Songs Yr Pilgrim Loves: Dropkick Murphys, "Workers Song"

We play and practice this, alone and in sekrit, we do, on our solitary single so lonesome guitar, though the studio version has like *three* guitars, pretty sure, and Bass and Drums and an Entire Fucking Chorus of Bagpipes like in this live performance, which has FUCKING BAGPIPES AND KILTS TOO, PEOPLE, we swear, happy and delirious, so watch it, but we are only one single humble musician who can only play one guitar at a time, and can only sing solo, and cannot do any three-part backing vocals on chorus, even though this song is easily within our practiced first-tenor range, not like the cool octave skips of Frightened Rabbit's Keep Yourself Warm, which are a stretch for us but we always try because Love That Tune, our vocal range being similar to Amy Ray's of Indigo Girls, which for the tune (Workers Song) we remember that we were talking about requires no straining for second-soprano David Crosby falsetto required, though we Really Wish We Could Do That, and we are impossible dreamers also though we have only two guitars between us and No Bagpipes At All, nor even a single kilt anywhere that we can find alas and yet we play practice on because love and stuff because that is what we do because we are just lame like that The End. 

Anyways, this song is so fucking cool rocking loud, and of a genre that we call "Heavy Metal Celtic."

Power chords (Root-Fifth-[Octave optional]) are of course a staple of rock, not just metal, with palm-mute and cranked-up amplification, as used adroitly here.

What makes this song very Celtic (apart from The Bagpipes Duh) is the Drone Note, used throughout. It's the Tonic, sounded through all three chords: Tonic (the root, no inversion), Fourth (second inversion), and even the Fifth, (not used here very much) where it creates a cool dissonance, because its third is the leading tone, just a chromatic step away from the root.

In this song's arrangement, the drone note shows up in the I to IV chord change, where the B-flat is played in the tonic, and then stays there steady as the bottom note of the IV chord, voiced in the second inversion.

You can hear the tonic drone note in the guitar parts, 'specially in the chorus, with the rapid staccato bouncing from leading-tone to tonic, in the I-chord and the IV-Chord. Easy in this song because B-flat. 

And now we shall RSN (real soon now) Shut The Fuck Up, because we sincerely want y'all to listen. But srsly, y'all: We LUVS This Shit. Didja notice?

Here is a good link for the song. And this one has lyrics, so's y'all can sing along, and rememberize the lyrics, which we think you should, and dance and bounce rhythmically too, most indecorously also, the best you can muster. 

Chords and tabs for fellow guitarists here. (Easy: B-flat: I, IV, V. Got it. But the solo: very Nice To Have.)

Let us Now Praise: Carlos Arredondo

We like the headline on Rebecca Schoenkopf's post:

You Will Want To Read This Gawker Story About The Sexy Man In The Hat

Sullivan has a good roundup on Arrendondo and the injured man he's helping in this stirring stunning photo.

Songs yr pilgrim luvs, Might Gay Marry Soon because Luvs

This is Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, performing solo electric, the tune "Time of Your Life," from the album "Bullet in a Bible." The studio version is solo acoustic, which we like. But we like this one way more betters because we do that's why.

When yr Pilgrim plays this, it is without the eye makeup, because we believe its contribution to our performance is negligible, so we save our eye makeup for more important occasions.

Also, when we do it, it is not as loud because we have No Amp. Srsly. ('Srsly' is Pilgrim Code for: we are not Making Shit Up Because Funniez, even though we do that A LOT, it is what we live for. Oh no. Srsly means this is really and for reals True, yr Pilgrim totally swears, because love and stuff.)

Also, and further, too, when we do it, it is without festival-size crowds because the fans of our work are not quite so numerous. But there was this one time when someone gave us two bucks and a beer to Shut The Fuck Up, which we think should count as Paid Performance.

(Oh, if any of y'all think that Green Day is lame, or yr Pilgrim's taste in music is even lamer, or anything like that we say WE STILL LOVE YOU OF COURSE HOW COULD WE NOT BUT WE DON'T CARE SO SHUT UP.)

