Whoever invented eggnog....

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

The Christmas season just wouldn't be the same without that most seasonal of seasonal drinks, eggnog.  Its a drink that you just can't get away with any other time.  Many drinks have time and place, but largely you can break the rules.  You know, a beer at noon rather than 5 or a nice spicy bloody mary in the evening instead of late saturday morning.  But not eggnog.  This fine concoction can really only be consumed during the holidays. Now before I get along any further let me clarify what I mean when I'm talking about eggnog.  I'm referring to eggnog and rum or bourbon with a touch of nutmeg.  Don't get me wrong, I'm all for having some unleaded eggnog, but when I'm talking about the decadence that is eggnog, it really must include a shot of liquor.

Really, eggnog is about as decadent as a drink gets so it's perfect for the holidays while you're stuffing yourself with other equally decadent foods.  Also, it just fits the season. the weather is cold (or at least cool where I live) and you just want to have something that has some substance to it.  I have a hard time imagining sipping an eggnog on the back porch in July.  That's just asking for trouble.
No, eggnog is not a drink for any other time.  It's a rarefied drink for a magical time.

This year, today in fact, I went to the grocery store to get some ingredients for another holiday favorite that my wife was preparing, Chex Mix.  As I was leaving I realized I hadn't gotten any eggnog yet this year, so I decided to add it to the list.  I went out of my way to go to a slightly nicer market because this year I decided that I wasn't going to get your average Alberstons brand eggnog.  I was hoping to find something more premium and hopefully local.   Once I arrived at the dairy section, I was happy to see that my strategy was to bear fruit and I picked up a bottle of Broguiere's Dairy Eggnog.  Here's a picture of it courtesy of my beautiful and much more photographically talented wife Denise.  Its right in front of the Christmas tree we put up yesterday which, as a side note, is the first Christmas tree that I've purchased that I didn't have buyers remorse with. 

Once I got it home (yes, I did remember the other ingredients) and after dinner, I set out to document my first eggnog of the year.  The first step was to collect all the ingredients.  Fortunately, eggnog is as simple as it is decadent.  The ingredients are simply eggnog, a shot of bourbon and some nutmeg. Here you can see all but the nutmeg prior to mixing. 

Now, as I touched on above, it is not strictly necessary to add bourbon or rum to your eggnog.  It's a fine drink without it, but it just doesn't achieve its full potential without a slug of firewater.
Next up was the mixing. 

I really just wanted an action shot here, but it is important to note that mixing your eggnog does require some care.  Well, not so much care as thoroughness.  Unless you want to have your first sips be almost entirely liquor, you really need to stir the drink well to get it fully mixed in.  The final step is to garnish the top with a little nutmeg.  Make sure this is after the stir.  You want the nutmeg on top of the drink when you first sip it so that you get the aroma as well as the flavor of it.  Finally, it never hurts to add another Christmas treat as a side to your eggnog experience.  In this case, it was the aformentioned Chex Mix.

How was it you ask? Well, I'm still drinking it as I write this, but it's pretty fantastic.  I'm very glad that i went to the trouble to get a premium eggnog, because this particular brand is a treat.  It's thick and creamy and sweet, but not too sweet like some of the cheaper brands.  The thickness of this eggnog makes it particularly good as a mixer with the bourbon as well.  The liquor doesn't thin it out like it would with a lower quality eggnog.  It tastes a lot fresher as well, which makes sense considering the dairy is something like 20 miles from my house.  Eggnog, like most foods is best when its local.  Well maybe I should caveat that statement by saying local eggnog is best if you don't live somewhere really hot. 
In any case, my eggnog purchase this year was a success, and the best thing about this first glass of   'nog is that I have a full bottle of it left.  I'll dole these out carefully over the course of the next couple of weeks and savor them all because it'll be a full year before I'll be able to enjoy it again. 

My favorite meal of the year.

First off, I’ve been remiss with my posting these last couple weeks.  The reason?  Well, I’ve been busy, but its been the kind of busy that no one would be interested in, so I didn’t have anything fun to talk about. 

But today?  Today I thought I’d talk about my favorite meal of the year, Thanksgiving.  I know, it’s not actually Thanksgiving today, but I was too busy stuffing myself and enjoying the day to do any blogging.  I’m sure you all can relate.  In any case, Thanksgiving is my favorite meal of the year.  There are, of course other great meals of the year.  Christmas, Easter, 4^th of July, but of all these holiday meals, Thanksgiving not only gives us some of the best traditional holiday foods, but the holiday itself is built around celebrating the things we are thankful for and uses a feast as the symbol of it.  We celebrate the things that make our lives good by indulging in a giant expression of our fortune….

