A Couple Thoughts; 3 Actually

I'd been searching the oddsmakers' listings for my formerly beloved Huskers' first game.  Usually they play two or three patsies to get the smell of the hunt into their psyches; kind of like throwing a squirrel into a pack of Dobermen to give them their taste of blood.  It's never been seemly, but playing some pitifully inept team to kick off the season is as much a tradition in Lincoln as is the color red.  But this year, I'm wondering, do they have a bye week to start the season? 

Finally I to to their web site, wherein the mystery solves itself.  The reason there is no point spread is that to start this year's glorious march to January, the Nebraska Cornhuskers, nee the Bugeaters, are hosting MAINE.  Who knew Maine even played football?  They gots pigs and pigskins in Maine?  An ignominious new low for a team I didn't think could ignominerate any lower.

And Robert Moog died, he of the eponymous synthesizer.  My buddy Dave Rinehart bought one of the first ones built - it could play only one tone at a time - back in 1970.  Somehow he got an invite to play it for a performance of Holst's The Planets with the Omaha Symphony Orchestra, and I came along as his roadie.  The only unpleasant part was when the orchestra conductor, to introduce himself, came into the room where Dave and I were, uh, prepping for the performance.

Anyhow, I was reading Moog's obit in the Times, about how Switched On Bach by Walter Carlos was the album that really turned the corner for the Moog.  I still love that album's transcendence, a perfect vehicle for Bach's virtuosity.  I'd never seen anything more after a second album by Carlos, but I had seen that Wendy Carlos had picked up where Walter had left off.  Little did I know.  I figured Wendy was Walter's daughter.  The obit obliquely noted that Walter Carlos had had a sex change operation and now is Wendy Carlos.

Lastly for now, The Kinkster, Kinky Friedman, late of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys, is making what is more than a half-hearted run at Texas's governorship.  He and the 'boys haven't played for a long time; the Kinkster's been writing fiction, running a ranch for abused animals, the usual thing.  Anyhow, he's got some folks worried that he just might have a chance, me not among them. 

Some of my favorite Kinksterisms include, "Get your biscuitsinto the oven and your buns back in bed."  His thought on the Baptists:  "They don't hold them under long enough."  Kinky swears that when he's elected he'll lower the speed limit to 64.95.  And my favorite, about the job (and a former holder of the job) he hopes to be elected to, "Hey, how hard could it be?"