Bob Dylan 'Blood On The Tracks'

After a long deliberation with myself and my associates... I have decided not to participate in much of anything today.

John Fogerty 'Centerfield'

Jamie surprised me this morning. She told me that her friend was attending her son’s graduation today.

“I didn’t know that he was a senior,” I said. The last time I saw him, he looked like a fifth-grader. And as it turns out, he is until this afternoon when he gets a fifth grade diploma or a Chucky Cheese discount flier.

“He’s graduating elementary and going middle school next year,” Jamie explained.

Of course, I think that it’s stupid.

She continued, “It’s a milestone in his little life.”

It seems like every year a kid is graduating from something. It could be the second grade, the Home Depot project squad, or a move up to solid food. What’s the frakkin’ deal?

Do kids really need all that unnecessary attention?

Jamie said, “Moving up to middle school is a big deal.”

I disagree.

When they called it junior high, it was a big deal. It sounded like you were getting older and more responsible. The girls were getting rounder and bumpy in places that I never really noticed before. And I liked it.

Junior high sounded scary. Just the words “junior high” made me feel like I was walking into a jungle where a battle was about to break out on that first day.

Going to junior high was a rite of passage. For me, it was a place filled with different classrooms, loud ringing bells, stairs, and Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts. And when I rode the bus, there were students from the nearby high school that was a football throw away. They were older, sometimes a bit more dangerous than my group of friends, and the girls were generally more voluptuous.

I was coming into junior high just as the hazing was coming to a halt. And if you’ve ever seen the film Dazed And Confused, then you know what I’m talking about. I experienced none of that, but I did hear some stories about overzealous paddling.

Junior high was a whole new world. It was a big deal.

So why have they changed the name? Why do they call it middle school now?

I don’t like it personally. Calling it “middle school” makes it sound like some kind of half-way house filled with ne’er-do-wells and kids that still drink juice out of boxes. It sounds like a place with no real direction… It’s in the middle… It’s not going anywhere.

If you call it a junior high school, then you know you’re going to move up. One day you’ll make it to high school and eventually become a senior… Lord over all. It sounds like you’re going places instead of sitting around in a classroom eating paste with Wildman Corey Casey.

Junior high is about dropping pencils to get a better look at your developing female friends.

Middle school sounds like you need to put on your mittens before going out to the school bus.

Junior high is about dodging that guy that likes to pop his mother’s prescription medication.

Middle school sounds like chicken nuggets served all day with copious amounts of chocolate milk.

Junior high is about skipping a class or two.

Middle school sounds like story time with Mr. Cotton and his hand puppets of make believe.

Junior high is about learning how to undo bras.

Middle school sounds like a place I don’t want to be. Period. It sounds like the play place at the fast food joint that you have outgrown. It even sounds like a mental institution to me… A reimagining of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

I just don’t like it. Can we please go back to calling them junior high schools?

Jimmy Eat World 'Static Prevails'

I am often amazed by the amount of people that check out wheelersdog.com. When I check the site stats, I find that a lot of people come here from a search page looking for information on an album title.

Here’s the deal… I only choose one musical title to drive around with during my day. It’s usually a compact disc and sometimes if I’m feeling particularly nostalgic, I’ll pack a cassette. If I’ll be driving somewhere more than an hour away, I’ll take my Zune MP3 player that’s loaded with over 500 albums.

And I’m not sure if I ever told you how this “sickness” came about.

I’ve always been about music since turning on my first transistor radio in the early 70’s. I listened to the radio at night in the darkness. And when I wasn’t listening to the radio, I was spinning singles on a small record player. Perusing through Hot Rod Magazine and listening to 45’s from the 50’s and 60’s was one of my favorite activities. I liked giving what I saw a soundtrack.

Music was always part of my daily experience and when I didn’t have a radio around, I would provide my own soundtrack by humming tunes that I made up on the spot. And I must say, my original incidental music was pretty damn kick ass.

I would spend my preteen Saturday nights tuning an AM radio on my parent’s old console stereo until the wee hours of Sunday morning. I could hear radio stations from as far out as Ohio and Texas.

