Wild Tangents
Marc talks about life in Nashville, life as a Catholic and life as a geek.

Everyone lately it seems is down on bottled water. They complain that the plastic bottles are bad for the environment. I’ve heard many arguments against drinking bottled water. Some of them I agree with. One I don’t is that bottled water is no more or less healthy than drinking tap water. Then I read this today.

Unsafe levels of toxic chlorine pollutants were found in 40 percent of the District of Columbia tap water samples tested during a spring chlorine surge, according to a study released Thursday.

Obviously the folks that compare bottled water to tap water have also never tried the water in Austin. I travel a lot and usually use bottled water on the road. Even if the local water doesn’t upset my stomach, it could have local allergens I might not be able to fight off quickly.

I just found it interesting that there seems to me to have been a recent uproar over bottled water, then this news story came out. Timing is everything….

Technorati Tags: news, water

That’s right, I am taking the plunge and developing my own podcast.  Here is how I am describing it.

The Catholic Vocations Podcast is a podcast which focuses on the people who answered God’s call to a religious way of life within the Catholic faith.  It includes news and information on vocations, as well as an interview with someone who has answered God’s call to just such a religious vocation.

I’ve got some ideas for some others too, but we’ll have to wait and see how this works out first.

I don’t plan on having this podcast dominate Wild Tangents, it will be on a different domain.  It’s just that I haven’t set that one up fully yet and wanted to test the Podpress plugin.   Let me know what you think of the clip (if I get Podpress working that is).

 

 Catholic Vocations Podcast - Teaser [0:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (110)

Was I wrong?

Technorati Tags: America, freedom

The fourth of July is considered the birthday of America. Despite all her troubles over the past 231 years, she’s still the greatest place to live. Let be sure to keep it that way.

Technorati Tags: America, fourth, holiday, US

Two big hangouts of mine when I was in high school were the Mall of Memphis and the Antenna Club. Neither one of them still exist. But memories can be had on the interwebs. Yes, it seems both of them have fans crazy enough to dedicate whole web pages to them.

The Antenna Club’s fan page can be found here.

To put the description in basic terms, the Antenna Club was a live alternative music venue. I know I saw many more infamous than this, but the shows for All (which was a band that picked up the pieces after Milo left The Decendents) and Pigface are the ones I remember most. I also remember an all local band show on Halloween of 1987. Sobering Consequences headlined.

To be honest, the place was a dump. The restroom, aside form being alive stunk up the whole place. But it was “our” dump. Plus we had the Piggly Wiggly parking lot next door that we could “hang out in” when there wasn’t a show. There was also a wall on one side of a parking lot down the street that would always get graffitied. It was a cool place. Of all the similar venue clubs I’d been to in my youth in other cities, “home” was the best. Nobody had anything as cool as the Antenna.

The Mall Of Memphis fan page can be found here

Really I started hanging out at the MOM (Mall of Memphis) well before I started high school classes. We moved into a house just around the corner when I was seven or eight. We moved away when I was fourteen. It was close enough to ride our bikes. I spent many weekends and summer times there.

I didn’t really spend much high school time there. I do remember this one time. A group of had ridden up there with my friend Mike Blumenthal in his car. Well, somehow someone lifted his keys from him and drove the car around to the other side of the mall without him noticing. It was so funny because at first he was freaked out, but then he got a little excited at the fact that he might be getting new car. His car was a piece of junk Chevy Caprice. It was in really bad shape. He was actually disappointed when they guided him around to where they had moved the car. I was of course not in on it. I was with Mike the whole time, so they didn’t have a chance to let me in on the joke. So in a way the joke was kind of on me as well. I seem to recall be a little put out by the experience. I had to get up early in the morning or something. Looking back on it though, it as pretty funny.

So if you have memories of the Antenna Club or the Mall of Memphis, leave them in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!

Technorati Tags: 80’s, eighties, malls, Memphis, punk, web

I’ve got this poem stuck in my head. you see, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about podcasting. What I’ve thought about is testing the waters and learning the ropes by doing a podcast of poetry. I have been known to write a line or two in the distant past (a small sample can be found here). It seems that all these thoughts of poetry have brought back something from high school. I went to Ridgeway High School back in Memphis. For senior English we had this very “no nonsense”, “tell it like it is” teacher by the name of Harry Raney. Some people said he was crazy, but I always just thought he really cared about preparing us to go to college. One of the first (of many) big assignments Mr Raney would give every year was memorizing the prologue to Chanucer’s “The Canterbury Tales“. “Memorize it you say, that ain’t so bad”! Well, it does get worse. The reason why you had to memorize is so you could recite the whole thing in front of the class, in Old English.

Here’s the first few of the over 800 lines from this prologue:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

I don’t remember how much of this Mr. Raney had us recite. What I’ve put above is all I remember. I’m trying to decide if it is unfortunate or exciting that remember that even.

My wife and I saw Mr. Raney a couple of years ago. He had retired and was working on his “second career”. He seemed happy enough, but it also seemed that he might be missing being up in front of a class preparing them for what awaits after graduation. It unfortunate that he’ not teaching anymore as he was a great teacher.

As for the Canterbury Tales, don’t expect to hear me talking about it on iTunes anytime soon. But I suspect my voice may be coming down in a feed near you soon!

Technorati Tags: Chaucer, highschool, poetry, english, schools

From the actor who brought us Ash and the guy who called his autobiography “If Chins Could Kill“, we get the best Old Spice commercial in the world. Who else can get away with singing “Hungry Like The Wolf” in such a cheesy way and still come off and suave?

Notice how the girls in the commercial are acting like cats or um wolves I guess, just like the in the original video….

Technorati Tags: ash, bmovie, Bruce, chin, evildead, oldspice, comercial, tv

I want you to know that I love you. I want to thank you for all the things you taught me that I needed to know to get by in life…

Also to my Nana, my dear grandmother. I miss you so much, but I am happy in the knowledge you are watching over me.

This is strange. Not only does my package from Amazon have to go through Memphis to get from Kentucky to here in the Nashville area. It seems it also had to go through 1969 in order to get from two days ago to now.

You can go to this Flickr page to see the whole thing. No photoshop type stuff is gong on here either. It is pure MAC OS X screen capture.

It also makes me wonder why since it is coming from Kentucky and is already in Memphis (not to mention the fact that it can time travel), why should I not expect it for five more days. HUMPH!

Technorati Tags: humor, amazon

Yeah…My mom now has a blog. There’s only one post over there, which is actually something I posted here for here a while back. I guess I better watch out now. There’s no telling what she might reveal about me!

But seriously, if you have a notion to go welcome her to the blogospere.

Her blogin’ name is “Hippie Nurse“.

Technorati Tags: blogs, family, moms, mother