Latest info on Abbey Hedrick is here. She is doing quite well. She’s moved to pediatric rehab in Atlanta, and you can follow her progress at carepages.com. You’ll need to create a user name and password. Abbey’s e-room is “AHedrick.”
| Six weeks and counting to Hillbilly Holiday, 2005, and as promised, I have compiled a list of songs constituting Required Listening consistent with the theme.The following songs best represent, in my opinion, all that is good about East Tennessee, Tennessee, the South, and the “country.” Because Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia is the Birthplace of Country Music, it just seems proper to focus on country music and its tendency toward healthy portions of self-deprecating humor, a love for family, simple pleasures, and the simple life, and an affinity for integrating God into casual, every day conversation. And that is as it should be.You’re going to need iTunes to make some of the following links work. If you don’t already have it, click on the graphic below and install the thing. It’s free. | ||
 |
||
| I. Signature Song | ||
|---|---|---|
| In East Tennessee any discussion of music both begins and ends with Rocky Top. The song originated with The Osborne Brothers, but it has become much more than just a bluegrass hit. It’s one of five official state songs, but it’s probably best known as the unofficial fight song of the University of Tennessee. During one telecast of a UT football game last year, the announcers said that the average number of times the song is played during a football game is something like 220. Consequently, it’s one of the most hated songs in the Southeastern Conference. And we like it that way. | ||
| Rocky Top | The Osborne Brothers | Lyrics |
| Rocky Top | The Pride of the Southland Marching Band | No Lyrics |
| II. Self-Deprecating Southern Pride and Other Humor | ||
| A. Country and Proud of It | ||
| These five songs capture the pride, charm, and self-deprecating humor of the South, where “everybody knows everybody” and where folks are proud of their coonskin cap wearing neighbors. Where a love triangle just might involve a pistol-packin farm girl who strays from her man and hooks up with a dude named Earl who rebuilds engines for a living — a “Charlie Daniels of the torque wrench” — only to be lured back to her man by the promise of onion rings and t.v. Where the family’s claim to fame is ownership of an Elvis t.v. tray and a penchant for going “hog wild over beans and barbecue.” Where the grease monkey who caught the record small mouth out on Kentucky lake is “one of the most famous people in the country.” And where A&P-workin’, baby blue AMC-drivin’, yard-mowin’, stamp-collectin’, canasta-playin’ Barney Jekyll metamorphasizes into a honky-tonkin’ Bubba Hyde. | ||
| I’m from the Country | Tracy Byrd | Lyrics |
| Queen of My Double Wide Trailer | Sammy Kershaw | Lyrics |
| Lifestyles of the Not so Rich and Famous | Tracy Byrd | Lyrics |
| Famous People | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Bubba Hyde | Diamond Rio | Lyrics |
| B. Punchlines | ||
| The next seven songs are basically jokes put to music. I won’t ruin them by giving anything away. I will say, though, that Two Feet of Topsoil, in addition to being funny, also qualifies as a nice geology lesson. Now that’s low! | ||
| I’m Gonna Miss Her | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| All You Really Need is Love | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Me Neither | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Drink, Swear, Steal & Lie | Michael Peterson | Lyrics |
| Two Feet of Topsoil | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| She’s Got the Rhythm | Alan Jackson | Lyrics |
| Did I Shave My Legs for This? | Deana Carter | Lyrics |
| C. Just Plain Funny | ||
The next five songs are not really jokes, just funny. It Never Woulda Worked Out Anyway is basically a guy telling the girl he likes not to fret about all of the lies he’s telling other guys about her because she’s not meant to be with any of them anyway. You can guess the theme of Mr. Mom. There’s a snippet of the video for the song on Lonestar’s site, if you want to check it out. Notice that the dog is sporting a band-aid.Is it Still Over is home to the best line in country music:Is it still over? Brad Paisley’s faith is tested by a long-winded preacher in Long Sermon. Lyle Lovett takes a more proactive approach to the same problem in Church. |
||
