Ontario Empoblog

Day Grocer Reformation Day 2003 with no apologies to Jack London The day grocer keeps company stores open while the company provides a stick-on name tag. The day grocer ensures that store jobs will not be lost forever while the union calls her a scab, a traitor to her God, her country, her family and her class. The day grocer pays taxes and helps the store to do so while the government condemns her and takes her job away. Yet the day grocer is no less important than the stockholder, the union steward, or the bureaucrat. Without her there would be no stores, no jobs, no tax revenues, no firefighters Condemned for working? If she receives nothing else, the day grocer deserves our respect.

Some comments on a few songs. "Nixon Landslide," 21 December 1998, 4:33. The somber mood of this song is derived from Chuck Colson's autobiography BORN AGAIN. Colson visited Nixon on the night of his November 1972 landslide re-election, and was struck by the lack of jubilation exhibited by Nixon. "Football You Bet," 20 October 1999, 4:28. The title came from a comment, oft repeated by a guy at high school. Until today, I never had any idea where the phrase originated, but according to http://www.jumptheshark.com/ , it came from a show called "The San Pedro Beach Bums," which once featured a guest star named Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not that my high school friend referred to Schwarzenegger a lot, but his cover band DID do justice to various Cars and Cheap Trick songs. Perhaps it's appropriate to mention that my song titles often don't have ANYTHING to do with the songs themselves. "Road Array," 8 February 2000, 4:34. Pa...

Translating things from English to another language, then translating them back, is a favorite (favourite) pastime among the inhabitants of the Yahoo! group Silliness and Nonsense . This exercise resulted in the following rendition of an old Men Without Hats lyric: "The troop of four, trying to do it like bandages Western" They don't write lyrics any better than that

When Patti Smith married Fred Smith, did she take her husband's last name, or keep her maiden name?

Why did synthetica start with fake bluegrass sounds? Why not? This is the Ontario Empoblog, or the blog for Ontario Emperor, which has nothing and everything to do with Canada, New Mexico, and Texas, but also California, which is a location in California. It exists in cyberspace, which is also synthetic. The Ontario Empoblog may or may not touch on a variety of subjects, including music, poetry, poker, the supposed familial relationship between Brian Eno and Slim Whitman, the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (1,121 - I checked), various comments about frogs, and the nature of nature.