It’s moving day!

— LAST BLOG POST HERE! —

 

Today’s blog will be the last post at mickeymills.wordpress.com. After today you will find my postings at www.theprodigalscribe.com.

My New Address!

Well, it’s not really a new address. I’ve had my website at www.theprodigalscribe.com for ages. This is more of a consolidation. The website traffic was negligible and the blog was getting a ton of traffic. It just made sense for me to make this move at this time.

I won’t close down this site for awhile I just won’t be adding to it. IF you are subscribed, I hope to get around to all of you soon and get you resubscribed to the new location. Feel free to go ahead and take care of that yourself.

I have also moved all the archive content to the new location so everything will be available there.

Counting Calories and Other Nonsense

Most of the reading I am doing these days is pulling the numbers off nutrition labels. It’s enough to drive a food fan yumpy.

I’m back on a low-calorie diet, at least for January. The few pounds I put back on during the Thanksgiving and Christmas food celebration will be the first to go.

Dieting is no fun for those of us that just love to eat. I mean I kinda like cabbage but cabbage won’t do what a Hershey bar will do. I even enjoy a salad but the salad I like comes piled with blue cheese dressing and croutons. Sorry- croutons aren’t on the diet.

I made the mistake once of Googling “Diet Plans” and found myself a bit overwhelmed with the sheer volume of replies. At the same time I was a bit encouraged. With over 17,000,000 hits for diet plans surely there was something in there that would work for me. Between Atkins and the Cabbage diet, Weight Watchers and South Beach, and the Grapefruit Plan are a million ways to shave off the pounds. The trick is finding something I will see through to the end.

With the nearly twenty million diet plans there is one commonality—me. I’m the one that has to find the motivation, the willingness, and the inner energy to put see it through one silly calorie at a time.

I only have to look at the scales to know what I am doing is working with nearly 35 pounds gone since October. My belt let me know I am losing weight long before I could see it.

The only question that remains at this moment is…

Grapefruit, cabbage, or another freaking apple. Decisions, decision.

Birds

New Calendars

What’s the best thing about 2012’s arrival?

It’s a new tax year? Hardly.

That much closer to next Spring? Maybe.

Daytona is just a few weeks away? Possibly.

How about you’ve been looking at the same calendar day-after-day for twelve months and now you can replace it. What started out last January as a fresh visual addition to the ambiance has become stale and mundane. The 2011 calendar has collapsed into winter like spoiled fruit ready to be thrown out and replaced. You’ve shopped for just the perfect replacement and anxiously count the days until January arrives and you can hang the new months.

So the first day of the new year drops in like the shimmering Times Square ball and you rush to renew that boring wall space. You hang that new calendar and the first thing you do is cheat. You flip ahead a month or two, maybe three, ruining the surprise waiting for you a mere 31 days down the road.

You might murder the opportunity for marvel by scanning many months ahead. Some people even glance at them all. The return trip on the new months is diminished by one’s calendar curiosity and by the time fall makes the scene you are already anticipating the next new calendar so you can repeat the process all over again.

Of one thing I am sure… Next January I get to pick the calendar. [insert eye-roll here]

The horror…. the horror.

A Birthday Fit for a King

Happy Birthday Elvis!

Elvis Aaron Presley was born January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi. He moved to Memphis when he was 13 and began singing for Sun Records when he was 19. Over his career he made music and movies for the masses like no other artist from the era. He is regarded as one of the 20th centuries most popular pop culture icons. The music business took its toll on Presley and on August 16, 1977, Presley died at his Memphis home, Graceland, at the age of 42.

Rock and Roll Saturday – Blind Faith

The Sixties—just the words bring to mind a wide variance of emotion and music. It was a period of change, of color, fashion and hallucinagenics. The music industry was very much like the old west town of Dodge City and supergroups were lining up as the big sheriff of the concert halls.

