities took place so I knew where to go and where to find parking.

Once we got to the big "do" we hit the ground running.

Gratuitous apple shot.

Despite the sunny and mercilessly hot weather the streets were packed with all sorts of people. To my surprise there were many people in the crowd who were openly supporting one Presidential candidate or another. I'll admit I was worried when I saw a slew of people wearing McCain stuff. But my fears calmed down when I saw just as much, if not more Obama stuff being sported by all sorts of people. What struck me was that this is what average McCain supporter looked like:
But us Obama people looked more like America does. We looked more diverseand braless than the Bush McCain supporters did.

Of course Sparky and I slapped on an Obama sticker each and we also bought nifty "Obama '08" bumper stickers as well. And despite her longstanding prohibition against it, Sparky actually had me put one of the bumper stickers on the back bumper of her car later that day. And let me tell you it looks damn good on there.

Sprinkled through out the crowd were some celebrities. Fat Elvis perched under some shade and sang to all of us.

Rudolph the red nose reindeer also showed up but some dumb ass redneck shot him.

And hypocrite evangelist Billy Graham showed everyone his nudes:Speaking of Christians, no outdoor festival would be complete without a bunch of those wacky folks spreading their message of love for their fellow man
and the good news about the return of Jesus.
Ah, there's nothing like a good jolt of religious insanity to remind me why I'm an atheist. It made my heart happy to see a gaggle of goth girls ferociously baiting and debating these idiots about what is and what isn't wicked and sinful. You go girls!

There were all kinds of booths set up at the festival. Some were informational, some charitable, but most were filled with people selling everything from hand made crafts to art to food. These gals in the Scandinavian products booth were cute as buttons. We purchased a few small fish and fishing related prints, we got a print of a rainbow trout for Saprky's dad and I got a small print of some fly fishing flies. Sparky also bought a hand made piece of local pottery. And yes, we also partook of some of the food that was for sale. We tired an apple slushie and some of this crazy gal's fudge.

I wish I could say we tried this:
Or had some of this:

But we had neither and since we didn't I probably won't have to have another coronary bypass for a few more years.

We only hung out for about two hours because the heat was so oppressive but all in all we had a nice time and I'm sure we'll do this festival again some time in the future. And if you want to do it as well it runs through Labor Day. It's held on Labor Day weekend every year so mark your future calendars as well.

And now I'll give the last word on the 2008 Apple festival to this blue GOAT:

"Baaaaaa."

"It's like Halloween for grown ups."

We did our bit to help the folks on the Tree Streets make their mortgage payments this month by buying some stuff at the annual Tree Streets yard sale.
I'll give you a full report with more scintillating action packed photos later and of course there'll be more photos of the event on my Flickr account as well. But now our whirlwind day continues and we're off to some friends house for supper.

East Tennessee Medical Massage...

...home of the "clinical ending."

It's alive!

I finally got my lazy blogging ass in gear and put a post on the film festival blog, so yeah the bastard is up and running. Go check it out, bookmark it, and why not make plans to come visit me at the film festival this year? It's November 14, 15, and 16 and if you start saving right this second you might be able to afford the gas it'll take you to drive here.

I'm curating the Socially Conscious Films series this year. If any of you know of any documentaries that are an hour or less that are available on DVD that are in a social justice vein let me know in the comment section, I'd be very grateful for any help you may have to offer since I'm on the prowl for more films to screen.

Blue Plum

The first full weekend in June in Johnson City means it's Blue Plum Festival time! There'll be live music, food, stuff for sale, and various organizations will have booths that offer info during the street fair.

Since I did not melt in this morning's high temps and 1000% humidity I'll be attending the festival with Sparky. We hope to see our friends Rev. Shuck and Snad at the PFLAG booth and to buy some spices from the spice and herb people, pick up some handmade soap, and score a bottle or two of datil pepper sauce. I'll take my camera and I'll have pictures and a report on the festival later.

In the mean time, you kids have a happy Saturday.

We have a winner!

Well, two winners in our latest contest to be exact.   No one correctly identified that above picture was taken outside the public library here in Johnson City so no one wins a postcard for guessing the location.

But there were a bunch of great entries in the 'most creative' guess and I decided to pick two entries as the winners.  Congratulations go out to Coaster Punchman and to Ricky Shambles for their humorous entries.  Guys, please send your snail mail addresses to monkeymuckATgmailDOTcom and I'll send out your vintage postcard with a Zen like proverb on it ASAP.

