Uncategorized

Today, marks the one year anniversary of the debut of lame-dog.com.  While a failure by any conventional measure, rest assured that this site is an astounding success in some alternative universe.  

Love and V.D. go hand in hand.  Why it’s hard to fall in love these days without being exposed to V.D., with all the expense and discomfort that entails.  I’m speaking, of course, of Valentine’s Day.

(more…)

Today the Dog is writing less as a wannabe critic than as a fan.  A few years ago, I came across a cover of a song that stopped me dead in my tracks.  Who was this woman?  Some further online rambling led to the recording below, a personal favorite.  If the lyrics sounds suspiciously literary, it’s because they were written by Jack Pendarvis, the author of several collections of short stories.  But the voice and phrasing perfect the mood:

(more…)

Once upon a time, when  the Dog was online, seeking a female counterpart (you know the word), he came across a personal profile that piqued his interest.  The woman who wrote it and the Dog shared some common ground.  But there was also something about it that gave the Dog paws.  I mean pause. 

This week, the Dog is passing along a favorite piece of trivia.  It concerns a person from an extraordinarily intellectually accomplished family. 

Our story begins in 1882 with the birth in Breslau, Germany of Max Born.  Born, who had a famous correspondence with Albert Einstein, made major contributions in his own right to quantum mechanics, solid-state physics and optics.  In 1954, he was awarded the Nobel Prize.  But I’m getting ahead of the story.

Born married Hedi Ehrenberg, who came from a distinguished family of her own.  Her father Victor was a noted law professor at the University of Leipzip,  Her grandfather Rudolph van Jhering has been called “the father of sociological jurisprudence.”

In 1933, when the Nazi Party came to power, Born was fired from his job.  He and Hedi emigrated to England with their nineteen year old daughter Irene.  Irene later fell in love with a man name Brinley who served as an intelligence office.  Brinley worked on building the Enigma machine, the secret project used to break the German military code during World War II.  And in 1941, when Hitler’s deputy fuhrer Rudoph Hess flew to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate a peace deal, Brinley reportedly was the man who apprehended him.  After the war, Brinley became a professor of German at the University of Melborne.

Brinley and Irene had a daughter who grew up to have a career of her own.  Was she a physicist?  A law professor?  An cryptographer?  A linguist?  Can you guess who she is?

Click the link below to see her in action.

(more…)

Attention.  The Dog has a matter of cultural significance for your consideration.  Who is the greatest living figure in popular music who is not a household name?

Before we can proceed, we must define terms.  What is popular music?  That could encompass everything other than classical music.  But in order to prevent our inquiry from becoming unwieldy, let’s limit ourselves to the non-classical music of the English-speaking world.  And let’s also steer clear of the grand traditions of Broadway and the specialized realm of jazz.

Next, what is a household name?  For present purposes, let’s define that as a name immediately recognizable to the general public of the United States.  In that way, we can avoid the daunting task of tracking everyone who is — or is not — very famous somewhere. Also, let’s assume that if a musical group is a household name, its members and ex-members likewise qualify as such, even if they may be less familiar in their individual capacities.

Now comes the really hard part.   What does it mean to be great and how should it be measured?  That’s endlessly debatable.  But here are some possible criteria:

— Someone with a  career of long standing, going back more than a generation.

— Someone whose achievements as a songwriter include a substantial body of work with finely crafted lyrics and beautiful melodies.

— Someone who is an outstanding performer on a musical instrument.

— Someone with a stirring and memorable voice.

— Someone who remains a creative force, having continued to tour and release new material in recent years.

— Someone who is highly respected in music circles and has broadly influenced others in the field.

So who best fits the bill?

Honestly, I don’t know.   I haven’t done enough research and would lack the discernment to express a reliable opinion even if I had. But it may well be (more…)

Not long ago, the friendly algorithms at Youtube, which know more about my peculiar tastes than I may have cared to reveal, recommended that I view a particular video. In it, the Be Good Tanyas, a Canadian folk trio, perform a song in which the narrator describes being abandoned by his mother and swindled by his girlfriend before going to jail for robbery. It concludes with the lines:

Now I’m out of prison.  I got me a friend at last.
He don’t steal or cheat or drink or lie.
His name’s Codeine.  He’s the nicest thing I’ve seen.
Together we’re gonna wait around and die.

Who could have written such a lyric?  A quick check revealed a name that I’d occasionally run across in conjunction with the adjective “legendary” and the phrase “songwriter’s songwriter.” It was (more…)

Here, at Lame Dog, we work hard to bring quality content to our thousands of subscribers. Well, currently four subscribers. And that includes — oh my God, can I bear the embarrassment? — the Dog himself. But who’s counting?

In the hope of increasing my international influence, I’ve been conducting an in depth study of business practices. Based on the behavior of certain other web sites (and local magazines), here are my findings.  If you want to succeed, you need to:

1. Post things that will appeal to your audience’s narrow self-interest.
2. Post things that are vaguely prurient. Or not so vaguely.
3. Turn everything into a list. Because it’s the only thing the human brain can process anymore.

Hence, the title of this post. But before we get to that, let’s spend a moment talking about this blog. Now, I’m sure you’ve been saying to yourself, “What can I do to help this site realize it’s manifest destiny to become an astounding success?” Glad you asked.

First of all, if you haven’t done so already, please consider subscribing. It’s not hard. See where it says “Subscribe” at the top right of the home page. Click on it. That’s important because you’ll receive an email alert when I have a new post, which is not often. Otherwise, you may log on at random times and see nothing new. Come on.   It’s got to be less annoying that those alerts you receive when one of your virtual friends announces that … wow! … they ate in a restaurant.

What else can you do? If you know people who may be interested, you can send them an email or post a link on your social media page. Say something like: “Check this out!! I have no idea who this lame dog character might be.  But he/she/it is my new guru.”

 After that, if you’re still itching for ways to help, you can:
* Put a sign on your lawn that reads “Log onto lame-dog.com”
* Take out a second mortgage and donate the proceeds to lame-dog.com.
* Remember Lame Dog in your will. Do you really want to leave that money to provide for your loved ones?
* Go up to random strangers in the supermarket and say, “The Dog Wants to Know.”

Okay. So about that orgasm. Here are the ways: (more…)