It was in the late 90s. Maybe it was 1996. I had been going to a songwriters' group in Hollywood every Monday night to see if I could get a grip on publishing and promoting my music… and of course, to learn a little more about the craft of songwriting.

Remarkably, any artistic home runs I'd hit prior to those meetings had become nothing more than wisps of memories. My current brood of songs, sadly, were systematically thumb-squashed by my panel of peers as well as by the moderator, an expert with his own string of successes. I was a nobody struggling and failing to become a somebody. I was a wandering minstrel in search of validation, but validation eluded me.

The thrust of our critique meetings was to decode and to second-guess the current song market. Our measure of skill was to write tunes that could be plugged in to whatever was for sale on the radio that month. I however, being a know-thyself kind of guy, knew for a fact that my greatest weakness was in trying to be trendy, in second-guessing the market. I'd never been able to spot a trend, whether it was an new band or a penny stock or a crazy dance step. I was a witless trend chaser, ill-fitted for the task. My strength, for what it's worth, and I knew it, was to do what "I" do. Unfortunately, what I do isn't necessarily what people want. Oh well.

I struggled with what was then the current rage: country music. Country had had many Renaissances. I was living in the 90s version, so I breech-birthed a handful of homely musical babies for the panel to point and laugh at. It was tough. I did have a couple of viable songs, though, from a previous onslaught into the song market. It seemed that it would be a good idea to push those tunes instead. So I asked for advice from the moderater, a heck of a nice guy. He told me that he was giving a class at a local university that would last ten weeks. In that ten weeks, he'd have ten special guest speakers who were essentially, famous songwriters. I signed up.

After week ten, having learned quite a lot, I never wanted to write again. Who know why. Maybe it was the industrialization of a process of something that I considered to be organic, like making your own pie crust or growing your own tomatoes instead of buying them. I don't know. All I know is that I didn't write another song for years after.

With my songwriting on hiatus, the creative void needed filling. I began writing. You know, "writing" writing - No notes or chords, just words.  Stories, articles, reflections; whatever I could think of to write about.

That went on for a while until I needed a little motiviation to pull myself out of one of my slumps. I looked for articles by famous writers, which were plentiful, to help push me along. They all said that writing is really hard and that I needed to get up early in the morning before everyone else. Then I found a book by Stephen King, and another by Dorothea Brand on the topic of writing. And guess what happened? I stopped writing. I'd lost my "Jones." Something about knowing too much, I suppose. Lucky for me though, it's been months since I've written anything and it's been months since I put those books down. Wisps of memories. But I'm starting to feel the urge to reach deep into my suitcase full of thoughts and pull out whatever my hand can grab. To have some fun. To be simple again.

The other night I was pulled over by a policeman. It was a Saturday night. He was trolling I'm sure, for drunks. So was the other police car that was sniffing around this stretch of road. It was easy pickin's, like shooting fish in a barrel.

I produced my license and registration, proof of insurance, passed the follow-my-pen-with-your-eyes-to-see-if-you're-drunk test. My wife sat in the passenger's seat in a cold sweat wondering what I'd done, wondering how much this was going to cost.

"Have you ever been arrested?"
"Nope."
"Any outstanding warrants?" he asked.
"Nope," I answered. "Just speeding tickets." The beam of his flashlight finally turned away. "I'll be right back," he said. Then he left me to do some business in his patrol car.

It was an interminable wait, there on the side of the road with cars whizzing by, drivers and passengers with their necks craned thinking, "Look at that sorry bastard."

"The reason I stopped you," the policeman said when he returned, "is that you have a burned out headlight here on the driver's side."
"Really? It doesn't look burned out."
"Yeah, it's burned out. I'm going to give you a fix-it ticket. You've got 'til March 29th to fix it....."

We drove off to have dinner with our friends. "That light's not burned out," I said to my wife.

Yesterday, with a few hours open to fuss around with my burned out headlight, I decided pop the hood of our 2005 Prius and see what was going on. In the time between the fix-it ticket and yesterday, I'd discovered that my left headlight was spontaneously turning off by itself. The high beam was fine. It was just the low beam. If I turned the switch off, then back on, the light worked. Then after a while it would go off again. The cop wasn't lying after all. Perhaps I should give people more credit.

I've changed a lot of headlights in my time. No big deal. This job should cost twenty bucks or so since it's a fancy bulb.

I unscrewed the protective cover over where the radiator probably was. This being a Prius, nothing under the hood looked like it would in a normal car. I peeked behind the headlight casing and saw... nothing. Nothing anyway that looked like I could just reach down and twist it, pop it out and replace it.

Off to spend some time on the internet. YouTube is usually a good place to find how-to articles on such things, so I sat with my coffee, poking at the keyboard.

This is the turning point in this account of my personal experience where I could either, item-by-item, describe everything that happened from that point - or, I could employ the phrase: "I'll make a long story short." I've chosen the latter.

The summary: For a person of my mechanical ability to change a headlight on a 2005, unless I want to remove part of the bumper and spend an hour and a half chasing lost screws around the driveway, it costs at least $300 to have a mechanic do it for you. Part of the reason is that the light bulb costs around $180 if they supply it.

