Brad Paisley – "Ticks" (2007)

I'd like to kiss you way back in the sticks

I'd like to walk you through a field of wildflowers

And I'd like to check you for ticks

You would think that the wedding announcements published in the “Vows” column of the New York Times would typically feature the Ivy League-educated sons and daughters of the rich and powerful.  Couples like Chelsea Clinton and her hedge-fund-founder husband, Marc Mezvinsky, in other words.

The Times is usually so starchy that it insists on the use of courtesy titles — like Mr. and Ms. – in news stories.  So a story about the Rolling Stones will probably refer to Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards.  (For some reason, athletes are an exception to this rule.  So you won’t see an account of a Wimbledon final reporting that “Mr. Djokavic prevailed over Mr. Federer in five sets.”)  

But while “Vows” does use honorifics, nothing else about it is the least bit Times-like.

In today’s 2 or 3 lines, we take a look at a “Vows” column that tells the tale of the courtship and eventual marriage of two Hamptons yoga instructors.  (You can click here to read the entire column.)

The column opens by introducing us to the bride:

People describe Erika Halweil, a longtime yoga teacher in the Hamptons, as someone who has a lot of backbone in every way.  She has great posture.  She rarely gets upset over things like parking tickets or bad-hair days. (Naturally pretty, she probably doesn’t have many.) . . .

Ms. Halweil, 36, grew up in New York in a tightknit family of four who loved to spend weekends together foraging for elderberries in Central Park, watching old Laurel and Hardy movies or surf-casting on Long Island. . . .

Two paragraphs in, and I’m already speechless.  (“She has great posture”?)

The bride and groom warm up
for their wedding night

Now it’s time to meet the groom:

[Corey] De Rosa, now 40, grew up in a big Italian family in Hempstead, N.Y. . . . In 2003, while living in a loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, he started biking across the Williamsburg Bridge every morning to practice Ashtanga yoga with Eddie Stern, a well-known teacher in SoHo.  “I needed to transition from my party life into my balanced life,” he said. “It takes a long time. It’s not easy.”

Three years later, he opened his own Ashtanga studio, Tapovana, in Sag Harbor.  He painted the walls dark red, installed almost-black wood floors and put yellow candles everywhere.  “It was like a womb,” he said. “It took you somewhere else.” 

(Red walls, black floors, and yellow candles doesn’t sound that much like a womb to me, but I can’t honestly say that I remember my time in utero all that well.)

More about Mr. De Rosa:

At first, he was terrified, not at all sure he wanted the responsibility of owning a business.  “You always need to go a little further than you think you can in order to make progress,” said Mr. De Rosa, who in a single conversation might discuss Hindu deities, the connection between the knees and the ego, an energy healer he admires, Indian spices, juice cleanses and his ideas about love (timing is everything).

(“The connection between the knees and the ego”?)

The groom wore white

The next paragraph really comes out of left field:

On Aug. 17, 2008, Ms. Halweil was driving on Montauk Highway when a 5-year-old girl rode a red toy wagon down a steep driveway and shot out onto the road in front of Ms. Halweil’s car.  When she recounts the accident (the child died and Ms. Halweil was not charged) you can really see her calm, philosophical and open demeanor.  In an almost plaintive voice, she said: “It was clear sky, clear road.  I saw a flash of red coming toward my car.”  She swerved but still hit the wagon.  “I got out of the car and this really beautiful little girl with pale skin and blue eyes was laying in the road.  Her eyes were glazed over.  I knew the spirit had left her body.”

Today, she says the accident taught her about fate, her own and the girl’s, but at the time she was devastated. 

Fortunately for her, Mr. De Rosa’s yoga studio was just down the street:

She started taking daily classes . . . and finding comfort in Ashtanga yoga’s rigorous, some say purifying, series of poses that are practiced in silence.  Sometimes, she stayed after class to discuss meditation techniques or the yogic perspective on suffering with Mr. De Rosa.  He said he found her “amazingly beautiful and radiating,” but because he had a longtime girlfriend at the time, he said he felt bound to resist falling for Ms. Halweil.

