“I’m trying to develop a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence.”

Yes! If everything could keep humming along while I took a week-long nap …

This quote, or a version of it, is attributed all over the Intertubes to “Doonesbury” cartoonist Garry Trudeau. But we might have another great thinker to thank: Kinky Friedman.

The farthest back I could track Trudeau’s quote was two articles from October 1990 — the 20th anniversary of “Doonesbury” — saying he’d used the phrase in the 1980s: ” ‘I’ve been trying to develop a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence,’ he’d say.”

In 1986, when Friedman sidelined his music for a bit to write mystery novels, the phrase pops up in a couple news stories, e.g. “I’ve always talked about finding a life style that didn’t require my presence and I think that writing novels is it.”

I’m not aiming to call either one a plagiarist; hell, maybe they both got it from Mark Twain for all I know. Just thought I’d give Kinky a shot at cropping up in the Google results, too.

Socrates got into this blog post because he, presumably, originated another sentiment I love:

ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστον βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ.

Or as it’s more often put: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Us Statesfolk were reminiscing about this last week, and I thought y’all might like to see the pics too. No Jolie — she wasn’t part of the very quick scene filmed here.

Everyone I can identify in this shot is a Statesman staffer except the guy standing up, who’s an actor (which you can tell because he’s wearing a TIE!). Colleagues observed that the film crew could have straightened our blinds, but probably thought they looked authentically sloppy. In fact nothing here was staged; this is exactly how it looks, except of course the trees outside are usually leafy. Coworkers also noticed that the cryptic sign on the column in back made it into the film — if you squint you can see it says “WHO-GAS,” the slogan of a former editor reminding us to focus on what’s important to our readers, aka WHO Gives A … toss. As an indicator of how often we clean and redecorate the newsroom, the sign is still taped to that column right now.

And the chair underneath the word “Journal” is where I sit! It is not, alas, where I sat in 2007, although I was in the newsroom during the shoot, over in Features — which is the backdrop for this shot:

Those are also real Statesbeings behind him. My desk, with me sitting at it, is approximately behind his right ear   We all got paid something like $28.62 after taxes, so that was kind of exciting. Should you happen to still be reading (hi! and thank you!), you’ve now spent more time looking at these photos than the Statesman spends onscreen in the film. Fame, how it fleets.

By the way, a great tool for getting into annoying plastic packaging is tin snips.

What to do when a compact fluorescent bulb breaks? CFLs contain mercury and other bad stuff, and I’d heard everything from “It’s no big deal” to “Evacuate and quarantine immediately!” When one fell out of a light fixture and broke on my front porch, I called a hazardous waste cleaning company to ask advice. Actually I was hoping I could slide somebody $50 to break out their hazmat suit and come sweep the porch, but this particular company doesn’t handle cleanups that small.

Advice, however, they did give me. It sounded so practical I thought I’d share it, combined with some EPA tips. So, when a CFL bulb breaks:

Get the hell away from it. The moment it first breaks is when the mercury vapor is most concentrated. Don’t suck it in, and don’t let anybody else breathe it, either.

Air out the place and keep people and critters away while you do. Turn off the heat/AC, open up the windows and stick a fan in there. The EPA says to give it 5-10 minutes; others say 15 or longer.

Check the bulb maker’s website for tips (bulb types change over time). Or call 211 for advice.

Prepare for cleanup. You want to avoid getting cut by phosphor-coated glass and use disposable tools where possible. The guy I was talking to said if he mopped the area, he would throw away the mop; the EPA seems a little more relaxed about this.

DON’T vacuum first. Get as much glass up as you can other ways.
Personally, I want some kind of hand covering — nitrile gloves or plastic bags, maybe.
Cardboard/stiff paper helps you scoop glass shards into a…
… solid plastic container that’s sealable. (Not a bag, which the glass can shred.)
Duct tape helps pick tiny pieces out of carpet or off a hard surface.
Damp paper towels also help on hard surfaces.
A strong HEPA-filter vacuum is best, and a disposable filter helps too. When done, take the vac outside, plug it in and run it in the fresh air for a little bit.
Dump your tape, paper towels, cardboard, filter, etc. into the sealable container and, er, seal it.

Call 211 to find out how to dispose of it.

