Willie Murphy & John Gorka

Posted at 6:00 AM on November 7, 2009 by Dale Connelly (2 Comments)

Tonight on Radio Heartland at 9pm on Minnesota Public Radio News stations, I'll welcome Twin Cities music legend Willie Murphy. Through the years Willie has produced recordings for Bonnie Raitt and John Koerner and has led his bands The Bees and The Angel Headed Hipsters in and out of countless gigs, all while indluging his passions for books, movies and songs. He has a new double-disc set out on the Red House records label - "A Shot of Love in a Time of Need" and "Autobiographical Notes". We'll talk about what you have to give up to spend a lifetime playing music, the voice you hear in the night, and why it's a good idea to get rid of your TV.

In hour two, John Gorka will stop by to play some tunes from his new recording "So Dark You See". On the disc, John combines his new songs with covers of some old favorites.
In the studio, he'll give us a live sample of one of his own songs, play one written by Utah Phillips, share a tune he wrote to go with words by poet William Stafford, and he'll do something he rarely does anywhere in public ... play the banjo.

That's tonight on Radio Heartland on MPR News stations.
The entire program will be heard on our radio heartland stream (radioheartland.org) and on HD radio in the Twin Cities at noon on Sunday and at 6pm on Monday.

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Change Agent

Posted at 6:00 AM on November 6, 2009 by Dale Connelly (30 Comments)

I found the following soggy note pasted to my desk this morning. A hunk of something like seaweed was smeared across the middle, but I was able to make out these words:

Avast, ye spoiled whiners!

I caught wind of yer parley just yesterday on that there blog regardin' the need fer second chances an' how sometimes a fresh start makes a world o' difference.

But in reviewin' th' transcript, It caught me one good eye that nowhere in th' discussion of second careers an' second marriages an' cross-country moves an' new lifestyles an' whatnot, did any of ye landlubbin' gasbags mention the one most obvious point about "change" - that th' very best way to mark th' end of one chapter an' th' beginning of a new chapter is to punctuate it by spendin' a stretch o' time at sea in th' company of a band o jolly pirates!

With them new job loss numbers comin' out today, I expects t' have more candidates than ever fer a once-in-a-lifetime life changin' experience.

A strong dose o' Pirate fellowship is quite effective at demarkin' the barrier between whatever you was doin' before an' whatever you is about to be doin' hence. Pirates has utter disregard fer all old habits an' every kind o' rule whether it be societal, personal or otherwise. Wardrobe, behavior, dietary, sleep-related ... all these here aspects of yer life changes completely when you falls in with pirates. Even a short while spent on board a vessel like our Muskellunge will hit yer "reset" button fer sure!

We is bookin' excursions right now fer winter months in th' southern hemisphere.

Fees is reasonable an' operates on a slidin' scale fer rich an' poor alike - basically you slides over t' us all that you has, an' we takes you on 'til we's had enough or you manages t' escape.

After yer therapeutic pirate experience aboard the Muskellunge, th' world will suddenly seem FULL o' fresh starts an' second chances!

That there's a guarantee!

Capt. Billy

Have you ever taken a trip that was so memorable, you divide your life into "before" and "after" categories?

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Rabbits vs. Rodents

Posted at 6:00 AM on November 5, 2009 by Dale Connelly (26 Comments)

Every day when I get home from work I have to check the basement for bodies.

Autumn is move-in time for the mice. They are persistent and creative, and they love peanut butter a little too much for their own good. I hate setting traps for them but the alternative is even worse, so I am constantly on the look out for signs of mouse settlements and development projects underway.

Maybe that's why it caught my eye that The Walt Disney Corporation is going to build a theme park in China. The deal to create Shanghai Disneyland was 20 years in the making. It represents Disney's unquenchable determination to sell countless numbers of plush Goofy figures and sparkly princess dresses in the world's biggest marketplace.

At the same time, Disney is busy updating Mickey Mouse. A video game called "Epic Mickey" is scheduled for release about a year from now. It will feature the iconic rodent having an adventure in what is described as "a world of paint and thinner", finding his way through a dangerous land populated by little-used or completely discarded Disney characters.

The evil overlord of this virtual kingdom is said to be Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Oswald was Walt Disney's pre-Mickey creation whose ownership rights Disney lost to Universal Studios in 1928. Here's the part that I find so appealing - The Disney Company finally re-gained control of Oswald in 2006 when ESPN (owned by Disney) traded human sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC (owned by Universal).

Traded for a cartoon rabbit. That has to be a very special feeling.

At the time, some people thought the trade was sentimental - trying to bring poor Oswald home. But now we find out it was all so the rabbit could play the heavy to the mouse's hero in a video game. Good thing. Otherwise Mickey would be left trying to defeat Al Michaels.

And all these billions of dollars are shifting around because back in 1928, Disney lost Oswald the Rabbit to Universal and was forced to start his cartoon enterprise over from scratch by putting pants on a mouse. Sometimes your second try is better than your first.

What worked out better for you the second time around?

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Rumor Has It

Posted at 5:55 AM on November 4, 2009 by Dale Connelly (21 Comments)

Radio Heartland has tickets for you to see Tim Ericksen at the Cedar Cultural Center this coming Thursday night! We'll close off entries at 1pm today.

Enter the drawing.
Obey the rules.
Good luck!

I read an article yesterday about gossip.

See, there was this study to find out how people in groups talked about other people behind their backs.

I didn't actually SEE any of the people who were part of this research project and I didn't HEAR what they said, BUT ... the word is ... (and I have this on good authority) ... this group that "allowed" themselves to be "studied" (like they didn't enjoy the attention) became more and more savage about people the longer the conversation lasted. YES! Incredible!

And the only thing that would stop it from being a total trash-fest was if some member of the group was brave enough to make a positive comment about the person in question EARLY in the conversation. Otherwise, it was pure carnage. Can you believe it? Who do these people think they are? God?

And if you're being dismantled by a group of your so-called "friends" and you don't get a defender after the first few salvos, you're toast. Because once negative comments start to build, the social pressure to conform becomes incredible and even people who really LIKE you will participate in your character assassination to protect THEMSELVES from RIDICULE!

Did you ever hear of anything so OUTRAGEOUS?

But you know what? As soon as I heard there was a study about gossip and this group was in it, I KNEW it was going to go badly. They are SO ...
Well ... you know how people are.

I'm not saying any of YOU were part of the group, but have you ever knowingly participated in a study of human behavior?

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Clueless Pride!

Posted at 6:00 AM on November 3, 2009 by Dale Connelly (21 Comments)

Radio Heartland has tickets for you to see Tim Ericksen at the Cedar Cultural Center this coming Thursday night! We'll close off entries at 1pm on Wednesday.

Enter the drawing.
Obey the rules.
Good luck!

Here's a special election day message for all of us, from the Hon. Congressman Loomis Beechly:

Dear Free Americans,

Today is Election Day, which makes it a great day for democracy.

Today our voices will be heard in contests for mayor, school board, city council and many other closely fought races waged between people we've never heard of - strangers vying for obscure public offices that often don't get the attention they deserve.

So speak up!
Even if what you have to say is "I don't know what this is about and I haven't a clue what I'm doing!"

As your Congressman representing Minnesota's 9th district (all the water surface area in the state), I consider myself a staunch ally and a passionate advocate for all of our nation's clueless voters. And I don't say that just because so many of them are my most loyal supporters.

Clueless voters are everywhere. They're the voters who don't know who the candidates are or what they stand for, haven't considered the issues, are unaware of the government bodies these candidates want to join, and sometimes they don't even know which city, township, county or state they reside in.

In short, these are my people - the people who will vote for a candidate based on nothing more than his interesting name. And I have one of those. Loomis Beechly is the kind of name that seems to draw your vote with the right combination of seriousness and approachability. It stands out among other, more common names, and that's a great asset when voters don't know anything at all about anyone on the list.

Some say the clueless shouldn't vote, but I say "why the double standard"?

As a member of Congress, I often vote on things I know nothing about. A lot of the time it works out OK anyway. And for those times when it doesn't, there's always another vote coming up that could change things just enough to undo the damage and make it right.

Let's face it, when the only choices are "Yea" and "Nay", you can let a wiemaraner decide and he'll be right about half the time.

So if you're thinking you shouldn't vote today because you don't know anything, I say "vote today BECAUSE you don't know anything." Otherwise, who will represent the uninformed? Their cluelessness elected me the first time, and it keeps electing me again and again.

From where I stand, that's a pretty good outcome.

How do you prepare for election day?
Do you ever guess when filling out a ballot?

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The Comfort of Routine

Posted at 5:59 AM on November 2, 2009 by Dale Connelly (27 Comments)

Welcome to November. And welcome back to Standard Time.

Today we start a new schedule on Radio Heartland. The thing you'll notice first is that we will have programs in the early evening during the weekdays - starting at 6pm today with a re-broadcast of the Saturday night Radio Heartland show that we produce for MPR's News and Information service.

In the first hour, it's a cavalcade of spooky, Halloweeney music for this dark time of year. I made a point not to talk too much about Halloween once I realized the hour would be heard again on November 2nd. You should listen tonight to see if I can convince you that I'm really in the studio. I know I'll be listening. Will I fool myself? We shall see.

By the way, I think we exceeded our 500 urchin estimate for Saturday night - I had to run to the drug store for supplementary candy at about 7:30 pm, boosting our total reserves from 500 to 572. Good thing. We shut off the lights at 9 with a handful of bars remaining.

In the second hour of tonight's inaugural cavalcade of personalized programming, I'll scout around the library for new music. October and early November are a great time for releasing discs - setting the table for holiday gift-giving. Of course this year may be less robust than usual with many people hesitant to spend. But a CD is still a relatively affordable gift, and if you run a record label you have to be an optimist. Especially now. We'll hear some of what the optimists are selling.

Also starting today, we're going to mess with the Dale Connelly Show.

For the past ten and a half months, I've been getting up at 3:30 am to get to the station at 4:30, so I'd have an hour and a half to finish the Trial Balloon Blog, make some coffee and pick some music before moving into the studio for three live hours, starting at 6am.

Now I'm going to try getting an extra hour of rest, arriving at the station at 5:30. I'll let JASPER run the show between 6 and 7 with a few recorded announcements dropped in. That way I can stay at my desk, polishing up the blog, making coffee, picking music, and then moving into the studio at 7 a.m. for two hours of live broadcasting. I'll record some more announcements for JASPER to incorporate between 9 and 11, and then the 11 to 1pm segment will be a re-broadcast of my 7 to 9am live show. Whew!

That's a lot more than you needed (or wanted) to know, but this is the Internet, and there are no secrets.

If everything works as planned, you won't notice much of a difference, except that you have already wasted several precious minutes reading about it here.

Have you ever had to learn a completely new routine?
How did you manage it?

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A Dark NIght Locked In The Library

Posted at 6:06 AM on October 31, 2009 by Dale Connelly (2 Comments)

That actually happened to me once when I was going to college at Southern Illinois University - I stayed too late in the remote stacks and had to call the campus police to come let me out. I could have been trapped in there until dawn with nothing to eat except stale vending machine candy.
Kind of like Halloween.

Tonight on Radio Heartland, 9 to 11 pm on Minnesota Public Radio news stations, I'll scour our music library (with the door ajar) for spooky songs to compliment your Halloween evening. Intentionally creepy efforts from Tom Waits, the Roe Family Singers, The Duhks, The Bills, Louis Armstrong and the Austin Lounge Lizards will be featured.
Add your own screams of agony.

Speaking of agony, record labels are suffering miserably from the economy and the relentless march of technology towards a system of music distribution that is completely online. And yet CD's are still being produced, and we've experienced a wave of them flooding our library in advance of the holiday gift giving season. I'll sample some of the newest music being added to our collection. Recordings from Pieta Brown, Lyle Lovett, The Avett Brothers , Delbert McClinton, Woody Guthrie and The Works Progress Administration (a band, not a government agency) will grace tonight's second hour on Radio Heartland.

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The Halloween Scene

Posted at 5:05 AM on October 30, 2009 by Dale Connelly (33 Comments)

Tomorrow is Halloween and I'll spend the evening hunkered down at home.

Somehow our neighborhood has become a trick-or-treat magnet for the surrounding area - we'll decorate the house on our usual "Eyeball" theme and be prepared for 500 costumed urchins at the door between 6 and 9 pm. This is now standard procedure. Our dog spends every November 1st in an exhaustion-induced half-coma, because after the first hour, "woof, woof" simply doesn't come close to saying all that needs to be said.

Halloween is a young person's festival. When you get to be a certain age you start to feel your mortality and all this joking around about ghosts and crypts and zombies becomes less an entertaining fantasy and more a preview of coming attractions. But I do like seeing the costumes, especially homemade ones that show some creativity.

There was a time when I dressed up for parties. My favorite and most ambitious Halloween costume was "Vince", a sidekick sewn together with old mismatched and worn out clothes that I stuffed with newspaper and secured with a few stitches to a separate set of clothes that I could wear, so when I put the outfit on Vince and I appeared to be Siamese twins.

Vince's face was a gruesome rubber mask stretched over a Styrofoam head that was impaled on a sawed-off broomstick. The broomstick ran down into the middle of Vince's stuffed "body" where my left arm was hidden. By twisting the broomstick I could make his head spin around, and by jiggling the stick Vince's head would bounce up and down atop his frazzled old turtleneck to the great amusement of people nearby.

The two or three Halloween parties that Vince attended happened many years ago. Even though we were attached along the left side, I couldn't keep my eye on him all the time. He must have been doing some things over there caused the invitations to dry up. It's difficult to stay popular when you have to drag around such a creepy appendage.

Of course, Vince probably felt the same way.

What's your best-ever Halloween costume?

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Lemonade Stand

Posted at 4:47 AM on October 29, 2009 by Dale Connelly (19 Comments)

Welcome to the last day of the member drive for Fall '09.
Thanks to everyone who made a contribution in support of Radio Heartland.
Let's finish it up today!

A couple of late posts on yesterday's blog got my attention.

Actually, if Bubby wants to expand his work to cleaning out basements and garages... A friend and I tried to start up a business like that one summer (out on their farm, and we'd run out of canning jars) with this ad in the local rag: "Tired of tripping over all those old jars in your basement? Call Barb and Jan's Canning Jar Removal Service..." Doesn't make nearly as good an acronym as SLAYER, tho' -- or CODGER, TGITH, made me laugh out loud.

Posted by Barbara in Robbinsdale | October 28, 2009 12:20 PM

My thanks also to That Guy In The Hat (TGITH) for CODGER (Cleaning Of Debris and Grunge for Elderly Residents). It's a great acronym, but BAJCJR isn't bad either, Barb. Looks exotic. Turkish, maybe.

And then there was this:

When I was in 4th grade (30+ years ago) my elderly widowed neighbor offered to pay me to rake the leaves in her yard.

She was the "candylady" on our dead-end street, so I didn't think to squabble over the amount. We used to come around and ring the doorbell at the side of her house for a chance to choose a piece of unwrapped sugar-coated jelly candy from the old tin she kept on her fridge.

I spent 2 or 3 days raking the leaves into piles, and even enlisted my mom's help to drag the heaviest piles on a tarp into the woods. When I was done, I got a $5 bill.

A few days after the job was done she called me over to point out that more leaves had fallen since I finished. This was my first (but unfortunately not my last) lesson about the importance of written contracts when doing business--even with people you know.

Years later when I was a young adult I stopped back to talk with her, and she sat me down and had me listen to a personal finance program on public radio.

Thanks for reminding me of Mrs. Abbott, her candy tin, and her radio-listening habits! Here's wishing you all a 4th-grader willing to rake your leaves (perpetually) for $5!

Posted by Flapper Jane in Lindstrom | October 28, 2009 4:08 PM

Thanks for that story, Flapper Jane. I guess Bubby's not so far off the mark after all. So what if she's your kindly old neighbor? Get it in writing.

Every time I hear a futurist say something like ... "Medical science is knocking down the barriers to immortality. The first person who will live to be 150 is already on the planet today!" ... I think of the poor kids who live next door to that medical miracle. They might wind up being locked into their first employment forever. That $5 perpetual leaf raking, garden weeding, plant watering, dog walking job can never end if Mrs. Abbott won't go on to glory.

In a world of immortals, where the brilliant bargains we make as 12 year olds routinely last into our own twilight years, I would still be caddying for Ed Kaufman Jr for 3 dollars a round. Of course Ed would have to spend a lot of time sizing up his next shot while I trudged, wheezing, down the fairway.

What was the first job somebody actually paid you to do?

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Customer Relations Experts

Posted at 5:15 AM on October 28, 2009 by Dale Connelly (25 Comments)

A note arrived yesterday from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, asking for advice on a seasonal small business start-up.

Hey Mr. C.,

Your friend, Bubby Spamden.

Dear Customer,

Thank you for doing business with Spamden Lawn And Yard Environmental Refreshening. SLAYER is your Fall and household chores partner! We'll do a good job if you create the conditions where a good job can be done. That's why we ask everyone to sign our ten point SLAYER Customer Code of Conduct.

1) I will pay promptly in cash and in full before the work starts so my SLAYER crew will have money for lunch and treats to keep their energy up.

2) I will not crab about left over messy-looking stuff that is too small to worry about, like a few stupid leaves left here or there. I will think positive thoughts about the leaves SLAYER DID take, not the ones that got missed.

3) I will not sit in my house peeking out the window at people while they're doing their jobs, acting like I want to catch them at something wrong. Trust is basic to good relationships, and we want to have a good relationship with you (especially if you already paid in advance and you're OK with points 1 and 2).

4) I'm hiring you to clean the yard, not to host a dinner party, so the way you dress is none of my business.

5) Music makes for happy hearts, so I don't care what you listen to if it helps get the job done. I realize that a company called SLAYER will have to rock out pretty much constantly while on the job, in order to keep its reputation intact.

6) When it comes to word of mouth advertising and talking to my friends about SLAYER, I believe in the saying, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all."

7) If I hire you to wash my windows, I will not get all upset by how they look in direct sunlight. The winter sun is so harsh, nobody can make a window look really, really clean. Besides, the wind is dirty and it blows all the time.

8) SLAYER is a green company that handles natural debris. I will not expect SLAYER to clean up unnatural material. For the purposes of this agreement, the droppings of any pet, including little boutique sissy dogs, are considered super-unnatural.

9) I agree to let SLAYER do the work and get on with it. I will not ask a whole bunch of pointless small talk questions about school and stuff, or bore the workers with stories about my hip replacement.

10) SLAYER employees are permitted to use the bathroom inside my house while they are on the job. I won't get all wigged out about them tracking stuff in, and if they look even just a little hungry, I will provide fresh, hot, apple pie.

I told Bubby I thought people in my age group might hesitate to hire a company called SLAYER.

Any other advice for a young entrepreneur?

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