Free Opera and some more Town Lake fish.
One fish, anyway. Free Opera. I’ve joked about it often enough, and I’ve asked, on more than one occasion, what the prevailing attitude would be if I took an idle afternoon, and just hung at an off-ramp, with a sign. “Anything helps, God Bless.” Or, “Need money for bait,” or something similar. Seems like someone is doing something similar.
How old, really?
From a “best of the web” link to poking around to this. Yea, verily.
Final silly notation:
Last of the “talk like a pirate” nonsense (one would hope).
Musical notes:
By now, the word that Steve Jobs (Pisces, of Apple fame) has suggested that the music companies are “greedy” is part of the news. Being a poor, marginalized horoscope writer, I understand. I’ve got clients on both ends of that deal, as successful musicians who depend on rights and royalties to help raise a family, as up-and-coming musicians looking for a deal, and as musicians who’ve been screwed by their “label” in any one of a number of ways.
I buy very little music online. I’ve got, maybe, a dozen “bootleg” tracks, which were, at the time, free & legal. I tend to purchase albums (CDs really) for liner notes and to assure that the artist is getting a cut, although, that cut usually doesn’t amount to much. However, I do like places like Executive Surf Club Records, and, of course, Austin’s Waterloo because they are independent and they report to the national sales charting company (I think it’s called Sound Scan or something). I’m forever going to root for the underdog.
My understanding of the deal, though is that out of that $1 per song, the recording company gets close to 80% of the cash. Not a bad deal.
I was thinking about this because I’m going to see REK Saturday night, I hope. I’ve purchased “No. 2 Live Dinner” a half dozen times. Always gets lent out, never to be seen – or heard – again. it’s a good album, one of the best. I’m wondering if his recent What I Really Mean will attain the same status?
So what I do these days? I burn up a playlist, mark the CD, and tell the folks to buy the album. Several folks have asked, “Hey, that third track, the song that goes… Who is that?”
But that’s not really going to sell any albums, or is it?
Hurricane notes:
Another link I’m unsure of, but it could work. I’m beginning to get the idea that the Fates really don’t want me in the Gulf, fishing.
I’ll predict landfall for Rita, south of Corpus Christi, and then the storm will drop a lot of rain in West Texas, southern New Mexico, and finally as far west as Arizona.
Cherchez les poissons:
I tried a half-dozen plastic bits, then settled on the old familiar, and there she was:
A neighbor (Sagittarius) was passing, walking her dog, “Hey, nice fish.”
In fact, there were two more, about the same size, perhaps a little larger, but alas, perched on an incline, balancing a pole, fish and trying to juggle a camera, it didn’t work. And without the evidence, those other two fish? I can’t say that they were really that much bigger. As I thought about it, though, might’ve been the same fish, twice. It happens.
“Fishing is worth any amount of effort and any amount of expense to people who love it, because in the end you get such a large number of dreams per fish.” (Frazier, Ian. The Fish’s Eye. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Chapter title: An Angler at Heart, page 47.)
“Most angling stories involve big fish. For a fish to be literary, it must be immense, moss-backed, storied; for it to attain the level of the classics, it had better be a whale.” (Frazier, Ian. The Fish’s Eye. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Chapter title: Big Fish, Little Fish, page 74.)
It’s just a thin, little book. And I’ve read some of his other material, and I can’t say I’ve always been impressed. But his fly-fishing tales, plus other adventures, makes me think about a summer afternoon, like yesterday, when I watched as a big bass gobbled up my bait, I set the hook, and I pulled in a big one. While I precariously balanced alongside a culvert.