| It Never Woulda Worked Out Anyway | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Mr. Mom | Lonestar | Lyrics |
| Is it Still Over? | Randy Travis | Lyrics |
| Long Sermon | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Church | Lyle Lovett | Lyrics |
| III. Life, Love, Family, and Other Simple Pleasures | ||
| Life’s all about love, family, and other simple pleasures. It’s about mowing your lawn, eating eggs and biscuits, and watching kids enjoying being kids. It’s about the unconditional love of a parent or spouse. It’s about expressing your love for another in familiar terms, comparing it to the depth of a holler, the strength of a river, the height of a pine tree, or the song of a whippoorwill. It’s about proclaiming your love for another in front of the entire town (as Billy Bob does for Charlene in John Deere Green by vandalizing the local water tower). It’s about marrying the girl you’ve always loved. And it’s about going through life expecting to get a bit of dirt on you and deciding to enjoy the process anyway. | ||
| Ain’t Nothin’ Like | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Love Without End, Amen | George Strait | Lyrics |
| Deeper Than the Holler | Randy Travis | Lyrics |
| Make a Mistake, Part I, Part II | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Little Moments | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Mud on the Tires | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| John Deere Green | Joe Diffie | Lyrics |
| Rebecca Lynn | Bryan White | Lyrics |
| IV. Just Plain Fun | ||
| These songs don’t really fit into another category. They’re just fun. | ||
| The Devil Went Down to Georgia | The Charlie Daniels Band | Lyrics |
| I Wanna Talk About Me | Toby Keith | Lyrics |
| Sold (The Grundy County Auction) | John Michael Montgomery | Lyrics |
| V. Faith | ||
| Religion is heavily integrated into Southern culture. We still pray at football games, mostly because we want to and largely because nobody objects. It sure is nice to live in a place where people don’t run to their lawyer whenever they hear the name of Jesus.The following songs are not found on religious albums — they are all included on mainstream, secular albums along with the radio hits. And, at least in country music, they don’t seem out of place. | ||
| The Old Rugged Cross | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Farther Along | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| Go Rest High on that Mountain | Vince Gill | Lyrics |
| In the Garden | Brad Paisley | Lyrics |
| VI. Signature Song | ||
| As I said, in East Tennessee any discussion of music both begins and ends with Rocky Top. Okay, then. | ||
| Rocky Top | The Osborne Brothers | Lyrics |
| Rocky Top | The Pride of the Southland Marching Band | No Lyrics |
Working on a fairly long and complex (HTML-wise) post: Required Listening for Hillbilly Holiday, 2005.
So chill.
And have some ‘possum. (Netnanny alert! One instance of minor vulgarity!)
The one thing not on your informed consent form for surgery. I think this guy used to play drums for Spinal Tap.
Twenty years. 2-0. TWENTY YEARS! Unbelieveable.
The dreaded “Dear Classmates of 1985″ letter came today. Twenty year high school reunion scheduled for September 24, 2005. Twenty years. I have more than doubled my age in high school.
The long dormant, long term memory area of my weary mind is stirring. Fond memories. Fun times.
Which reminds me, here’s something I wrote to my best friends and band-mates in high school, Shawn Driscoll, Shawn Anderson, and Eugene (now “Pastor Gene”) Reynolds a few years back.
First the context: I was living in Fort Lauderdale, FL around 1993 or so. I pulled out an old video tape of when our rock band played a high school assembly. Eugene had just lost a bunch of weight, and our bass player was a guy from Moline, which was the big city to us, named Corey something. Myers, maybe, but I can’t remember. We went through bassists like Spinal Tap went through drummers.
Anyway, when I was done rolling on the floor in a fit of laughter, I wrote this letter to the old dudes from Main Entry:
O.K. Let me set the scene. Here I am in the “electronics room”, the room that is off limits to my parents because they can’t seem to be able to even turn anything on in here. I just popped in an old tape because I thought the caption that was written in faded blue ink was intriguing. Ready?
Scene 1. Juli MILLER is teasing a young Shawn Driscoll’s hair into curls with a 200 degree steel stick. Shawn looks like a grown up trans-gendered Cindy Brady. Okay, then.
