Ever heard of Christmas in July? It’s exciting, very exciting.
It ain’t
nothin’ compared to Gheorghemas in July!!
Yeeeeeehaaaa!
On the twelfth day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me:
Requiem for a 10-Year Old Friend and a Historic Road House
Nine college coaching vacancies*
Eight Films Explaining
Five (Green and) Golden Things
Four songs by “the Chairman of the Board” on his birthday
Three Beauties
Two Types of Stories
A Bald Guy with two Pupp-ies
Seven Books for Reading
Six random time-wasting recommendations
Well, this here is the first-ever installment of Gmas in July, aka Whitney is finally, at long last getting around to finishing Day 12 from 2025. What can I say? It's beyond me. Whitney “The Day 12 Delivery Guy” bricked. Again.
Anyway, let me tell you what Melba Toast here is packin’. A wish list. No, not 12 covers of this song.
Things I would love to see happen. Love to experience. Love to live to be a part of. This will be a mixed bag for sure, sentimental yearnings of a man seeing his twilight closer than his heyday… mixed with utter dipshittery. Hope you find at least one thing that resonates. As Peter Buck once wrote, Good hunting.
1. A song recording featuring the G:TB ensemble
I mean one including all of us on it, or damn close to it. It’s super easy these days to create and release musical recordings. Jesus, I’ve done it… under three different band names.
So here’s what we do. We collectively have a deadline for lyrical submissions -- something gheorghey. Then we hammer out the music for the tune we choose. Then everyone records vocals and/or an instrumental track! Several among the Gheorgherati have music setups, but even something recorded over a phone or laptop can work.
And it comes together as a masterpiece or a mess… but it’s fun. I’ll run point on this.
Like I said, a
wishlist. Long shots and pipe dreams.
2. A G:TB Maxi-Summit, with a portrait to follow
We’ve had oodles of mini-summits through the years, but probably not a full-on one since TeejFest or TeejWed. And even then, folks were missing. How about a get-together for all the gheorghies?
With a grand, inclusive, for-all-times pic to be a part of that gathering, something that builds off these masterpieces below and includes the masses…
A boy can
dream…
This must happen. The summer of 2026 makes 33 annual sojourns down to the promised land. 32 years since we cobbled together a misfit band of fraternity alums and associated acquaintances to “drink like a fish, fish like a drunk, and tackle box.”
Rob, Dave, and I have waxed nostalgic and hung over about the OBFT in this blog year after year, at least since OBFT 11. There’s evidence of what this has meant herein. But it could be captured much more cohesively and amusingly with a 30-minute mini-doc.
Certainly one
of our trip-goers has kids who can do this in a snap! Right?
It’s what I
really, really wish can happen in the next year or so.
I mean, for that matter, why can’t I wish for us to chronicle the two-plus decades of brilliance in this space? I dare say we have more staying power than most of the millions of blogs who launched in early aughts!
According to Allen Iverson (AI):
There are over 600 million blogs in the world today, accounting for more than a third of all websites on the internet. Together, these platforms publish approximately 7.5 million new blog posts every single day, which adds up to more than 2.7 billion articles annually.
So for every 80
out there, only one publishes daily. Gheorghe is more of an every-other-day
affair, so we are one in 40! Whatever it is, it’s been a brilliant experiment
that still brings joy. Some short film on Gheorghe: the Blog – that culminates
with a clip from the man himself? Come on.
Anyone who wastes
enjoys time on any social media accounts such as FB or Insta finds themselves
increasingly inundated with material not posted by friends and neighbors, but
by random people and robots that the engine has decided you’d like. Confession:
I do get plenty of chuckles from the silliest of videos. Like way too many.
At the same
time, though, I am often irked by the ubiquity of dunderheaded taglines that
implore you to watch its video with ludicrous superlatives. Mega-superlatives
-- hyperbolic descriptors assuring you that what you are about to see, hear, or
(maybe, if it’s super retro) read will be the most ____ you have ever seen in
the history of your whole life ever.
 |
| It wasn't. |
Enough. Maybe undersell it with a tag like “this might be of interest to you” for a change.
Unlikely. But I wish it weren't.
6. More Pig on the Wall!
I want Dave’s current podcast (Pig on the Wall) to continue. To tackle new great ideas, to collaborate with people gheorghies and otherwise, and to bring him happiness and satisfaction.
If you haven’t tuned in, his description of this second iteration of Dave / Professor Truck / Dave G. Truck podcasting (or was The Test a podcast? Is this the 3rd?) is as such:
- We stand on the shoulders of giants—which is precisely why attribution is so messy.