Thanks for playing everyone and don't be sad if you didn't win, there'll be other chances to win coming up soon!

Amy and me

I first became aware of Amy Goodman and her great TV/radio show Democracy Now! in the fall of 2004. Sparky and I were supposed to make our yearly pilgrimage to the beach in North Carolina but we chose to go to Knoxville so I could get my quadruple bypass done instead. When the days of searing pain stopped we decided to get away for a long weekend around election day, so we rented a house on a lake near Hickory, NC and we arrived there on Saturday and we left on Tuesday morning, election day. During our stay we stumbled across something called Free Speech TV on the satellite system they had in the rental house.

We had never seen anything like it. There on TV was someone who sounded like us, someone who was doing news stories about the things we cared about. There was someone, and a whole network too as a matter of fact, who was devoted to telling the kinds of truths we didn't often hear on the news we get on our local cable system. It was a revelation to us. When we weren't out enjoying the lake or the local scenery, we watched this wondrous woman Amy Goodman do her thing. We watched other shows on Free Speech TV about how we can achieve true democracy and shows about history that we never would have seen in corporate media outlets. Sparky and I both fell hard for the charms of that honey voiced progressive babe Amy Goodman.

We were very sad when we had to go because leaving meant that we would no longer get Free Speech TV and we couldn't see our new beacon of hope and progressive news, Ms. Goodman. Then later as the events of election night 2004 unfolded we became more depressed and sad. The Idiot Boy King got reelected and we would no longer be able to see or hear Amy.

But as luck would have it the universe conspired to even things out for us. Not too long after Bush got reelected our local public radio station picked up the radio show version of Democracy Now! and they began airing it at 6:00 PM every week night. We usually go for our nightly walk on weeknights around 6 so we got to listen to the show on our way to the park. We'd listen to the show on our way home and we'd finish listening to it when we got back to Monkey Central. We'd cheered when Amy socked it to the corporate media for not doing their jobs in keeping the ass hats in Washington DC honest. We cried with delight when they did stories that no other media would touch. We were overjoyed when Amy kept us informed of all the shenanigans that the Bush junta was trying to get away with.

It was a courageous thing for our local public radio station, WETS 89.5 on my FM dial and online at wets.org, to put this show on in our area at that time of the evening. I've said before how conservative this area is, they'd elect Adolf Hitler to Congress if he ran as a Republican, and the decision to air Democracy Now! ruffled more than a few feathers. WETS lost some members because some people didn't want to hear Amy tell the truth and to do the kinds of stories she does on her show. They wanted our local public radio station to be nice and safe and quiet and comfortable and not to rock the boat or make waves. The more they ran the show the angrier some people got. But something odd began to happen, other voices sprang up and these voices were in support of the show.

Then something even more unexpected happened, someone, my friend Joseph F., the smartest guy in the world, started a group in support of the show called "Democracy Now Tri Cities." The purpose of this group was to make sure Amy Goodman stayed on the air. My friend Joseph then did something radical for this area, he began a progressive blog in conjunction with Democracy Now Tri Cities and he used this blog as a clearing house of information about all the progressive events that happen in our area of east TN/sw VA/western NC. And it was because of Joseph and his support of our local public radio station that many people in our area began organizing and reaching out to one another. Amy Goodman and her show brought progressive people around here together and together we've put on many anti war protests and done many other things to raise the consciousness in this area about progressive and peace related things. Sparky and I met and became friends with Joseph and his wife, Sand and her husband John, Rev. Shuck, and many others because of Democracy Now! and Amy Goodman.

So now it's that time of year I used to dread around here, spring pledge week on WETS, click here to give our local NPR station some money if you like. I became a member last year because of Democracy Now! and this year I'll donate my time during pledge week. I'll be answering the pledge phones from 4 to 7 tonight and one day next week as well. I used to hate pledge week because it interrupts all the programming, but now I gladly put up with it if it means we can keep Amy on our local airwaves. So if you're in the WETS listening area and you call and make a pledge later this evening or next Monday evening from 4 to 7, then you might get lucky and I may answer your phone call. If you talk to me real nice and make a nice size pledge, who knows, I may even write about you on here.

Support your local NPR station, especially if they air Democracy Now! And your local station doesn't air the show, then pester them until they do.

We're good thanks. No, seriously, we're good. We mean it.

