On Sports Logos On Bumper Stickers

I don't have a lot to say this week. Too much turkey, too much stressing over whether to actually go Black Friday shopping, so I'll take a break from my usual loquacious vibe, keep it simple with a little light talk about bumper stickers.

Make no mistake, there's a part of me that doesn't want any bumper stickers on 1/48/50; a part of me that wants to be completely incognito on this drive, a part of me that bristles even at having to have license plates, as if revealing something so day-to-day as the state in which I register my vehicle is revealing too much. Nebulous, right...? I want to exist, for those few months, mostly in the peripheral vision of the people I encounter.

But I don't want to take this trip, or myself, so seriously that I can't have a little fun, and there's something appealing to me about bumper stickers. To be clear, not the ones that try to be funny or clever, or insult other motorists, or wield some (usually radical) political statement. Actually, the only sticker with a message of any kind I'd ever consider brandishing on my bumper would be that old existential gem, Shit Happens, because ultimately that's all that needs to be said. Maybe, possibly, ones that announce where I've been, as well...although I don't think I'd ever go overboard upholstering the ass end of my vehicle with stickers from Boise, Bozeman and Brownsville, Dallas, Dubuque and Duluth, Albuquerque, Wichita and Saginaw. That's just tacky.

I do, however, enjoy the thought of giving a little glimpse of myself as I go, just a little impersonal Twitter post-caliber flash of who I am, and what I might be like, where I've been in the larger (existential) sense as I'm flying down the road at 80 miles per hour, and I see no better way of doing this than with sports logos.

Think about it, the teams we support, on whatever level (whether merely caring if they win or lose, or the super fan who dons the official team underwear), say a lot about us. There can be any number of reasons why a person likes a particular team, often having nothing to do with geography. Most of my teams have nothing to do with where I was raised or live currently, and those that do have a story behind them that is uniquely my own. I like the thought of another motorist being left to ponder what that story might be from just a short glimpse of my rear bumper as I pass on the left.

And so, in no particular order, I present - drum roll please - 'THE BACK OF MY VEHICLE ON 1/48/50':

(Truth be told, I'm dying to explain each of these, but then they'd no longer be bumper stickers...let readers ponder as motorists one day will. 

Or not...that's okay too. ;-)

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#130) "Ridin'" by Chamillionaire feat. Krayzie Bone - A couple weeks ago, I lauded the satirical greatness of White and Nerdy by 'Weird' Al Yankovic, and I feel that recognition would not be complete without taking a moment to laud the greatness of its inspiration.

And yet, in doing so I feel self-conscious, feel like I'm going out on a limb. Too many times Ridin' has played on my phone at work and prompted someone to say, with eyes and mouth wide, "This song's on your phone? Really? Wow...!"

Yes, I'm 41, white, and Midwestern, mostly small town, have never had much direct contact with rap or hip hop culture, but by including this song on the soundtrack of my road trip, I'm not pretending to be something I'm not. I don't ride down the street with it blasting at top volume, slumped down in the driver seat, hand draped over the steering wheel, pants around my knees, hat cranked sideways, flashing symbols with my fingers. It doesn't perpetuate my image...er, wait, what image?  I'm not the least bit fly for a white guy, and perfectly okay with that. ;-)

I just like the song, the way it sounds, and it's disheartening to realize so many think of music in such narrow terms. Culture, style and race mean nothing to me. If something is good, it's good. If something grabs my attention and holds it, I'm going to jam to it. If it moves me in some way, any way, I just might want to bring it along for 14,000 miles.

For my Midwestern white boy money, Chamillionaire sets the bar here for all rap music and rap artists. Ridin' is complex, at moments astonishingly so, the lyrics (especially Krayzie Bone's Verse 2) coming so fast they spin into an hypnotic kaleidoscope of sound that seems almost incoherent, but isn't. This, like what 'Weird' Al did in his parody, is not easy. Rapping well is not easy. Truth is, a lot of black artists are terrible at it. Why? Because it's not about race at all really, it's a skill like any other that not everybody possesses. It's relatively easy to merely assume the look and the style, wear all the right clothes and posture in just the right way. To be a wordsmith, as rapping was originally intended, and to insert those malleable words into music in such a way that creates an unforgettable hook that listening to feels like an experience, is something else all together.

