Deep saxophone jazz, the kind that sounds like having a cigarette in bed on a hot night after sex and feeling your pulse beat under the drumskin of your belly.

Makes ya want to take up smoking, doesn’t it? I’ll tell you who wrote it later.

It’s hard to describe the joy you get from what to you is “new” music; music that doesn’t fit the cliches you “know”, music that shows you so many great things about the culture and the performers…I was buzzed about it for weeks after hearing them the first time, which in turn, has led me to see quite a bit of Irish and Scottish music, more than I ever thought I would growing up!  Not everything reverts back to childhood joys!
There’s also something else  — seeing a band over a long period of time.  You want both the familar and the new, to see where they want to go musically!  It doesn’t always work out, as I recall one tour where Altan was pressured to be a bit more “New Agey” than I think they were naturally inclined to be, but that’s the biz for you!  If you love them, you stick with them in the hope of this being just a phase.
The moment I’ll always remember is when, Frankie Kennedy, one of the original founders of the band, the husband of the lead singer/fiddle player Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh passed away from cancer at a quite young age.  I wasn’t sure if they would tour, but they did with Mairead in black, without the band mentioning his passing during the show.  This lent a somber note to those of us who followed the band, but it was the first encore that nearly did me in.  She came out to sing a song that she had done as a duet with Frankie playing the flute — alone.  I couldn’t look, and covered my eyes so I wouldn’t get upset.  Later, she upbraided me for that telling me that if I had started crying, she’d start crying, and she was on stage!  Crying — and drinking — was for backstage.

A video taste of her singing for you…

I can’t wait to see them again, if only just to get in some solid footstomping to some of the more lively jigs and reels, like this one

If Altan comes your way….I couldn’t recommend a band more highly.  If I can scrape together the $25 I’ll see them March 4th.

update:  Martin Sheen gets demoted in the post title from Col. to Captain as he was in the film.  [nod to Icepick]

Never get out of the boat. Absolutely G*d-damned right. Unless you’re goin’ all the way.

This was a lesson NOT learned by Francesco Schettino, Captain of the cruise ship Costa Concordia.

Authorities were holding Schettino for suspected manslaughter and a prosecutor confirmed Sunday they were also investigating allegations the captain abandoned the stricken liner before all the passengers had escaped. According to the Italian navigation code, a captain who abandons a ship in danger can face up to 12 years in prison.

The accounts so far don’t look good for the Captain’s future. He should have stayed in the boat – or hightailed it to Brazil.

Better still, never get IN to the boat.

For blogger/opinion writer Steve Sailer this brought to mind a similar incident. In 1991 the cruise ship Oceanos sunk off the coast of South Africa. What happened was covered by People Magazine:

On Saturday evening, Aug. 3, as a 50-mph gale buffeted their ship, passengers aboard the Greek cruise liner Oceanos gamely made their way to the main lounge for the evening’s entertainment. No sooner had they settled in than the lights went out. The 492-foot ship, suddenly without power, tossed in high seas off South Africa’s aptly named Wild Coast. For 361 weekend tourists, one of the most harrowing nights of their lives had just begun. The Oceanos was sinking.

Disgracefully, many of the 184 crew members clambered aboard the lifeboats ahead of some of the passengers and paddled to the safety of tankers and trawlers that had drawn nearby. At daybreak on Sunday, South African Air Force helicopters joined the rescue operation. But to the astonishment and anger of the 217 passengers still aboard, Capt. Yannis Avranias grabbed the second chopper off the ship. With no one clearly in charge, an unlikely hero emerged among the remaining crew: Robin Boltman, 31, the ship’s magician.

Giving the performance of his career, Boltman entertained and calmed passengers throughout the pitch-black night. In the morning he ascended to the bridge and maintained radio contact with rescuers. Finally, at 11:30 A.M., after all other passengers and crew had been removed to safety, Boltman was lifted from the ship by a helicopter. At 1:45 P.M. the luxury liner nosed into the Indian Ocean and disappeared under the waves.

I had seen Sailer’s excerpt earlier in the day and left it up. I wanted to read it to my wife when she got home, and did so. This caused her to say, “I think I heard of this guy recently, before this wreck in Italy.” So I hit Yahoo up for some search engine action, and found a story up near the top with an interesting headline:

DID OUR SINKING MAGICIAN GO DOWN WITH THE CONCORDIA?