Growing up in Michigan for the first 13 years of my life I learned that Big Ten college football was a passion with people in the midwest. When I moved south in 1974 I learned that college football down here was something different, I learned it wasn't just a passion, it's a religion. And it's adherents down here are more than mere followers, they're crazy, rabid zealots for whichever Southeastern Conference team they root for. People in the south live and die each Saturday in the fall depending on which team they follow.

In the are of the south where I live now, the mountains of east TN, there is only one team that most people around here root for and that team is the University of Tennessee Volunteers. The Vols are loved by people not just all over the state of TN, people in southwest Virginia and western North Carolina love them rabidly as well. The current success of the men's basketball team is nice but people down here know that in Knoxville and in a 150 mile radius of that city football is king. Football brings in the bacon and fries it up in the pan. It pays the bills and therefore it's put on a pedestal. It's sacrilegious to speak against the Big Orange football machine around here.

Yes, there are other colleges and universities that field football teams but none has the following that UT does. Case in point, the East Tennessee State University Buccaneers. ETSU is a smaller institution of higher learning than UT but one would think since it's located in Johnson City that people in my town would have embraced their local school's football program. Well, you'd be wrong. For many years ETSU put a team on the field, not in the same division of the NCAA as UT but still football is football right?, and for may years not many people cared. People in this area stayed away from ETSU football games in droves because the only team they cared about was UT. UT played in the marquee bowl games, UT had shots at the national title, UT played on TV on ABC, CBS, ESPN. ETSU was lucky to get radio coverage or a reporter from the local TV stations to cover their games. In short no one gave a damn about ETSU football, they stuck by UT and that was that.

So about 5 years ago ETSU decided to save some money by dropping football all together. They said that while it might be painful to some, it had to be done. Attendance at games was laughable, media exposure was slim, and so it just made sense that they drop it and put that money towards something else, they still had a highly regarded basketball team that made the NCAA tourney once in a while and a very highly regarded golf team. So the axe fell and we waved bye bye to ETSU football.

But a group of ETSU football alums wouldn't let it go. They were sure that people wanted ETSU football, they were sure that people were going to rise up and demand the Bucs be allowed to live again. They wailed and gnashed their teeth, they cried foul, they spoke to anyone who would listen to them. And yet there was no clamor for ETSU football to return. No one gave a damn that it left, well no one except for the guys who used to play.

After a few y ears of crying over the loss of their beloved sport, they hit on the bright idea of letting the ETSU students vote on whether to bring back football. The university let the students know that if they brought back football then fees would rise, all fees that is, as in all fees to all students, even those who did not like football would have to pay for it. The football alums patted themselves on the back because they were sure the students would vote to bring back football but when they dust of the election settled the measure to bring it back was resoundingly defeated.

So you'd think in the face of widespread public disinterest, student apathy, and a fan base that will never be disloyal to UT, they just give up. Well, you'd be wrong. A hardcore group of these ETSU football alums got together and they paid some outfit to do a study on how they could bring football back to Johnson City. After studying the matter and looking at things the group doing the study said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "In order to bring football back you're going to have to remove all the obstacles that got it removed in the first place."

Duh. I could have told them that. Hell, I could have told them that and I would have charged them half what they paid the other guys. Oddly enough, or maybe this is a sign of how delusional these bitter decrepit old football jocks are, they got excited about putting a plan of action together based on the findings of the study. I'm not sure what they plan to do about the dominance of UT football in this area or what they're going to do about the thousands of of fans they don't have, but if it makes them happy to think they can do the impossible then more power to them.

Me, I just wish they shut the fuck up and accept the fact that ETSU football is dead and that it will never come back. It's kind of sad to see these frustrated old jerks pine for the glory days when the seats in the Mini Dome, that's right they used to play ETSU football indoors, were two thirds empty and no one gave a damn if ETSU won or not. They remind me of the Republicans who keep saying we're winning in Iraq. They think that if they pour more money and more time into study after study that shows if people came to games here that the local economy would grow like gang busters. Just as there is a fatal flaw in the Bush led war on Iraq, there's a fatal flaw in the dreams of those reviving ETSU football, just as the Iraqi's hate us and want us gone, Johnson City and the area as a whole hates ETSU football and they want it gone forever.

But like the delusional Republicans, the faded football jocks of ETSU still cling to their dream of winning hearts and minds back to Buc football. Anyone close to both situations can see that there is no such thing as victory in Iraq and there sure as hell ain't ever gonna be a victory for ETSU football in the this area. I can only hope one day we'll stop trying to "win" something in Iraq and that the cry baby ETSU football jerkoffs will stop their pointless crusade to bring football back to Johnson City.