Also, there's a message to the song, about racial profiling and/or police brutality, that shouldn't be ignored.  Once again, in no way can I pretend to be able to relate, but as the nation waits tensely for the grand jury ruling in Ferguson, Missouri, I've been thinking more about my own unnerving experience with the police, long ago.

When I was a teenager, I had a long, flowing mane of hair hanging all the way down my back, and this attracted the attention of police. I would be cruising up and down the main drag in my 1977 Chrysler Newport minding my own business, completely sober, totally going the speed limit, my only crime perhaps searching for someone to buy me beer (and even then, when/if I found someone, I was conscientious, never drank in the car, never drove while intoxicated), and yet I would routinely get pulled over for no reason.  They'd check my license, search my car, ask where I was going and where I'd been, then let me go without comment once they ascertained this long-haired, acne-ridden teen's only real offense was being unsightly.

This happened numerous times during the summers of  1989 and '90, enough for me to become aware of a pattern, to develop a Pavlovian response to the sight of a squad car pulling up behind me. Most of the time there was no problem. I wasn't a trouble maker, I just had long hair, and I've always found that 'Yes sir/no sir...yes ma'am/no ma'am' goes a long way with cops  But one time, I was pulled over by an officer who revealed himself to be a true pig. Seriously, I'm a law and order guy for the most part, a supporter of cops and a proponent of the difficult job they do. But I went to school with this guy's son, and knowing what I knew of him, I guess it should have come as no surprise that his father would act the way he did on this particular traffic stop.

I knew something was up right away: when he first clambered out of the squad car, he slammed his door shut. The impact echoed off the houses across the street.

He came up to the driver side window, this big, neck-less barrel of a guy, and barked, License.

I handed it over (I had it ready for him), and he snatched it out of my hand. I looked at the person I was riding with and she flashed my look of concern right back at me.

Whose car is this?

I told him it was mine. I sensed he did not completely believe me, or didn't want to, but what else would I be driving at 17 but a car with rusted out wheel wells and rear bumper barely hanging on? Better question: why would I steal this thing?

This your current address?

Also a dumb question. I was still a kid. I'd barely had my license a year. But his tone of voice was surly, had this kind of juvenile hostility not unlike his son (although I would not realize this was his father until much later) and put me ill-at-ease.

I said yeah, it was my current address.

Those sunglasses prescription?

I should have lied, could have, I guess, and been reasonably sure he wouldn't rip them off my face to check. No, I told him.

You got a restriction on your license. That means you wear glasses when you drive. Do you understand that?

I said, I know.

Your glasses in the car?

I pointed to them on the dashboard.

Get 'em on your face! he yelled, loudly. A volume better suited for, Get on the ground!

As he stormed back to his squad, I reluctantly replaced my sunglasses with the eyeglasses I hated. My companion and I looked at each other again, surreptitiously, as if doing so was a crime. I wanted to think I was imagining all this, but every time I looked over, the look on her face confirmed I was not.

We sat there for several minutes, much longer than a run of someone's driver's license should have taken. Other motorists passed us slowly, giving a wide berth to the flashing cherries. Across the street a lady emerged on her front porch to water a hanging plant. A guy walked by with a dog, cast his own surreptitious (and seemingly scornful) look in at us. It was as if the cop was back there in his squad smoking a nice long cigarette, fleshing out our anxiety. When he finally came back, he asked a strange question.  You been stopped by an officer before?

I replied, "Yeah, it's been happening a lot lately as a matter of fact."

That's all I said, and with no attitude at all. There was no need for attitude, it was just a truthful remark. It had been happening a lot lately.

