Wednesday September 28th, 2005 @ 8:55 PM
Jason opened the package and read the cheap photocopy inside, “you’ve got to read this, Carl,” he said.
I looked at the handwriting, all caps slanting unevenly across the page. It was a promotional flyer from a new band in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It began “Sun Raze take Cheyenne by storm…” We owned a popular nightclub in those days and received several such promo kits every day.
Let’s examine what we can learn from just this much information. What professional band would send a hand written photocopy to be taken seriously? But these guys had an important message: they were conquering geographical territory. So far they had taken Cheyenne. Not lightly either, but “by storm.” Were we to assume that this meant all 50,000 residents of Cheyenne? If not, then how many? Since one could assume that little children and old people were not in this equation, that removes about twenty grand right there. Since this was not a country band, another twenty grand wouldn’t be included. Since they just started up and since they only played in one of two bars that held a capacity of a hundred people or so, we have to assume that out of Cheyenne’s fifty thousand populace, they’d played to maybe two hundred. However, since a new band usually seeds the audience with friends and relatives for about the first six gigs, these two audiences were most likely the same people. So a final tally of maybe one hundred is what we can conclude “taking Cheyenne…” actually meant.
Now what does it mean, “by storm?” I’m guessing we were to assume that the converts were won quickly and powerfully. Since mom and dad, cousins and siblings, neighbors and school friends were already won over before the band even formed, I will give them that the conversion was rather quick.
Now the rest of the promo letter was filled with equally embarrassing self-proclamations: “If you liked Stevie Ray, you’ll love Little Ray Stevenson…his guitar sears like a cutting torch…this band will kick your ass…opened for Jose Flores and the Hot Tamales at the VFW prosthetics fundraiser.”
Here’s one thing you can count on, every band in the country thinks they are better than they are. It forms a weird pattern. When a band starts out they think they are about 1000 times better than they are. They hear their mom and buddies and girlfriends cheering and they thrill to the deafening blast of the amplifiers and they are lofted into psychodelia. In their minds they are Metallica prancing and stomping about the great stage. The longer a band is together, the less blown up this exaggerated view of themselves. First their moms don’t come any more, then their friends, then they go on their first road trip and play to twelve strangers who stand around booing, laughing at them, giving them the finger, and pelting them with ice cubes. At some point they are taken down to the lowest point a musician can get which is thinking they are twice as good as they are. Here they give up, or start getting success. Either way the scale starts back the other way.
If they quit, the more years go by, the better they think they were until they are telling old-timers at the local watering hole that they once took Cheyenne by storm. In their memory, thousands of people were screaming for them at the VFW prosthetics fundraiser, only it has become the opening for BB King when he played the Pavilion.
If, on the other hand, they become successful, their self-view can take them back to 1000 times as good as they are. I think of the sixties British Rock groups who got a hit record, like Herman’s Hermits singing, “I’m Hen-er-ee the eighth I am, Enereeee the eighth, I am I am…”
Their music aside, if the Hermits had even looked one thousand times as good as they did onstage, they still wouldn’t be as cool as James Brown.
Now you fans can do the music world a lot of good by being able to distinguish between a truly good band and a pretender and then cheering or booing accordingly. The main source for musicians’ self-image warp is accolade. It is hard not to think you’re pretty cool when an audience is screaming and clapping and whistling and girls are flashing their breasts. The worst thing you can do when a band sucks is to give them accolade. This means we have to listen to them again. Girls, if you must show your appreciation with breasts, not saying this isn’t a great idea, then save them for those who really deserve the honor. You’ll have those musical cretins out buying bigger amps, smoke machines, and leather pants if you keep that up. Do us all a favor and don’t encourage these yo yo’s with boobage.
I personally think that the kindest thing you can do when you hear a lousy band is to boo, laugh, pelt them with ice cubes, and give them the finger. This way they’ll go get a job at Seven Eleven, find a nice little wife, have a couple of kids, pay their taxes and say their prayers. Society is much stronger this way. They can tell their grandkids about how they opened for Jose Flores and the Hot Tamales and they’ll believe it was fabulous and so will their grandkids and everybody will be happy. If you applaud these guys and show them breasts, they’ll end up in their forties still hauling out their leather pants on weekends playing the VFW and winking at your daughters. Be merciful, kill them when you have the chance.