…And we do it with some incredibly yummy food.  This my wife and I hosted the turkeyday feast.  We went with the traditional food selection.  Turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, green bean casserole, home-made cranberry sauce and dinner rolls.  All of it was fantastic.  This year, my wife Denise made a sweet potato casserole with a pecan crumble top that was really great.  It was more like a desert than a side dish.  Man, I could have filled my plate with just that.  But really, how do you choose just one thing out of a selection of so many good things, so my plate was filled with healthy samples of everything.  Another beauty of Thanksgiving is the leftovers.  We have a ridiculous amount of food left over this year, and I’m really happy about that.  I love eating turkey for a week after the holiday.  This year, we’re going to make turkey soup for the first time, and I can’t wait. 

As I mentioned above, the holiday is about giving our thanks for those things in life that we are fortunate to have.  I can’t comment on Thanksgiving without listing some of those things that I am thankful for.

·         My beautiful wife who makes everything about my life better

·         My incredible little son Felix who is the most amazing little boy.  Its hard to express how much I love him

·         My family, who are always there for us and love us no matter what

·         My far away friends who despite the many miles between us, are still some of the people I’m closest to.

·         My CA friends who have been so welcoming of me and all around great people

·         My job, which gives me the ability to provide for my family and does so without being the terrible drudgery      that some people have to suffer through

·    My luck for being born in a country with such an astounding amount of wealth and opportunity

     My fortune at being born to a family that was able to provide me with stability, education, and love

I’ve probably missed something I should have included, but that’s at least a decent list to start with. 

Before I sign off so I can finish watching the Husker game (GO BIG RED), I feel that I should remember those that aren’t as fortunate as I am.  We’re a pretty fortunate bunch here in America.  Our standard of living is far better than that of the vast majority of the world, and yet even here, we see poverty and hunger.  With that in mind, I hope that all of you will remember those that don’t have much or that are suffering somehow  and do what you can to help alleviate some of the suffering in the world.  Here are some of my favorites

MercyCorps

United Way

Heifer International

St Jude's Children's Hospital

FREE BEER..................Reviews!

One of the reasons I started this blog was to do some beer reviews and discussions.  So today, I decided to author the first of those reviews.  Now I know not all of you are beer fans, but I hope that those that aren’t will be able to get something out of this post because it’s not just a review of a particular beer.  I’ll provide some description of the type of beer I’m reviewing as well. 

An important thing to note before I continue.   I love good craft brew beer, but I’m not really a beer snob.  I’ll tell you what I like about a beer, and be pretty simple about it.  I’ll leave the really detailed analyses to the people over at Beer Advocate.

Beer, like its snootier cousin wine (I kid, winos, I kid), has a long and storied history.  In fact, its likely that beer is the oldest alcoholic beverage. Some scholars believe it was being brewed as early as 9500 BC.  There is a dizzying array of beers to be tried, and I could probably spend the next few years doing daily beer reviews and not cover the variety that’s out there.  For now though, I’ll limit myself to beer reviews just every once in a while.  It’d probably be detrimental to my health and pocketbook to do this daily. 

With that said, the beer I’ve decided to review today is New Belgium Brewery’s, Mothership Wit.  I’ve been a fan of New Belgium Brewery for some time now.  It probably helps that they’re based out of my adopted home town of Fort Collins, Colorado but they do brew a good beer or two, and this beer is one  of them.

As one might surmise by the name, Mothership Wit, this beer is a wit, or witbeir.  Witbeir’s are from Belgium or the Netherlands, and are brewed with a combination of wheat and barley rather than the traditional, all barley brew.  Wits are a particular type of wheat beer that uses only small amounts of hops in the brewing process.  Hops are the ingredient in beer that gives it the bitter taste.  Wit beers instead have traditionally used spices and other plants to add flavors.   Another feature of witbiers, and a feature common to many wheat beers, is that the yeast hasn’t been filtered out of the final product, so where a Budweiser will be very clear with no particulates in it, a witbeir will be a cloudy straw yellow color. 

Mothership Wit in particular is one of the best domestic bottled wheat beers I’ve had.  I qualify that with “bottled” because I’ve generally found that the best wheat beers I’ve had have been out of kegs, but there are some Belgian styles like this witbeir that keep their character in bottles.  Now, to be truthful, I’m not certain the reason I think kegged wheats taste better is because of the process, rather my suspicion is simply that the wheat beer you get from a keg is likely to be fresher than those in bottles. 

