The question asked and the answer given have been discussed so much already, but that delay just kills me. And the eye-roll! Dear God, the eye-roll!

Number One. I have my original .com domain back.  Turns out there is a grace period and I was still in it.  I’m still more than a little annoyed that my registrar saw fit to allow a squatter to keep my site warm during my brief expiration period, but it is good to have it back all the same.  (And I would have never looked into the existence of any kind of grace period if Dan (of Dan And Sally) hadn’t reminded me of such.  So the credit is mostly due to him.)

Number Two. I’ve restored most of the post-related images.  Nothing but text is minimalist and somewhat chic, but an illustration or two never hurt anyone.

Number Three. I’m sticking with the .org.  I’m redirecting the .com traffic over here.  I like the fact that this domain is basically unexplored territory.

Number Four. I’m rebuilding my blogroll, starting with the locals.  If I’ve missed you, fret not.  I’ll link to you shortly.

I have made a tactical error, basically. Here’s what happened …

When I registered grabbingsand.com so long ago, I was hosted by a friendly little company called LogJamming. It was run by two guys, just a pair of geeks who had the bandwidth. They established themselves by hosting Wil Wheaton’s blog, so I figured they could host mine. Nice fellas, too. Need support? Just find them on AIM and say so. They did all of their registering through a company called TwentyBones. So called because they’d register you on the big Wide World of Web for just twenty bucks. A deal at the time.

After some time, I left LogJamming, but I stuck with TwentyBones. Soon enough, they were bought out by a company called DomainMonger. I figured it hurt nothing to leave things as they were, so I let it stay. Their re-registration was just as inexpensive, after all. The last time I logged in to their website? 2005. And there’s the problem. They didn’t have my updated credit card info. They didn’t have my GMail address. And since I hadn’t given it a thought it three years, July 2008 arrived without me noticing that my domain was going to expire.

So grabbingsand.com expired. There is a search engine squatter where my blog used to be. The vultures, they move fast.

But all is not lost. I’ve backed up every piece of data from the old site. It is amazing what you accumulate over four or five years, even virtually. I had about 400MB worth of photos, mp3s and assorted nonsense. I’ve also managed to pull a complete backup of my previous WordPress database. The only problem is that it is pretty big, weighing in at over 8MB. That’s a lot of posts, but I’ve been doing this in one way or another for nine years.

So that’s why you’re looking at a rather skeletal blog today. If you’ve been a regular reader, I thank you, and I beg your patience. With any luck, I’ll be able to set everything back to mostly normal before the weekend is out.

(You know what the best thing about this seeming misfortune is? I didn’t freak out. Not all that much, anyway. Had this happened a couple of years ago, I would’ve railed and ranted, scaring the cats and making my wife wonder what happened to her sensible husband. But as it was, I saw what happened, muttered “You gotta be kidding me” a couple of times, then just went to work on finding a way to fix it. Maybe this means I’m growing up. Or something.)

I don’t live in the past. It’s just … as much as I like so much of today’s music, I know full well that most of it just isn’t real. Artifice can be beautiful, but when I find something that resonates with a rare honesty, I tend to embrace it.

So when I mentioned yesterday that I might’ve just found my favorite new album for 2008, I mean that I think I’ve found another honest artist to celebrate.

Danielia Cotton has a voice that fears nothing. If she needs to crack it to bring a feeling to your attention, then it’s going to crack. She’ll wail if the song warrants. She’ll keep low when a verse warrants, then set her voice afire through the bridge and send it soaring through the chorus.

