JonGorey.com

You may as well know, today's my birthday. Hooray for me! Anyway what's funny is that I had almost as many "Happy Birthday" emails from quasi-spam mailing lists as from actual friends this morning. Check it out: I mean, even "Medianext Cron User" wished me well — just how many mailing lists am I on?  And this doesn't count all the other birthday emails I got two days ago, since I often give a fake birth date when I sign up for stupid stuff.  Anyway, a big thank you to all you real people who've sent kind emails and sweet phone calls my way. I'm grateful to have made it to Larry Bird territory with all of you in my life. (Sorry, getting mushy!)  Since birthdays — and, well, blogs — are ripe opportunities for a little self indulgence, today's WOL Wednesday will be a pop quiz about yours truly. Ready?  1. I'm turning ___ years old today.  2. In college I majored in _____ but grew disillusioned with the industry after watching ____ games.  3...

Today's song — one of only a dozen or so of mine that I'm still happy with, to be honest — takes us back to my scathing indictment of Andrew Jackson . I wrote this song around the time I learned about the Trail of Tears, though I didn't record it until years later. This is a fine time to plug an excellent new American Experience series, called  We Shall Remain , airing this month on WGBH — you can watch the Trail of Tears episode online and get learned! Anyway, on to the chords and lyrics... Ten Thousand Candles © 2005 by Jon Gorey Chords: Am: x02210 Em/B: x22000 C: 032010 F: 133211 G: 320003 Fmaj7: x33210 E7: 022130 G/B: x20003 Intro: Am | Em/B | C | F | Am | Em/B | C | G (Am) Ten thousand (Em/B) candles burn (C) just for a (F) lesson learned (Am) Ten thousand (Em/B) hopes inside of (C) me (G) (Am) I try to (Em/B) see the true (C) like all good (F) people do (Am) They say the (Em/B) truth will set you (C) free (G) (FMaj7) Tonight I (Am) hold t...

I just got a text message from Guinness , inviting me to join — him? it? — for a pint at the Irish Village after work (a block away from my office).  A flurry of questions and thoughts sprang to mind: 1. What, are they reading my mind now? 2. That's pretty ingenious.  3. And yet another example of life in our Crazy New World.  4. In the span of 20 minutes I received happy hour invites from a good friend... and a beer. Granted, my favorite beer, but really just a marketing or brand rep from a giant corporation. I'm not even sure what to make of that, but it's a strange juxtaposition, right? 5. Finally, isn't this a slippery slope? I mean I love Guinness, and I'm typically a big proponent of a trip to the pub, but do people really need that extra nudge to go boozing? What if Johnnie Walker sent someone a text at 3pm on a Tuesday saying, "Hey fella, been a tough day, hasn't it? A smooth glass of blended whiskey would really take the edge off right now. Why d...

Perhaps you've caught on to the fact that I'm trying to move anything of value from my archaic old site onto this shiny (and free, woohoo!) new blog. To that end, I'm going to start posting the lyrics and chords to some of my songs. For this inaugural edition, we'll do one of my old favorites. Streetcorner Song © 1996 by Jon Gorey Chords: G: 320033 D/F#: 200233 C: x320013 Am: x02210 Bm: 224432 Em: 022000 D: x00232 Intro: G D/F# C G (X2) Verse 1: There's a [G] smiling man singing [D/F#] loud as he can On the [C] corner of the [G] street His [G] hands are cold and he's [D/F#] growing old But [C] he still taps his [G] feet. He's [G] playing a song he's [D/F#] known so long That it [C] brings him back in [G] time. He knows [G] some of the words but he's [D/F#] not too sure So [C] he just makes it [G] rhyme. [Am] His eyes have [Em] seen the [Bm] hardest [Em] times [Am] His mother [Em] ran away and [Bm] left him [D] behind [...

Near the end of college — second semester of senior year, the home stretch — I signed up for U.S. History: 1620–1865. I needed the social science credits and I thought, come on, I'm from Boston... I learned all of this in the second grade. This will be a piece of cake! And it was easy... up until John Adams or so. After that — well, how much do you know about the early 1800s? Yeah, that's what I thought. So I had to start "reading the material" and "attending class" and whatnot. I learned some stuff.  My professor was in love with our 7th president, Andrew Jackson. Some people think he's awesome: he was a POW in the Revolutionary War at like age 13, he was a bigshot military hero in the War of 1812; some say he stood for democracy and the common man. Whatever. Andrew Jackson was a first-class dick. There, I said it.  This guy championed Indian removal, most notably forcing 15,000 Cherokee Indians clear across the country to Oklahoma on what became k...

I'm an organ donor myself, and you really have to respect what this guy and his family agreed to do (if you're too lazy to read the article, a man who died during open-heart surgery donated his face — his face ! — to someone who was badly disfigured in an accident, marking the second-ever face transplant).  But the whole thing just makes me really, really squeamish. I'm not what you'd call "ER-ready." When I was a kid, I fainted on the kitchen floor after losing a tooth and seeing my own blood.  So... the idea of a doctor surgically lifting off a whole face , and sewing it onto someone else, with like, yuck!,  the goopy, bloody tissue and stuff... ooof. I'm feeling a little sick. There are also the philosophical questions this begs — like, now this man's widow might actually see her late husband walking around town (or at least his face)... I mean, that's kind of freaky, right? To be honest, it's an interesting kind of extended mortality.  It ...

