Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize for Literature....

Dave Bidini wrote an article in the Globe and Mail and took some hits for it... Dave is always good for generating comments, but then comments may have dubious merits.  The point is I don't think anybody with a head on their shoulders would deny that Bob Dylan's lyrics are of the highest quality imaginable and that his body of work is nearly unmatched  ( does Joni Mitchell win the next Nobel Prize for Literature?).

I have an idea... I know crazy old Robertson with his crazy ideas?  Can we have a Nobel Prize for meaningful, inspiring and relevant song lyrics?  God knows we could use it given some of the insipid words cobbled together and slapped on a loop and called a song these days.  Imagine giving a shit about song lyrics?  A friend of mine was in a song/band contest in Vancouver and there was a hundred thousand dollar prize, and you had to go to a boot camp and prove your worth and learn how it is done.  I was quizzing him on things and was shocked to find out that according to this industry funded opportunity the idea of having good lyrics accounted for only about 5% of the focus for success.  So literature has no place in modern music, according to the leading industry folks.

This is insane to anybody who has ever been truly affected by "Words and Music", which happens to be the motto of SOCAN the society of composers and authors... just savior the irony.

So yes we could perhaps use some inspiration on the lyric commitment, and if you want to aim for the sky then Bob Dylan is one of the highest marks without question.

But as to the point that I believe Mr. Bidini was making was that writing a masterpiece book is a different animal than writing song lyrics.  Me, i have released a dozen albums worth of song lyrics and have plenty unreleased, and some I have laboured over and some came to me in moments of inspiration, but i have yet to write a book, but yet it is on my list, but i haven't mustered the courage to take it on.  Why take a carrot away from one of the hardest things to do for people that basically get very little reward for such massive effort.

I wrote a eulogy for my father when he died, and it went over pretty well, and a family member who knew I was a stay home dad mentioned to me a perfect career I could have... become a writer.  It was nice to hear that somebody thought I could do something, but I dismissed the idea with the logic that I would still have to sell some product to people.  Given  my massive failure selling words and music and the effort/ reward ratio was not conducive to me living a happy life and being a decent available father to my children and family.  I'm in a good spot, our family is surviving nicely on the fact that my wife has a good career and our family has balance and a level of prosperity.  Can i write a book?  That remains to be seen, but the overwhelming chance that if I do it will be in obscurity is not lost on me.  For the record I don't believe I would win a Nobel Prize if I did write a book, so this is not a "sour grapes" situation as some have suggested that Mr. Bidini's angle was.

Why not have a new category?  "Nobel Prize for lifetime song lyric output" and then let the people who slaved over books to still have a shot at the "Nobel prize for Literature".  Let's face it, another award ain't going to throw a rake on the spokes of humanity... we fucking love awards, and an award category for song lyrics might help raise the bar a bit as far as that is concerned.  Give the book people a chance to shine, or at least a hope, or a mirage perhaps and this whole thing can be done with.

I can almost imagine the people deciding on this thinking they are so great thinking outside the box giving this award to one of the greatest songwriters ever. Neat idea given to a worthy candidate, but at some point they lost focus on what they were actually doing... there is a Nobel prize in Chemistry and a Nobel Prize in Physics, also one in Physiology and Medicine.  These are all in the science field... there is not just one for science because they are all different, all meaningful and all important.

Books are important and so are songs, but they are different... Bob Dylan deserves a Nobel Prize for his lifetime body of work that has inspired the world to be better and more fair.  So do many authors fighting in the tunnel where the light at the end just got dimmer.

SOCIAL MEDIA TO STINGING - random ideas of no particular importance

Social Media is becoming a weird dog... do people actually think they are accomplishing anything?  Mind you a few are... i can think of one offhand.  Now that is an incredibly negative thought that i just had... one that is surly to gall others should i decide to share it, and of course that said i didn't count myself as the one who is accomplishing anything. To be honest, i am very pleased with my insignificance... it's good stuff.  Why comment then?  Why fucking not, if it's just for kicks, complaints, and something else that might start with a "k" sound, if i wasn't too lazy to finish the sentence with some alliteration.  Why get it right?