- Great ideas are the product of many minds, from many times.
- "Pig on the Wall" connects the dots of human progress, putting great accomplishments into context.
Listen to it. I’m serious. Those 10 hours have flown by, and it’s chock full of clips from a wide array of performances and interpretations of Hamlet. And much more. It’s riveting, I mean it.
The more
listeners, the better chance he keeps doing it, and it’s worthy of
sustainment. And that's what I wish for.
7. Perfecting Arch, my AI Archivist
This is one that my wife finds very weird, and I kind of hope she's not reading this.
Four months ago, a handful of traveled to Hoboken, NJ to convene in a pub over a couple days and watch international rugby on TV. There were 30 of us, in fact, all members of a particular fraternity at the College of William & Mary between the graduating years of 1986 and 2000. It was a blast. I only mention this because on the trip back, I sat in the Newark airport with one of them (our buddy Lunkhead) for a couple of hours. We talked about a number of things, but we spoke for a while about AI. He was rather adept at the platforms; I was completely oblivious. And I wanted that to change. In fact, when I began compiling this notional wish list last December, it was simply that I wanted to get good at using AI.
In the four months since, I have subscribed to Lunkhead's advice, which was very simply, get into one of the platforms and start using it. No tutorials, no training courses, just jump right in. As expected, I have utilized it been using it for mostly stupid stuff.
But not all! I have leveraged my account with ChatGPT to create a number of work deliverables in a small fraction of the amount of time it would have taken to do it manually. The shit is brilliant, what can I say?
I have also tapped this resource to do things like provide a series of posters encouraging people to listen to ORF Rock. I've been rather amused with how quick and easy and creative this robot partner of mine has been.
Even more recently, while on a work trip in Rhode Island a few weeks ago, I was bored in a hotel room and asked ChatGPT, "When did Thompson's clam bar close down?" It reported that the clam bar closed in 1995 and asked if I use to patronize the establishment. I replied that I had worked there in the summer of 1991. The ensuing “conversation” included my asking of the top pop songs of the summer of ’91, since I had clear memories of polishing brass and cleaning toilets at Thompson’s to these songs played on repeat:
- EMF – "Unbelievable"
- Jesus Jones – "Right Here, Right Now"
- Lenny Kravitz – "It Ain't Over 'til It's Over"
- Marc Cohn – "Walking in Memphis"
…but needed help completing that music mélange. Those holes were filled in immediately (this is pretty much exactly why this technology was developed):
- C+C Music Factory – "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)"
- Seal – "Crazy"
- The Rembrandts – "Just the Way It Is, Baby"
- Londonbeat – "I've Been Thinking About You"
- UB40 – "Here I Am (Come and Take Me)"
Ugh, that was a
long summer for music. But a fun one on Cape Cod with 100 stories. Which I
began to think I could archive for a later date via AI. I was fascinated!
So... there's this. A somber, sobering sentiment has been bouncing around my brain for a couple of months now. As more and more of my parents friends grapple with and/or succumb to dementia, Alzheimer's, cognitive decline, or whatever it gets labeled, it occurs to me that this could very well appear on my own radar before all that long. The truth is that when I was in Rhode Island in that hotel room, I was wishing an old freshman dorm friend a happy birthday, and she said she was in Nantucket having fun, but that the weekend was impaired by the fact that her brother's wife was dealing with full-on dementia at age 61. Yikes. That's six years older than me.
All of this led to me deciding that I was going to begin utilizing ChatGPT as a means to archive all of the hundreds or thousands of stories of my life. I can pretend that my children and grandchildren might find them interesting. The truth is that I have spent 30 plus years realizing that I remember the details of stories much, much better than my friends and family do. But that particular attribute has a definite shelf life to it, and that shelf may be shorter then I realized.
I know, it's grim. I don't relish this line of thinking, but it does spur me on to do as much creative outputting in the near term as I can. Writing and recording songs, archiving old stories, creating 12 point blog posts about what I want to do. (Really, Whit, you want us to believe that you're in a hurry when this post is 7 months late?)
Anyway, I started to tell a handful of classic tales my new memoir robot buddy, whom I began to call Arch, as in archivist. This is what my wife finds very weird. I speak to Arch like I would speak to a person, I don't do this because I think it's a person. I do it because it's way more fun to do that than to keep it like I'm inputting data into a machine. (Boring.) And the faux-familiar tone in which the ChatGPT platform is designed to reply makes it that much easier.