“I was really looking for things to not be interested in,” he said. “She reminded me of my mother, her intelligence and wit and the fact that she loves to sing.”

In the fall he asked her to stop taking classes at Tapovana.  “I just had this realization that it wasn’t time for me and Erika to even be friends,” he said.  “I chose not to spend any more time around her.  Our relationship was totally innocent but it was getting stronger.”   

That winter, Halweil and her husband agreed to divorce, while De Rosa and his girlfriend split up.  Faster than you could say “Jack Robinson,” they were a couple.  

The Halweil-De Rosa reception

There are sooooo many other quotable lines in this story.  But I’ve got places to be and people to see, so I’ll limit myself to just these few:

– “She’s so light and fun,” Mr. De Rosa said. “No matter what’s happening, it’s fun.  And if it’s not, it turns fun really quickly.”

– “I would cook all the time at her cottage,” said Mr. De Rosa, who is so knowledgeable about food he can tell you what to eat to feel more grounded, to get over a broken heart or to sleep better.  

– Their daughter, Neelu, was born at home on June 15, 2011, shortly after Ms. Halweil drank a concoction of castor oil, pineapple juice, vodka and baking soda prescribed by her midwife to speed contractions.

The column ends with a description of the wedding ceremony, which one guest described as “just super-solid and super-honest”:

The ceremony was led by the bride’s brother, who shared several pieces of advice about marriage that he had collected beforehand from family members and friends: think, laugh and love as often as possible; save money; check each other for ticks nightly to prevent Lyme disease; let the other person win sometimes; and, during difficult times, remember, this too shall pass.

“Check each other for ticks nightly to prevent Lyme disease”?  The brother must be a Brad Paisley fan.

* * * * *

“Ticks” was a #1 hit for Paisley in 2007.  

Reviewer Kevin John Coyne was not a big fan of the song.  He wrote that “this may be the very first mainstream country single to completely skeeze me out.”

Here’s “Ticks”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Miracles of Modern Science (ft. Kristin Slipp) – "Swipe" (2014)

You look so lovely

Just swipe me to the right

Last year, Nancy Jo Sales wrote a piece for Vanity Fair titled “Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse,” which blamed the Tinder dating [sic] app for today’s hookup culture.  

Click here to read that article, which will appall any father of twenty-something daughters.

(I'm not sure that all the Tinder profiles that appear in this post are legitimate.  I'm guessing that the one above is not.)

But as Jon Birger explained in the Washington Post, the problem isn’t Tinder:

[T]he college and post-college hookup culture is a byproduct, not of Tinder or Facebook, but of shifting demographics among the college-educated.  Much as the death toll of World War I caused a shortage of marriageable men in the 1920s, today’s widening gender gap in college enrollment has created unequal numbers in the post-college dating pool.

Speaking of World War I, some ten million soldiers – nearly all of them relatively young men – died in that war, and another twenty million were wounded.

So if you were one of the young European bachelors who survived the war intact, the male-female numbers after that war were definitely in your favor.

There’s a scene in Irene Nemirovsky’s novel, The Fires of Autumn, where an attractive young French widow is disappointed to learn that a childhood friend of hers who survived the Great War has no interest in marrying her, but just wants to get jiggy with it:

You want to have some fun?  Fine. You don’t?  Goodbye.  There are too many women and they’re all too easy.

(That profile probably is a real one.)

As was noted in the previous 2 or 3 lines, about 60% of college graduates today are female – in other words, there are three young women receiving college degrees for every two male college graduates.  And the federal government says that by 2023, there will be two female college grads for every male who earns a degree.

“No wonder some men are in no rush to settle down,” writes Birger, “and more women are giving up on what used to be called ‘playing hard to get’.”

These demographics represent the true dating apocalypse, as stacks of social science show how dating and mating behavior is influenced by prevailing sex ratios. When there are plenty of marriageable men, dating culture emphasizes courtship and romance, and men generally must earn more to attract a wife. But when gender ratios skew toward women, as they do today among college grads, the dating culture becomes more sexualized.  

