Friday Night Potpourri

End of the non-work week odds and ends:

• Last night I went to the Giants game against Arizona, and it was shorts weather. After 25 years of holding Giants season tickets, I have only been able to wear the t-shirt/shorts combo maybe a dozen times for a night game. It is usually extremely cold on a San Francisco summer evening.
• A new neighbor in the apartment across the street installed a new lawn in their back yard. He came over and asked if I had a lawn mower he could borrow to mow it. I said yes. As payment, he offered to mow my lawn. Perfect.
• Still unemployed. I have a number of friends in the architecture profession who have been out of work as long or longer than I have. No new jobs for them either. One friend found a new job, only to be laid off again a few months later.
  
• Autumn is coming. I love the weather and the air and the sun. Just a few months until colored leaves.
• Pennant races are shaping up in baseball. Mostly wild-card battles.
  
• This song came out while I was in college. It was played quite a bit on MTV (back when MTV played music). Not my favorite genre of music, but the overall feel made it one of those songs I remember from a specific time period. My friend and I both had a crush on the girl in the video.
  

iMonk on The Evangelical Liturgy

Michael Spencer, aka the Internet Monk, is doing at least a 23 part series on evangelical liturgy. At the time of this post, he's at part 5. He's bringing years of observation and his own take to the table here. It will be interesting to me to hear this from somebody with a big past in Southern Baptist circles. He's had other influences too, but I see this already shaping up as at least a description of what standard evangelicals have done in church. Recommended reading.

Friday Night Potpourri

A highly ordered set of thoughts disguised as random - for a Friday night:

• Not a faith-healing church. Julie Neidlinger at Lone Prairie mused about the newly added blue parking stalls at the front of her church parking lot.
• Mrs. Scott and I agree that lately (caused by the recession?) the number of people driving 10-20 mph below the speed limit on the freeway has dramatically increased. And it's creating some dangerous driving conditions.
  
• In a related topic, I asked several people in the body shop/rental car businesses (in context of my recent fender bender and subsequent car repairs) about the effect of the economy on their businesses. Accidents are up, despite fewer people driving, but repairs from those accidents are down, people choosing to live with the dents.
  
• The sales rep at our new auto insurance company that wrote up our policies was the greeter, along with his wife, at the church we attended last Sunday.
  
• The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing? Well, that's better than the left hand not knowing that there is a right hand.
  
• Another song from my childhood. I just started wearing these, and I loved the song on the clock radio. Listen to the reference to Exxon gasoline in the lyrics! Tch-tch.
  

Friday Night Potpourri

Random thoughts on Friday night:

• French fries and stout for dinner tonight.
• Is our religion reflected in our architecture? In the 21st century? My friend Peter loaned me a copy of the book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem by Philip Bess. Tradition and New Urbanism.
• I got stuck in bad traffic tonight, going counter-commute. It was a 49er pre-season game that caused it.
• What do you get when a seven year old, a five year old, a four year old and a two year old play with the same bucket of Lego's? Answer: chaos and crying.
• Quoting a friend: "Church girls I've dated are either dopey or crazy."
• I once read a book entitled, "I Kissed Dating Goodbye."
• I married my wife and chucked the book.
• Another of my very favorite songs from my childhood. These guys are hip.

New Profile Photo

I've added a new profile photo to my blogs. This photo was a professional headshot produced by my friend Deb Wat. The photo shoot was a very interesting process, and Deb is a true professional. Her objective for this shot was to draw me out of my element as a writer. I think it came out great, and my family and friends agree. Check out her site at Deb Wat Photography. I'm adding it to my links.

Friday Night Potpourri

I posted this late, but here goes:

• I love talking with people from other places. On the train last night I sat next to a man from Tucson whose son graduated from college and was moving away from San Francisco. He mentioned that he had to wear a jacket at night in SF in August. It's usually 110 every day in Tucson. That started our conversation into anything and everything SF/AZ. Later at the game, I sat behind a woman from Toronto. She compared people there with people here. Fascinating. People are different in different places and it's great to hear about them from somebody who knows.
• After living here five years, we finally got large garbage cans for greens and recycled stuff. Our new recycle can would have been nice all along, instead of the small plastic bins.
• I mowed the front lawn and pulled all the weeds. Looks great. Now to get those weeds coming up out of the driveway cracks.
• Back yard'll get done one of these days.
• Both our cars got washed recently. Makes 'em look like new. Now to find them in parking lots.
  
• This week's featured surprise song is one from my childhood. My folks missed the rock generation threshold by about a year. They didn't quite embrace Elvis, but their younger siblings did. So this song was big to me in the first grade because of how new sounding this genre of music was. I heard it on the neighbor's garage radio. It stuck for a lifetime. Here it is. Enjoy.
  

I Got A Foul Ball At The Game Friday Night

For those who would care about such a thing, I got a foul ball at Friday night's Giants/Reds game. The tenth in my life. Then, moments later, another one headed for my glove was deflected by another fan and off my bicep. Read about it at From the Bleachers, my baseball blog.

I Was A DJ, I Was What I Played

Back in high school I was an FM radio disk jockey. I worked at a small local station, KEGR in Concord, CA, in about 1981. The owner was a radio and electronics buff, and had the station set up in his own apartment living room. It did not broadcast over the air, so he needed no FCC license, but instead over the city's TV cable system. We were a bit far from San Francisco, and many of the FM stations didn't have very good reception, so our city carried all the FM stations over TV cable. Simple, connect the TV cable to the antenna hookups on the back of your stereo and you had crystal clear reception.

It was an amateur operation, with minimal advertising (paid stuff during off hours), so the DJ's worked for free. It was a cool job. The owner worked as a manager at Radio Shack so he kept on top of his DJ's by playing the station over the store's stereo systems. Clever. I got to play all the rock faves of the time, and aside from having to play certain genres during the hour, it was free format, and the DJ's even picked the song within the required genres. If you played five Hendrix songs in a row, the owner would call you on the phone and tell you to cool it.

This was a one man operation. No engineers or call screeners. Make sure the phone was off the hook while the mic was on. Had to go to the bathroom? Put on a long song like Free Bird. One DJ took advantage of some 25 minute live Led Zeppelin songs to take a swim in the apartment pool. For such times, we had to be careful to not put on songs that had backward skips in them.

The listening audience was small, and there were a few high school girl groupies. You know, sixteen year olds that moved out and were living with fifteen year old boyfriends with guns. Rock 'n' roll stuff to be sure. The station's call letters, KEGR (The Concord Kegger) were funny to me later because they interrupted Harold Camping's string of radio stations on his network (KEAR to KEIR, I believe).

Wild times in high school.