Also, when we DO IT: no aerial shot from two thousand. Oh, and you know what, like also too? No fireworks at the end of our DOING IT.

Other than that, our performance is almost pretty nearly, real soon now THE SAME because Love Practice Study.

Gay Quote of the Day

Posted 27 Mar 2013, by my dear friend HoneyBee (a paraphrase of her name. I posted before I had consent .)

Facebook is so gay today, I could marry it.

We love you, dear, and everyone you loves too, and we are with you because love.

_ love,

Yr Pilgrim, yr friend, yo, um: y'all.

Stuff your pilgrim thinks is cool

(via Jezebel's Doug Barry.)

This is so Fan-Freakin-abso-Fuckin-lutely-All-Kinds-o-AWESOME-tastic you guys.

Here's the deal. These young women (click-y the link-y, watch-y the vid-y, prepare-ye to be all happiez-y. Runtime: 3:47 of nonstop amazing, with the coolest music cue.), these women who are 7th graders, They Did This Science-y Project Thing. Which was awesome, yr pilgrim, duly sworn, testifies and swears.

They, these awesome young lady-persons, made this rocket-shaped payload (a la the retro hokey 1940s-1950s conceptions, back when some movies actually portrayed fast-blowing atmospheric winds, IN SPACE). They designed this lifting lofting apparatus, and set up the video to record the mission.

And this whole awesome cool thing which These Girls, who are awesome young WOMYN, yay, which they, did we mention, designed and made: It went to SPACE, people. IT WENT TO FUCKING SPACE. (nerd/tech note: it passed the boundary known as Karman Line, defined as 50 miles above surface. Prolly at the Wiki Thingie, accessible somewheres on the intertubes, where y'all can look it up. )

But here is yr Pilgrim's most-est favorite-est part, which grants his face and his everythings the sooper surpassing happies, about this most awesome very cool thing, which these awesome-young-Double-X-Chromosome-having persons So Totally Did:

It is the *Cool de Grace*, y'all. Ready?

HELLO KITTY was the passenger who went to space. How awesome ADORABLE is that?

Anyways, that is all, you guys. Love y'all truly I do. Gonna go now and haves me a happiez cry at the Awesomes.

Um, kthnxbai.

Shit Yr Pilgrim Makes Up because funnies

My skeet gun is short-form, not long. (Triple Score! Ripped-from-the-hedlines; wing-nut mocking. And: PENIS JOKE! Booya-shakalaka!)

Shit your pilgrim says

Republicans currently are interested in only two things. The Deficit is not one of them.

What I did "New Year's, New Year's Eve"

Your pilgrim: Wrote Code. He did, blatantly, and in front of god and everybody, because he is such a shameless blatant programmer-writer, who loves programming and coding and writing and stuff.

Further, he wrote Lots Of It. (Also, Said code is really good, because your pilgrim Wrote It.)

Further, your pilgrim has been doing it, this code-writing, at big urgent fevered fun creative pace, since like last Thursday.

Anyways ... fun, good, stuff. I think it might work. So, happies, and stuff ...

Good thing I finished my First Collection of Poems in late November. So like, That's Done.

So, um, The End, and: I love you all.

Feel the love

In writing the hed, your pilgrim was being ironic, cuz what he really wants is: to be funny. Or clever. But also: Mock Those Who Deserve It.

I'm reminded of what Happy Bunny sez: "Hate is a just a *special* kind of love we give to people who suck." But don't waste time on hatin', y'all. Not even this guy, quoted below. (About and because of whom your pilgrim wrote all this.) Hate is for haters. Let them have it.