I’ll refrain from naming the company I talked to because I didn’t decide to blog this until after we got off the phone, so they were not speaking for publication. But it was great to chat with an expert about this for a few minutes, and it yielded tips I hadn’t heard before. Happy mopping, y’all.

Full disclaimer: This is NOT official medical, legal or other advice, and I am just an ordinary mook of a homeowner. When it comes to your own and your family’s safety, take whatever actions you think best.

And here is a John Wayne movie’s anachronistic but stirring delivery of an actual rebel song:

Back in the heyday of MTV, when I was a budding little pre-teen U2 fan, I heard Bono say something that lodged in my memory: “This song is not a rebel song.” He said it as he introduced “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and it was clear from his phrasing that the words meant something additional that I didn’t understand. Taken at face value, of course, with the lyrics of the song itself, the message was clear: “No more.” I’d say many Americans who did not know what Bloody Sunday was the first time they heard the song had learned that piece of recent history by the second or third time they heard it. (In July 2012 — forty years later — Northern Ireland police have opened a new murder investigation of the event.)

But it wasn’t till this year that I learned what was behind the extra weight Bono gave to the words “rebel song.” And I learned it because of a John Wayne movie, of all things.

Director John Ford of course is known for classic westerns, particularly the “cavalry trilogy” of Wayne films: “Fort Apache,” “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” and “Rio Grande.” He was also what you might call a devout American Irishman, a son of Irish immigrants, and made “Rio Grande” purely so that Republic Pictures would let him cart his stock company over to County Mayo to film “The Quiet Man.” Wayne played former Union officer and Shenandoah Valley veteran Lt. Col. Kirby Yorke, who is ordered by Gen. Philip Sheridan to lead a cavalry raid from Fort Stark across the river into Mexico.

As in his other films, Ford chose music carefully: sometimes songs true to the historical period shown (“The Girl I Left Behind Me”), sometimes anachronistic songs that nonetheless fit seamlessly (“She Wore A Yellow Ribbon”). In “Rio Grande,” two emotional moments come as the regimental singers perform “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” and “Down by the Glenside (The Bold Fenian Men).”

“Kathleen” was written in 1875, but “Down by the Glenside” fits less well into the chronology, as the film is set in 1879. (Although it was 1873 when Gen. Philip Sheridan ordered former Union officer and Shenandoah Valley veteran Col. Ranald Mackenzie to lead the 4th Cavalry in a raid from Fort Clark across the Rio Grande.)

My dad noted, as we re-watched the movie recently, that the song was a specific reference to Irish history. We set to Googling, and learned it was written in or about 1916 by Peadar Kearney, who fought in the Easter 1916 uprising and had earlier written “The Soldier’s Song” (“Amhrán na bhFiann”), which is now Ireland’s national anthem.

And we also learned Kearney’s ballads were part of the body of Irish music called rebel songs. Though the tradition was familiar to us — centuries of history in which the oppressed Irish used music to transmit culture and calls to arms, up through the modern “Troubles” to the present day — the term was not, to me at least. Finally, then, I knew why those words were so freighted when Bono called them out to the crowd at Red Rocks.

In fact, as I might have learned in 1983 had the Internet been suitably developed, that was how Bono introduced “Sunday” during most of U2′s “War” tour. At the song’s first performance in Northern Ireland, Dec. 20, 1982, the band were so wary of its reception that Bono added a promise that if the crowd didn’t like the song, they’d never play it there again. Happily, they did like it, and another piercing song carried its piece of Irish history out into the world.

Or even, “It’s things like this that make me not want to be around you. You have a real problem, you know. You might even need help. It’s hard to deal with you when you’re like this.”

“Gaslight” is a 1944 movie in which Charles Boyer slowly convinces Ingrid Bergman that she can’t trust her own eyes and her own judgment — that she’s crazy.  In his case, he’s carrying on illicit activities in the attic, and when he turns on the lights up there, the gas lights in the rest of the house dim. He convinces her that she’s imagining it… that the lights really aren’t getting dimmer… and it goes from there.

So the term “gaslighting” has been used to label a form of emotional abuse in which one person manipulates another to believe that she* is the problem, that she’s unreasonable or even crazy. Milder versions, though, happen every day, without us even noticing them.