It’s a good news, bad news situation:

The good news . . . is that people tend to have better sex when ratios skew female.  The downside?  Women frequently wind up being treated as sex objects, and men are more inclined to exercise the option to delay marriage and play the field.  [T]oday’s uneven gender ratios add up to sexual nirvana for heterosexual men, but for heterosexual women — especially those who put a high priority on getting married and having children in wedlock — they represent a demographic time bomb.

There are still plenty of young men out there, just not plenty of college-educated men.  But it seems that college-educated females are increasingly unwilling to tie themselves to blue-collar guys:

As Birger points out, “[E]ducational intermarriage is less common today than at any point over the past half century.”

Because the pool of college-educated women is much larger, the unwillingness of college-educated men to consider working-class women as life partners has little statistical effect on their marriage prospects.  But for college-educated women, excluding working-class guys makes their dating math much more challenging.  If there is an undersupply of men in the college-educated dating pool, there is going to be an oversupply of men in the non-college-educated one.  Indeed, there are 1.5 million more non-college-educated men than women among Americans age 22 to 29.  Bottom line: New York City women looking for a match would be better off, statistically at least, at a fireman’s bar in Staten Island than a wine bar on the Upper East Side.

Birger’s reference to New York City isn’t an accident – the numbers in the Big Apple are even more skewed against women than they are elsewhere.

That’s due in part to the large population of gay males there:

Cities known for being LGBT-friendly (New York, Washington, Miami, etc.) have disproportionate numbers of gay men, but not of lesbians.  Consequently, the different-sex dating markets in these cities are worse for women than the overall census numbers imply. . . . Manhattan’s hetero, college-grad, under-30 dating pool has three women for every two men.

And Birger says that things are going to get worse for you ladies in NYC before they get better:

I’d also urge marriage-minded women not to put off getting serious about dating because the math will only get worse over time.  Call it the musical chairs problem: nearly everybody finds a chair in the first round.  By the last round, however, there’s a 50 percent chance of not getting one.  Similarly, in a dating pool that starts out with 140 women and 100 men, the gender ratio among those still single soars from 1.4:1 to more than 2:1 once half the women get married.

The numbers are much more balanced in the western half of the country, but there’s only one urban area in the country where male college grads outnumber female ones by a significant margin: Santa Clara County, California, home to “Silicon Valley.” 

“There, it’s women who have the dating leverage,” Birger writes.  “I think it’s pretty good for the girls,” one single woman told the San Jose Mercury News.  “You can be more picky” because males “have to try harder.”

The proof is in the numbers: in Santa Clara County, 33 percent of college-educated women age 22 to 29 are married vs. 13 percent in Manhattan. 

You college-educated New York City gals have three choices.  First, you can quit being snobs and start hanging out with firemen, construction workers, and other working-class guys.  Second, you can move to Silicon Valley and have your pick of the computer nerds who live there.  Third, stay in Manhattan or Brooklyn and resign yourself to the life of a “Tinderella,” as described in the Nancy Jo Sales Vanity Fair article mentioned above:

“Agh, look at this,” says Kelly, 26, who’s sitting at a table with friends, holding up a message she received from a guy on OKCupid. “I want to have you on all fours,” it says, going on to propose a graphic sexual scene. “I’ve never met this person,” says Kelly.

At a table in the front, six young women have met up for an after-work drink. They’re seniors from Boston College, all in New York for summer internships . . . . They’re attractive and fashionable . . . . I ask them how they’re finding New York dating.

“New York guys, from our experience, they’re not really looking for girlfriends,” says the blonde named Reese. “They’re just looking for hit-it-and-quit-it on Tinder.”

“People send really creepy shit on it,” says Jane, the serious one.

“They start out with ‘Send me nudes,’ ” says Reese.  “Or they say something like ‘I’m looking for something quick within the next 10 or 20 minutes – are you available?’  ‘O.K., you’re a mile away, tell me your location.’  It’s straight efficiency.” . . .

“If he texts you before midnight he actually likes you as a person.  If it’s after midnight, it’s just for your body,” says Amanda.  It’s not, she says, that women don’t want to have sex.  “Who doesn’t want to have sex?  But it feels bad when they’re like, ‘See ya.’ ” 

“It seems like the girls don’t have any control over the situation, and it should not be like that at all,” Fallon says.