I eventually graduated to recorded music because radio started to become sterile and formulated. I preferred LP’s over cassette tapes. They sounded better and I liked the idea of making compilation tapes, first on 8-track and then to the 4-track cassette. If something happened to the tape, I still had the LP as a back-up. When compact discs came along, I transferred those to Denon cassettes to listen to in my car and Sony Walkman.

My friend Tracy Thornton did the same sort of thing… Rarely did we have a prerecorded cassette tape. He used TDK and I used Denon and Maxell. And we both went with high bias tape.

Tracy would ride around the countryside in his convertible MGB with hundreds of tapes. I only remember him carrying one case that could hold up to 120 cassettes… Until it was stolen along with his tape deck.

He lost everything. From the rare stuff that we recorded up in Jonathan Everett’s upstairs loft to a taped copy of King Kobra’s ‘Ready To Strike’. All 120 cassettes were gone. The rare stuff couldn’t be replaced, but since I had the King Kobra on LP… All we needed was the time to rerecord it.

From that moment on, Tracy only carried one or two cassettes around with him. He wasn’t about to lose anymore rarities or not-so-rare stuff. I saw the logic in that idea. I didn’t want to lose a good chunk of my collection in an accident or have it stolen out of my car. A tape deck can be replaced, but a copy of Krakkin’ live at the GYC Carnival on a TDK was irreplaceable.

When I leave the house, I will usually take one compact disc with me to listen to while driving around. If something happens, I may only lose that one CD from my collection and hopefully it’ll be something that can easily be replaced. The loss will be minimal.

When I started writing this blog, I didn’t know what to title each day’s entry. Without a thought about it, I titled that first entry with my musical choice of the day. It gave readers an idea of what I spent my day listening to. I thought it may even inspire them to check it out for themselves.

I have kept with that tradition and sometimes if I’m feeling particularly good about a musical choice of the day, I’ll say something about it. But usually, I won’t say a word about it. It’s just used as the title and I may attach a video from You Tube if I feel that it’s a worthy choice.

When I see that someone found my blog from searching out “Gwar scum dog blogspot”… I have to wonder if they were looking for an album review. Because the site stats tell me that they didn’t spend a whole lot of time reading what they searched out on Wheeler’s Dog.

I started noticing that someone in New York City was constantly checking out wheelersdog.com and spending what I thought was an obscene amount of time here. As it turned out, they found an entry from July 29th, 2007 titled with Richard Kastle’s ‘Streetwise’. That person keeps coming back to that same page over and over again.

I did a little research and found that someone linked Wheeler’s Dog to a Richard Kastle page.

That’s totally cool and I appreciate it, but it has nothing to do with Richard Kastle’s music or leather jackets. It’s about my visit to a retailer looking for a laundry basket. Here it is.

Glucifer 'Tender Is The Savage'

It’s been over a week and I’m still real good with the Lost finale. I have no complaints. I’m good with the 24 finale as well… Hell, 24 needed to go about 2 seasons ago. I managed through it all even if I did start a couple of seasons behind.

Actually, I did the same thing with Lost. I caught on at the right time.

I’m happy to hear that V has been picked up for another season. The momentum the series had was killed by the LONG hiatus that included the Olympics.

Stupid Olympics.

ABC executives please note… Hiatuses are no longer needed in this day and age of the DVR. If someone wants to spend their time watching fringe sports like curling while they record V, let them. The show will still have that following, but they’ll just watch it a little later. Ratings are important, but more episodes equal more DVD’s sold in the future.

You also did the same thing to Flash Forward. Long hiatus equals fewer viewers on the return. Unlike V, you gave this show the ax.

I’m good with that. The show just felt like it was going nowhere. I didn’t get attached to any of the characters and I think that was show’s main problem. It left on a high note full of possibilities with another “flash forward”. It’s all left up to your own speculation and imagination.

Fringe ended real damn cool. And if you’re not watching this Fox show, do yourself a favor and get caught up before the next season. It’s a helluva ride for geeks and non-geeks.

During the past season, I became increasingly disturbed by a seemingly out-of-control trend concerning young male characters. The networks have been engaging in “Operation: Wussification”.

There are a lot of series out there with sensitive young males who are led around more by their emotions than their peckers. And that, ladies and gentleman isn’t right. It goes against the natural order of things. That’s just not the way it is in our species. Things are just understood. The males are the horn-dogs and I expect that in my movies and television. It’s been that way for a very long time.

