cats just gotta have food

[calimac]

Cats get fed at 6 o' the clock here, am or pm. They usually start pleading for it an hour or two earlier, and I often give in at about 5:30, especially in the evening when I usually have to start occupying myself with fixing human food about that time. But that doesn't always satisfy them. Often on B's days off, I'm up earlier, give the cats their food, fetch the newspaper which arrives at 6 am on the dot, and then come back upstairs to my office to work. Then when B gets up, the little liars will start pleading with her, under-reckoning her ability to use human voice communication to ask me if the cats have been fed. My answer is usually: I fetched the paper, didn't I? Do you think I could have gotten downstairs at 6 am without having been besieged by a horde of hungry cats?

Unfortunately, today I was up unusually early, and after fetching the paper I went back to sleep. So B gets up, and the little cries of hunger are so convincing ... Anyway, the little rotters got two breakfasts this morning, so now they know they can sometimes get away with it. Life is gonna get worse.

In other news:

1. The Super Bowl is coming, and we cannot escape it. Article in today's paper on what roads are going to be closed, and a matching article on related airport congestion. At least we only have to put up with a week of this. The front desk staff at the gym were discussing which team they like. I'm glad they didn't ask me: I wouldn't have had the slightest idea. I hadn't even known there was such a thing as a Carolina Panthers.

2. Paul Kantner died. Unlike Glenn Frey, this is somebody I'd actually heard of, and whose band's work I know. Some of it I even like. But I'm seeing a lot less reaction to this death than to Frey's. So it goes, I guess.

3. The big feature article in Thursday's paper was on a festival being held this weekend to celebrate the work of an African-American classical composer, Valerie Capers. The article was written by the paper's ex-classical critic, who was cruelly mostly taken off the beat a while ago. It sounded enticing. But when I went to YouTube to hear Capers' music, I found mostly either modern jazz or the more arid variety of classical art song, neither of which I much care for. So I think I'll give this a miss.

4. Beware the technology. B had to upgrade her cellphone, and for various reasons got her first with a touchscreen. 'Tis bewildering. A week later she found that her account was empty: the phone had, entirely on its own initiative, been connecting to the internet and downloading something, spending hundreds of dollars doing it. More amazing than this was that AT&T gave her the money back; the capacity has been disconnected, but I'm still not sure what caused it.

5. On one thing I agree with Jeb Bush: they haven't even started voting yet, so let's give the process a bit to play out, shall we? The big four openers - IA, NH, SC, and NV - will all be over before the end of February, and Super Tuesday is March 1. By then we'll know a lot that we do not know today, even if we think we do.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I suppose Kantner spoke to a different generation than the Eagles, so there's either fewer people of that age group online to make a fuss or there are just a lot more people who remember the Eagles as living history and Kantner is Old People music their older siblings or parents listened to. I, anyway, am pretty bummed about it. I was blown away by Airplane's "Surrealistic Pillow" which I heard at a friend's house when I was ten. So different than the Broadway musicals and crooners we listened to at my house.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I remember Paul Kantner fondly for his frequent use of sf themes and allusions—and in his case I mean specifically "science fiction"; I don't recall his doing much in a fantasy vein, if anything. The last time I listened to his sequence about highjacking the starship I was struck by the extreme technological optimism: he imagined construction of the first starship starting in 1980 and being complete by 1990!

[(Anonymous)]

I know popular music almost entirely from radio, and while that includes a lot of "oldies" (which meant 50s-early 60s when I was growing up in the 1980s but means 70s-80s now), it restricts my familiarity to the songs that were most popular. For listeners like me, that means knowing The Eagles' nine top ten hits and especially the five that reached number one, as compared to the eight top ten hits, with two that claimed the top spot, of Jefferson Airplane / Jefferson Starship / Starship. Also Glenn Frey had two top ten hits on his own, while Paul Kantner had none, so I'm sorry to say I'd never even heard of Kantner before his death.

-MTD/neb

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The difference for me is, that I could remember the Jefferson Airplane songs I heard, because some of them were good, whereas poking around the Eagles' hits yielded a total blank for me on recognizing anything other than "Hotel California", and a feeling of "just another mediocre rock song" ennui on hearing any of it.

And, as a rock band that could generate as many as four songs that I really liked, as well as a number of others I enjoyed, was such a rare phenomenon, I actually bought a couple Airplane albums and learned the names of the band.

[ken-3k.livejournal.com]

Paul Kantner and Jefferson Airplane/Starship were maddeningly inconsistent, a band for which I need to compile my own personal anthology running to the length of 2 or 3 CDs. I couldn't locate any of my Jefferson Airplane CDs, but I did stumble across a "Best of Jefferson Starship" CD which I'd forgotten I owned, and I recalled that the "Red Octopus" album got a lot of play in my late-1970s fannish household.

For those who are fans of British folk-rock, recall that Fairport Convention began as a conscious attempt to imitate what Jefferson Airplane was doing.

Paul Kantner's final recording under the Jefferson Starship name, "Jefferson's Tree of Liberty," appears to be a collection of folk-rock settings of folk and other classics. I regret passing that up when it was new and I should run a copy down. The album includes a cover of Fairport's "Genesis Hall", a song penned by Richard Thompson.

Signe Anderson, the original female lead voice for Jefferson Airplane, died on the same day as Paul Kantner. Ms. Anderson had left the group after 1 album, when she decided that being the mother of an infant wasn't compatible with rock and roll touring.