So, what does it taste like?  Well, like wine, one should include all the taste factors in the review, so I’ll start with the aroma.  Mothership has a spicy coriander, orange, and wheat smell with a hint of yeast.  Now some people might not like the yeast aroma, but I love it.  It makes me think of fresh bread baking.  The beer has a really light mouth feel.  By that I mean that it is crisp and clean.  It isn’t thick and cloying at all.  Now, the taste.  Like most wheat beers, the use of malted wheat in place of some of the malted barley gives the beer a very distinct, flavor.  The wheat flavor is unmistakable and one of the first things you notice.  The second thing you notice is the sourness of the beer.  Many wheat beers have a sour character which melds well with the spices used in the beer.  As I mentioned above, there are very few hops in a witbeir, and this beer is no different.  I’m not even sure I can detect any hops at all in the flavor profile though that doesn’t mean NBB didn’t use any, I just might not have the palate for detecting it.   The final component of the flavor is the yeast.  It is far more prevalent in the flavor than it is in the aroma.  The yeast flavor of the beer is really the only component that takes away any of the crispness of the beer, which I don’t find to be a problem at all. 

Overall, I think this is a pretty good beer.  It’s not the best wit I’ve tasted, but it is the best I’ve had out of a bottle (and not from Belgium).  Wheat beers are really fantastic for summertime drinking.  They are very refreshing, and have relatively low alcohol content (4-5%) so they make a great BBQ beer.  This beer fits that profile very well, and when I don’t want to shell out the clams for some imported Belgian wits, its nice to know I can go to this beer as a good standby. 

I miss autumn

The following stanza from and Emily Dickinson poem about fall really sums up my feelings on the season nicely.  Fall is my favorite season (with spring close behind).

Besides the autumn poets sing,

A few prosaic days

A little this side of the snow

And that side of the haze

-Emily Dickinson

I lived the vast majority of my life in places that have all four seasons.  True, some were longer than others, like winter in Nebraska always seemed to be, but the bottom line is that there were (and are) four seasons.  Now that I live in southern California, there really aren’t four seasons.  My wife jokes that we have 3 seasons; Hot season, Fire season, and Mudslide season.  Even this abbreviated and oddly descriptive synopsis of seasons here masks the fact that in reality, SoCal has 2 seasons.  Summer and pre-Summer.  I mean really, when it rarely gets below 60 degrees and the sun shines for 355 days per year, can you really say you don’t live in permanent summer?

This brings up a sidebar thought.  I’ve always found it funny that right around May I always see an increase in advertisements touting the return of summer and bbq season.  It’s never not bbq season in LA, unless you count days where you might get heat stroke doing it, and that clearly counts as a summer day in most people’s book.  Sidebar complete

So what brought me to missing the fall actually was a change in the weather here that reminds me of fall.  We’ve had a relatively mild summer, but we did have a string of higher temps including a bunch of 90+degree days going into October.  It’s par for the course here and it drives me crazy because October is fall, not summer (dammit!) and all I want is for it to cool down.  Fortunately, last week we saw a fairly dramatic cool down, and last Saturday, we woke up and it was actually chilly.  Denise looked at the temp and it was 39 degrees.  That’s practically Absolute Zero for the natives around here, but in most anyone’s book, it would be considered a chilly low for the day.  The day was mostly sunny, and later on it warmed up into the 60’s.  It was really a classic fall day. 

That got me to thinking of how much I enjoy fall.  Going back to Dickinson above, I like fall because it’s a fleeting time of perfection between the drudgery of the hot summer and a long, isolating winter.  You get this handful of just PERFECT days where the temperature is warm enough to be in shorts during the day and cools down enough at night for you to put an extra blanket on the bed and sleep in on Saturday morning.  Then there’s the autumn harvest going on, and anyone who’s lived in an agricultural area can relate to all the activity that surrounds it.  Even in SoCal, you can get a feel for that when you go up in the mountains to places like Oak Glen where there are apple orchards and pumpkin patches to enjoy. 

Fall is also a motivating time, to me at least.  Because you only have so many perfect days left, you really want to get quality time in outside.  I’m far more inclined to get out on the trails in the fall because it won’t be long before you can’t get on them.  Of course then there’s skiing, but that’s another subject all together. 