Boiled to its essence, “gaslighting” is the act of making another person doubt herself in order to make yourself feel better. Ever told somebody, “You can’t be serious!” “You’re making this out to be worse than it is.” “You’re being ridiculous.” “You’re overreacting.”

OK, sure, most of us have. But if we remember how we felt at that moment, and we do it honestly, were we mostly feeling uncomfortable? Squeamish? A little guilty, maybe, or simply angry? Did we feel better after putting the other person down? A little relieved? Whew, that was close. But I’m right and she’s wrong, so it’s all OK.

A rational question to ask is, “But what if she really IS too sensitive?” And certainly there’s no doubt that our society is overpopulated with folks who lash out unreasonably at small provocations.

Here’s the answer, though: There are very few circumstances in which a normally empathetic person would tell another person, “You’re just too sensitive.”

That means most of the time you hear that statement, it’s coming from someone who is trying to make the other person doubt herself.  In order to make himself feel better.

Because he’s getting uncomfortable — maybe nervous that he might be wrong or might look bad, or maybe he’s used to always being the dominant person in the conversation, or a dozen other reasons.  And it’s probably an instinctive reaction, rather than a conscious effort to control her.

But that’s exactly what it usually is: an effort to control.  Manipulation, not honesty.  And it’s very rarely the response of a caring or loving person.

Imagine what words that caring or loving person would be likely to say.  Different, right?  Now stand up, walk away, and go find him.

* For simplicity’s sake, I’m using “he” for the manipulator and “she” for the subject of the abuse. It’s a stereotype, for which I apologize, but it’s also the most common scenario in this form of manipulation. Call it equal time for decades of jokes in which gossipy, emotional binge shoppers are always a “her.” But please know that I am fully aware there are many, many men to whom this doesn’t apply — thank God — many men to whom demeaning another person would not even occur as a possible course of action. A couple who happen to leap to mind are named Gerald, Matt, Ponch, Joe, Rick, Adrian, Andy, Darius, Chris, Robert, Todd, Kyle and probably YOU, if you’re a friend of mine who is still reading this post down to the footnotes. I love you guys, and I always will.

That’s Pranav Mistry in 2009 explaining how his invention “sees” your gestures through a camera and uses a little LED projector to give you a “screen” to work on.

Because the talk is two years old, we can jump into the future — 2012 — and see what happened next. We’re all using this now, right? Er. Also, no jetpacks.

But give it time. In January 2012, TEDTalks reported Pranav Mistry and his crew had posted the SixthSense code to let anyone who wants to dig in and start building their own devices and apps. Pranav’s website says building a prototype SixthSense device would cost about $350, and links to instructions for building your own.

Companies have been talking about, demonstrating and buying gesture-recognition interfaces for a while now, and Qualcomm has said it expects to ship an ultrasound-based version in late 2012. (Basically, the onboard mike hears your gestures and lets you control your phone without touching your phone. Except, presumably, for the hand you’re holding the phone in… oh never mind.)

If you want to build your own, these are your new friends: This guy has very endearingly cobbled one together using a wood slat and tape, and here’s the status of homebrew 6SD as explained earlier TODAY (I love the Internet) by a member of the SixthSense Workshop group on Facebook:

Here‘s what those drawing, clock and other apps look like. And it looks like other people are thinking about it, but haven’t cooked up their own yet.

We’ve got robots cleaning our houses and the entire world’s information in our pockets and purses. I can wait a couple years to see crowds of tourists in front of the Eiffel Tower snapping photos with their fingers. But it’ll be cool.

The hall was built in 1878 and has a rich history. The original sign over the bar read “Den feinsten Schnaps, das beste Bier, bekommt man bei dem Heinrich hier” (“The best liquor, the best beer, you get at Henry’s here”).

Bill’s a web architect, journalist, friend to starfish and as you see a terrific artist.
This artwork is copyrighted with all rights reserved by whharrison4, republished here with Bill’s permission.

Sometimes I really can’t believe I was here. A couple thousand years ago, if you wanted to meet up with a friend in Ostia, you could say, “I’ll meet you at that bar, you know, the one on Diana Street just off Main.” They have bar food, too, and a beer garden out back — the arched doorway in the photo leads out there and you can see a little of it.