It’s an article from the Daily News of South Africa, written by Barbara Cole, and starts off with

[M]any are asking whether Midlands magician Robin Boltman was on the doomed cruise liner Costa Concordia. Boltman has a knack of being aboard cruise ships that go to watery graves.

Um, what? He’s been on more than one? Yes, he has, although he wasn’t on this Costa Concordia. Besides being on the Oceanos on her final voyage, Boltman was also on the final voyage of the Achille Lauro back in 1994. In that incident the ship caught fire off the coast of Somalia and eventually sank. Here’s a tidbit from the Daily News story:

When fire broke out on the Achille Lauro, the captain Guiseppi Orssi called Boltman to the bridge and asked for his advice, telling him he did not want to make the same mistakes as the Oceanos captain.

“I told him he first had to sound the alarms,” he said.

“It is important to stay calm and collected. Passengers should also go to their cabins and get their life jacket and any medication.”

So score one for Captain Orssi for consulting an expert!

For those of you who think the Achille Lauro sounds familiar, that would be because of the high seas hijacking back in 1985. So add that to the list of reasons to NOT get on a cruise ship.

So here’s a partial list of reasons to not get on cruise ships: sea sickness, sickness (there’s a freakin’ CDC page for this!), terrorists, pirates, rocks, icebergs, storms, U-boats, rogue waves (two links), drunk captains, dare devil captains, incompetent captains, incompetent crew, too few life boats, Bond villains. Not to mention the strange men in blue boxes looking for some chap named Alonzo OR the freakin’ tigers that try to eat your ass (and presumably the rest of you) when you go looking for mangos!

Never get in to the boat!

I believe mentioning before that the view from the back yard is delightful. (In fact, somewhere around here is a picture or two featuring that view.) While the breakfast area, the master bedroom and another bedroom all have large windows through which one can enjoy that view, it has always bothered me that the one room I spend the most time in, the family room, doesn’t.

At the end of September, two able-bodied and knowledgeable friends and I embarked on a project to rectify that situation. We removed a door, moved a window, put a new 8′ tall sliding door in where there was once a window, moved the gas fireplace from the center of the back wall to the corner, added a large window where once the fireplace and a well for an old-fashioned large TV set, and finished that area off as a window box seat.

As we finished only last week (and still have much “touching up” to do), we obviously weren’t in a huge hurry. The project was most definitely entertaining, often educational, and rarely tedious or bothersome.  It was a great way to take my mind off other things. Suffice to say we had lots of fun.

Here’s what the room looked like before we started:

And here’s what it looks like now:

We couldn’t resist adding a twist:

What’s that opening up from behind the window seat?

It’s the television:

If not for the the very reasonable price set by the fine folks at Firghelli Automation for their lift ($590),  this would not have been option as we’d read/heard that this kind of equipment usually retails for about $2,000. Anyway,everything turned out great as far as I’m concerned.

In other news, chemotherapy didn’t work, which is not a great surprise as it usually doesn’t in cases like mine. IMO,it was worth making the attempts, though. Throughout that process, I was indeed fortunate that the side-effects were by-and-large minor. In the meantime, the tumors reproduced at a terrific pace and are now recorded as “innumerable.” A CT scan two weeks ago showed that four or five nearby lymph nodes have been affected as well.

Well, it’s time to get cleaned up before the guests start arriving. Here’s hoping all of you reading this have as much fun and good food as we’ll be having here.

Once again, Merry Christmas!

But while Peter, Paul and Mary are one way to look at a Gloomy Tinsel Season, I’ve always chosen another song:  Fairytale of New York.

My first thought was, hey, shouldn’t this be an Amba song, too?  Sure, why not.   It’s a duet between Shane MacGowan (poster child for British Dentistry) and Kirsty MacColl, and rapidly becoming a New Holiday standard, one I hope to record with my friend CamieVog someday. So, let’s hope the New Year brings better things for us all, God bless us.

Mary Travers was 45 when this clip was made. How beautiful she still was! So sad how time carries it all away.  I heard this song in a church in Chapel Hill a year ago, still raw and fragile from J’s death.  Now I’m sitting here draped in cats, who look at me lovingly (or maybe forgivingly) when I sing along, surrounded by pictures of people who are gone. I myself am going, going . . . but not so fast, Louie.