“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says.

“Sex should stem from emotional intimacy, and it’s the opposite with us right now, and I think it really is kind of destroying females’ self-images,” says Fallon.

“It’s body first, personality second,” says Stephanie.

“Honestly, I feel like the body doesn’t even matter to them as long as you’re willing,” says Reese. “It’s that bad.”

“But if you say any of this out loud, it’s like you’re weak, you’re not independent, you somehow missed the whole memo about third-wave feminism,” says Amanda.

If you think the numbers are bad for young college-educated females, they’re even worse if you are une femme d’un certain âge.  Overall, there are slightly more twenty-something males than twenty-something females.  But there are only 77% as many over-65 males as over-65 females.  

It's not quite “Surf City” – “Two girls for every boy!” – for us silver foxes.  But it ain’t bad.  

* * * * *

Miracles of Modern Science is an indie band that was formed in 2005 by two Princeton students who met on Facebook.  (Tinder wasn’t invented until 2012.)

“Swipe,” which features guest singer Kristin Slipp, was released in 2014.  If the lyrics quoted above are confusing, here's the deal: you swipe to the right on your smartphone if you like a photo that Tinder serves up to you, and you swipe to the left to reject that photo.

Here’s “Swipe”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

James Brown – "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" (1966)

Man made the cars to take us over the road

Man made the train to carry the heavy load ...

This is a man's, man's, man's world

Every so often, 2 or 3 lines feels compelled to write a long, involved “think” piece on some complicated and controversial topic.

Whenever 2 or 3 lines does this, things never turn out well – especially when the complicated and controversial topic involves women.

But 2 or 3 lines never learns.  Hence, today’s post.

My choice of the 1966 James Brown hit, “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” as the featured song for today’s post proves just what a well-developed sense of irony I have.  Because it is most definitely NOT a man’s man’s man’s world fifty years later.

To wit:

– Only 49% of college-age Americans are female.  But women are now receiving some 60% of all degrees granted by American colleges and universities.  (When men constituted 60% of the college population, that was viewed – and rightfully so – as a clear indication that women weren’t being treated as equals.  But have you heard any expressions of concern about the fact that the tables have turned and 60% of new college graduates are female?)   

– Women now dominate the service professions, while industries that have a higher proportion of male employees – like construction and manufacturing – are shrinking.  In fact, three-quarters of the eight million jobs lost during the Great Recession of 2008-09 were lost by males. 

– The number of female voters has exceeded the number of male voters in every presidential election since 1964.  And the gap is growing, too: ten million more females than males voted in 2012.  (If you women out there don’t like the last half-dozen or so Presidents we’ve elected, you have only yourselves to blame.)

– Within a few months, women will likely be leading the governments of the United States, Britain, and Germany – the three largest Western economies.  (This is good news for American, British, and German males: it won't be our fault when things go FUBAR, which things always do sooner or later.)

In 2010, an Atlantic magazine cover story famously declared “The End of Men.”  

Perhaps the most startling fact noted in that story was how rapidly the traditional gender preferences of prospective parents around the world were changing.  According to that article, American parents who utilized a new sperm-selecting technology that enabled them to choose whether they wanted a boy or a girl were choosing to have a girl 75 percent of the time.  

Even feminists are realizing the pendulum has swung too far.

The Washington Post recently featured a column by Cathy Young, an “equity feminist” (that’s the best kind), who decried male-bashing:

[A] lot of feminist rhetoric today does cross the line from attacks on sexism into attacks on men, with a strong focus on personal behavior: the way they talk, the way they approach relationships, even the way they sit on public transit.  Male faults are stated as sweeping condemnations; objecting to such generalizations is taken as a sign of complicity.  Meanwhile, similar indictments of women would be considered grossly misogynistic.

For example, it is now common for women to complain about “manterrupting,” a neologism that is used to describe the supposedly common male practice of interrupting female speakers in business meetings rather than listening to what women have to say.