This time of year, I’m jealous of my friends that are able to enjoy fall.  This year some of them are even enjoying an early winter (some might not say they’re enjoying it, but to each their own).  I really miss those few perfect fall days where the air is crisp and clear.  Where there’s a hint of winter in the air and the feeling that you need to get things done before old man winter makes it impossible.  Even though it’s hard to complain when you live in a place where you’ll never really be too cold, I miss all these things about fall, and I look forward to when I’m able to enjoy it again.  Maybe then I’ll just make trips back to SoCal when it’s February and -20 degrees.  

The N is for Nowledge!

Today, a defense of my favorite football team and the university from which it comes!  It’s unapologetic fandom at work, but I’ve been provoked. 

Having lived in Nebraska from age 0 to 15, I have a strong connection to the state.  Part of that connection to Nebraska is a passion for Cornhusker football.  I’m a fan and I do my best to watch all the games I can.

Being a Nebraskan and Husker fan does come with some challenges however.  As a Nebraskan, I have to weather all the comments about how terrible a state it is because the commenter has only travelled  I-80 (never mind the remaining 80% of the state), or how horrible it must have been to live on the flat plains, etc.  In any case you get my point.  I’ll talk about Nebraska the State hating some other day.  For now I want to address Nebraska the Cornhuskers haters.

It should be noted here that this post stems from some comments I saw about the Huskers and the University of Nebraska on a college football forum/blog a few days ago. I know, I shouldn’t be worrying about internet arguments but in my defense, I didn’t feed the trolls at the time.  I’ve elected to gather some facts and post here instead thus avoiding the inevitable flamewar that would erupt. 

 The essential argument was “well sure Nebraska is good at football, they recruit a bunch of big dumb hicks who are good at football but nothing else. I mean none of these kids are actually required to graduate from college after all.” 

Well, let me lay out a stat here that will blow that assertion away.  The University of Nebraska has produced more Academic All American’s from its football program than any other university in Division 1.

ANY OTHER UNIVERSITY. 

This includes all those big fancy-pants schools like Notre Dame, Ohio State, USC, and Stanford.  What makes this even more impressive is that the closest contender is Notre Dame with 51 AAA’s (avoiding a joke here).  Nebraska has produced 95. 

Another impressive cut of this statistic is that during Tom Osborne’s coaching career, UNL produced 65 AAA’s.  So, Tom Osborne’s program produced more football AAA’s than any other university has done in their entire history. 

Now, I’ve made this argument with people before, and their first response is always, well yeah, but its only the 2^nd and 3^rd string guys that get this.  To this I respond with another stat.  Of those 95 AAA awards, 66 of them were awarded to starting players.  So UNL not only blows away all other schools, but AAA awards to starters account for 2/3rds of the total awards, and like Osborne’s record, is greater than any other university has produced in total. 

Finally, a response to the next obvious objection, “But Nebraska’s overall academics suck and it’s easy to get the required grades for AAA at a bad university.”  Not true of Nebraska.  UNL ranked 101 in the US News College Rankings for 2012.  This is among almost 1400 ranked universities putting UNL squarely in the top 10% according to US News.  It’s pretty clear that the Nebraska football program has not abandoned academics.

So to those people out there posting on the internet, and those closer to home, say what you will about Nebraska football, but at least hand me an argument that has some teeth.  I mean it’s sports, we’re fans, and there’s going to be some argument about who’s the best, but don’t come to me with “the N is for Nowledge”.  The only thing that proves to me is that you can’t spell.  

MTB'ing the San Gabriel valley

or, getting in a good, cold-belly ride.

Not so long ago a good friend of mine authored a Facebook post where he said something to the effect of "You know your ride has been good when your belly fat is cold."  For the record, I don't know exactly why your belly gets cold.  I just assume it's because of less blood flow to that area, but really who cares.

In any case, he's right, and I had one of those rides today.  I've been riding a lot more lately spurred on by my desire to rekindle my love of riding and the fact that I got a spanky new mountain bike.  Well technically it wasn't new, but it was only very lightly used. Here it is, in fact.

The ride I took was over to Bonelli regional park, which surrounds Puddingstone reservoir.  It's a really great ride because its about a 15 mile loop from my house and it includes a good combination of fire roads and singletrack once I'm in the park.  Now truthfully, if I had my preference, I'd spend my entire ride on dirt, but I figure its not worth it to load the bike onto the car when I can just do this simple loop.