You start getting boxed in after a while... i believe that to be the general mathematics of the relationship of the being and the medium as they evolve over time in a synergistic relationship.

That was a pretty good sentence until the word "synergistic" popped up... that is a punch in the head for the author.  OK i gave myself a stinger over the right eye... it's all good now. 

Now don't get me wrong... the relationship between a person and social media is indeed a synergistic relationship.  When a person posts something on social media, social media responds, and that response will factor in the decision making process in the next thing that person posts, and social media will respond in a different way.  And that person's unique world... i use the term "unique" verry verry fucking loosely, so fucking loosely in fact that i added an extra "r" too both very's.  Are you allowed to apostrophe s  the word very if you refer to it as a noun?   So confusing... but don't worry proper language use has gone the way of the Dodo. I'll tell you one thing you don't want to do... kill slugs at night with a headlamp outside a beehive.  The headlamp will stimulate the bees, an organism that is not keen on being stimulated late at night when it's "hunker down in the hive" time.  Now there is a saying in hockey "sometimes you have to take a hit to make a play".

Speaking of strange events involving bee's... I was at the beekeeping supply store the other day and the person at the cash could barely write because of a hand was all swollen  to the size of a guinea pig...  got stung by a bee.  Actually when pressed about it one sting happened about 3 days ago and the other was just yesterday.  Now me,  I'm thinking that perhaps a career around bee's is not in the cards for this person... from the talk, it doesn't seem to have crossed the mind.  With allergies, sometimes the reaction can get worse and worse over time, so you might not want to push getting stung.  I wear gloves when i go into my hive... apparently this person doesn't because they consider themself an experienced beekeeper... so i hear.  I was wondering if a prayer might help, but no for the record the person does not believe in prayer... there seemed to belief in Karma, fate and Omens, although for sure there was a bit of a problem with common sense and logic.

My first swarm capture

It was a busy day and i was just going to relax tonight... and make some plans for tomorrow.

My bee's died this winter... it was unfortunate, but these things happen, and i actually am set to get some more on Wednesday... it's Monday night right now.  So I have a friend who has a drip line irrigation system for me and i phoned her up to see if i could get that before i install my bees on Wednesday.  She is telling me i can come and get it tomorrow, and then as a final note, rather casually mentions that in the giant Oak tree across the street there is a massive swarm of bees.

"The bee's are there right now" i say calmly even though my nervous system just kicked into hyper-drive... "oh yes she says".  I'll be there in a few minutes.  On the way down to get my beekeeping stuff i call my bee buddy Christof and we have the shortest conversation we have ever had..

-Hello
-Want to come and get a swarm
-Yep
click

All i had to grab them was a brew bucket and a heart full of hope... time is of the essence, nightfall is coming, for all i know another beekeeper is on the way to claim this bundle of gold.  Christof is a more experienced beekeeper than myself and is slightly more prepared grabbing a large box and a light and some duct tape... i knew my friends who lived by the swarm would have some things, like a ladder and some tools that i could figure something out.

The swarm was actually 3 clusters hanging about 20 feet up in the middle of an intersection, not a busy one luckily, and my friends had an orchard ladder and a long pole tree pruner.

As we were getting ready the zipper on Christof's veil broke and we lost the last bit of daylight getting that fixed... for a moment i almost said "don't worry about it", which i thought might be kind of funny given it was getting dark and bee's tend to be a little more testy at night.   It was a good thing we got it fixed for sure.  The first cluster came down into the box really easy.  It was on a little branch and the twig was cut easily with the pruning tool. 