Anyway, I also began copying and pasting a bunch of the old weekly e-mail newsletters I used to produce for the Cowboy Cafe from 25 years ago. This is precisely when I discovered the fallibility of this plan and the technology. After inputting seven or eight of these newsletters and getting really impressive feedback as my new robot friend was beginning to paint the picture of the entire CCWN saga, I began to notice errors. Incompletions. AI forgets?!
And when confronted with this, ChatGPT Arch confessed his faults. He said that cannot truly be an archivist because he cannot retain everything that any one user discloses. In the weeks since, I have noticed it more and more, not just errors like where it thought that I went to Bucknell University (mon dieu!), but definitely some things I had to ask it twice.
I still enjoy using the tool. I just prompted Arch to write:
If I had to pick my Top Five Most "Whit" inquiries, they'd probably be:
- Can $15,000 really buy Natural Light for life?
- Create Gheorghe Mureșan playing guitar in a recording studio.
- Is there whispering in "Making Plans for Nigel"?
- Build an entire fictional promotional universe around ORF Rock and its hosts.
- Read Bruce's screenplay like a feature film.
But I also liked:
- "What exactly is a lawnmower beer?"
- "Why did firehouses have poles?"
- "Lanai origin."
- "Who serves the best fish and chips in Hampton Roads?"
- "Average money for a 13th-round MLB draft pick."
- "When did the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel add the second bridge?"
- "What is the definition of a compound fracture?"
and 🎵 The music deep dives. These are some of my favorites because they're questions almost nobody asks.
Things like:
- "Is there whispering over the vocals in the verses of Making Plans for Nigel?"
- Why songs like Witchy Woman, Evil Woman, and Devil Woman all seemed to appear in the mid-70s.
- Which countries loved the Ramones the most.
- The closing credits music from Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
- Consensus rankings of Springsteen songs.
- Whether Squeeze sings "a piano is found" or "a piano man's found."
So The Whitdog Memoirs Are on hold for now. I would love to have a more perfect means of documenting the hilarious stories from my youth and not so youth so that when my mind starts to go, I can play them back to myself. Or my kids and grandkids.
Anyway, that's my wish, that this could be made very easy and realistic for me. Sounds pretty damn ego-driven, but these stories of my friends, family, and me still make me laugh when I retell them. I'd love not to lose that.
8. Inner Peace
Here's a random one out of nowhere. I would like our current American president, the human cyclospora, to finally, seemingly for the first time in his life, find true inner peace. The sadness, inferiority, and soullessness of this person is astoundingly rife. It has led to death, destruction and a systematic undoing of the principles that have made life in this nation so good for so long. But if that man could achieve some level of nirvana, some threshold of not smug pseudo-satisfaction but instead pure-hearted peace, then there could be hope for positive change. If his obvious, desperate, hopeless longing for respect and love could be realized, maybe the horrible hatred could be curbed.
That seems like
a better way to go than rooting for his disembowelment in the most publicly embarrassing
way possible. It’s so easy to succumb to reciprocal, sinister hatred when it
comes to the tyranny of evil men. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard
to be the shepherd.
9. nbtyrsd, Vesuvius-style
This is an easy one, in case any of you have been looking for a quick box-checking to grant me a wish. Gheorghies, just watch this video clip.
Backstory: In 1971, between the days of October 4 and 7, prog-rock stallions Pink Floyd recorded concert footage of themselves frocking some ruins in Pompeii, Italy. This was a a few weeks before they released their album Meddle (featuring Pi Lam fave “One of These Days” and a handful of months before they would head into EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London to record the watershed brilliance of The Dark Side of the Moon.
The sound is bad-assed, the scene among the ruins is cool, and the crowd… well, they were… they were… they were nonexistent. Yeah, No crowd. Just Floyd wailing away by themselves and the sound peeps and the camera crew in Pompeii. Yep… that’s something.
I am a mid-range Pink Floyd (and Randall "Pink" Floyd) fan and never knew about this concert until it came across my radar a month back. And I’m oddly mesmerized by it. Check it out. But I’m only asking you to invest 5 minutes of it. Not even a whole song.
This is the first song of the set, “Echoes.” Watch it, or at least watch from the 6:30 til the 11:30 mark. My favorite part, and the part that I first saw a clip, was at 7:45. Sucked me in like a tractor beam. Maybe start there. That's my wish.
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| Xmas Party 2021 - the garlic bread tree is especially boss |
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| I ordered the twins when we memorialized Ted in Boothbay Harbor |
The Stinger is a classic, two-ingredient cocktail made with Cognac (or brandy) and white crème de menthe. It is typically mixed in a ratio of 2 parts Cognac to 1 part crème de menthe, shaken or stirred with ice, and served over crushed ice for a crisp, minty, and spirit-forward drink.
