* Twins Surge?

As usual, the Minnesota Twins are making some noise in the second half of the season—despite Johan Santana's complaint about no major moves before the trading deadline. Unfortunately, they have two (pretty) good teams in the division to catch now (or several more teams in the wild-card race), and I don't think they have the pitching this year to make up for an inconsistent offense. But it is good see Joe Mauer's bat back; and Justin Morneau is simply a monster. But it'll boil down to timely hitting from the Jason Bartletts and Nick Puntos of the world, finally. (Remember who got the game-winning hit in the extra-inning Game 7 of the 1991 World Series? A relative nobody named Gene Larkin.)

But it was the 1987 World series champions that I most loved: with Puckett, Hrbek, Gaetti, Brunansky, and Viola. I wrote a song for/about them a few years later (country/folk chords & rhythm):

Big Kent Hrbek, well, he's our man--
We jut call him Hrby--
And Kirby Puckett's loved by the fans--
We just call him Kirby--
And Garry Gaetti, let's give him a hand--
We just call him the "G(ee-ee)-Man"--
The Twins'll take the Series with just these three:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."

They're Minnesota's blessed trinity:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G"--
For other teams this trio spells tragedy:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G"--
Over the shoulder or over the wall--
With a glove or a bat, they can do it all--
We could challenge the division with just these three:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."

At the start of ev'ry season, they're in first place:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G"--
They'll spoil it for someone when they're out of the race:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."--
Over the shoulder or over the wall--
Can't believe what they can do to that baseball--
The Twins could play the spoiler with just these three:
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."--
Hrby, Kirby, and the "G."-- [repeat & fade]

(The song's lyrical progression is based on the old baseball anecdote about beloved Chicago Cub, Ernie Banks: at the beginning of each season, he'd always say, "We're gonna win the pennant!"; midway through the season, he'd say, "We'll finish in the upper half of the league!"; and finally, when the Cubs were mired as usual in the cellar towards season's end: "We're gonna spoil it for somebody!")

* Bar Band Blues II

I could never sing worth a crap (after my voice changed—as a kid, I was an All-State soprano!), and so, when any of my old bar bands insisted, I liked to wait until the 4th & 5th sets to do any lead vocals—that is, when the crowd(?!) was pretty well "tuned up," and ergo more forgiving: A few more asides: yes, that's a Blue Öyster Cult t-shirt I'm wearing—bought it when I saw them in Sioux City a few years back. And yes, I'm prob'ly one of the few people in the world who actually (occasionally) finger-picks that narrow-fingerboard slab-of-wood called a Gibson SG. (But hey, with a pick and a fuzzbox, it's a monster. The amp, more visible in the previous photo-cartoon ["Bar Band Blues I"], is a Fender Deluxe Reverb, another classic: only one 12-inch speaker, but a real TUBE amp; and when you hit it on its top, you can actually hear & feel the reverb springs "shimmer.")

* Bar Band Blues I

Me playing in a Yankton (SoDak) bar a few years ago:

* RADIO RANT: ELLinois & SAYRicuse

Another sportscaster bugbear of mine is the pronunciation of college names. I'm not even qualified to comment upon the regionalist phonemic vicissitudes of (the Universities of) Missouri, Louisville, and New Orleans; but what does bug the hell out of me is how Illinois so often becomes "ELL-uh-NOY" and Syracuse becomes "SAYR-uh-KYOOZ" in mainstream sports-media discourse. Maybe some new "great vowel shift" is occurring that I'm unaware of, and maybe even the majority of the people at these institutions/places actually pronounce them this way, but it still grates upon the mind's ear. . . . Hmmm, the phrase "ELLinois and SAYRicuse" is so lilting that it begs for a song lyric; e.g.—

DAH-duh-DAH—gotta pay their dues
At ELLinois and SAYRicuse—

—but who's got time to even pick up the guitar (then GarageBand) nowadays? . . .

* "Bumper" Tune

My wife has been nagging me for several years to try my hand at podcasting my own "radio show"—but I have neither the time or inclination. But I did find the time to create a "bumper" tune for any such eventuality, in GarageBand: it's the mp3 file in the right-hand column, just below my profile. (Yeh, I experimented w/ "auto-starting" the song, upon page loading, but I know from my own experience with others' pages that such a procedure can be irritating as hell to the web surfer.)

* Iraqi Ditty

[Revised from a February 1991 journal entry; for the first Gulf War, but still applicable today (please sing it to your favorite show-tune melody):]

We've got a death wish for eternal night—
So let's go start a war to set things right—
    Let's do to the Iraqi
    What we did to Nagasaki—
George Bush don't wanna talk, he wanna fight—

[Added 4/27/07:] Suggested chords (for a schmaltz-country version):
    I    I    I    I
    I    I    V7    V7
    I    I7    IV    iv
    I    V7    I    I