Scene 2. “Euey” Reynolds, at 80 pounds, is tuning a 100 pound guitar. After one run through each string, not being satisfied with the axe being in perfect tune, he de-tunes his g string only to bring it back up to being about 25 hertz flat. Randy Ruth and Chris Brown watch this with great curiosity, nodding their heads as if Euey knows what he is doing.
Meanwhile, Matt Bowman, Greg Inslee, and Doug Hessell have gathered around the Cindy Brady mutant thing that is Shawn Driscoll.
Euey turns around, giving the camera a great shot of his newly found Cambodian biscuits. He is straightening the corner of what looks to be a page torn out of a giant coloring book. It says Main Entry. I try to think of what it could mean as I stare at the way Euey’s biscuits look in his blue parachute pants. Whatever it means, it looks like the child that colored this masterpiece got tired before he or she got done because the blue abruptly ends at odd angles.
Wait. What in the world …. Here’s a guy, even skinnier than Euey, white as a t-shirt, dressed in stop sign red parachute pants, dark blue kneepads, yes, kneepads, and a rainbow shirt with odds and ends of silhouetted barbed wire across the front. He is putting on his feet what look to be like leftover scraps from the Elves and the Shoemaker’s house. They are brown rawhide boots with tassels.
I know this guy. Joel, or something like that. Whatever. He looks like the ghost of Robin Hood who just jumped out of a plane, (without a parachute, but with the right pants), after a rain at sunset, and landed on Fred and Ethel’s barbed wire fence. This is the kind of guy that would wear plaid pants to a birthday party. [Editor’s note: I am told that this actually happened. I have apparently repressed the memory.] To top it all off, he actually thinks he looks cool.
Well there must have been a sale or something because Shawn Anderson is donning gray parachute pants and an almost conservative blue shirt. He may be the only one on stage that knows up from down.
Well, maybe not. He doesn’t have any of his equipment set up yet because he’s engrossed in doing something called the superbeat on Cindy Brady’s drums.
And here’s a gorgeous guy in a white sport coat with a bass. I can’t remember his name. Corey, or something. He’s staring at the Joel-thing like he may have ventured one cornfield too many into the boondocks.
Tension is mounting. Shawn Anderson plays that one lick from 157 Riverside Avenue for about the millionth time. The Joel thing is turning his amp up to ensure that no one else will be heard during the show. Euey is chowing down on the skin of a grape, and Cindy Brady is on all fours trying to find a wing nut he twisted off his hi hat 45 minutes ago. Corey is taking everything in like he may have ventured one cornfield too many into the boondocks.
Now, the curtain is drawn and the spotlight is on Mark Clark, his real name, and Bill or Bob Wilkens. Bill/Bob says with eloquence, “This is greatest band ever to come out Rockridge…” and then stops. Mark Clark, the great orator, does him one better. “Right now I’d like to introduce, the greatest band on the face of this earth, the best concert band in the United States, the one, the only, Main Entry. (The are enough guffaws from the audience to re-record the entire laugh track to I Love Lucy.) The crowd goes crazy; It was this or Geometry.
For awhile, you can’t hear anything, and slowly you start to recognize a rousing rendition of Sammy Hagar’s The Girl Gets Around. Euey is lugging his 100 pound guitar around like it’s a piccolo. Shawn A. is wearing sunglasses. Cindy Brady is driving the band at about, oh maybe 30 clicks of the metronome too fast. The Joel thing is singing the song like a banshee being whipped repeatedly, partly because he thinks he can sing this song even though it just happens to be, oh about an entire octave out of his range. Corey is playing his bass with his hand over the neck instead of the standard under method and looking like he thought he may have ventured one corn field too many into the boondocks.
Well, it must be Sammy day at Rockridge Hick School because the next song is I Can’t Drive 55. When the Joel-thing gets to the part where he sings “55″, the sound that comes out is amazingly like the sound he makes when he drops his amp on his foot.