So why not just change out both bulbs since the other one might go bad too? Because it might cost $300-plus too.

So it looks like my almost-paid-for, gas miser computerized car has an economy-killing flaw. A flaw that makes it suddenly less loveable. So what else can't I do on this car? Change the wipers? Check the dipstick?

Does this whole thing sound weird or is it just me? No, it's not just me. Take a look at these entries at www.consumeraffairs.com on the topic of Prius headlights. Or perhaps this LA Times article from 2011. One friend suggested I look for a recall notice on my car at http://www.toyota.com/recall. Sadly, there is none for my car.

Ideally, after so many irate customers steaming after a headlight change, Toyota would kindly redesign the bulb access method. Did they? I think I'll stop at the dealer and take a look at the 2012s.

But for my car? Time to pay.

_Yes, Wordpress makes me sad. It seems to make others feel sad too, which is good, because then I don't have to feel alone on top of being sad.

It turns out that a musician friend of mine is on an extended artistic pilgrimage to Brazil. He thought it would be a good idea to keep his pals posted regarding his adventures while he was gone, and he decided that Wordpress would be the best medium for his broadcasts. "Not so," he reports from his urban jungle location. He complained of bugginess, blank pages and general headaches. In other words, he complained that Wordpress made him sad too.

I can empathize. A long time ago (maybe 2003) I was building a website for a client, and the client asked if I could put together a blog for him. At the time, I didn't really know anything about blogs or why anyone would even be so presumptuous as to assume that someone would read theirs.

_
I did my due diligence though, and searched the internet for interfaces that would make it possible to do this thing that my guy wanted. I ended up discovering, after finding what seemed to be overwhelming evidence, that Wordpress was the way to go. It was used by very smart people -- both those types who were programming-savvy, and those who just wanted a get-it-up-and-running system to feed the world their deepest thoughts. It was also the skeleton of the content management systems of giants like CNN and Time Magazine. It was therefore, good enough for me.

I started out doing an experimental site for myself just to see what would happen. Wordpress was really cool. It was virtually automatic compared to programming HTML by hand. (This was of course before Facebook had overwhelmed the internet with its almost idiot-proof communication vehicle for the common man. It had photo sharing and media posting, chatting, all learn-able by regular people.)

I was in love with all the Wordpress templates where you could, with a simple click, change the entire look of your page without altering any of the content you'd toiled to create, both pictures and text.

I decided to start filling up my Wordpress blog with "stuff" just to get comfortable with its topography; stories, anecdotes. You know. All was well for a year or so until something, I can't even remember now what it was, happened. Essentially, I lost my blog. I had to go in to my host's database, using my programming skills (which are more than totally unsophisticated, yet far less than world-class) to locate my dear stories and ramblings.

Yes, I found everything and I started again. I simplified too. But then other things started happening. The details are blurry: The site wouldn't load. Pictures would disappear. It was slow. Features didn't work. Tech support was only available on what were essentially bulletin boards. In other words, if you had a BIG problem, forget it.

Oddly, there were thousands of sites around the world that seemed to be functioning flawlessly using Wordpress. What was my problem then? I certainly had no idea. Neither did tech support at my primary site's host (I won't name names.) who I pleaded with to help me determine if there was something wrong with my database files which I had deployed from their ecologically friendly, wind-driven server farms; whether there was something wrong with Wordpress, or, whether I personally had actually broken something.

By the time I'd gotten to this point, I was actually spending more time coaxing and nurturing my experimental blog than I was writing material for it. It was clear that it was time to either study harder and become a more skilled programming drone, or to simply cut and run. I cut and I ran. I was done.

I decided that I needed a "blog for dummies" system. This Wordpress thing was way to deep for me. If that meant that I simply wasn't bright enough to understand it, then so be it. I'd deal with that ego-slapping burden later. But for now, I needed to get my site up and running, and I didn't care how.

I began searching for the alternative. There was the Blogger interface. (Now a Google partner.) Then there was something from Yahoo as well as a few others. This was back in 2009. 2003 in contrast, when I started this whole escapade, was the stone age if you compare it to the way things are now.

I finally fell onto a site called Weebly. (Weebly how this site that you're now reading was made.) Weebly is a site-building system for sissies. It's for sissies that don't want to be burdened by programming and CSS code and HTML5, sissies who need to write something down, stick a picture in, maybe an audio file, and get on with the next thing in life. It was a no-brainer like Facebook, like MySpace. It was for me.

Tech support isn't perfect; it's email-based, and there are some quirks, butcha know what? It's a whole heck of a lot easier to use (for me anyway) than Wordpress.

Sure I had feelings of guilt and worthlessness when I had to face the the possible reality that I was just a web wannabe, a hack designer and programmer, but think of the hours I've saved not stressing over why my site doesn't work.

It was like a fantasy: The carols playing, the giant Christmas tree, children on Santa's knee. One last sweep of South Coast Plaza mall and I'd fulfill my shopping duties for 2011. "Such a beautiful dress in this store window." I remembered having a crush on a mannequin just like that one when I was four years old. "Look at the interesting display in that one. I should take a picture of it," I thought to myself. "No. Never mind."