Like many of you out there, my wife loves cold pizza. I, however, do not. I don't know what my deal is; perhaps my years of suckling at the school cafeteria's teat (it was just as gross as it sounds) left me conditioned to eat a hot lunch each day. But anyway, when we have pizza leftovers for lunch, she's all set, while I'm at the mercy of whatever heat source I can find.  At work, that amounts to a microwave, which in turn amounts to a hot sludge of chewy dough and tomato sauce for lunch. (For the record I still prefer said sludge to cold pizza.) So, here's my question: what's with no toaster ovens? There are like 900 people here! My last workplace didn't have them either. I mean, I get that they're a bit of a fire hazard; I understand why we couldn't keep them in our dorm rooms at school. (Odds of the oft-inebriated populace of freezing-cold Syracuse, NY, trying to stuff socks, hats, limbs, etc. inside their toaster ovens? Alarmingly high.)  But co...

God, I hate acronyms. Is there anything more soul-sucking than trying to decipher a line of acronym-laden buzzword jargon or a teenager's text message?  Working in public broadcasting certainly involves using an unfortunate amount of acronyms  — hell, the whole industry begins at TV and FM — but it still (gratefully) doesn't compare to my days in textbook publishing.  {{{shudder}}} Which brings us to our new theme day. WOL is a publishing speak for a write-on line, like you'd have in a classroom workbook: Jane goes to the ____.  So from now on Wednesdays will be Write-On Line Day . We'll have quizzes, and mad libs, and lots of fun.  Hooray beer!   Here's your first exercise. Complete these sentences from today's Boston.com article about Phish's upcoming show at Fenway: 1. The Green Monster is getting ______.  a) higher    b) scaly     c) greener 2. Phish announced a May 31 concert at Fenway Park on Monday, one of a handful of shows the Vermont ______ added ...

...as sung to the A-Team theme song : O-pening Day!  Oh-pen-ing Day O-pen- ing Day!  Oh-peh-nee-ing Day (repeat ad nauseam) So, yeah, I get that in my head about once a year. But this year, it's happened twice, since the opener was rained out yesterday. Honestly, can you imagine the caliber of politicking and/or bribery that takes place behind the scenes at MLB to allow a season opener in Boston (or any other cold-weather city)? Especially when we're playing TAMPA! It's not like they had to pick the warmer option between Boston and Cleveland. They could have played yesterday's game, and today's, in Florida — indoors nonetheless! Instead, Josh Beckett will be pitching through full body numbness and the Fenway Faithful will be drinking themselves into, or perhaps out of, hypothermia.  But in any event... baseball's back, and therefore so is spring (whether it's obvious or not), and for the second time in three days I find myself trying not to throw up from ...

Friday night we attended a classical choral concert, drank wine in the basement of a Back Bay church, and rediscovered the joy of Uno's — or, more specifically, their draft beer special. You see, a couple of years ago, fed up with the $5-and-up beer policy of Back Bay establishments, we started frequenting Uno's on Friday nights — where they had $2 Killian's drafts (22 oz. at that) and a half-price appetizer menu. The appetizers grew old real quickly (think lots of fried cheese), but there was something special about spending an entire night drinking downtown, and finally receiving the bill.... for $12. Word got out and a bunch of us started going to Uno's nearly every week for months, without shame. Eventually, $2 turned into $2.50, Killian's turned into Michelob, and that was that. But it was quite a run; I have to give that damned chain restaurant its props. It's not a half bad bar! And so in desperation on Friday night, seeking respite for a dozen thirsty ...

So tomorrow I'm attending a tiling workshop at the Boston Building Materials Co-op . (I like taking classes and pretending I'm handy, so it's a good fit for me.) I'm gonna learn how to tile the hell out of our ugly kitchen — you'll see. We're planning a low-budget overhaul (I'd like to take a moment to thank our official sponsor, the Federal Housing Tax Credit for First-Time Home Buyers ), and it's looking like it may be even lower budget than initially planned, since here at work we're being forced to take an unpaid week off sometime this summer.  You know what that means, right?  Meet our new contractor!  (Gulp.) What do you think — it's a small kitchen, only 10' x 10' including doorways and windows... can we strip it down, replace all our cabinets and countertops, install a dishwasher, paint the walls, and tile the floor for $3,000–4,000? I guess we'll find out!

Henceforth (! I just used henceforth, awesome), Thursday is going to be Top Five Day. Because by this point in the week, I'm pretty much scattered and need some structure to rein in my mind's wanderings. Today's Top Five is about bridges. Not the cutesy covered kind in N.H., or the engineering marvels made of steel and cable, but song bridges. (Quick lesson, if you don't give much thought to music: a bridge is a departure from the song structure, a little something to shake things up about mid-to-three-quarters of the way into a song; not every song has one.) Top Five Best Bridges (ha, better than stupid Nash Bridges ) 5 . Rocketscience - Day or Night Man I miss this band. Andy Galdins sure had some velvet pipes. Anyway this bridge puts the breaks on the song and starts with a throbbing pulse, builds up in momentum, and delivers the genius line, "You could touch me a thousand times, and I won't even tell your boyfriend." 4. Radiohead - Creep The soaring, ...