So how can you tell if a band is bad? Some things are obvious, like horrid tone and bad timing, but I’m going to give you the subtler clues-don’t let them fool you:
1) Their equipment is too nice. If you see amps with no rips, scuffs, or dirt, and drums that gleam and have a bunch of ancillary hardware, and an elaborate lighting system and a P.A. that takes half a day to set up, the band sucks. The two nicest drum kits I ever saw belonged to a lawyer and a teen-ager with rich parents. Both drummers sucked.
Good bands have hauled their equipment around so long that it looks war orphan poor. And they leave most of it at home.
2) They play Mustang Sally without being threatened or cajoled. All good musicians have come to hate that song, most of them at least a dozen years ago. This extends to Sharp Dressed Man and anything by Bob Seger. If you hear them playing these songs and you know they are a good band, look closely and you’ll see that they are in extreme pain.
3) You see a middle-aged lady in the audience with a video camera who looks suspiciously like a mother. Mother’s only come out when their kid’s band is starting out, or they are famous. If the band you are watching isn’t famous, well, there you go.
4) The frontman winks at women while doing overt pelvic undulations. If he
does this while sporting a gut, hairy chest, and gold chains or dog tags, oblivious to the giggling girls who are sticking their fingers down their throats, the band not only sucks, they are disgracing mankind.
5) The guitarist is wearing a Stevie Ray Vaughn outfit. Even one item is bad, but if it is the entire regalia then you’re in for a long night. Here’s the clues: a flat brimmed hat with silver spangles around it; the whiskers growing in a V just below the lower lip, not the chin; a silver spangled belt; puffy sleeved shirt with a scarf around the neck; pants tucked into moccasin style boots. Now if the guy actually adds the Mexican serape to this outfit you need to sic your dog pack on him have them drag him around the parking lot for a couple of hours.
6) The time between songs is longer than the songs. When a band has to use this time to light up cigarettes, drink beer, confer on what song to play next, ask who starts the piece, and argue with their wife or girlfriend, the band is more amateurish than a sixth grade play about Pilgrims. If they lean into the microphone and start demanding drinks from the bar over the P.A., you know they are a step away from calling Bingo at an Elk’s club in Nebraska.
7) They tape words to songs on the mic stands. Bands that do this couldn’t be more embarrassing if they puked on themselves. Hell, why not just get a karoke machine and a screen?
8) Their sound check takes longer than their gig. Bad bands feel very important walking around sound checking and fussing over things about which they know very little. They take great pride in conferring and discussing with serious looks on their faces. I’ve seen amateur bands sound check the entire day previous to their gig. A good band sound checks the way an old cowpoke rolls his own cigarette with one hand-no fuss, no muss.
9) One or more of the members has his back turned to the audience all night. This is made worse if they fiddle with equipment while they are playing, still worse if they smoke a pipe. This seeming indifference is really insecurity to the point of wetting his pants. It is the opposite of panache and charisma. These bands would be much better off replacing these guys with cardboard cutouts fronting a tape recorder.
10) The band is huddled together like sheep. This is especially bad on a big stage. They do this for security purposes, same as sheep. It is exacerbated if they all wear dark glasses for Ostrich purposes, thinking you can’t see them because they can’t see you. These guys need to take an injection of hormones and have their wives bitch slap them a few times before going on stage. When a guy takes up guitar and starts practicing, perhaps he should practice audience rapport in the mirror at the same time, like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver: “Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?” If you were the guy in junior high who waited for everyone to leave the locker room so you could get undressed, being a stage personality is probably not the job for you.
The last clue I’m going to cover today so you can tell which bands are bad, is going into the club and seeing only twelve people there, booing, laughing, pelting the band with ice, and giving them the finger. This would be number eleven, but who ever heard of eleven points to anything? If you see this kind of rude behavior going on, there is only one appropriate action to take-join them. Remember they are actually doing the band and the world a favor. These are humanitarians in action and you probably need to do something good for a change as well. So give it everything you’ve got: jeering would be nice; heckling and mooning are good; sticking your tongue out and wiggling your fingers in your ears is always a nice touch; you can’t beat a good raspberry. I would recommend calling their mothers nasty names, but remember the lady with the video camera is probably a band mother. So try insulting their dads, even the mom would appreciate that.