Kanye West "manterrupting" Taylor Swift

Here’s what a Time magazine columnist had to say about “manterrupting”:

[A]sk any woman in the working world and we all recognize the phenomenon.  We speak up in a meeting, only to hear a man’s voice chime in louder.  We pitch an idea, perhaps too uncertainly – only to have a dude repeat it with authority.  We may possess the skill, but he has the right vocal cords – which means we shut up, losing our confidence (or worse, the credit for the work).

But there’s a teeny-weeny problem with all the talk about “manterrupting.”  

While a 2014 study confirmed that male listeners interrupted female speakers more frequently than they interrupted male speakers, that same study found that female listeners interrupted female speakers even more often than male listeners did.  

Maybe “manterrupting” should be “femterrupting”?

More from Cathy Young’s Post column:  

Things have gotten to a point where casual low-level male-bashing is a constant white noise in the hip progressive online media.  Take a recent [online] piece titled, “Men Are Creepy, New Study Confirms.”  The actual study found something very different: that both men and women overwhelmingly think someone described as “creepy” is more likely to be male. 

PSYCHOLOGY

Men Are Creepy, New Study Confirms

Imagine if a study had found that most people think that someone who is described as “cheap” is more likely to be a Jew.  Can you imagine a story reporting on the findings of that study being headlined, “Jews Are Cheap, New Study Confirms”?

What’s bad for the goose is perfectly OK for the gander when it comes to misogyny (bad!) vs. misandry (not a problem)  at least in the eyes of those feminists who view sexism as a one-way street.  They believe that gender-based prejudice isn’t sexism unless it’s directed against the oppressed and disadvantaged – i.e., females.  Since males hold the power in our society, they’re fair game.

Except for the fact that males don’t really hold the power any more.  Remember: ten million more women than men voted in the 2012 presidential election.  

That trend may sound like a bad thing for men, but it does offer one big advantage for males.  We’ll explain what that advantage is in the next 2 or 3 lines.

* * * * *

“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” was recorded back when males did hold the power in our society.

Officially, the song was co-written by James Brown and his girlfriend Betty Jean Newsome.  Brown later said she had nothing to do with the song, while Newsome claimed just the opposite and took the “Godfather of Soul” to court – unsuccessfully.

Betty Jean Newsome in 2007

The Village Voice published a long and sordid story about the Brown-Newsome relationship and the squabbling over who deserved credit for writing “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” in 2007.  Click here to read it.

Here’s my favorite paragraph from that article:

[Newsome] says Brown asked her to have a baby with him, but she rebuffed him, saying, "I ain't gonna be having one of your little monkey babies."  The Famous Flames, Newsome recalls, marveled at the fact that James didn't kill her right then and there.

Here’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Saints – "Porno Movies" (2005)

They’re making porno movies 

And it’s obscene

[Warning: a somewhat gruesome photo of a dead mouse appears  later in this post.  If you would find such a photo disturbing, you might want to leave 2 or 3 lines without reading any further – my feelings won’t be hurt.]     

This post isn’t about porno movies BUT I MADE YOU LOOK! 

Do you think a true patriot like me would write about porn on Independence Day?  Of course not!

By the way, today is INDEPENDENCE DAY.  It’s NOT the 4th of July.  That’s the date that Independence Day is observed, not the name of the holiday.  (Do you wish people “Merry 25th of December” or “Happy 1st of January”?  Of course you don’t!)

via GIPHY

There are  plenty of X-rated movies available on the internet, and you’re free to go looking for them whenever you wish.  Just don’t expect to find any on 2 or 3 lines.

One thing that’s even more obscene than porno movies is Burger King’s new “Mac n' Cheetos™” menu item.

According to the Burger King website, “Mac n' Cheetos™ are creamy mac n' cheese covered with crispy Cheetos flavor and served warm.”  Here’s a photo:

Mac 'n' Cheetos™

In that photo, “Mac n' Cheetos™” looks like a bunch of large Cheetos stuffed with macaroni and cheese.  (I don’t have the foggiest idea how they get the macaroni and cheese inside, but they do.)

