Somehow I’d entirely missed the wonder that is Incorrect Music, a radio show on WFMU every Wednesday afternoon. Incorrect music presents “present an asylum of crackpot and visionary music, covering sounds that are atrocious, outsider, blasphemous, or just plain WRONG,” and it’s wonderful. They’re on summer hiatus, but you can listen to most of their previous shows right on the website in Real format. Their last show, number 235, was a two-hour special. My friend Matt Goolsby may want to forward to 1:55 first, and then rewind to catch the rest.

Another busy week and month is drawing to a close and again I’m left wondering where the time went. The play I’m in opened last night. We had a good show and a sparse audience. It closes tomorrow, on my sister Adrienne’s birthday. A character with the same name has a small but dramatically intense appearance in the show. Happy birthday, A! The farm’s to do list is getting longer rather than shorter. While it can seem overwhelming at times, and it’s meant putting aside the day-to-day-living type of things like, say, unpacking the kitchen from our mover seven months ago, I think we’ve done really well considering what this place was like when we bought it. And we’re bringing in enough money to cover most of our expenses for the year, which is really good since a lot of those were one-time-only startup costs. Sometimes I ignore all those and just say the farm is covering more than half the mortgage all by itself. After another wonderful meal there last night (a simple mushroom cheeseburger that still manager to be the best burger I’ve had in a long time), I’ve discovered that my new favorite restaurant is called “Hudson Carter’s CLOCKED” with the byline “…food for the space age…”

I am reminded again how lucky I am to be living near Athens. Yes, I know there are other similar towns (reports continue to come in extolling the virtues of Iowa City, Madison, and Seattle), but I don’t see how they can beat where I am. I just had an hour to kill between work and dress rehearsal for the play I’m in. The show’s at the Morton Theatre downtown. I’ve written about the place before (it’s a fabulous formerly Black owned and operated theater that brought in some of this century’s entertainment giants), but can’t link to it due to my using my Handspring to post this backstage. Anyway, I went down the block to what used to be a great hole-in-the-wall Mediterranean restaurant. Now it’s a hole-in-the-wall diner-type named, as far as I could tell, “Diner”. I plopped on a comfy couch and browsed the menu. It consisted of various burgers, sandwiches, grilled cheeses, pasta plates, fried potatoes in multiple forms, ice cream drinks, and the like. I settled on the fish and chips and iced tea (not sweet). While I waited, I read a copy of a magazine/book on the Beatles, 1963-1967. Meanwhile, the sounds of an equipment check drifted in from the 40 Watt a few doors down. As diverse a mix as you could imagine drifted in and out. When the basket arrived, I moved to a table and enjoyed what turned out to be the best fish and chips I’d ever had. Without all the atmosphere, they still would have been.

Like with many other agriculture products, the state of Georgia is very strict on who can sell eggs. If people come to your farm, it doesn’t matter, but the moment you bring an egg off your farm to sell to someone else, the state steps in. It used to be that folks with only a few chickens who sold less than 30 dozen eggs a week could escape regulation, but the large producers successfully sued the state into changing that law. Well, actually, they threatened a lawsuit and pressured the legislature into closing the hole for the little guy. So, to be able to sell eggs at the market, I had to get liscensed by the Ag department. Today the regional guy-in-charge came by and gave me a two hour class and a written and practical test. I passed, so now I’m liscensed. However, I’m still supposed to buy some special equipment, and I’m not supposed to sell just “eggs”. They have to be graded and sized, just like the eggs from the store. We’ll see how well that goes…

For Windows XP users, here’s a fantastic guide to tweaking your system. This is better written and more thorough than the other tweak guides I’d seen. It even pointed out a built-in Windows XP utility I didn’t even know was there.

Schlake pointed out this fun little cartoon on correct driving practices.

Free food heads up: Today between 11am and 2pm, KFC is giving away snack-size servings of their popcorn chicken. I don’t eat fast food all that much, but I like those popcorn chickens.

Today is World Sauntering Day, so celebrate by going from point X to point Z in an appropriate manner. This day was created by W. T. Rabe at Mackinac Insland, the perfect place for sauntering. Other events Mr. Rabe created include Dancing Cuckoo Week (in January), the Mackinac Island Stone Skipping Tournament (July), and the very popular Unicorn Questing Month of October.

Ahhh! One of my favorite shows on television is BBC’s Coupling. It’s funny and intelligent in a way that put it well above Friends. Now NBC has bought the rights to the show and will set it in LA with American actors. I can’t think of a single instance where we’ve inproved on a BBC show and am having a hard time even thinking of one that held its own. Except for the accents, there was nothing inherently British about the show; NBC would be much better off just airing the original rather than trying to remake it. Although, there’ve only been 15 episodes of the original made so far.

Growing up in Missouri, I listened to a lot of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games on the radio. They were all called by Jack Buck, who passed away yesterday. Since I was fairly isolated in the country, playing basebal with other people was pretty rare, so I had to play my own games with a rubber ball against the side of our shed. The shed was the batsman, and I was the pitcher and fielders. But I wasn’t so much imitating the players (except for Ozzie – trying to do his summersaulting diving catches were just all out fun) as imitating Jack’s play by play. Out loud, even. I thought of him during my own brief stint in radio, though my play by plays of the local parades weren’t near Buck’s quality. He’ll be missed.