She’s not blazing any trails here-to-fore uncovered. She’s doing quite the opposite. Her influences are obvious and proudly so. What hits me first is how much of a Mother’s Finest vibe I get from every other track on her latest album, Rare Child. Mother’s Finest’s iconic Another Mother Further is thirty-one years old, but remains one of the best albums I’ve ever heard (albeit an album that few others seem to remember). So that association alone would be enough to pull me into Danielia’s corner, but then she goes on to channel so many other damned good sounds. Etta James is in there, as well as Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, The Stones, Bad Company, Stevie Ray, maybe even some latter day folks like Shelby Lynne, Nikka Costa, Jennifer Nettles (Pre-Sugarland, especially). There’s even one track that reminds me quite spookilly of The Scorpions “Still Loving You,” a metal ballad that kept me in its thrall through junior high. If you look on YouTube, you can find her doing live covers of AC/DC’s “Back In Black.”

My only complaints about the album would be that it is simply too short — these ten tracks fly by far too quickly — and that a couple of tracks could’ve used a bit less polish. A well-intentioned producer somewhere seems to have the notion that Danielia should follow the K.T. Tunstall route, but that’s far too limiting. To be honest, I’ve no idea where Danielia belongs. What radio station is going to play an artist from New Jersey who slips so easily from Texas-style blues to old Nashville country to late-seventies guitar rock?

Luckilly, NPR caught one of her concerts for safe-keeping back in May. The forty-one minute show is just about enough time to run through all of Rare Child, and she is in strong voice throughout. Give it a listen, then go pick up the album in whatever format suits you. We’ve another six months to go before the New Year, but I’ll be hard-pressed to find another offering in 2008 so rich with promise. Maybe you’ll agree.

Photo from Shore Fire Media, Photo Credit: Chia Messina

Actually, that kind of behavior is what my grandmother would’ve referred to as “being contrary.”

There’s a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery … In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would “set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year.”*

No, Jonah. A national call to volunteerism, especially one with a carrot and a stick involved, would give complacent young Americans — you know, the ones whose eyes glaze over while watching MTV — the opportunity and incentive to seek a cause beyond their own. Conversely, slavery — at the very least — involves the wholesale dehumanization of a particular segment of humanity (through the deprivation of freedom) to the socio-economical benefit of another segment.

Asshat.

Quantum Leap / Enterprise

This one writes itself, doesn’t it? The final episode of Enterprise was horrible, even regrettable. For a series that had suffered so much already, they had to go and frame the last hurrah in a contrived holodeck scenario involving Next Gen’s Commander Riker and Counselor Troi. Shameful and stupid.

So why not do this instead. Bring the whole series to a close with one last big episode, something massive and epic that will determine the course of Federation history from that point forward. And then, once the dust has settled and all of the conflict has been resolved, we cut to Captain Archer on the bridge of the original Enterprise. He looks around, surveys his crew and sees that everything is as it should be. The look on his face lets us all know that he has never felt so content. And as he cracks an honest smile, his body is enveloped in a Quantum glow.

Next, we cut to an interior shot of some kind of storage closet. Or maybe a cave. The man we’ve known as Archer is crouching over a ticking time bomb with a Swiss Army Knife in one hand and an empty roll of toilet paper in the other. At his left shoulder, looking on anxiously, is a young girl (probably blonde) with big hair. “What’re ya waitin’ for, Mac? Stop the bomb!” Former Archer glances at a pair of wires on the timer. One is red. One is blue. Looking up from his task, he says to nobody in particular:

“Oh, boy.”

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States specifies the qualifications or requirements that make one eligible to hold the office of President. These are as follows:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

Notably absent from this compact list is a requirement that candidate have experience “riding in a fighter plane” or “getting shot down” (presumably while in said fighter plane).

Chocolate Covered Bacon, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Update: Perhaps I should explain. The bacon was created by the brilliant Sally (of Dan and Sally fame) and shared with us last night after a sustaining bowl of Indian carrot soup with flatbread.

Now, the obvious question is this: Was it good?

I’m going to say “Yes,” with an additional bit of observation. Not a disclaimer, mind you. What you see here is the convergence of two very powerful tastes. The bacon was smoky, substantial, the scent reminding me (very specifically) of the Pancake Pantry in Gatlinburg. The chocolate was dark and melty, coating my fingers just about as soon as I picked up the slice. Put them both together and they … do not really meld at all.