His response was even stranger, and kind of outrageous. I bet it has, he smirked. And with his pointer finger and thumb, he flicked my license back at me. It hit my chest and landed in my lap.

He flicked my license at me.

I know it's a G-rated version of that kind of story, but it easily could have been much worse. And it happened, though I wasn't doing anything wrong (except driving without wearing my glasses), with no mention made as to why I was pulled over in the first place. That cop was loaded for bear about something that could not possibly have had anything to do with me. Any number of adult world stressors might have been eating him alive in that moment, and I was just unfortunate enough to cross his path at the wrong time. Maybe he was fighting with his wife, or his son was giving him grief (I'd bet). Maybe he was being foreclosed on, or hadn't had a drink yet that day, or maybe he just hated all kids because he wasn't one anymore.

Doesn't really matter; he had no right to take any of it out on me no matter what. But the scary part is he could have. With the law on his side, that silver badge punctuating his 'right', he could have escalated that traffic stop, and who knows where it might have led. Looking back twenty-five years later, I wonder how much separation there actually was, emotionally and mentally, between flicking my driver's license at me and grabbing me by my long greasy hair and pulling me out of the car onto the pavement, just because he felt like it, just because he was having a shit day?

I wonder how he'd have acted if someone else hadn't been with me.

And that experience was just a one time thing. It does not hold a candle to what many African-Americans, whether they're doing something wrong, have to deal with every day, the Pavlovian response they endure when they see that squad car pull up behind, hoping sometimes beyond hope the officer (s) will observe the thinly traced boundaries implied - if not spelled out - in their charge.

"They see me rollin' / they hatin' / patrolling they tryin' to catch me ridin' dirty..."

#131) "Women I've Never Had" by Hank Williams Jr. - This song also comes up fairly frequently on some of my playlists at work, and one time, a girl, in her mid-20s, listened to a few measures, looked at me with a kind of hybrid smile and roll of her eyes, and said, Is this your jam, Jared? 

She meant it playfully. Women I've Never Had - musically at least (if I'm to go by what she played when she was allowed to plug her phone into the radio) - was nothing she'd probably ever heard before. She was no fan of country music in general, this was certainly not Brad Paisley, and she was goofing on me a little, as if to suggest that I might be as quick to strike a pose with this song as I would with Ridin'....only instead of anything 'gangsta', it'd be a huge pair of sunglasses, huge collar, jeans and a belt buckle the size of an old vinyl record...or maybe a polyester leisure suit, doing little gunshots with my fingers....er, something.

Without missing a beat, I looked her right in the eye and said, You may find this a difficult pill to swallow, but this is every man's jam.

She wasn't entirely thrilled with my response (I can't imagine any woman would want to hear that). It too was meant primarily as a joke, of course, but there's truth there, for sure. Common sense, a sense of decency, maturity, these things keep good men grounded in their lives, keep them from making mistakes. And the bottom line is, sleeping around, especially those who will sleep with anything that moves, doesn't do anyone any good, male or female. But the impulse made evident in this song? Speaking honestly and candidly?  In the most fundamental sense? Oh yes, it's every man's jam. And in deep, unconscious ways, down where the stuff of human behavior that changes very little over millennia is buried, it's part of what enables our species to propagate successfully.

If nothing else, Women I've Never Had is an addictive song. Its whole New Orleans funeral horn section is kind of goony, but hey, humor is one cornerstone of sexy.

"I am into to happy and I don't like sad / I like to have women I've never had...."

#132) "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty - I suspect this is what people might think would be on my phone, although I'm okay with being pegged that way. Tom Petty - at this point - should be on everyone's phone. He's achieved living legend status, and really, how cool is his music from the late 80s and early 90s? Mary Jane's Last Dance is also very much 'every man's jam' at one time or another.

Tired of myself, tired of this town, indeed.


"Well I don't know, but I've been told, you never slow down, you never grow old..."