As it was getting dark it was harder to see the branch that the bigger cluster was on so he pulled the branch towards me and i got an hand on it so we could try to maneuver it better... it was shortly after that that the branch snapped and the bee's rained down, mostly into the box and on to my head... not the way we had it written up for sure... it was on the street so we could sweep a lot of the clusters up into a dustpan and get them into the box.  Now the bees were very docile which was nice and they did head towards the box and some of the bees lined the perimeter of the box to fan pheromones outward... these are good signs that the queen was in the box, which is a very important piece of the puzzle... time will tell.

There was a lot of bee's, i would probably say about 15,000 and the weather report calls for rain tomorrow, so I'm happy the bee's are safe in a good hive right now.  Two guys driving home in a van in bee suits and a box of gold in the back.

A swarm in May is worth a load of hay; a swarm in June is worth a silver spoon; but a swarm in July is not worth a fly
   -Beekeeping proverb

So a monster swarm in early April is the big time Jackpot!  We put them in my hive and gave them some of the frames of honey that i had from my last hive to make their new home seem nice and beehive like.

Now about those bee's i have to go and get on Wednesday... I guess I'll be building some boxes.

You can never have too many hives right?

 

Enlightenment is good, better when it comes before injury

We need to widen our dinner options declared a family one weekend, and the youngest one said "we can only eat what we know how to make"... and then the father true to his "maniac" way of doing things set off on some righteous sermon about how there is nothing we can not learn to do and do well... there was a paragraph titled "limitless potential"... scratch that as paragraphs aren't usually titled... bullet points might be... but now our story is getting irritating.

So the father declares "name anything and we will make it".

Sushi- We can do this... make some avocado rolls, some cucumber rolls, some deep fried shrimp rolls...

Within a small broken sentence our hero has now, even though he has yet to realize it, planted a seed in that little place in his brain that will cause the deep fry operation to overtake the sushi operation.  Now as a natural maniac, and an older one... one who's brain is more accustomed to naturally justify this coming imbalance the Father triples the sushi rice recipe.  Now lets change "the father" to "me", so i can be less confused and get on with things.

One of the justifications i used to myself at the time was "with more rice we can make mistakes and not go hungry", which is odd seeing that I had already committed to pot stickers and steamed buns as a backup.  Now i did get the steamed buns and pot stickers frozen in the Asian market when i went to fetch pickled ginger and what turned out to be fire hot wasabi. I was just going to batter and fry some shrimp, yams and asparagus, but then i got fixated on onion rings, and everything else that could possibly be deep fried

So we have about 36 avocado rolls, 24 cucumber rolls, 12 dynamite rolls, 18 tempura asparagus rolls, 30 pot stickers, 8 steamed buns, a plate of red pepper tempura, and I'm trying frantically to push out a batch of onion rings so we don't starve to death.  I ate my portion 15 minutes before going to yoga.

Now in Yoga often times your body wakes up and becomes aware and begins processing things... you breathe into spaces to open things up and push away discomfort.  In retrospect it seems foolish to gorge back a deep fried feast and then go to yoga, but in life sometimes you are focused so heavily on another job, or you fall into a deep fry frenzy and all bets are off.

My neighbour's have a deep fryer, they want me to use their deep fryer... they are community foodies who believe a deep fryer is a good thing to have, and by me using it i am helping justify the roll... we understand this and are happy, mostly, that we do understand this..  I was thinking about the deep fryer (obviously), and it is that oil commitment that is the "economic saver mentality syndrome"... If i am going to spend a pot of oil, then spend a pot of oil.   It's all decoys... there is always a reason to go insane, life is about finding the reason.  As we speak my heart is kind of feeling a little congested, perhaps i can fix this with a few wind sprints up and down the street.

Post wind sprints - Ankle hurts, seeing mild stars, new sweat areas, fresh odours... most likely the second biggest mistake of the night... pulled hip muscle is kind of coming on strong now.  What was that saying... "if you find yourself in a hole stop digging".  Enlightenment is good,  better when it comes before injury... not a bad quote to salvage from today's self induced carnage.