Get rid of these guys before they do something injurious, like putting on a concert at the local grade school. One of them is probably the school principal anyway. You owe it to our youth. And if you are a female, please don’t show them breasts. I have a theory that one sincere flashing of breasts negates ten bad things you do to the band. One woman can wipe out a lot of hard work by the fellows.
Carl
Posted by Carl
Monday October 21st, 2002 @ 8:54 PM
“The days come and go and they say nothing, and if you do not use the gifts they bring, they carry them as silently away.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
I memorized that quotation many years ago and have used it countless times and in a great variety of ways ever since, probably in a past TTW, but seldom do I fully appreciate or use the gifts of any given day.
We Americans are a spoiled lot by anybody’s standard. We have come to expect our days to be full of material gifts and we whine over the most trivial of disappointments. That we have a program on television like the Anna Nicole Smith show tells me that our values are reaching a disgusting nadir.
Our children demand expensive electronic games and gadgets and profess to be unable to function in life without them. They have become skilled in laying guilt trips on parents who equate love with material purchases: “Joey’s parents bought him a techno marvel-surround sound-wrap around vision-three dimensional-cyber cloning-virtual reality-warp speed-Satan worshipping-hip hop playing-million gigabyte-video game with its own refrigerator and heat sensing back scratcher, plus–it that will guide him through puberty and do his homework all at the same time whether he’s awake or asleep. Our children’s bedrooms are a snake-pit of extension cords.
I was born the year after World War II ended. The first of the baby boom years. I went to grade school before anyone had a television. I was forced to get my entertainment by playing in the back yard or the City Park and using my imagination. In the winter I actually read books. The library was a place of great joy to me. I don’t want to sound self-righteous. If I had the techno-gadgets available today when I was a boy, I’d have become addicted just as fast. But I fear we are collectively becoming desensitized to the most beautiful gifts life has to offer.
I make my living, meager as it is, performing as a blues music artist. The entertainers at the very top of my chosen genre of music sell only a few thousand records a year with the exception of BB King and one or two others. The hallmark of our music is the ability to be genuine. To instill heart and soul into each note. To allow the listener to feel the emotion and character of the artist. Most music charts revealing top sellers and influential music don’t even list blues music. Record stores allot only a tiny shelf space to blues, some none at all.
The rage these days is techno music where machines synthesize sound and computers measure every beat and note to precision–the antithesis of blues where phrasing and heart play hugely important roles in the end product. It is hard to get a young person today to submit to the discipline of mastering a real instrument. They want thousands of dollars worth of techno turntables and synthesizers and computer cards.
To accompany this synthetic sound are lyrics often obscene, Satanic, murderous, sexist, and certainly vulgar. The other day I drove by a blues club where we play and it was half full at best while just around the corner was a theater where a hip-hop band was playing and it was noisy and overflowing with many young people waiting on the sidewalk hoping for a chance to get in. I have seen this all over the country. Last March in Salt Lake City people were standing outside around the block in freezing temperatures waiting to hear an advertised Satanic cult band while we played to thirty people at a blues club right across the alley.
I read a book one time that said it wasn’t good for the human soul to be surrounded with plastic flowers and fake bricks and zircon jewelry. I believe that principle holds true across the board. Try reading the label on some of the foods you eat, it reads like a chemistry formula. No wonder we have a nation of cancer and clogged arteries. This cancer I’m afraid has invaded our souls.
I could go on to moralize or write a diatribe, but why? Mankind is playing out a Saga in a scope far beyond the call of my tiny voice. What I can do is be thankful and recognize and use the gifts each day brings to me. It is so easy to do just the opposite: to lament my lack of success, to complain about how hard it is to obtain meaningful gigs anymore, to wish that I had a nicer house, a better car, a measure of status in my society.
Blinddog Smokin’ just returned from a little tour of Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Over the long miles I was able to read deeply into several wonderful books with the luxury of nothing else to do. I’d look up into splendid sunrises and sunsets, majestic mountainscapes, passive farm scenes, and billowing Old Testament clouds with their intermittent rays of sun spearing through to the Autumnal earth. I smelled rain on the freshly harvested dirt of Eastern Kansas, and smelled it in another way in the thick forests of Western and Central Arkansas where frogs sang in mighty choruses in the gloam of a stormy twilight.