On Water Towers

There was no water tower in my home town when I was a kid, I'm not sure why; maybe because I grew up on the shores of Lake Superior, and North America's largest single supply of freshwater is what we drank from...lined up along the shore like zebra. (Just kidding.) The first place I remember seeing a water tower - that is, the top-heavy, sphere-shaped variety found abundantly across the Midwestern landscape - was Phillips, Wisconsin, not too far away, and for a long time, at least up to fifth grade (when I last remember making a joke about it to a couple of bewildered - and probably annoyed - kids on the playground), I thought that all water towers said 'Phillips' on them, like it was a brand name, or something.

Thinking like that, I guess it's miraculous they let me graduate from elementary school, but I've maintained a healthy fascination with water towers ever since. There is a water tower in my hometown now. Maybe there always was one, I'm not sure, but the one that now towers visibly over a large section of town was built in the 1990s, and I don't remember ever seeing one before then.

How a water tower operates will be interesting to any self-respecting info nerd (er, right...?); the water gets pumped up into the reservoir tank and gravity is utilized to push it down from the reservoir to where it has to go. Sometimes the water is potable, and sometimes it's not, used instead for fire protection, or industrial purposes. It's a concept that dates back to ancient times. The Romans really knew how to handle their water properly, doubtless contributing mightily to their success.

But water towers are a bigger deal than just their size or their mechanics. I've always thought they help to punctuate a community, at least little towns. In cities they tend to get lost in the clutter of the skyline, reduced to a mere tank sitting discreetly on top of a building, looking much like part of the architecture. But in small towns they are often the tallest structure around, they help define the skyline, visible from a distance, and with the community's name painted on the side, they declare something vital. This is us, and this is where we live. We are here. 

They let the traveler know where he or she is as well, perhaps not so importantly as in days before GPS, but still preferably. I'd much rather a water tower tell me what town I'm in than my phone.

The good news is, unlike certain other objects, technology is never going to snuff the water tower out completely, and to that end, I'm looking forward to spotting them, lots of them, on 1/48/50.



BOYD, WISCONSIN - What better way for Boyd, Wisconsin, population 552, to announce its presence to the world that with its water tower?

YORK, NEBRASKA - Decorating water towers further distinguishes a community as unique (in a way the golden arches and the Arby's sign also visible in this picture can't possibly...)

ROCHESTER, MINNESOTA - And then, sometimes things get ridiculous, but that's okay. What did Neil Simon write? "Never underestimate the stimulation of eccentricity."

The NEXT Top 100 (or so) Songs I Absolutely Must Have With Me on 1/48/50 (cont...)

#127) "Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again" by Barry Manilow - Yeah, I know what you might be thinking. There's no more memorable ambassador from the land of flaccid love songs than Barry Manilow - standing in his polyester jump suit on a darkened stage circa March 1975, microphone clutched in his hands, golden locks clutching his head like an ill-fitting helmet, staring wide-eyed - and a little pie-eyed - out at the exit signs, his thin warble leaving frumpy post-hippie era girls in brightly patched bell bottom jeans inexplicably mesmerized.

Agreed.  But a couple of things:

1) There's no way around Barry Manilow for me. For better or worse, this kind of music punctuated my early childhood, and I intend to supply myself with at least a little bit of it on 1/48/50. My parents were simply not rock and rollers. AM Gold, and classical, maybe the Beatles once in a while, was what they listened to, and thus exposed my brother and me to early on. There are still 8-track cassettes of Manilow, The Carpenters, and The Captain and Tennille stacked up somewhere in their house to this day, and whenever I sit and try to reconstruct the very first days I can remember with any clarity, it's Mandy, or Weekend in New England, or the like, playing on a little transistor radio on the sun drenched window sill of my parents' book store.

2) It's really hard to hate on Barry. He seems like a genuinely nice guy, by all accounts gracious and down-to-earth with his fans.  He's still performing to this day, and doing so with a refreshing sense of humor about everything, including himself. There's something to be admired in that. Long may he roam.