Like the true geniuses they are, the band ends the song with the DX7’s CAR patch. When you play it at 100 decibels, it sounds like the world’s biggest Hoover vacuum, but the band never thinks about that. After all the patch says CAR. The audience hears the Hoover and they’re thinking, “great, nuclear war, am I gonna have to go back to class?”, until Shawn takes off his sunglasses and starts applauding himself and his ingenuity. The audience, remarkably, follows suit.
Fade to black.
Fade up to Shawn A. going to the front microphone and readjusting it to his six foot four from the Joel-thing’s four foot six. Totally impromptu, Shawn says (into the mike), “Maybe if you guys yell loud enough, Joel’ll tap dance for us!” He eagerly applauds himself again. “We’re gonna play some RATT for ya. Kick it in Cheesemaster!”
I assume he’s addressing Cindy Brady. But maybe it was the Joel thing because all you can hear through the whole song is his cheesy guitar. When he gets to the solo he hits the hyperdrive hidden on the floor as if his amp wasn’t loud enough already. He hears the feedback and then scowls at Euey, yelling at him to turn his amp down.
After Round and Round, the Joel-thing leads the band in Don’t Tell Me You Love Me. Euey is bouncing around like his parachute pants are too tight in all the wrong places. As the solo approaches, the Joel-thing steps on his hyperdrive and starts to writhe in ecstasy. He fumbles his way to the “whoooo-whoooo” giving his 15 dollar tremolo system the yank of death. So, when he starts his finger tapping, the only part he can actually PLAY, his guitar is flat. Still, his ears are shot and he continues to play anyway. He attempts the end of the solo, only actually hitting every fourth or fifth note, and when it’s over, he and Euey fall to the ground, apparently on purpose, but one can’t be sure.
What a show!. Corey now approaches center stage. He spends about 2 minutes yelling unintelligibly into the mic. Maybe it’s just city talk, but no one understands. Finally, the Joel-thing and Euey start to get up, threatening not to until the crowd yells loud enough.
Risky gamble, but it works. When the song reaches its peak, Corey risks life and limb in a heroic jump off the three foot platform, nearly jumping on to the Joel-thing in the process.
Time for Cindy Brady’s drum solo. He attempts Neil Peart’s 25 piece drum kit solo with his own 5 piece set. The crowd goes nuts, perhaps because this is Rockridge Hick School and they’ve never seen a drum set in person. After the solo, Cindy throws his sticks into the air. He then takes off after them because, well, they’re the only two sticks he has. He finds one lodged into Shawn Anderson’s eye socket to the hilt. He giggles and says “Oh, man. Sorry.” He then slaps Shawn in the face with a piece of Swiss cheese, yanks the stick out of Shawn’s head, and jogs back to his drum kit, tripping twice on the way. He starts to play a song that sounds like it’s called Turnips and Potatoes. The Joel thing loves this song because it gives him a chance to make wierd noises with his guitar. Nobody notices, though, because it pretty much sounds like the rest of his playing.
Euey steps up to the mic and sings his guts out, wiping his nose after every line. The crowd is on its feet, rushing the stage to dance, ignoring the singer shooting snot. The Joel-thing is so engrossed that it takes him 3/4 of the song to realize he is out of tune.
After the song, Shawn A. explains that the song they are about to play is one they just recorded in a real studio. Catch Me. With the Joel-thing’s guitar mute, the sound actually isn’t too bad. The song proceeds without incident until at the very end, a protruding piece of skin on Shawn’s neck gets stuck in the tiny wholes of the microphone, he panics, and he jitterbugs off of the stage dragging his equipment behind him. Tragic, but Olympic.
After the Joel-thing gets his guitar back on and turns his amp up another notch, he grabs the mic and says, “What do you think of the new Main Entry?” Another dangerous gamble, but a bit more safe than the last considering the audience pity level after the last song.
Corey is introduced and conned into attempting a stupid joke about his voice. He sings the next song, I’ll Be Going Back to Moline Now. The Joel-thing spends the entire song crouched by his amp trying to tune his guitar.
The song after that is Runaway. This is by far the band’s best song, partly because Joel’s guitar is turned off, and partly because halfway through, Euey turns around and shows everyone his butt.