Anyway, Andrew Sullivan quotes this guy, filed under the Hathos Alert/Malkin Award:

"All family and friends, even close family and friends, who I know to be Democrats are hereby dead to me. I vow never to speak to them again for the rest of my life, or have any communications with them. They are in short, the enemies of liberty. They deserve nothing less than hatred and utter contempt. I strongly urge all other libertarians to do the same. Are you married to someone who voted for Obama, have a girlfriend who voted 'O'. Divorce them. Break up with them without haste. Vow not to attend family functions, Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas for example, if there will be any family members in attendance who are Democrats," _ Eric Dondero, LibertarianRepublican.net.

No problem, dude, you squishy squeakee charmer you. Happy to be dead to you. Grateful, even. Truly.

Meantime: Live long and fester, man.

I'm wondering though, how far Mr Dondero is willing to take this. Would he, for example, fuck a pure conservative Republican woman, if said woman, who was willing to fuck him, had a mother or brother or half-sister, twice-removed, who voted for Obama? Or even marked an absentee ballot for the Kenyan Socialist Freedom Annihilator, but slept late, because poor and one of the *takers*, and did not get to the post office in time.

UPDATE: Your pilgrim swears, he does, that he conceived and typed and crafted and revised and Google-checked a quote and clicked the Publish button too, after reading Sully's post only, (and he might have been at his desk at his job) all of which was so totes before reading this on Wonkette, written by Editrix Extraordinaire Rebecca Schoenkopf, Esquire, whom your pilgrim luvs secretly and from afar. 

Further, your pilgrim would never steal or copy cool funny stuff from her desmesne. (She knows what the word means. The rest of y'all, look it up. Or crack open your brit-lit anthology from college. It'll be in the second volume, Romantic Period.) No. Not without giving gushing praise and credit and all the Wonkers Gay Love I have for Her Editrix, and for all who slave happily too in the Employ of her Empire, which is communist, because she is Commie Girl, awesome daughter of Commie Mom the also awesome. Thursdays, she leads the happy workers in song, I hear.

No, your pilgrim, um, avers. I would only draw inspiration, with most proper linky-thing credit included in me post. (And afterwards maybe a thank-you note and invitation to tea some afternoon) All that, so's I can be: More Funniez. (Yo, Becks: Air Kiss!)

Let us now Enjoy: Very Cool Words

So, your pilgrim has this Most Coolest Awesome-est Friend and Fellow Journalist-more-extraordinaire, and An Awesome Mom Also. This aforesaid awesome friend a coupla years ago posted to her Facebook status what I think must Forever Rank, unchallenged for eternity, or at least until our Sun dies, as: The Coolest Facebook Post Ever:

[S] is making milk. What are your superpowers?

What my friend was doing, most naturally near automatically and most casually miraculously too, was lactating. As in, her mammary glands, known coarsely as Boobs, were: Making Milk, Making Nourishment for her own newly born child. 

Let us all pause now to say: Wow.

Lactation is the usual word for this amazing mammalian miracle. It's the term you will see in medical texts, and in the literature too from the La Leche League, there to help possibly anxious new mothers deal with problems, including physician/family/workplace/culture hostility to the Naked Breast-Baring Audacity of Nursing, which all mammals have always done, but which some in these latter days, have insisted is *so* not appropos for homo sapiens in civilization today. The La Leche lit would also have supportive sensitive advice on what to do about problems like nipple irritation, important stuff like that.

Anyways, all that is very important. But Your Pilgrim Wants Y'all to Know: There is this cooler, more awesome word for this most normal miracle: Galactopoesis. 

Milk-making is the plain literal meaning. But we have our connotations of the constituent words, and therefore think more along the lines of Galaxy-Maker, or Galaxy-Poet.

As astronomy developed, there were fuzzy white patches increasingly observed in the sky. Their census grew in number and detail, as observers' optics developed. Through it all, the metaphor persisted, because it stayed so ineluctable to the observers and cataloguers: Wow: This is so Milky. Hence: galaxy, galactic. [source: Your Pilgrim. Ha!]

Galactopoesis! How cool is that? Us writers and poets and dictionary-lovers so totally Eat This Stuff Up. (And sometimes we *decide* to write 'us' when we know perfectly well that the correct pronoun case to use is the nominative, not the objective.)