This isn’t bad, mind you. It’s just very unexpected. The bacon wants to be the dominant flavor, but so does the dark chocolate. The chunks of salt on the chocolate try their hardest to negotiate a treaty between the two tastes, but all it really does it assist both sides in their little flavor war like a culinary double-agent. All in all, I had about one and a half slices. That was enough. Any more than that would’ve been just too much.

The moral is this: If someone offers you chocolate-covered bacon, take it. Eat it. But stop after the first one or two. The cocoa-jacketed bacon will call to you from the plate, but turn away from its siren call, leave some for another day.

0625082155.jpg, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Izzard!

I would walk with my stereo, playing my various cassettes. Around the circle of my neighborhood. All over the campground in Alabama where we kept a trailer at Lake Weiss. Across the elementary school playground behind our house. Looking back, I must’ve been an absolute nuisance to anyone I passed. I was blasting our neighbors with The Beatles, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Duran Duran, Alice Cooper and (God help us) Chicago. My parents, usually very observant and corrective when I did something particularly anti-social, didn’t seem to mind. Maybe they liked being able to hear my stereo, to know I was probably okay, even from a distance.

It was during one of those late afternoon walk-abouts that George Carlin saved me.

Suzy lived up the street. She was older than me by a few years. And by all accounts, she was a “bad girl.” This meant that she smoke cigarettes, even when other people were watching. And she kept time with the local “bad boy” — a tall and lanky long-hair named John. He smoked, too.

I was crossing the playground, boom box in hand, when someone yelled at me. “Hey!”

It was Suzy. She and long-haired John were holding court on the big cast-off tires that sat on their side atop a low mound of sawdust. This was during the heyday of the “recycled industrial scrap” playground, when creosote-coated telephone poles were deemed suitable for balance beam use and massive earth-mover tires were arranged as rubber castles for children.

I started to make for the drainage ditch, the one that seperated my back yard from the edge of the playground, but she called again. And she sounded angry.

“Hey!” So I turned and looked in her direction. That’s when I noticed the others. Four or five more were sitting or leaning around them, smoking. Teenagers, mostly.

I’m not sure why I didn’t run. I was a scrawny kid. Really scrawny. But my flight or flail instinct failed to engage, so I stood there. Waiting.

“What ya got on yer radio?” For all of the reputation that preceded her, she’d never said a word to me, but now she was asking questions. Setting me up for a good and solid mocking, it seemed. And it could’ve gone so wrong.

Instead, I walked on over and told her. “George Carlin,” I said.

“Who’s George Carling?”

I’d only just learned of George Carlin a few weeks earlier. One of our number, one out of the handful of gifted junior high geeks, had seen a special on late-night HBO, then gone the extra mile to borrow his dad’s cassette of Carlin On Campus. Copies were made and distributed. Mine was in my boom box. The tape was cued up to “An Incomplete List Of Impolite Words.”

I pressed play.

“We start out lightly with heck, hell, damn, God damn, bitch,
bastard and crud …”

For about the next hour, I played the whole cassette. Front and back. They all loved it. Why would they not? Turns out that the so-called bad kids dug the same comedy as the geeky kids, and for many of the same reasons. After all, this was more than just entertainment. This was verbal ammunition!

When the “Incomplete List” played through a second time, that was it. The other kids all made their excuses and ambled back to wherever they belonged, some of them mumbling thanks as they went. Suzy didn’t say thanks, but gave me one of those cool kid nods and wandered off. John followed her.

It could’ve turned out much differently. I doubt the same reaction would’ve followed a sharing of the latest Duran Duran. Or Michael Jackson.

So here’s to George Carlin.
Here’s to boom boxes.
Here’s to bootleg tapes.
Here’s to unauthorized crash courses in obscenity.

Most of all, here’s to Suzy and John and all those/us misunderstood kids who were really never as bad as they/we feared or as hopeless as they/we seemed.