Johnny B. Goode is next. This band can handle three chords. Shawn A. gets to do a piano solo in this song, and it sounds amazingly like 157 Riverside Avenue. The Joel thing does a solo that sounds amazingly like the beginning to Turn Up the Radio. In the middle of the song, they go into Wipe Out. For a minute, the Joel thing, Euey, and Corey are standing in a line. Euey wipes his nose again, this time spraying Corey with green death. Did he really say that? “Go. Rockridge Be Good?” Yessuh. Sho did.
Without warning, someone closes the curtain, and it’s over.
Except they do it all one more time.
Fade to black.
Fade up to ….
Bill/Bob says, “Are you ready to rock? I said are you ready to rock? All right. Five guy back here once say picky ack bwah sah big. Introducing Main Entry….”
Leave it to the Japanese to develop bionic pants.
They call it a “hybrid assistive limb,” or HAL:
HAL is the result of 10 years’ work by Yoshiyuki Sankai of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and integrates mechanics, electronics, bionics and robotics in a new field known as cybernics. The most fully developed prototype, HAL 3, is a motor-driven metal “exoskeleton” that you strap onto your legs to power-assist leg movements. A backpack holds a computer with a wireless network connection, and the batteries are on a belt.
Two control systems interact to help the wearer stand, walk and climb stairs. A “bio-cybernic” system uses bioelectric sensors attached to the skin on the legs to monitor signals transmitted from the brain to the muscles. It can do this because when someone intends to stand or walk, the nerve signal to the muscles generates a detectable electric current on the skin’s surface. These currents are picked up by the sensors and sent to the computer, which translates the nerve signals into signals of its own for controlling electric motors at the hips and knees of the exoskeleton. It takes a fraction of a second for the motors to respond accordingly, and in fact they respond fractionally faster to the original signal from the brain than the wearer’s muscles do.
Beware of malicious remote-control wielding penguins.
Humorist Dave Berry live-blogged last night’s episode of 24.
As our CFO eruditely pointed out this afternoon, if you end up with that football, the best play is a quick kick on first down.
The Unknown Long Term Care Lawyer is a new blog by a, well, an unknown long term care lawyer. He (or she) has been all over the AIG mess and the auctioning of Beverly Enterprises.
I’ll be a regular reader.
Sony’s just been granted an interesting new patent:
The U.S. patent, granted to Sony researcher Thomas Dawson, describes a technique for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce “sensory experiences” such as smells, sounds and images.
Some games, however, I don’t think you want to smell.
Goodbye Mapquest. Goodbye randmcnally.com.
Hello, again, Google. I’ve been a fan of Google’s maps and driving directions since I discovered the service a few months ago. Typical Google, the maps are a blend of simplicity and style. And unlike the other online map services, Google’s actually recognizes my home address, which was a cow pasture two years ago.
And yesterday, the Google map service distanced itself from the competition by introducing satellite pictures to accompany its maps. The traditional method is still available, but now you also have the option of viewing locations as satellite images or aerial high-resolution digital photos. Driving directions can be integrated into the images, too.
Coolgle. Let the privacy discussion begin!
Just heard that Abbey Hedrick started talking last night. Apparently, some of her first words consisted of a disagreement with her mother. I would wager that her mother was never so glad to hear her child sass her.
Abbey Hedrick is still progressing. She’s been moved out of the Pediatric ICU, and they’ve limited the pain meds, and removed the feeding tube through the nose and inserted one into her stomach. She’s apparently been pretty active, but as yet has not given any indication that she recognizes her family. Still, the professionals apparently remain optimistic.
According to their grandmother, the other girls are easing back into their normal routine despite their soreness and seat belt burns. The three-year-old is reportedly car-shy, understandably so, and doesn’t want to go anywhere near “the mess,” as in her mind the remnants of the accident are still strewn about the highway.
It’s my understanding that after an accident, the outpouring of support is immediate and strong, but that it eventually slows while the tragedy for the family lingers on. So do not let up in your prayers for this family.
