Brad McConahay » Miscellaneous

Gatlinburg 2009 Highlights

Brad — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:01:00 +0000

Some quick highlights of Deb’s Gatlinburg 2009 trip with Sheri and Judy, taken by Debbi with the Flip camera.

Holly Hates Her Sweater

Brad — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 07:21:13 +0000

When we got Holly, she arrived with a sweater. A Freddy Kruger sweater. We would never think of putting clothes on a dog, so we put it away. Four years later, we accidentally found it and thought we’d see if she liked it. She didn’t.

Randy’s Invitation

Brad — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 10:48:59 +0000

My boss and friend of 14 years, Randy Weeks, was recently spotted performing his new song “Invitation.” It’s a heartfelt composition, partly inspired by the work of A Small Group, that encompasses the idea of local community and how we connect – a concept that he and our company have been focused on for a long time. Here’s a video of him performing it at Ray Ash’s home.

And here’s an audio version with full instrumentation, recorded with Ric Hordinski who’s done production work with the likes of Peter Frampton, Phil Keaggy, and David Wilcox.

Invitation

This is the Invitation
To a new conversation
Of depth over speed
Of gift over need
A new Listening

The structure of how we gather
Speaks of what really matters
Telling a new
Story of Who
We are to each other

This is the Invitation
Community’s Restoration
By just showing up
We’re gifted enough
To birth a new world

And though we don’t know what it will look like
We’re feeling that world’s alive
Like it’s ready to bloom
Here in this room
The seeds in each life.

So community’s new frontier
Is finding all that we need right here
To weave a rich local life
Into a tapestry lined
With the connections we share.

This is the invitation
To join a celebration
Of Neighbors and friends
Connecting again
Creating the new…

Neighbors and friends
Connecting again
Creating the new.

My neighbors and friends
I’m glad to come in
And be here
With you.

Confessions of an Ego-Surfer

Brad — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 10:41:52 +0000

The wife gives me grief for occasionally “ego surfing” on Google. I suppose it sounds like a really self-centered thing to do, but since I’ve been promoting my original music and various web sites since 1995, I’ve always been curious to know what pages my name might turn up on. I have other excuses too, but I’ll save them for the wife.

The search usually turns up the same basic list of ham radio, original music, and weather station pages, but something new and odd will turn up from time to time. The last time, I found my music listed on a Japanese site that may or may not be called “goo”.

Click here for … goo?

From what little I can read on the page, I apparently sound like Chick Corea and Return to Forever. While I am a huge fan of Chick Corea, I don’t consider myself in the same league. Who knows, maybe it says something like “he could never be as good as Chick Corea and Return to Forever.” Flattering none-the-less.

The new discovery this time out was finding my old general MIDI songs for sale on a CD in the Netherlands.

Click here.

You can find me in the huge listing of artists right in between Boyz 2 Men and Brahams (yuck and yuck, respectively) as having “27 nummers” on the CD. Thanks to Babel Fish, my suspicion was confirmed: nummers means numbers! (duh) You know, I don’t honestly recall ever having put 27 general MIDI files on the web. Maybe 10 or 12. What gives?

Since I’ve yet to find another person on the Internet with the same name, let alone somebody with the same name who also posted original MIDI files on the web, it has to be me. So curious. I guess I’ll try to buy the CD if I can even figure out how…

Robbers Crash at Mother-In-Law’s House

Brad — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 04:44:17 +0000

On Thursday morning I was listening to the police scanner as it often makes for good background listening while working. All of a sudden there was a big police chase moving across Hamilton County that originated in southeast Indiana where suspects had just robbed an auto parts store. Anytime a chase crosses state lines it becomes a bigger deal than the average pursuit. The local TV stations were even breaking into regular programming at this point.

After a while, I noticed they were moving toward Golf Manor and getting very close to my mother-in-law’s house, the house where my wife grew up. Imagine the surprise when they said the suspects had just wrecked at the intersection where she lives. I called the wife at work, and she called her mom. It turns out that they wrecked into the telephone pole right in front of her house, and they had taped off her yard. What a way to wake up! The passenger was captured near the scene of the wreck with lots of cash, and the driver fled to an apartment complex a couple blocks away.

Almost all of the TV coverage was centered around the SWAT team who eventually arrested the second guy hours later. But WXIX Channel 19 did manage to show one quick clip of the wreck, which is the picture shown above. It looks like it was taken from my mother-in-law’s driveway, with the yellow police tape leading over toward either end of her house.

What are the odds?!

Here are a few links to the story…

WLWT Channel 5
WKRC Channel 12
Cincinnati Enquirer

New Blog, Beat Frequency

Brad — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 07:08:44 +0000

Goodbye “Trivial Hate”, hello “Beat Frequency”.

A few people whose opinions I trust in these matters (rbw, dsk) have been starting to use Wordpress for blogging, so I thought I might give it a whirl.