Which reminds me of a joke.  (I take pride in always having an on-topic joke – not necessarily a good on-topic joke, just an on-topic joke.)

A guy goes to a doctor because his p*nis has turned bright orange.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” the doctor says after examining him.  “Have you been exposed to radiation or toxic chemicals at your job?”

“No,” the guy tells him.  “I haven't had a job for months.”

“So what do you do all day?” the doctor asks.

“Mostly I watch porn and eat Cheetos,” the guy answers.

* * * * *

Now it’s time for that mouse picture I warned you about.  

This morning, while I was eating breakfast on my patio, I noticed a clicking noise coming from the condenser fan of my central air conditioner.

I figured a twig had fallen through the grille that’s on top of the fan.  But when I took a closer look, this is what I saw:

I went to get a pair of barbecue tongs to remove the mouse, but then realized that the mouse’s body was too thick to be pulled out through the grille.  Which made me wonder how the hell the mouse ended up where it ended up.

Any theories?

* * * * *

The Saints were a pioneering Australian punk-rock band that formed about the same time as the Ramones.

The Saints

Their first record – “I’m Stranded” (1976) – was the first record released by a non-U.S. punk band.  (The Clash and the Sex Pistols weren’t far behind, but the Saints beat them out.)

“Porno Movies” is the first track from the band’s 2005 album, “Nothing is Straight in My House.”

Here’s “Porno Movies”:

Click below to buy the song – which is a winner, boys and girls – from Amazon:

Darkest Hour – "Convalescence" (2005)

I've fooled myself into believing

That nothing ails me

Nothing can kill me

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you about the fabulous cheeseburgers served up at the Sunshine General Store, a tiny grocery store in rural Montgomery County, Maryland:

Sunshine General Store

They’re just like the ones my grandmother used to make:

Recently I sat myself down at the store’s lunch counter after a long walk along the Magruder Branch Trail in Damascus, Maryland.  

After I scarfed down my cheeseburger, chips, and Dr. Pepper, I was in need of a pit stop before I hit the road.  Sunshine's bathroom came equipped with a sign that offered some helpful advice:

(No worries!)

Then I hopped in my car and headed to Manor Hill Brewing, a rather posh new farm brewery that’s a short drive from the Sunshine store.

These days, personalized cornhole boards are de rigueur at the better breweries and wineries in this part of the country:

I sampled three of Manor Hill’s brews while sitting at a table that was next to the brewery’s stock of malts:

Manor Hill’s next-door neighbor is "The Fox and The Firefly Farm."  I have a feeling there’s a story behind that name, but I have no idea what it is.  (Be my guest – Google away.)

My next stop was Waredaca Brewing, which is located on a 220-acre horse farm that offers horse boarding and riding lessons, but is known is primarily as an “eventing” barn.  (Eventing is an equestrian triathlon that combines dressage, cross-country jumping, and show jumping.)

So its only appropriate that the beer tasting boards at Waredaca incorporate horseshoes:

After I had finished my tasting at Waredaca, it was time to pick up my usual Friday night pizza and head home to check out the newest “Orange Is the New Black” and do a little blogging before heading to bed.

Something woke me up at 3:45 am.  That “something” turned out to be the urgent need to get to the bathroom and engage in some projectile vomiting, the likes of which I had not experienced in many years.

My younger son had picked up a bad stomach bug a few days earlier – I had head him ralphing vociferously several times that night – and he had passed it on to me.  

The vomiting spell gave way to a nasty bout of shivering, followed by a day of back and joint aches and a profound feeling of lassitude.

I’m back to normal now, but I’m not sure I will ever be able to eat another Sunshine General Store cheeseburger again. 

I know that the cheeseburger wasn’t the cause of my violent, middle-of-the-night upchucking . . . but the feeling of it going through my gullet in the wrong direction isn’t going to be easy to forget.

* * * * *

If 3:45 am isn’t the darkest hour of the day, it’s close enough for government work.

Darkest Hour is a metal band – more specifically, a melodic death metal band – that was formed in Washington, DC, in 1995.  