Loves me the modern world, I do

Comes now your pilgrim, who affirms and attests, and types on keyboard also, and such significant shit like that:

Around the time relevant when I composed and typed this post: My Android phone, which fits in my pocket, and sleeps by my side at night, charging, was awesomely effortlessly doing the following:

• Giving access to the worldwide intertubes: for my computer and for Marcia's, here at your pilgrim's home, at Rock Creek & P.
• Pushing me favorite stored music to me ears, via that wireless modern also-miracle known as Bluetooth, which I totes Cranked to the Limit. (Alas. Bluetooth does not go all the way to: Eleven.)
• Oh, it counted down also the cook-time on the pasta I'd started in me kitchen here.
• Other miscellaneous ongoing background miracles of which your pilgrim might have been unaware, but he acknowledges gladly, readily, is most grateful for.

All of this reliably ongoing while I wander on important tasks around your Pilgrim's studio home here:  Kitchen to cut onions, prep the sauce for the dinner. To the bathroom for bladder-emptying. Back to kitchen for washing of dishes.  

Writing This Post. Important Stuff Like That.

How Cool is that?

The End.

Let us now praise famous guitarists: Eric Johnson

Here is Eric Johnson performing "Cliffs of Dover" on Austin City Limits, 1988.

There are many Eric Johnson performances of this song, my favorite of his, to be found on the intertubes, and I have watched and studied them all, but this one tops my list.

Your pilgrim has studied avidly and practiced the song, of course, and can even imagine putting together a respectable performance, given world enough and time. But: Your pilgrim does not mind telling you: To be able to play this way, so awesomely, I would be *tempted* to make that deal Robert Johnson did, as legend has it, down at the Crossroads.

Also, don't mind tellin ya: Wow. So handsome.

My interview with the world, which never interviewed me

Q: What three writers from any time or place would you invite for an evening of drink and dinner and conversation?

A: That's easy: Sappho, Elizabeth Bishop and um, hold on, gimme time, and ...

Q: Interesting.

A: Yeah, thanks, sure. Don't feign sincerity and interest with me

Q: You're right. Sorry.

A: And James Joyce and Annie Dillard. And Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton and Nora Ephron, too, because I so wish they hadn't died. And Mitch Hedberg, because he was so funny and so sweet, and I so wish he hadn't died.

Q: The question was three writers.

A: I know. I changed it.

Q: You can't do that.

A: Yes I can. I'm the one writing the questions, remember?

Q: Oh, right. Carry on then.

A: I shall. Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Keats. And Sappho gets to bring her girlfriends, including Erica Jong.

Q: Girlfriends?

A: Yes. I believe she invented the word, in the sense that women use it today, as in "Girls Night Out," and "The Five Girlfriends Every Woman Must Have ..." It's attested in this quotation, numbered 160 by Lobel-Page. It's basically a usage gloss by the writer Athenaios, who says

And now freeborn women and virgins call their intimate friends *hetairai* as Sappho does in this passage:

Athenaios then quotes Sappho, which I translate this way ...

Q: Hold on, *You* translate? Like from Greek?

A: Yes, from Greek. Yes I do. Sappho wrote in the dialect known as Aeolic. The translating of her barely surviving ouevre is a big part currently of my life's work. Anyway, I translate the fragment this way:

Of these things now, for my girlfriends dear, of delight beautifully I shall sing.

Q: Barnstone didn't do it that way.

A: No, he didn't. But I did. My rendering is more like Anne Carson (2002). And it follows the word order a bit more closely. Always a hazard because it strains the limits of English syntax, which relies more on word order than does Greek, an inflected language.

Q: OK. But back to your guest list. So it's a party, then.

A: Yes it is, yes it is. But if Joyce gets too plastered, I'm cuttin' him off.

Q: Your list has more women than men. Why?

A: Easy: I like women more than men.

Q: I see.