On the way home we drove all night through the deserts of New Mexico and Arizona where we told stories and laughed until we couldn’t catch our breath. We had spent three days at the King Biscuit Blues Festival along the Mississippi River where a Fall moon rose up out of the swamp trees and crossed the sky over tens of thousands of people sitting on the levy listening to the heartfelt music of the best the Delta land has to offer. We had gone down to the gospel stage and “got the ghost” among hand waving black folk who smiled at us in love and welcome.
Most of all, we had experienced the love and appreciation of our fans. In Cherryvale, Kansas, our greeting included a huge spread of home grilled steaks with all the trimmings. We slept on the floor of a bail bondsman’s office complex and awoke to a hot breakfast he cooked in his kitchen and sent on our way with baskets of fresh fruit and muffins and leftovers. Our memories include standing ovations and warm hugs and handshakes, tears in the eyes of fans who wouldn’t see us for another year, and the sincerest of smiles by those truly glad to see us again.
In McPherson, Kansas, we played to a full house on a Sunday night where people knew they had to get up the next morning to go to work. Again the club owner met us with a feast before we played. We stayed in this little town three days and slept in their houses and ate their food and drove their cars and even got invited to the Movie Theater for free. My hostess took me to her sister’s house to learn how to make pottery and gave me all I could pack into our limited space in the van to take home with me. Her husband painstakingly wrapped every piece so it wouldn’t break. Another lady sent us on our way, each with his own loaf of banana bread. Another spent days creating a collage on canvas of our images as she had seen them over the years in Kansas.
In Oklahoma City Miss Blues got up at 3 A.M., to prepare all day a feast for us before we played that evening. Barbecued beef ribs, roast, beef brisket, three kinds of corn bread, fruit salad, regular salad, sweet potato pie baked with honey instead of sugar. What a blessed soul she is.
When I lament not having much in life compared to my neighbors who drive fancy cars and take vacations to exotic tourist towns, I stop and remember Emerson’s quote and realize I am a man most blessed. I have a loving and devoted wife, four gorgeous kids grown up to be healthy and prosperous adults, two fun and loving step children, my first grandson with another due in December. I still have my parents and my siblings, and I have you fine people who like to read my writings, and many of you let me know that to my deep gratification.
Each day allows me the time to read and write, to engage in fun and creative endeavors, to make music, and to love my fellow man who is in such desperate need of loving in this world of terror and uncertainty. I maintain tremendous good health for a man my age and every day bringing me that gift is a day to be savored.
Blinddog Smokin’ has two fans, one in Chicago, another in Nebraska, who are dying of cancer. A relatively short time ago they both took their health for granted and had plans for old age with their loving mates. Now it appears neither will see that time come to pass. It touches me profoundly to report that both of these human beings wanted a Blinddog Smokin’ song to be played at their funeral, but I suggested that we really don’t have anything fitting.
I played softball for years in Chicago with the one man. We were in our twenties and I remember him so vibrant and energetic and agile. His wife tells me that there were many things they planned to do and put off for another day. They will never get to do those things together; the gift was carried silently away.
The Nebraska fan approached me only this last summer, not knowing anything about his cancer at that time. He and his devoted wife took me aside and gave me a package. It was a beautiful and very expensive sixteen hole chromatic harmonica. It took my breath away. I can’t afford such an instrument. I don’t think they really could either. But there it was with a message of thanks attached for the many hours of enjoyment I had given them in music and in this Tales Told Well column. He named me “The Blues teacher.” I was overcome with surprise and deep gratitude. This was from a man I seldom even saw in our audiences. I had no clue to how grateful this man was for whatever transcendence Blinddog had provided him over the years.
On a business and political level, America doesn’t reward its musicians. We lead a meager and sometimes desperate life with hope as our beacon. But on the grass roots level, America loves its musicians and gives to them a poignant heartfelt appreciation that brings tears to my eyes.
I watch our performances on those special nights when people who know and love us come to let us take them somewhere over the rainbow. It is our job to lift these farmers, mechanics, teachers, businessmen, housewives, truck drivers, etc., above the mundane to a plane of human potential that only the dynamics of inspired music can transcend. They realize whether consciously or subconsciously that they aren’t animals, or machines, or numbers, or anything relegated to anonymity or insignificance. They are human beings with the unique powers of emotion and love, full of wonder and mystery, able to exhilarate and remember. Those days are so special because we are your gift and you are ours. This is my way of not letting you slip silently away, because none of us knows how many days we get on this earth.