Ostia Antica was the main port of ancient Rome. Unlike Pompeii, it’s not frozen at a moment in history; there are all sorts of centuries jumbled up here. It was not small; this computer animation shows just how fully developed it was, with dozens of large buildings including a half-coliseum theater.

On Ostia’s eastern side, Decumanus Maximus was the main street — literally: the “big decumanus,” with decumanus being the term for the largest east-west road in a Roman city or military camp. Here’s a street sign. A 2,000-year-old street sign, I kid you not:

(in that the third picture, I highlighted the letters so they’re a little more readable)

So, if you were walking down Decumanus Maximus, and you turned on Via Diana and walked past some two-story apartment blocks, you’d be here at this bar. You could grab food to go from the street-facing counter or go inside — there’s the menu on the wall, a fresco above those three marble shelves, with pictures of the different foods available.

Click here to read more about this bar and the other rooms in this building. Definitely scroll down for the illustrations and photos that show what it looked like when people ate and drank here. They’ve got better pictures of the “beer garden” (OK, courtyard), and they translate more of the signs and inscriptions found there. (A lot of the inscriptions in ancient Roman cities are quite dirty, some of them relating to which prostitutes are the best at particular services, etc. You have been warned )

More links:

• Aerial view of Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber
• Interactive maps of the city and 3-D reconstructions
• All the inscriptions in Ostia — signs, political slogans, apartments for rent, graffiti, want ads

Pulling out of work one evening a year ago or so, I flipped on Chris Mosser’s “Roadhouse” show on KVET, and within a few notes, I swerved over and started writing down lyrics so I could look up the song later. Three minutes after I got home, I owned the Turnpike Troubadours’ second album, “Diamonds & Gasoline.” Here’s the song that about ran me off the road:

Last May, I dragged my old roommate to see them at a wine festival here in town, where a stupidly small crowd in a field in about 400-degree weather was nonetheless appreciative. Thank god the sun eventually went down.

“Ridiculously good” is the phrase that came to my mind. Of course, I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, but I do believe these guys should be really, really famous, if there is any justice in the music world. Which there is not. But since they won Best New Group at the Texas Regional Radio Awards last year, are all over the Texas radio charts and headlined the hell out of an off-SXSW show last Wednesday, things might be going to turn out all right.

The showcase was put on by the KVET “Roadhouse” folks, and the firepower was impressive. I don’t know squat about the Red Dirt scene, and also I am personally older than dirt, but I’ve just barely managed to hear about this guy named Cody Canada; Gary P. Nunn was there, and I adore Bob Schneider though I don’t know what he was doing on that bill. Fans around me kept misidentifying the people on stage, which tripped me up too, but please give us a break: A good chunk of the ones we talked with were there specifically to see the Troubadours, and they showed up early and stayed till 1 am to do it. They were not disappointed.

Everybody always writes about the frontman or frontwoman, and sure, I will too, but that’s definitely not all there is to this band, so first here’s one favoring Ryan Engleman (lead guitar) and Kyle Nix (fiddle and backing vocals) — “Easton and Main”:

“Leaving and Lonely,” which probably is a two-step floor-filler, was written by RC Edwards (bass and backing vocals):

Drummers always take it on the chin, don’t they? I apologize for not finding a clip where Gabe Pearson (drums and backing vocals) was suitably featured. I’ll keep looking.

Those clips give a peek at some of the music styles they can switch through or wave at: bluegrass, honky-tonk, folk, bottle-slide blues, Cajun, rock. You can certainly dance your fanny off at the shows, and plenty do, but you can also just stop and appreciate what you’re listening to. It well repays the concentration.

“Long Hot Summer Day” has been a big radio hit for them; it isn’t so much a cover as it is a complete recarving and polishing of a (little-known?) 1989 folk song. The very funny and photographic lyrics did at first make me think it was one they wrote; who the hell sings about chicken consommé? It absolutely kills live, and they can rave it up, as they did for the opening number at the KVET showcase, or stretch out and feature the harmony singing, as they did at the much quieter wine festival show. Good to know your crowd (which they are certainly road-tempered enough to do, unfazed by bar fights and such).