A: Hey! Warned you about faking. Anyways, I included Joyce, despite my concern that he might be a bit too abrasive, too unmodernly un-reconstructed for the 21st century. Mitch, however, I'd expect to be a perfect polite unthreatening non-creepy gentleman, and that all the women at the table would love him, as I do.

Q: Wait. You *love* Mitch Hedberg?

A: Yes, I do.

Q: But, he's like, a guy.

A: So?

Q: What about Joyce?

A: Love only his work.

Q: Any other loves to profess?

A: Certainly. Thanks for asking.

Q: Hey! Self-congratulating, are we?

A: You're right. So, carrying on: I love Sappho and all her girlfriends, and Ms Bishop and Ms Dillard. Don't know Ms Plath and Ms Sexton well enough, so not sure yet. But knowing me, as the evening concludes and everyone gathers coats and belongings and checks purses to make sure they have cab fare, plus tip, back to the afterlife, I'd be gushing to both of them: I love you.

Q: Well then, let's end it here.

A: No, let's not. We'll keep it going, and post another day.

Quotes from the Blessed Matron Saint of Your Pilgrim's Blog

Emphasis added, by your Pilgrim blogger:

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering and, like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild glitt'ring eye and say, "Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?" The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life. I seem to possess an organ that others lack, a sort of trivia machine. -- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim (1974) 1998, 134.

Happy happy joy joy, Love My Neighborhood Here

It's got Chinese food, 'natch, carry-out and nearby too, because we gots yr Regular Civilization Here. You just like call, and they tell you "Ten minutes," and it's like, for realz, ready for you in ten.

Walked there, less than two blocks from "chez de la casa hut" of Your Pilgrim, in flip-flops, because October and barely three blocks in total steps traversed, and also, Your Pilgrim made: A Promise, To God, last year. For reals.

Lovely sweet man there at the Chinese restaurant place knows me, always remembers my order (Szechuan Chicken) just by looking at Caller ID! Always smiles so slight and brightly, sometimes gives me a half-pint of Hot 'n Sour soup when my customary whole pint is not this time on my order, and never says anything when I use my credit card to pay for an order that is below the "$10 minimum, please."

In the first year of Your Pilgrim's third mission here (August 2010-present), I would go there Every Tuesday of the World.

Love.

Also, the streets here, in Your Pilgrim's 'hood, they (Ack! Double Nomative!) are always lovely brimming full of Happy People, and Gay People too. And on Fridays, 'specially, the female people: They're dressed like: Wow.

Love.

Also, on Fridays 'specially, and as it gets later, even more 'specially, I hear on P Street, nine floors below, the pleasing spoken noise of many happy people, engaged earnestly in rituals both complicated delicately dancing and so very basic foolproof certain too: Hoping To Get Laid. The happy in their noise is soothing and contagious. I wish them well, I do. Bon chance! y'all.

Love.

Anyways, whole lotta happy here, y'all, Whole Lotta Love. And takeout Chinese.

Oh, and: Good shabbos, y'all.

I Biked Home in a Torrent

Since I was wearing jeans, like I do every day that ends in Y, and since proper jeans are made of that thick, shamelessly flagrantly water-lovin' cotton (a well-known paraphilia in the fabric world: "hydrophilic," the other fabrics say with barely veiled disdain), I weighed like 20 extra pounds by the time I got home and it had stopped raining and I could see the waning crescent moon in the now clear non-drenching sky and the only water-drips I detected whilst crossing P Street after buying two Guinness singles at my favorite liquor store were coming from my head and my fleece (its valiantly hydrophobic fibers overtaxed and defeated, succumbing at last to sogginess) and my bike gloves and I could see the planes up there passing by the aforementioned waning crescent moon, on final approach to Reagan National, they were.

My sudden weight gain? Temporary. Just "water weight." So, no worries. I changed pants, then ate an entire pan of brownies, right out of the pan, which was shaped more like the mixing bowl, actually, because I kinda skipped the part on the box that sez "Bake 40 minutes in preheated oven at 350 degrees."