"Oh, look! They're serving champagne in that store! They have waiters. What's it called? Oh, it's called Assouline. Hmm. And it's a book store. I'm probably pronouncing it wrong.

Ah, French. So impossible for me to understand. So easy to mispronounce. Should I learn to speak French? No. Why? No practical reason, I suppose.

I have an American friend who speaks French. He moved to Paris with his wife. They got mugged on Christmas Eve. They'd seen a concert and were walking home when a small crowd of rowdy, bratty French teenagers came along. One grabbed his satchel. My friend tried to fight him off but failed. My friend's wife swore in English at the brats. She swore that she'd kick their asses if she got ahold of 'em.

My friend picked himself up off the ground. He'd lost his balance in the tussle. The brat ran toward the darkness with the satchel while my friend squinted, huffing and puffing, thinking dirty thoughts.

From the other direction, a whining, grinding sound swelled up from a dim alley. It was a Samaritan. The Samaritan was driving a Vespa. He'd seen what had happened, and like Batman to the rescue, he vowed to right the wrong done to my friend and his satchel.

The Vespa roared like only a Vespa can roar, thinly adolescent, yet insistently toward the thief. Four seconds later, the French brat was on the ground, tire tracks drawn up his back like a skunk's stripe, his face mashed into the sidewalk.

"Merci," my friend told the Samaritan as he took back his dusty satchel. "Joyeux Noël," he said.

The Samaritan responded in French. "You're not from around here, are you?"

I'm kind of lazy, so when I decided to rob that bank, I only disguised my hand.

Not really.

Actually, what happened was that I baked something in a pan in the oven last night, took the pan out and removed the food, then a few minutes later decided to use the pan for something else.

The salad was ready. The potato was in the microwave. I had just opened a beer.

It didn't occur to me that the pan was still about 300 degrees Fahrenheit (down from 450) when I grabbed the stainless steel handle with my bare hand. At the emergency room they said, "I'll bet that really hurts."

The answer is, "You dream in English."

When you think about it, you can't sing "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" in Italian, can you? (Look at the picture.) The song won't rhyme.

The creator of this store window display in Rome agrees. He/she knows that you don't mess with tried and true slogans and lines from Christmas songs. (Try singing, "Here Comes Suzy Snowflake" in Italian.)


They have a different approach in Asia, though, where anything goes. Look at a couple of examples of Christmas sloganry on www.engrish.com. example A - example B

So why tear down a perfectly functional building when you decide that you don't want to use it as a movie theater any more?

Obviously, there's no reason to. Someone in charge in the Croatian town of Pula decided that they needed more parking spaces. Where better than in the movie theater?

Until 1990, it was called the Beograd Theater, then it was called the Pula Theater, then it was called the Sayam book store. Now you park cars in it.

When my brother showed it to us, I asked him if people could sit in their cars and watched movies, just like in the good old days. (It was a funny thought as far as I was concerned.)

He looked at me quizzically and said, "No. It's a parking garage. They park cars here."

I said, "No... but wouldn't it be funny?"

"They park cars here now," he said.

He had a point. Besides, all the cars were pointed sideways which makes for a bad movie experience. (But still, don't you think it would be funny if they still watched movies there?)

_I've been mesmerized lately by a peculiar phenomenon that's been plaguing Los Angeles: Tuba thefts.

For what? Steal 'em for spare parts like a Cadillac Escalade? Hold 'em for ransom? Maybe even make music on 'em?

It appears that something called "banda," a type of polka-style brass band music from Mexico might have something to do with it.

Look at an example of banda music on YouTube.


According to a Los Angeles Times article, an abnormal amount of these sometimes mind-numbingly expensive instruments (worth as much as $5000 each) have been the removed from local schools during after-hours breakins.

Stolen by whom? Aspiring banda bandits, one might assume. I can imagine, if this theft trend continues, that in a matter of months one could assume that if he saw two banda groups in a given period of time, one of them would be serenading you with a stolen Los Angeles School District tuba.

But why would someone want to be in a banda group in the first place?

To pick up chicks, of course. What draws women like a tuba? (I once saw a didgeridoo player fail to pick up two girls on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. He failed because he wasn't playing a tuba.)

Curiously... on the other side of the world, a similar brass music phenomenon (minus the tuba thefts) has been sighted. It's in a town called Gucha in Serbia where, every year, the Gucha brass band festival and competition is held.

What's a Gucha band sound like? It sounds like a banda band. Click to listen.

(Hey, that tuba looks familiar.)

Helpy?

When we stopped at an Autogrill, a chain restaurant on the freeway between Trieste an Milan, this was written in the no parking zone. I'm not sure if helpy is some international code (For, oh I don't know, "emergency vehicle?") or if it's the name of the eighth Disney dwarf who happens to have VIP parking privileges at Autogrills worldwide, and who happens to be their honorary goodwill ambassador... a sort of Ronald McDonald. (No, the space next to it did not say Dopey.)

If you're feeling helpy today, let me know what you think.