Blind Faith is one of those lineups, a cross between genius and disaster; a marriage of fantastic and fiasco. They were like a star that went super-nova, burned brightly for a few white-hot moments, and then they were gone.

The roots of Blind Faith trace back to late 60s England where arguably the first “Supergroup” Cream was selling records by the boat load and filling concert halls where ever they played.

Cream was an overnight international success bringing fame and fortune to the trio, Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. In their short career they recorded four studio albums and sold 35 million albums worldwide. In the end Clapton’s easy-going demeanor was not enough to calm the conflict between Bruce and Baker and after three years Cream was no more.

In the meantime, Steve Winwood was having similar conflict with his bandmates at  The Spencer Davis Group. He left to form Traffic and in the meantime began jamming in Clapton’s Surrey basement studio. Winwood had met Clapton and worked briefly on the short-lived Powerhouse project with him and Jack Bruce in 1966.

Shortly after Cream folded, Clapton and Ginger Baker joined forces with with Winwood and another Powerhouse alumnus, Ric Grech on bass, to form Blind Faith. The band debuted for a free concert on June 7, 1969 in London’s Hyde Park. Although well received by everyone privy to the show, Clapton was disappointed believing the group had not practiced enough to be a solid musical unit. Also, their repertoire was somewhat limited with barely enough original music to fill an hour. They ended up playing Cream and Traffic music to fill out the set.

Working on a setlist for recording the quartet put in time in London’s Olympic & Morgan Studios recording their untitled debut album. Between late February and June 24 they worked on six tracks that would make it to the album.

In August of 1969 the self-titled album, Blind Faith, released to a wide audience and appeal with two tracks, Winwood’s Can’t Find My Way Home and Clapton’s Presence of the Lord climbing quickly onto the UK and US charts.

The cover for the initial release brought with it a fervor of controversy. The topless pubescent 11 year-old model holding a hood ornament from a 1956 Chevrolet proved to be too much for the label and they moved to immediately to release a second package with a photo of the band. The initial album cover is to this day a coveted collectors item.

The cover art was created by photographer Bob Seidemann, a personal friend and former flatmate of Clapton’s known primarily for his photos of Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead.

In an interview regarding his original Blind Faith photo Seidemann said,

“I could not get my hands on the image until out of the mist a concept began to emerge. To symbolize the achievement of human creativity and its expression through technology a space ship was the material object. To carry this new spore into the universe, innocence would be the ideal bearer, a young girl, a girl as young as Shakespeare’s Juliet. The space ship would be the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the girl, the fruit of the tree of life.”

Seidemann named his famous photograph Blind Faith. The group embraced the image name for the group and the a tiny span of rock and roll history was forever locked to the image. Not wanting to deface the image the band elected to have their name inked into the plastic jacket sleeve to disappear once the album was opened.

The promise of new music and future tours went away as quickly as Bind Faith took the stage. After the album release and the end of their US Tour rumors of breakup ran like wildfire through the fan base and respective labels. Blind Faith didn’t last a year but left a lifetime of great music. Their only album occasionally finds its way to my digital jukebox even today.

After Blind Faith, Baker, Winwood, and Ric Grech, joined with former Moody Blues frontman, Denny Laine, and formed Ginger Baker’s Air Force.

Eric Clapton toured with Delaney and Bonnie and spun another collaboration with friends, Derek and the Dominoes.  He followed the supergroup musical chairs with a successful solo career of his own. Grammies and and platinum records line the Clapton walls.

Steve Winwood returned to Traffic taking Ric Grech with him to record The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys in 1971. In 1986, Winwood enlisted some friends in a project and released Back in the High Life in the US. He topped the Billboard Hot 100 with “Higher Love”, and earned two Grammy Awards: for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. On High Life you will find contributions by James Taylor, Chaka Kahn, Joe Walsh and many others.

Ric Grech made a short career of doing sessions work with the likes of George Harrison, Gram Parsons, and Rod Stewart. He even did a short stint with The Crickets in the mid-seventies. He retired from the music business and returned to England in 1977. Grech succumbed to alcoholism in 1990 at the age of 43.