Carl
*Blinddog Smokin’ now has a manager, Ronald Chew, an attorney on Wilshire Blvd in the L.A./Hollywood area. He is a very nice man with a big perspective and scope of our potential. He doesn’t think small. He has recently gotten us a headline gig at BB Kings club at the Universal Studios in Hollywood.
*Blinddog Smokin’ will be featured on the cover of Southland Blues Magazine in December. This is the leading Blues publication for Los Angeles and San Diego and should open doors for us. The publisher has become a friend of mine and is very supportive of the band. He is a sincere and hardworking man whose humble and honest demeanor goes contrary to the Hollywood image and gives hope to those of us who want talent and character to win in the end over hyperbole and Machiavellian politics.
*Look for all new Blinddog Smokin’ promotional material to be out soon. We have invested in a top graphic artist, David Vaughan, who loves the band and works as a labor of love as well as money. This will be the most professional and artistic image we have ever portrayed and hopefully will mark the beginning of a new level in our opportunities.
*Jason “12 Fingers” Coomes has had a new custom guitar designed and built by Scott Platz and it will be the subject of its own Tales Told Well if Jason allows me to write about it. It is a mysterious guitar with a lot of mojo inherent in it for certain reasons and it is destined to be the stuff of which legends are made. I doubt you will receive the story of this guitar with indifference. You will love it, hate it, be fascinated or repulsed, but you won’t be indifferent. Jason will be receiving it sometime in the next month.
*Our congratulations to the King Biscuit Blues Festival volunteers in the little Riverboat town of Helena, Arkansas, once again you have made your festival an experience to remember, the best there is. Readers of TTW would do well to consider this experience in years to come. Some things exceed anticipation. Don’t go if you prefer plastic flowers to the real thing. This festival is what the blues is all about.
Posted by Carl
Saturday March 30th, 2002 @ 8:54 PM
I looked out at the audience and a cow looked back at me and mooed. We were setting up on a flat bed truck in the heat of a summer afternoon and the cow was the most attractive female I’d seen since I arrived. It was an Angus with long fluttering eyelashes. Her tale teased coyly as she swatted the flies around her bottom. Leaning on the fence all around this unabashed bovine lovely were about a hundred humans, smoking and spitting tobacco, and encouraging the cow as she chewed cud from a forkful of hay they’d spread around the lot.
In counterpoint to her sonorous moos, the crowd hooted and hollered profanely while they beckoned her to come hither and yon. The cow just stood there until rocks began to pelt her backside. She moved away. An empty Budweiser can hit her between the eyes; she whirled and trotted away. The humans roared with varied intensity depending on where she ended up each time she moved. A man belched mightily and several women around the fence laughed hyena style.
I noticed the ground inside the fence was chalk-lined into many squares. The squares had numbers in them. After about a half-hour of taunting the cow, a man yelled out, “She ain’t a gonna do it, let’s get the chicken.” Soon a fat, frightened, chicken was tossed onto the squares. Unlike the cow, the chicken was lively and ran all about. The crowd pelted the chicken with pebbles and cigarette butts. Everyone laughed and encouraged the chicken. They had forgotten about the cow that now stood still, probably wondering how she had gotten into such a predicament.
Suddenly the Chicken slowed and arched her back a moment and then defecated quickly onto number 37 sending a big bearded guy into a paroxysm of knee slapping and bellowing. The Chicken had done what the cow couldn’t do; she had ended the contest. “You purty thing,” the man cried, “You done shit in my square…” If I remember right, he won about three hundred dollars, and the chicken.
Dark clouds were piling up over the Rocky Mountains to the West and they shimmered with electricity. The happy winner had the chicken under his arm and was showing her to his buddies, bragging about her shitting prowess on his way to be a judge in the women’s flatulence contest. Five, big, burrito-biting, bitches and a microphone-need I say more?
I felt bad for mankind. The only creature with the powers of reasoning, humor, love, compassion, creation and emotion was using these awesome potentialities for scatological fun and games. I became sad when I pondered this event and day being the highlight of the year for many of these people. They had held meetings, made plans, raised funds, and labored over its success. I thought about the enthusiasm they must have shown when they voted to have the great shit-in-the-squares lottery.