Sure, we had our tough guys with a sensitive side… But we didn’t have 126 channels filled with “Angel” (Buffy The Vampire Slayer) and “James Hurley” (Twin Peaks). That excess gets disgusting and I totally blame the whole damn Twilight series of books, t-shirts, movies, shot glasses, and feminine napkins.



The young males in V and Happy Town (a fine show that is going bye-bye – see it while you can) have been making me sick. They’re just too damn sensitive. They weep and pine. They take their love troubles out on everyone else by moping around in their pre-Goth hairdos listening to whiny emo bands.

Ladies… Guys like that aren’t real life. And maybe that’s why you buy into the whole romance novel and Twilight thing… The young males being portrayed today are kind of like puppies filled with unconditional love that get big-eyed and hurt looking when they displease you.

It’s a fantasy. And the last season of television series were selling those sorts of fantasies on genres that shouldn’t have them.

The sensitive tough guy is much more believable and less alienating to the general television watching public. We like our Jack Bauer’s, our Sawyer’s, our Sayid’s, our Spike’s, and our Barney Stintson’s.

And they don't disgust us with their lack of testicular fortitude.

I’m sick of this “Operation: Wussification”. The tentacles are digging deep in every genre of television out there. Something must be done, ladies and gentleman. It’s down right disturbing. We need more “I’ll do any female in the Universe” characters like Captain Kirk.

Def Leppard 'High n' Dry'

I’ve been thinking about trying standup comedy again. Doing standup was a dream of mine back some time ago. I tried it once at an open mic night and quickly went down in flames. I couldn’t understand how it happened. I had studied under some of the masters… Comedy masters like George Carlin, Bill Hicks, Bill Cosby, and Cher. Standing on a stage with only the sounds of clinking glass and cigarettes being lit can be a very lonely place. It means that you’re not standing in front of your target audience.

But I gave it a shot. And for some strange reason, I’m feeling the desire to pull that trigger again.

I came up with the ice breaker and that seems to make people laugh. The rest of what I’ve got so far is a little out there. That shouldn’t surprise most of you. I’m always springing the “Operation: Little Dog Urination” on people and that brings a laugh. Or at the very least, a strange look accompanied with a hesitate smile… So I know that’s funny.

Urination stories are always funny because it’s something that we all know about. If you’re breathing with lungs, there’s a good chance that you urinate often. It’s pretty much a universal subject with creatures that understand abstract thoughts. And that’s where the comedy cranks up.

For example… My friend Jon went to a family reunion in the great state of obesity, West Virginia. And I’m not saying that as a put down because I was born in that great state and do what I can to represent, know what I’m saying?

So all jokes aside… The host family had a huge spread for everyone to enjoy. The kids could run free and loose. The adults could hang under trees and around the grill. From what I remember Jon telling me, it was pretty much a hillbilly orgy of gelatin, watermelons, and fatty foods.

The host family had a large, fully enclosed pen on the property. That’s where they kept the pet crow. I don’t remember him saying whether or not it was some sort of rescue deal where they kept the crow because of an injury. Jon found it highly unusual.

When the family gathered around the tables to put on their feedbags, there was a terrible squawking coming from the crow’s pen. All heads turned to see some 6 year-old boy chasing the crow around inside the pen while urinating. Jon said that the crow was flapping its wings and making as much racket as it could. The droplets of urine being flapped off were turned a bright golden color as the sunlight lit them up. Some members of the family found it rather amusing… Especially Jon who couldn’t stop laughing.

Of course, the immediate family members of that 6 year-old were completely mortified.

So… Urination is always funny. It always has been. Why do you think there are so many euphemisms about it?

Draining the lizard
Walking the dog
Going to see a man about a horse
Number one
Feeding the goldfish
Take a leak
Check the creek temperature
Make water
Drain the main vein
Point Percy to the porcelain
Siphon the python
See someone about the plumbing
Shake hands with the unemployed

That last one is a new one for me and I like it. If you’ve got any more to add… Why go right ahead!

If I do get a stage show worked up, I’ll be sure to tell you the where and when.