While I admit there isn't a lot to grab onto in most of Barry's music (unless you're a frumpy post-hippie era girl-turned-Long Island grandmother), I'm always stirred listening to Tryin' to Get the Feeling Again. It starts out soft as a feather, but after the second verse, the accompaniment starts to rise in intensity (achieving a fevered pitch by the end), and Barry matches his method of attack, sings with a passion you would never expect...a ferocity, even, for one explosive moment, that just might give that Long Island grandma a heart attack.

In other words, he forgets the exit signs completely, takes a step toward the edge of the stage, lowers his head and looks the audience right in the eye.

"Doctor my woman is coming back home late today / could you maybe give me something...?"

#128) "White and Nerdy" by 'Weird' Al Yankovic - Sure, there's Sinatra and McCartney, maybe Elvis, or Madonna, or Streisand, or Aretha, to fill out the list of greatest/most influential performers of the 20th Century, and I would never presume to try including Weird Al - of all people - on such an august enumeration. And yet...

When you consider all the evidence, he does emerge among the most prominent and certainly long-lasting performers we've known in our time.

Think about it: he's been going strong for more than three decades, and has managed to keep himself fresh and relevant by adapting his song parodies to changing styles and emerging genres. Over time he's parodied, among others, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Coolio and R. Kelly, and ironically enough, his career has outlasted them all. His most recent offering, Word Crimes, a spoof of Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines, is proof positive that well into his fifties, he still has a finger on the pulse of something....maybe of everything.

Part of his lasting success is due to the fact that he's gotten undeniably sharper and smarter in his satire over the years. It was one thing to spoof Michael Jackson's Beat It in '83, enough to be, in those early days, merely 'weird', or silly, and Eat It was clever and cute enough, and different enough, to launch his career.

It's quite another to go after something like Chamillionaire's tightly woven Ridin', and make it work - that is, not only make it legitimately funny, but in a strange way do the original justice, while overcoming the inevitable cultural and racial divide that would seem to put any rap music as inaccessible to 'Weird Al' Yankovic as could be imagined. (On that score, Yankovic had already ran into trouble with Amish Paradise, his parody of Coolio's Gangsta's Paradise.)

A unique challenge, for sure, but Yankovic does it seamlessly. I don't think it's overstating that parody gold was spun here. White and Nerdy holds true blue to the style, sound and most impressively the complexity of Ridin', matching the original almost word for word, syllable for syllable, beat for beat, and yet remaining laugh-out-loud funny, building a fricking hilarious tension by rattling off a brilliantly-conceived list of top shelf 'white and nerdy' stereotypes, from Star Trek to Star Wars to X-Men to Monty Python...AV club and glee club and even the chess team. And then to perform it as well as he does, prompting Chamillionaire to give him props for his rap skills...

Good parody is really not an easy thing to do. Yankovic just makes it look easy, as he did with Trapped in the Drive-Thru (parody of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet) and Tacky (parody of Pharell's Happy).

The video, too, with cameos by Key and Peele (nervously locking their door and peeling away as the whitest man on earth approaches their car...lol), Seth Greene, and Donny Osmond, is uproariously funny.



"The only question I ever thought was hard, was do I like Kirk, or do I like Picard...?"

#129) "It Was a Very Good Year" by Frank Sinatra - What can I say? The best era of Frankie, in my humble opinion, is the late 60s and early 70s, his melancholy, September of My Years phase. It Was a Very Good Year is from that album, as a matter of fact, and it's pretty much the life every man would like to be able to look back on, almost to the point of being a caricature.

Even if it hasn't played out quite as grand and manly as this (think the Dos Equis beer guy...;-), I have to say (and have many times, because I can be annoying...) I can't really complain about my own life. I look back fondly on just about all of it, good and bad, and that, more than what's in the details, is what this song is saying.  Grow old graciously, look back with dignity.

"And now I think of my life as vintage wine from fine old kegs / from the brim to the dregs, it poured sweet and clear / It was a very good year..."