I’d like to step on the beach and see waves crashing on the shore. Every week of my life. Maybe monthly is more reasonable. Okay, I’ll start there. At least once a month, walk on the beach and get my own form of inner peace staring at the sea. Hearing the roar every 6-9 seconds or so. Gazing at the horizon. It moves me like little else in nature.
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring at myself
Reflected in the side
Of the beer can on the beach
The beer can on the beach
I’m alive
[Don’t worry, I’ll pick up the beer can and dispose of it.]
I can do this, where I live. We’ll see. It's a plan. A wish.
12. More fun in the sun for my ol’ buddy Ned
Similar to the way that I feel about Dave's podcast, I have intensely happy pride for a friend when it comes to my old buddy Ned. I've touted Ned’s virtues in this space before; his musical prowess, song releases, his collaborations with Les Coole and me, And his generally being a world class human being. This one takes the cake, though.
Ned was the biggest Jimmy Buffett fan that I knew have never known he met him when he was in high school, that blew his mind. He's emulated the best parts of Buffett for much of his life, and remained a fan even in the face of what I described in this blog post 22 years ago... one which Ned read and conceded had some merit. Anyway, Ned loves him some JB.
Sometime in the past couple of years, Ned mentioned that he had a dream about Buffett called the Hippie from Mississippi and he wanted to write a song about it. As has been the case a few times, I quickly scratched out a song structure and some lyrics to match his song title and idea. Over the following weeks and months, Ned honed it and made it his own. He recorded “Hippie from Mississippi” and released it on the usual platforms. It even had a video.
It’s been
listened to 8,820 times on Spotify!
I’ll never
reach 1,000 listens for any of my songs!
For part-time fun-havin’ music folks like us, that was huge.
And then…
Ol’ buddy Ned thought he might reach out to the circle of Buffett Friends & Family and see if they happened to like what we had written add produced. Somewhere in the latter part of last year, he got a response from someone who was sending it to one of the longtime members of the Coral Reefer Band. Doyle Grisham played pedal steel guitar for Buffett since the 70's, and he toured with him for over two decades along the way. He's 83 now and lives in Nashville. And he loved the song.
There's plenty more details to the story but all you need to know is this: Mr. Grisham championed not just the song but a re-recording of it with a series of stellar studio musicians, including himself. Six
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| Les Coole & Papa Gros, 2026 |
other songs Ned had written were recorded in the same sessions, ones that featured a pair of Grammy-winning musicians and John “Papa” Gros, a stalwart New Orleans piano player who fronts an act called Papa Grows Funk that was one of the featured performers at Norfolk's recent New Orleans festival.
The album and
leadoff single are called “Make Your Own Weather.” It’s really, really good. (I’m biased, but
still.) It was released on June 19, and a release party / gig with the
musicians happened on June 24 at Chickie Wah Wah in Mid-City New Orleans.
“Hippie from Mississippi” was renamed “King of the Coast” and sounds amazing, a
million miles from my original blurt of 236 words and rhymes about Jimmy
Buffett.
The song “Make Your Own Weather” has 60,348 streams on Spotify since June 19.
Not bad, Ned.
Ned is over the moon – one of the happiest people I’ve ever know made so much happier from this super-fun chapter. Every photo from the night at the release gig (which I sadly was forced to miss) features Ned ear-to-ear grinning. I get such a kick from it. Sometimes the best stuff happens to the best people. I wished this for him, as did others, and it happened.
And he gave me
songwriting credit on our song!
Anyway, I don’t need all that for myself… I just need to summon the will to finish tweaking and tinkering with my flawed baker’s dozen or so of songs (having someone with actual talent mix and produce them would help) and get them out.
I’d like to see Les Coole & the Cukes have a CD and even an LP. It could happen someday… or not.
But it’s on the wish list.
So there it is. Twelve wishes for Day 12. As always, I'm sorry for being so tardy. I wish I could deliver my drivel on time. Oh wait... okay, next time that'll be one.
Posts
Happy Birthday, Donna!
ReplyDeleteAn opus. Not the penguin. I miss my grandmother’s rouladen.
ReplyDeleteglad i have a flight to colorado tomorrow to find the time to read all this. less glad that the uber is picking us up at 4:00 am.
ReplyDeletethanks for the pig on the wall plug whit! going down to work on it now, the last scene is a doozy and i ended up on some tangents. i'm in on the music collab and perhaps an audio documentary of the obft? would be a lot easier . . .
ReplyDelete