Harmony features prominently in another great cover, “Fox on the Run,” which is now a bluegrass standard but, the Internet tells us, began life as a fairly putrid British rock attempt (sorry, Manfred. Loved “Do Wah Diddy” though) that was utterly redeemed by Bill Emerson and even wound up on a Tom T. Hall album, which is where I first heard it when I was rolling around on the floor playing with blocks and trains and ducks and stuff.

They sure will rip through the Old 97′s “Doreen,” too. Other people’s songs, though, are not the story here. And in this case, it turns out, the front guy does write most of the words; that’s Evan Felker. Best way to appreciate what’s going on here is just to quote some big old chunks of it, so here you go. A bit of “The Funeral,” which isn’t quite as downbeat as this sounds and has this great line in the chorus — “Nothing like a family to make you feel so damned alone”:

Well they pulled out into traffic and nosed in behind the hearse

And that awful empty feeling, well it went from bad to worse

The preacher read from Scripture and they put him in the ground

Everybody loaded up and headed back to town

But Jimmy got his whiskey out once everyone was gone

Felt he should say something staring down at the stone

…

The menfolk folded tables and the ladies cleaned the plates

The cousins asked about the car locked behind the gates

Jimmy knew his daddy’s .38 was in that trunk buried deep

And it’d find its rightful owner once his mama was asleep

Jimmy looked at Mama, and Mama just looked down

She said “Why’s it take a funeral, boy, to bring you back to town?”

OK that was heavy. Good, but heavy. Let’s bring the house lights back up. “Shreveport”:

On a Greyhound bound for Shreveport I’d been too long in my seat

I stopped off in a no-name town to grab a bite to eat

The ceiling fans they hummed above a screened-in patio

Crawfish hotter than a chimney fire, the beer was cheap and cold

And the barmaid smiled that kind of smile that knocked me off my stool

She said “Hang around, I’ll show you things they don’t teach in school”

Go listen — it’s all like that, just picture after picture and a growling jake brake. “Crayfish hotter than a chimney fire” — Did you know a chimney fire really is hotter than other house fires? I didn’t; I had to go look it up.

On “Whole Damn Town” (audio’s back up at the top where I ran off the road), at least for me, it’s not just the lyrics but the way the music and the whole attack of the song catch one very specific emotion. Still, there are a lot of pictures here in very few words. At “The neon signs light up the block / It’s a living, breathing honky-tonk,” I always picture Gruene, though that’s surely not the original antecedent. “The music pours out on the street / Just as clean and cool as a cotton sheet.”

Do I detect a slight aversion to choruses? (Screw rules anyway.) Here’s a good one, though, in “7 & 7″:

He’s not just strumming up there either. (And it looked like he burned through a couple sets of strings Wednesday!) Here’s Felker in Dylan mode On voice: If your heart doesn’t jump into your throat when he launches into “Good lord Lorrie, I love you / Could it go more wrong,” at the 2:54 mark, well, to quote our governor, I don’t think you have a heart. Or maybe it’s just me… Nah. But god do I know that feeling.

So when these guys take famous in the full-fledged national sense, you already know some things about them. Impress people with the knowledge that their name comes from the Indian Nation Turnpike. Also, try to say Tahlequah right. (You have to love folks who’re this proud of their hometowns.) Because I am an ethical newspaper person, I am not going to tell you to go buy their upcoming album, “Goodbye Normal Street,” but I am going to tell you it comes out May 8. Brush up on your dancing.

This method/kit just struck me as a really genius way to make a difficult task very easy. Three difficult tasks, in fact, because

– Stretching canvas evenly is hard — it puckers

– Wrapping canvas around corners is hard — you get those annoying thick wodgy triangles of fabric, and your nice neat corners suddenly look like hell

– And mitering corners — cutting a 45-degree angle at the ends of two pieces of wood so that when you join them together, they make a nice neat corner — is the devil himself.

So what did they do? They deconstructed the frame, created a clever reusable gadget, and simplified each step to the point that the hardest thing you have to do is cut a straight line.

The kit appears to be kind of expensive, but I’m not suggesting we all go buy ‘em — I’m just appreciating it for the beauty of the idea. It takes all the frustration out of the process while also yielding much better results. Clever.