This ride is just one of several that I can do either from, or pretty close to my house.  For those who don't already know, I live in San Dimas, right up against the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains.  This is a pretty decent place for riding trails.  Now when I first moved out here, I was NOT enthused about my mountain biking options because I was so spoiled living in Colorado.  To be fair, I didn't have the same immediate access to trails from my home in CO, but I did have access to some fantastic long-ride trails.  Anyhow, with that said, over the last few year's I've managed to find some really good trails around here.  Bonelli park is one of them. 

On today's ride, I was primarily on fire roads.  Here is what things looked like.

The roads were in good condition, and had recently been ridden on a lot as they apparently had a race there not too long ago.  In this particular part of the park, its fairly peaceful because some of the close by freeway noise is absorbed by the trees and low hills. 

This brings up the double-edged sword of riding in this park and one of my biggest complaints about riding in this area.  I'll use more pictures to tell my story.

This view,

becomes this view

by literally turning my body 180 degrees.  Bonelli park is bordered on two sides by major freeways, the 57 and 10.

Brief diversion.  Mentioning the freeways makes me think of another potential post; Californian freeway naming conventions.  More on that at a later date.

Back to the ride.  Like I said, Bonelli is bordered by freeways, and the noise from those freeways carries throughout the park which, to me, is really annoying.  My preference would be to be on dirt trails for my entire ride AND have some peace and quiet while I'm doing it. 

This is only the second time that I've ridden Bonelli since I got my new bike.  Bonelli has some good terrain for testing out the ride too.  Its got some good, simple fireroad descents which give me a chance to open the bike up and dial in my rear suspension a bit.  Prior to riding this bike, I really wanted to have a rear shock, but oh man, I had NO IDEA what I was in for.  The ride is just so much different.  Smoother yes, but the key thing is that I have sooooo much more control.  The bike basically has no rear chatter and it sticks corners like no ones business.

 

The singletrack I rode was also a good test for my other favorite feature;  disc brakes.  I'm not really an aggressive technical rider, and I certainly don't want to bail in a rock garden.  These brakes have really improved my confidence in that sort of terrain.  The bottom line is that I feel that I can get slowed or stopped quick enough to adjust to terrain that I'm just not capable of bombing down without resulting in lacerations and broken bones.  This particular piece of singletrack is roughly 1/2 mile long with lots of rocky spots.  On my hardtail bike, I could ride less than half of it.  Today, I rode 95% of it, and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to navigate the other 5% after a couple more rides (I take things slow). 

Now another thing that was great about today's ride was that I didn't run into anyone.  Building off my earlier ride preferences, my favorite kind of ride is one on all dirt AND no civilization noise, AND no one else on the trail. Now don't get me wrong, I don't mind running into other people on a trail, but crowds are just plain annoying, especially when you consider that it's pretty rude and dangerous for a biker to bomb down a trail with hikers on it. 

This is, without a doubt, the worst part of mountain biking in my area.  There is a trail close by that is really fun.  The problem is that on the weekends it's a madhouse of hikers.  The first time I rode this trail, I did it at 9am on saturday.  I stopped counting the hikers when I reached 125.  It was ridiculous.  So, to get on this trail and have any chance of it not being crowded, you have to do it at night (and some people do.  Not this cat), or in the middle of day, middle of the week.  Its just annoying, but it's just one of the prices to pay around here.  I guess, if I had to silver line that problem, its that the tradeoff is being able to ride basically all year long. 

I'm excited about the new bike and my rekindled enthusiasm for getting on the trails.  It's something that's good for me, and really once you've paid the bike off, it's pretty cheap(cheaper than golf anyhow).  Finally, its always nice to spend time in places like this:

So here's to more cold-belly rides, and having less and less belly to be cold as I get in more rides.

 

"Now somewhere in the black mining hills of Dakota....

"...there lived a young boy named Rocky Raccoon"

These are lyrics that are embedded in my (un)consciousness like no others.  They and all the songs from The Beatles White Album are some of the first that I really learned to appreciate as a child, and were surely influential in my love affair with music.  I would sit in front of my mom's record player and listen to this album over and over again. You do remember a record player right?  The one my mom had was an old 60's model that looked something like this.

It was probably the worst record player ever.  Two underpowered speakers and a stylus with a needle that should have been replaced years before I started listening to it.  Hell, I still have the actual LP and you can hear the havoc that needle wrought on it. It didn't matter though.  This was my music and I didn't care what it came out of.  In fact I largely wouldn't care what my music came out of until I got to college and hit my "stereophile" phase.  A phase my pocketbook is happy to say I grew out of.

