Tom Waits: A Poet of Outcasts Who's Come Inside "Sunlight wouldn't seem to be Tom Waits's element. His songs tend to take place in rainy nocturnal realms filled with outcasts and freaks, where his slurred gargle of a voice and his junkyard assortment of sounds won't upset passers-by. Yet there Mr. Waits was on a bucolic northern California afternoon a few weeks ago, lunching on minestrone soup in a small-town restaurant near his home, and talking affably about how he has created and maintained his own peculiar zone [~] more like a back room or a bunker full of debris [~] in American music."

I've always loved Tom Waits' music. Ann admits she finds it interesting and tolerates the periods, every few months, where I go on a Tom Waits bender and listen to lots of albums over and over again before I move along to something else. Every woman I've dated long enough to live with me through my Waits Phases has tolerated that phase and just smiled and loved that weird part of me. Well, they did at the start of the relationship. I'm sure that as things were winding down it was another nail in the coffin. Rain Dogs helped me get over a particuarly nasty breakup some years ago. I think the album has moments that are so dark and depressing that I, by comparison, was happier and brighter. Either that or the album allowed me to go all of the way down so I could start my journey back up again. It's hard to say.

These days, my life has its stresses and strains but I am, on the whole, a happy person. So, Waits' music isn't about happy or sad to me now, they are about mood and melody, tone and timbre. They make me look at the world with my head cocked at a 30 degree angle the way a dog does when you make a funny noise at it. Yeah, that's it. Tom Waits' music is that funny noise that makes me do that. And I love it.

Don't tell my wife. But I may have to sneak off and buy a pair of CDs this week.  3:14:04 PM    

Is the Pope Catholic?: "Like the Communist Party circa Leonid Brezhnev, the Vatican exists first and foremost to preserve its own power."

What an excellent op-ed piece. I find myself in complete agreement with everything he says. I am not Catholic but I married one and I went to a Catholic high school. But my wife and I have talked often about how we want to raise Jack and whether we want to raise him in a given faith (though we've also agreed that we want to develop in him a strong capacity for critical thinking) and we've both shied away from the Catholic church as we disagree with its politics strongly. Personally, I love a good theological debate. I ain't gonna get one there. Not now. Not with the draconian policies they have in place. Remind me to tell you the story about why we had to drop the Catholic priest who was going to marry us a month before our wedding leading us to change the location of the wedding at the 11th hour.

I'd say more, but breakfast needs to come out of the oven. Homemade scones. Yum.  9:20:54 AM    

Ok, I know it's only the beginning of the season and I realize that we've been playing teams like Baltimore and Tampa Bay (and barely winning the last two against Tampa Bay at that) but it's hard not to get excited about the Red Sox this year. After we finish with Tampa Bay we face the real teams: Seattle and New York. The proof will be in the pudding. But, hey, this is a fun season. So far. Last year we felt this way at this point too. So, let's see how we feel come August...  12:18:56 AM    

Ok, I'm a bit behind on pictures. So here are way too many at once!

First off, we had some impressive thunder storms in the last week. Here's a rainbow earlier in the week...

And here is a closeup...

New! If you have lawn-pattern-baldness, you can get spray-on-grass for lawns!

We joke about Jack having a girlfriend. She's the only other two-year-old in the neighborhood. Her name is Nimra and she's been letting Jack play with her car. In this series of pictures notice that she tries to give Jack a kiss. Of course, he was completely oblivious...

Finally, Jack had a balloon and then lost it...

  12:13:23 AM