I’m also tired of having a blog dedicated only to trivial annoyances. Rather than keep multiple blogs, I figure I’ll just roll Trivial Hate into this new site, minus the user comments.

So if previous posts seem excessively whiney, keep in mind that they came from a place where excessively whiney was the theme of the day.

Goodbye Trivial Hate, I hardly knew ye!
(and I hardly posted to ye, either)

Cheap Checks Buy Scooby Snacks

Brad — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 21:25:41 +0000

There’s only one place left in the universe that requires me to pay with a paper check, and it’s a place at which I have no choice but to pay. The local tax office. So I to continue to buy checks. I probably would anyway. They’re bound to come in handy for the odd situation where the bank’s ATM system sputters.

So as not to be anything other than thrifty, I always buy the cheapest checks available. “Gimme the cheapest checks ya got”, I literally say. In past years, this meant powder blue, light green, or puke yellow Charlie-Brown-shirt-striped checks. Highly spartan. No problem, they could be made of paper bag for all I care. As long as they don’t have Nazi propaganda or ethnic slurs on them, I’m thrilled.

After all these years, the cheap check philosophy finally failed.

This time, cheapness got me Scooby Doo.

Do you know anybody old enough to write checks who would be so into Scooby Doo as to buy the checks? Of course not. I mean, even if I had a really tiny kid who had his own checking account for some reason, I wouldn’t get him Scooby checks. I’d get him South Park checks.

So of course, I wouldn’t be so vain as to not use the checks to pay this quarter’s tax installment. But I did leave a small note in the memo area. “These checks were cheap.”

I might’ve gotten away with decent checks if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their dog…

It Snowed In Hamilton, Too

Brad — Thu, 30 Dec 2004 11:52:39 +0000

I just saw a piece on the morning news where people from the armpit of Hamilton!, OH were in a city council meeting complaining that their snow wasn’t removed quickly enough for them. Perhaps it had something to do with the RECORD SETTING SNOWFALL. People all over the place dealt with abnormal conditions because of the RECORD SETTING SNOWFALL.

They showed footage of a lady explaining how she asked a plow driver what the problem was. He told her she was mad at the wrong people, and that she should be mad at god since he dumped all the snow. And with a gleam in her eye, you knew that only the most clever retort was to follow … she replied that “god isn’t on the city payroll!” This was met with resounding whiney applause from the other whiney citizens at the meeting. This conversation alone probably dropped the collective I.Q. of southwest Ohio by at least a few points. And we don’t need that.

Idea: Expanding the Rumpke landfill in the Colerain area is a hot topic right now. How about we just move it right up the road to Hamilton! instead.

If I were the boss of Hamilton!, I would fire those citizens immediately and replace them with cheaper and smarter outsourced citizens from the far east. You know, the far east… Clermont County.

Why I Hate Summer

Brad — Fri, 21 May 2004 01:41:31 +0000

Okay, it’s still a month before summer officially begins, but this spring already feels an awful lot like summer. And even though I’m highly adverse to hot weather and I totally miss NFL football, these are not my main complaints.

It’s the sounds. I hate the sounds of summer. People run lawn machinery almost constantly. Lawn mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers. One neighbor shuts down, another immediately starts up.

And the car stereos … whatever happened to the “$500 loud stereo fine” street signs? Those signs are long gone, but the noise is worse than ever.

I mean, if I really wanted to feel the bass from other peoples’ stereos, I would’ve stayed in an apartment. With the thumping car stereos, now it’s like I’m trapped in an apartment where I can’t even pound on the wall.

And then … you’re finally enjoying a relaxing weekend evening, lounging in the yard or on the porch – even the lawn-mongers are respecting this time of weekend. But as luck would have it, the neighborhood kids always pick this time to assemble down the street to play hoops. Which, of course, means they continuously scream at the top of their lungs. Why can’t they congregate in a nice quiet neighborhood crackhouse instead? Say yes to drugs, kids, nice quiet drugs…

Oh well, I’ve officially become one of the ill-tempered ogres I used to hate when I was young. But I don’t care … STOP IT!

Cut Me Some Slacko

Brad — Fri, 28 Nov 2003 01:36:01 +0000

This is a moronic ode to the unimaginitive hacks who come up with the headlines for Michael Jackson stories…

Jacko’s backo, and he’s whacko. He’s smokes tobacco and cracko, and shoots the smacko until he has a heart attacko. Then he has a snacko, like maybe a Big Mac-O, a lunch packo, a stacko of flap jackos, or Tacko Bell. He’s got a real knacko for letting a quacko hacko his olfacto – you’re on the right tracko if you think he hates being blacko. And he doesn’t lacko a racko to hit the sacko with his packo of little victims… er, friends.

For christ’s sake, you hackos, get a new headline gimmick. It wasn’t clever in the early ’90s, and it isn’t now.