It’s better to burn-out than to fade away – Neil Young

Really?

Milestone – 500 blog posts

Yesterday’s post represents a milestone in the Prodigal blog. It’ was my 500th posting since signing up with WordPress. I think the best is yet to come.

 

Rock and Roll Saturday will follow in a bit.

The Birds Are Confused

It was knocking on 70° today. The birds were singing. I think the song was It Might as well Be Spring.

The birds are confused. Hell, I’m confused. This time last year I was breaking my back digging out from the great blizzard of 2011. Today I was out in the Harley getting a cool breeze in my face. There seemed to be a thousand other motorcycles out doing the same thing. What a difference a few months make.

You might remember just a few months back I was bitching about how hot it was. Day after day of temps over 100°. And then one day it was bearable again. It’s like it went from OMG to “isn’t this nice” in the blink of a porch light.

I have a theory I hope proves to be true although I have a poor track record in the prognostication department.

It was so hot for so long this summer it can’t get as cold this winter.

Well, it sounds good on paper but I was missing in action for most of my classes on theory.

I had a theory about Tequila and that didn’t work out too well either.

Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.” ~Robert Byrne

Can I Shoot Him?

Oklahoma is still pretty much a wild west kind of place. There’s biker bars and honky-tonks around here where they check you for weapons at the door and if you don’t have one they give you one.

This is the story of 18 year old Sarah McKinley. On New Years Eve, McKinley was home alone with her 3 month old baby when intruders attempted to break into her Blanchard mobile home.

The young mother immediately got on the phone with a police dispatcher and asked, “I’ve got two guns in my hand. Is it OK to shoot him if he comes in this door?”

Makes sense to me – two intruders, two guns, one very protective mother.  This can’t have a good ending for the unsuspecting robbers.

“Well, you have to do whatever you can do to protect yourself,” the dispatcher responded. “I can’t tell you that you can do that, but you have to do what you have to do to protect your baby.”

In Oklahoma the law allows deadly force against intruders.

Standing outside her door trying to enter her home was  24 year-old Justin Martin and 29 year-old Dustin Stewart. Apparently they were on the prowl for prescription drugs and either didn’t consider McKinley a threat or didn’t know she was home. McKinley’s husband died on Christmas day from complications of lung cancer.

When the men entered McKinley acted in self-defense and fatally shot Martin. Stewart fled the scene unaware of the scope of his situation. Prosecutors have arrested and charged the alleged accomplice with first-degree murder.

Grady County Assistant District Attorney James Walters told The Oklahoman newspaper,”When you’re engaged in a crime such as first-degree burglary and a death results from the events of that crime, you’re subject to prosecution for it,” Walters said.

Sounds like a big win for second amendment rights.

(The above photo is NOT Sarah McKinley.)

 

First Wednesday

The sun is high in the sky and temps on the plains are more like April than January. It’s the first Wednesday of 2012 and without my weirdo posts to fall back on I have to figure out what to write about. I don’t have the crutch of a regular topic to be researched and written. I have to be creative on my own and I haven’t even had coffee yet.

The horror… the horror…

The truth is I was getting a bit burned out on Weirdo Wednesday anyway.

Without a game plan, an idea or concept, I’ll be winging it, so to speak, from here on out. You’ll be getting whatever I can come up with. It’ll be a wide range of musings, my perceptions, my hopes and dreams, and my spin on current events.

I’d like to explore the obscure and mundane aspects of life. What better challenge is there than to write the minutia of one’s life and make it interesting. Now there’s a personal contest I can sink my keyboard into.  Many days will be fairly short and brief snippets of my day. Occasionally I will drift into some kind of rant, although I’m not really a ranter. (Come to think of it I could probably use the practice.)

All in all I’m looking forward to more writing in 2012.

Who knows… I may even finish Haunting Charleston.

First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
– Ray Bradbury