Sans specifics, the telephone chat is for a company that looks like it’s doing some really cool stuff. Homework, hooo!
Blues Dream
A few years ago, my mom gave me a CD for Christmas, because the musician behind the record lives here in Seattle and his mother is my mom’s neighbor.
The record is Blues Dream and the musician is local hero Bill Frisell.
Nothing long winded here; just that it’s an amazing amalgam of languid blues-based jazz that builds more on non-jazz American popular music of the past seventy years than jazz per se. Listening to it over and over I long fantasized that Frisell would make a record with Austin transplant and banjo nutcase Danny Barnes (nutcase is here used in a technical sense, meaning genius), after a while, so it came to pass.
Tracks three and four are “Pretty Flowers Were Made for Blooming” and “Pretty Stars Were Made to Shine.” The titles are taken from the lyrics to Little Maggie, and listening to these two tracks is one of the coolest aural experiences someone who listens to music written before the steam engine was invented might have an opportunity to experience.
Frisell plays out with well-spaced, even stately regularity. Consider him.
End Times, end times
Man Killed by Mountain Lion Identified [LA Times]: A cougar attacked two cyclists yesterday in Orange County, California, at different times. One of the victims is dead and the other is hospitalized.
Floods, fires, killer flu, wild animal attacks: keep an eye out for plague and quake, California. Arnold is the antichrist, clearly. If you’d only elected me.
Another Day, Another Flood of Apps
I applied for another seventy-odd jobs today. I did get one response from a h00man – someone at an agency noticed that I was systematically applying to each listed postition on their intake board that matched my skillset (which is unusually broad, driving the large number of positions I’m submitting for) and dropped a polite little note asking me to cool it.
When I first moved here, I would scour the want ads in the paper and enter the contact information into a database for each position, as well as the title, a note, and the date I saw the ad. Then I’d do a mail merge and print off a cover letter and resume for each job listing, using dbase II and WordStar on my old Kaypro. I had a nightmarishly loud teletype-style printer (a Juki) that took about two minutes to print each sheet of paper. I believe I averaged about forty jobs a week, so each print run went on for about two-and-two-thirds hours.
Eventually I upgraded to a little dot-matrix printer.
As I recall, I got one interview, which led to a job as an art historian, of all the crazy things – actually using my degree! – with a startup that was attempting to develop an automated insurance-and-collatteral vaulation system for art collections based on scanning and databasing the art-auction results for everything, everywhere, since the beginning of time.
Extrapolating from that experience, I’ll keep my seventy-a-week average – maybe even expanding on it – going for about four months, and I expect one inteview to result. Bear in mind that Viv has actually laid down the law: I have to get a job. Just lookin’ doesn’t produce revenue.
UPDATE: Crazy, I already have a phone chat request. Cross your fingers!
Snow Day Stragglers
FOKG Patrick Murphy weighs in with some photgraphic updates on the Denny Way Sled Resort. I’m sure you’ll concur that they are worth sharing.
Oh, ingenius!
Diabolical! Somewhere a child weeps.
Note: this is NOT a donkey.