We started the music and people came from inside the bar and all around the games area where they had been crunching beer cans into their foreheads, catching a greased pig, and flinging cow turds for prizes. They had a kissing booth with a woman who looked like Howard Cosell smoking a cigar. People paid to watch drunken volunteers kiss her on the lips. Having no dance area, people danced where they wished and between the folding chairs in front of us. The dancing reminded me of the bouncing that toddlers do when they have to pee.
To the west the storm clouds had spilled over the mountains and were spreading across the horizon, close enough now for me to spot miniature zigzags darting out of them. A low rumbling threatened from within the black interior. The sun’s descent met the billowing whorls below and suddenly glowed brilliant red, the atmosphere magnifying its size and intensity. The moving sky became a harbinger of the apocalypse. I expected to see the demons from the Lost Ark movie shooting out of the swirling clouds. No one paid attention to the weather, the collective mentality wallowing in alcoholic stupor.
The late afternoon became very dark although turquoise skies remained in the east, lightening streaked repeatedly and pervasively in the approaching clouds followed by fantastic claps of thunder. Often many streaks of lightning would criss-cross against the black backdrop and thunder would arrive from all over in surround sound. The cow mooed nervously and a flea-bitten dog barked then hid under a pick-up truck. We started playing “The House of the Rising Sun.” Raindrops began to puff the dirt and I could smell the rain in the dust.
The fresh rain produced a lot of odors: gasoline from a spill just ahead of our flatbed, wet hay from the pile brought for the cow, freshly cut grass from across the street, the red end of a cigar absorbing the moisture, the coat of a mangy dog, rubber from an electrical short, hot summer asphalt soaking up wetness, rain pelted barbecue briquettes, and sage brought in on the wind from the prairie beyond.
When Jason went into that great solo you all know him for in this particular song, the heavens let loose their fury. The sky had become so dark that the stagehand had turned on the floodlights producing a spectacular water dance of blue, red, yellow, and purple. The thunder no longer followed the lightning, but now accompanied the jagged displays in mighty crashes one after another and simultaneously as well.
Jason Coomes lives to solo. Everything else in life is waiting. This is his purpose on earth and he treasures the moment with the passion of parting lovers. To say he is in a zone is to make tawdry the complete isolation of which he is capable. His focus transcends concentration into a spiritual centering that at this particular time had me impaled in wonderment.
Rather than flee the storm he strode out to become part of it. He lifted his guitar away from his body and to the turbulence above. He played with a fury matched only by the galvanization of the atmosphere. He didn’t curse the gods for their rage, he joined them. He saw the powers of the universe as a mighty orchestra come to elevate his solo in omnipotent power and ineffable beauty.
The wind tore through his long yellow hair and it flew like a battalion banner in the charge. Lighting burst about us illuminating the sky like titanic strobe lights, and wrote its own crackling, tearing, sub-melody to Jason’s solo. The tubes of his two puissant amplifiers glowed orange as he wrenched the volume level to compete with the elements. Chuck sat transfixed by the spectacle ahead of him, knowing that to stop and break the spell would be sacrilegious, a violation of everything Jason held holy and sacrosanct. Andy was stoic. Somehow nothing mattered but the transcendence. Equipment could be replaced, but never the moment, never the memory, never that rare glimpse of paradise.
I’ll never forget colors from the flood lights dancing fiendishly in the blurring rain against the alternating black and brilliance of the coruscating heavens with Jason in their midst, giving his very soul to the elements and the powers beyond-playing the solo of the gods.
The solo ended. We stopped. I looked out at the audience. No one was there. Of course they had retreated inside to safety and security, to cigarettes and beer, to inane jokes and meaningless laughter. They had missed it. A singular occurrence as rare as a magic unicorn, as precious to human potential as the first breath of a newborn.
I have seen many bands in my lifetime play outside and encounter the elements. Invariably they retreat to break time and a little smoke or booze. I may go the rest of my life and not see an orchestra like Jason and the gods. It was a thing to behold. It restored my faith in the potential of mankind. It was an escape to utopia, Valhalla, the Elysian Fields. It’s what separates we humans from the cow and the chicken-and the gulf is wide.
Carl
Posted by Carl