I digress.

I bring up the White Album because one of the reasons I decided to write a blog was to talk about music.  As I said a few days ago, I won't always talk about it, but you can be sure it'll show up regularly.  With that in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to have the White Album be the subject of one of my early posts.  As with my childhood, so with my blog I guess. Also, it'd be a crime if a blog named "I get by with a little help..." didn't start off with some Beatles commentary early in its life.

A few weeks ago, I authored a Facebook post discussing how its so rare for me to listen to an album straight through these days, and what a shame it is that I don't.  That began a week of listening to at least one album a day (I almost got 7 in).  I'm glad I did it, and I'm endeavoring to listen to albums more frequently as a result.  Albums can be whole pieces of art and it can really do them a disservice to split them up.  The experience of listening to the piece from start to finish can add a lot of context and texture to the stories that any given track is telling.  Some albums like Pink Floyd's "The Wall", or The Who's "Tommy" or, more recently, Green Day's "American Idiot", are designed from the outset to be whole pieces much like a symphony or opera (man, comparing rock to classical/opera.  I'm gonna get in trouble there...)

Listening to these albums in their entirety also makes me want to talk about the albums.  So, after that long introduction, the thrust of today's post is really just my thoughts about the White Album after listening to it the other day.  For those of you thinking "I hope he doesn't talk about every damn song", rest assured I will not. Just a few. 

The White Album is technically not named the White Album.  Its actually a self-titled album, The Beatles, which was a bit of an oddity since it was their ninth album.  In any case, the solid white album cover eventually cemented its unofficial title as the one everyone uses. 
The album was recorded in 1968 at a time when the Beatles weren't getting along.  The result is that a lot of the work done on the album was not done all at one time with the entire band present.  A lot of people have said that the album isn't consistent because of this.  I'm not sure I agree, but I can see where they're coming from. It has a variety of styles, and no specific theme.  Regardless of the "problems" with the album, it has several of my favorite songs on it.  By the way,  I already posted Blackbird, the other day, so I won't talk about it today.  Maybe some other time.

Lets start with Dear Prudence:


Even if you ignore the pleasantness of the lyrics, "..The sun is up, the sky is blue. It's beautiful and so are you...", the music is just great.  It's mellow, and catchy and just generally enjoyable. This song is one of those standby songs that just makes me feel good. Trivia note.  This song is about Mia Farrow's sister Prudence.  She and the Beatles were both in India studying transcendental meditation at the same time.

I would be completely remiss if I didn't include "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" in this discussion.  Lets listen shall we?



This song has one of my favorite lyrics.
   "I look at the world and I notice it's turning
   While my guitar gently weeps
   With every mistake we must surely be learning
   Still my guitar gently weeps"


To me it speaks to the inevitability of the passing time and the tragedy it brings.  Still it has a positive message that the passing of time provides us with the opportunity to make things better.Also, this song is one of the great Beatles tunes that has a guest artist.  In this case, it's Eric Clapton playing lead guitar.

Yer Blues:
I love the blues, and you really don't get more bluesy, content-wise, than having your tune be about  being so lonely that you want to die. This is classic blues in tone and lyrical content. I love this particular lyric:
   "Black cloud crossed my mind
   Blue mist round my soul
   Feel so suicidal
   Even hate my rock and roll"

I mean, you've gotta be bummed out if you even hate rock and roll  ;)


This song illustrates one of the things that I like about the White Album.  There are so many different types of songs on the album.  This brings me to my final song for the day.

Rocky Raccoon
I couldn't leave off without commenting on the song that titled today's post. Rocky Raccoon is great for a few reasons.  First I love the folksy, cowboyesque style. It's yet another example of them playing around with styles on the White Album.  Secondly, this is a classic storytelling song, and I love story songs.  Third, I adore the honky tonk piano that enters the song after the second verse.  Finally, I love the imagery that the song plants in my mind.  Listen to the lyrics and imagine cowboys and hoedowns and the consequences of a love triangle doomed to violence but ultimately ends in redemption.



So, if you've made it this far, I applaud you.  You that took some time to read my ramblings and listen to some great Beatles tunes.  In this day and age, spending any time actively listening to a song is a bit of an oddity, but I certainly encourage all to do so.  Just don't get yourself in the situation where, like me, your time to listen is because of your 2 hour commute.  Better yet, live close to work and take that extra time you'd spend commuting listening to albums in the comfort of your home.  Preferably with a beer, but more about that at a later date.