I don't have / that kind o time. Besides, I Just Lost: 20 pounds! Celebrate! Fudgy Chocolate Kegger! (Slathered and dunked to a heavy drooling drip with a ... refined butter frosting, accented with a hint of almond extract, garnished with lively fresh spearmint sprigs, and locally grown strawberries sliced with a microtome.)

(Your pilgrim, will always, Tell Y'all: The Truth. Except: when making shit up is way more funnies.)

But back to your pilgrim's arrival, via bicycle, in the rain, which came in torrent(s), at home here at Rock Creek & P.

My Converse Chucks (same slutty water-lovin cotton canvas, with sole cushions made outta SpongeBob SquareTrousers' dead, probably synthetic, relatives that, hey! they probably never were in the actual Ocean, let alone On The Show  ... "No porifera were harmed in the making of this popular retro footwear that lotsa olds probably wore in the 60s, when they were younger than you, mofos.")

[hold on. too long an interpolation there to properly lead in to the next bit. pick up again at:]

My Converse Chucks were 

Squishing to the rhythm that my footsteps made ... [and, um]
People passing by they would stop and say
Oh my that little country boy could play

Go go
Go Johnny go . . .

You know what else? My sodden underwear is now dyed with a light indigo wash, even lighter than the kind of jeans Old Guys Buy.

You know what? You know what else? Everything inside me Timbuk2 messenger bag (my most constant companion) was all like, cozy comfy dry.

The End.

"Txts from Hilz" does #bindersfullofwomen

It's "Texts From Hillary," The Next Generation. Thank.The.Gods.

These are good, y’all. My fave:

[The Hilz:] Where’s my binder?
[The Prez:] You’re flying in it.

The Linky? Clicky. textsfromhillary.com
 
Discovered via Andrew Sullivan today.

Happy-happy, joy-joy, gay-day

Ding, dong, the DOMA might soon be dead. Second Circuit totally smacked its unconstitutional shit right down. Read it and weep your tears of gratitude, ye children of the light. The best read is Jezebel's Erin Gloria Ryan, of course. 

Today, a Federal Appeals Court in New York ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act — which defines marriage on the federal level as the union between one man and one woman — is unconstitutional on the grounds that DUH, LEGALLY ENSHRINED DISCRIMINATION AGAINST GAY PEOPLE IS NOT OKAY. I'm paraphrasing here.

Ms Ryan has more, so clicky the linky, y'all.

Stupid things guys say when "Talkin' Sports"

So, bro, what's on your mind this fine sabbath morn, while waiting for your Starbucks coffee?
(Your pilgrim never says 'bro,' but he hears teh guyz use it like all the time.)

"My [New Orleans] Saints [that's a football team] are horrible this year. I don't know what to do about it."

Uh oh, sounds like the 'bro' is like, down two, 30 seconds on the clock and, Oh Noes! the ball's at THE OTHER TEAM'S TEN: TOO FAR to go for a field goal, and Win The Game.
This analogy, of course, is stupid sports stuff even your pilgrim knows, because easy. Also, teh guys always use sportz stuff to explain everthing. Otherwise, their 'buds' would not understand.

And yes, even your pilgrim knows there are plays that could be called. Like the 'Hail Mary.'

Here's how it works: At the snap, the QB kneels, Tebow-like, prays to the Blessed Virgin, who actually doesn't care for football, then rises to throw the ball to the essential asshole (his spelling of  "team" uses the letter 'I') known as the wide receiver.

The QB's prayer is, "Yo, Mary, Mother of God: Please guide my pass to the receiver, turn the ball into Velcro loops and the receiver's hands into Velcro hooks. Amen. p.s. Been in a dry spell lately. Would really like to get laid tonite. I mean, you're like a chick and all, but you got powers, and stuff, right?")

Let us now praise: Jimmy Page

Us old guitarist guys really love this dude. Like Hendrix, like Clapton, he changed the genre.

Here he is, with the Foo Fighters, Live at Wembley Stadium 2008, performing "Ramble On."