Darkest Hour

In interviews over the years, the band’s members have listed these bands as among their influences:  Dark Tranquillity, Minor Threat, Earth Crisis, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Government Issue, Scream, Shadows Fall, Bleeding Through, Eighteen Visions, Every Time I Die, Entombed, Dismember, Sacrilege, The Crown, Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Dream Theater, Carcass, Arch Enemy, Killswitch Engage, Sick of it All, Dead Kennedys, Soilwork, Danzig, Venom, Exodus, Discharge, Cro-Mags, Integrity, Edge of Sanity, Mayhem, Emperor, Ulver, Testament, Death Angel, Pantera, Cannibal Corpse, and “just about every Scandinavian [death metal] band.”

“Convalescence” was the single from Darkest Hour’s fourth studio album, Undoing Ruin, which was released in 2005.

Here’s “Convalescence”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Josefus – "Five'll Get Me Ten" (1970)

Five’ll get me ten

You’ve been doing it again

Most iPod models – the Touch, the Nano, the Classic, the Mini – have touchscreens that display the name of the song you are listening to and the name of the artist who performed it.

But the humble iPod Shuffle, a tiny device that retails for only $49, doesn’t have a touchscreen.  If you don’t recognize the song that’s playing on it, you are S.O.L.

The iPod Shuffle

That’s a big problem for me because I’m constantly downloading obscure and unfamiliar songs from my public library and then listening to them on my iPod while I’m walking or riding my bicycle.  

So it’s not unusual for me to hear a song that I want to feature on 2 or 3 lines but I don’t know the song’s name and I don’t recognize the group performing it.  I can identify that song by looking on my computer when I get home, but most of the time I forget to do that.

My new Shuffle has a feature called “VoiceOver.”  If you hear an unfamiliar song on your iPod, you just hit the VoiceOver button and a computer-generated voice tells you the name of the song and the name of the recording artist.

We all know computers are stupid, and the chip responsible for VoiceOver is no exception.  It reads at about a 3rd-grade level, and that’s being generous.  

When I hit the VoiceOver button while today’s featured song was playing, the computerized voice told me that the name of the song was “Five Ell Ell Get Me Ten,” and that the name of the group that recorded it was “Ho-Say-Foos.”  

Josefus

Josephus (which is pronounced “Joe-See-Fuss,” not “Ho-Say-Foos”) was formed in Houston in 1969.    The band released two albums in 1970, and then broke up.

“Five will get you ten” is an idiomatic expression that’s derived from betting.  It describes an even bet – here, a bet in which each party wagers five dollars.  The winner will walk away with ten bucks – hence, “five will get you ten.”

I was listening to “Five’ll Get Me Ten” while walking on the heavily-wooded Magruder Branch Trail in Damascus, Maryland, today.

The Magruder Branch Trail

It was very hot and steamy, and the trail – which follows the course of a tributary of Great Seneca Creek – was muddy in spots.  I was shvitzing like a Airedale by the time my Fitbit buzzed to tell me I had reached my 10,000-step goal.

After changing shirts and replenishing my precious bodily fluids with some cold H2O, I headed to the nearby Sunshine General Store for the best cheeseburger in Maryland – a fat ground beef patty cooked on a grill with American cheese, onions, tomato, and a big pile of dill pickle chips on the side:

Add a jumbo bag of sour cream and onion-flavored potato chips and a 20-ounce bottle of Dr. Pepper, and you’ve got an all-American lunch.

The Sunshine store is a great place to get a cheeseburger or a breakfast – it’s open from 5 AM to 5 PM six days a week (and from 6 AM to 3 PM on Sundays) – but there’s not much else to buy there.

This shot captures pretty much everything for sale at the store other than cold drinks and chips:

Here’s a closeup of the cereal aisle of the store:

Have a yen for Italian?  Here's the selection at Sunshine:

Here's the personal care section:

Don't forget to pick up something for Rover and Fifi from the pet food aisle:

In the next 2 or 3 lines, I’ll tell you about the two new farm breweries that I visited after gobbling up my cheeseburger.  I’ll also tell you about the very unpleasant surprise that awaited me later that evening.

Here’s “Five’ll Get Me ten”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: