Why I'll Never Be a True Guitar Hero

As I was treadmilling last night, the Carpenters' song "Goodbye to Love," with its fairly cool guitar solo, came on my MP3Player, and I wondered if that song was available on any o' those interactive gaming systems. I'm thinking not.

(Forget pretending to be John, Paul, George, and Ringo on LSD, let's play Karen on drums or Richard on keyboards! Insert anorexia joke here.)

The song also brought to mind that, when our family bought a brand new 1975 Chevrolet Malibu Classic with its 8-track tape player (no more am radio for us!), my father complained about the racket emanating from it on The Carpenters Greatest Hits tape. That, and "Better off Dead" from Elton John's Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, simply drove him nuts!

We were truly a headbangin' family, in case you you couldn't tell.

"Jobs Loss" Equals Stock Drop (and, no, we don't mean unemployment)

From the NY Times:

The good news:
Steve Jobs isn't dying; he just has a hormone imbalance. (Whew.)

The bad news: "People are spooked by these health reports because he is so important to Apple and is viewed as synonymous with the company by so many people,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/technology/companies/06apple.html?_r=1&hp

The scary news: I'm reading about Steve Jobs' weight loss in the NY Times. Who do we think he is, Oprah?

The money, the weight loss, my disinterest all recall perhaps my favorite cruel, but decidedly smart, one-liner by the once-actually-funny Joan Rivers. In the wake of singer Karen Carpenter's death from anorexia, she cracked:

I'm sorry, I can't feel sorry for anyone who's thin enough to be buried in pleats.

In any case, I guess we can lay to rest (as it were) the old adage, "An Apple a day keeps the doctor..."