| I was home for the day to celebrate my mom's birthday and my brother's birthday. We went to dinner and then had dessert and what-not at my brother's amazingly comfortable and welcoming futuristic hobbit-hole. As always happens when I visit the family, I learned many things. Technical things, philosophical things, historic things, and much more.
On my ride home, with my head slightly buzzing with new thoughts, I listened to an old highschool album, an old soundtrack to my highschool town's windy roads. The album was "Ha Ha Ha" by Ultravox. Nobody knows it. Just me and my brothers and a few friends.
Back in the day, that album resonated most with myself and two of my friends who were both named Jim. Is your name Jim? Well, then you might like this album, Jim. Or, well then, you might want to stay away, Beatrice.
I think that I have written about driving from Andover to Northampton before. I've made the ride exactly one zillion times. I know it. I know its thirds. It's a trip of thirds, marked in half hour segments. The first third gets you to Route 2. The second third gets you to Route 202. The third third gets you to the driveway.
So, Ultravox had a couple of wonderful albums at the beginning of their career. I think "Ha HA HA" was their second. It's a rough squelching recording that mixes punk with pop with new wave with psychedelic rock. Parts of it hurt your ears. It's incredibly hard to introduce people to this album.
But I love it.
The ride was rainy and the road was steaming and the headlights had halos. (Do 75% of people really believe in angels?) The air pressure kept changing as the car went over the small mountain ranges. My perpetually stuffed-up head is very sensitive to changes in air pressure. I even have trouble spending more than a few minutes in the Target at the Holyoke Mall. (Maybe I should pursue a career as a human barometer. I could travel the world quantifying the comfort level of indoor environments. Surely, some of the world's ritziest hotels and spas must need someone to alert them to any improper pressures.) Some people have a nose for wine. I have an ear for barometrics.
On a different front, another local eatery in Northampton, I am told, has changed their menu to leave off the phrase "french" fries - their website doesn't seem to work, so I can't verify it, but I trust my friend. Well, that's another place to scratch off my potential dining list. The first is the Pioneer Food Factory which boasts both Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast. I wrote about them before on my Eye On Northampton and even traded a few emails with the owner about the symantic disgrace. I won't get into it here agin, but I did consider setting up a website listing restaurants in YOUR area that continue to disply their ethnocentrism through this pointless atrocity of besmirching the name of one of my all-time-favorite foods. Do you think that such a website would be worth-while? What would it be called?
Anyway, the Ultravox album "Ha Ha Ha' is from 1977 and one of it's most memorable choruses goes, "I can feel the fear in the western world. I can feel the fear in the western world. I can feel the fear in the western, the western wooooooorrrrld!"
2 comments:
You WILL tell us the name of the new freedom-fry offender, won't you?
I think restaurants should start calling them pommes frites. Go all the way with the Frenchiness.
Ha, Nate, I tried to get that URL a few months ago, too. Somebody got there first.
Debl, I actually thought that I wrote which restaurant it was. Weird. It's Webster's Fish Hook on Damon Rd. I used to go there all the time for about a month.
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