Duck? Decorated Shed?

The gracious and ever-rocking Sarah Schmid (D-Mich.) sends a link to this lengthy but fantastic article from Harper's about the Soldiers of Christ. I especially liked it because most of it concerns the particular strain of Xtian soldier that inhabits Colorado Springs, home of Focus on the Family, et. al.: Soldiers of Christ.

Like I often say: It'd be cool if these folks could segregate themselves and begin living their lives in the theocratic oligarchy that they seem to want so desperately. I'd wager that most of them would soon come crawling back to the relatively more functional society that they left to join the Bible Brownshirts.

Like I also often say: take you a trip to Co Springs someday. It's one of the creepiest fucking places you'll ever visit, though (or perhaps because) it often bills itself as "The Godliest City in America." It represents kind of a modern hyper-suburban dystopia in which residents happily indulge themselves in as much gluttony and self-righteousness as possible, having relegated many of their formerly mortal responsibilities to their faith in Our Savior.

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Then there's the forthcoming TotalFest in Missoula the week after next. Omigosh, what a hellacious stable of bands they got lined up for that thing. Ding-dang Fireballs Upon Freedom, Last of the Juanitas, Ass End Offend... even Big Business for shit's sake! Freakin' Le Force!

Bud Light and WäntageUSA also proudly welcomes the reuniting of Humpy and The Banned! Legends of Missoula's not-so-distant yesteryear, yo! The Banned, featuring my old pal Charles R. Beaton, was the first Missoula band I loved, way back in god-dang 1988! And Humpy will be reuniting as a four-man: Me, Justin, Andy and charter Humpy member Dave Parsons. I'm pretty concerned about my physical ability to play fast shit like I could when I was 23, but I've been assiduously kicking up my steering-wheel drumming regimen lately in preparation. But I've found that what really fucks a drummer up after he's been off the kit for a few years is callouses, specifically the absence thereof. As is the case with most instruments, it takes a long time to build up callouses where your hands make contact with the instrument. For drummers, you build them up on your thumbs and index fingers, and I had a proud set of drummer's callouses in the 1993-2000 epoch that you could pert' near slice onions on. Now, after five years of drumlessness, the callouses are long gone, and every time I get on a drum kit again, I get hellacious blisters there. I've tried "ducto-therapy," where I wrap strips of duct tape around my fingers and thumbs, and that works pretty well, although I find that it screws up my drumming quite a bit because the friction between drumstick and duct tape is significantly less than between drumstick and finger. So this time I think I'm gonna try the golf glove method, a'la Dale Crover.

The other thing that happens when you don't play drums regularly is that several muscle groups tend to atrophy. Drumming builds weird groups of muscles, ones that you wouldn't think would be built up. They're usually muscles that enable nimble movements, as opposed to brute strength, which is why you see so many drummers with what appear to be weenie arms. Bodybuilder guys usually don't make good drummers because they're preoccupied with using their huge biceps, thinking that will make them play better and harder. But this is usually a misconception; drumming requires very little bicep strength. It's all about the long striated muscles in the front of the forearms and the weird little blob muscle between your thumb and forefinger. Ask any seasoned drummer to flex his flexor pollicis brevis and you'll see a preternaturally engorged hump of muscle, hypertrophied from prolonged and specialized use (also used in male masturbating, as it happens). Another reason that bodybuilders make poor drummers is that they typically neglect many lower leg muscles, particularly the muscles on the front of the tibia, the Tibialis Anterior and the Extensor Digitorum Longus, both used to adduct the foot toward the leg. Drumming is pretty demanding of that particular muscle group. There are a couple others, but I suspect that this partiuclar tangent is not terribly enthralling for most.

But what is worth mentioning is that, according to the schedule I got, every night of TotalFest culminates in "Cushion Time." I can't imagine what all that entails...

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Another weird thing that's been catching my attention lately: when buildings that formerly house franchises get transformed in to other things. Consider Pizza Hut. I don't know if they're still doing it, but for years, Pizza Hut buildings were immediately recognizeable. Even while they were being constructed, as soon as they got the frame up, you could say, "Yup, that's gonna be a Pizza Hut." The weird thing is when, at some point, the Pizza Hut goes out of business, and someone buys the building and uses it for bank or a payday loan shop and retains the original Pizza Hut architecture.

Also IHOP: for years, IHOPs were built to resemble some sort of Bavarian ski lodge or something. I'm not entirely sure what exactly it was supposed to represent, but it had the really tall, steep roof, essentially an A-Frame. There was one in my hometown of Missoula for a long time near Brooks Ave. and Reserve St. It went under in the early 80s and subsequently became a casino. The building was enough of an eyesore when it was an IHOP, but having a goddamn casino in the IHOP architectural vernacular was nigh on ridiculous.

Burger King used to employ a specific architecture, the flat roof with steep shakes around the side (mansard, is it?) Recently I've begun to notice buildings around Denver that I suspect may have once been Burger Kings. There's one that is now a Starbucks that I wouldn't have known was a former BK until I noticed the drive-thru. Then I noticed the shakes and the mansardic roof and it all made sense.

Anyone remember Circle K? It was a chain of little mini-stores that I recall as being frontrunners to the convenience store boom of the early 80s. There used to be about seven of them in Missoula, and they were typified by their post-modern design that, ironically enough, sorta resembles the way museums are built nowadays: the sharp obtuse angles, ridiculously sloping roofs, big glass facades, etc. Circle K is long gone in Missoula, but to my knowledge, almost all of the buildings are intact, having undergone rebirths as various other businesses. There's one in particular that, last I checked, is now an Army recruiting office.

Hmmm... I guess I was thinking I had something more interesting to say about all of this, but it seems to have eluded me. I think it had something to do with the architectural philosophy concept known as Duck vs. Decorated Shed. The concept is used to illustrate form vs. function, where a Duck is a building shaped like a duck (or as we have in Conifer, Colorado, a building in the shape of a giant hot dog), and a Decorated Shed is just a big barn with a duck painted on the side of it. In the case of the Decorated Shed, the building is ornamented with a painting of a duck, while in the other case, the building is the ornament. Something like that.

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Ask a Cunning Linguist section

The wife and I often like to dissect the text on signs that we encounter. We've found that this is a good way to break up the monotony of discussing domestic tedium such as track lighting, coffee table placement, differences in tortilla chip bag opening technique, etc. I've long since given up kvetching about misused apostrophes, but luckily, there are so many other opportunities for this kind of shit in everyday life.

The most recent subject of our scrutiny was at the Wheat Ridge Recreation Center, where we all gone swimming one Sunday. Upon egressing the building after our swimming session, we noticed a sign near the staircase leading to the exercise room:

NO FOOD OR DRINK ALLOWED UPSTAIRS
(water accepted)

We had us a lengthy discussion as to whether the sign's use of "accepted" was correct. I maintained that the correct word there would be "excepted," meaning "no food or drink, except water." Glenda said it meant "no food or drink, but we will accept water." Both ways convey the same general idea, but one is slightly more meaningless than the other. "Accepted" implies, to me at least, that there is a recipient.

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