Dizzy loves America

Originally uploaded by Dizzy Girl

Happy birthday, America!

Just testing this YouTube blog feature out. It’s nothing new, but I’ve never used it before and wanted to see how easy it was. Pretty easy.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter for the past couple of hours, then you know that my life is over. I lost my debit card at the post office yesterday and some asshole took it and used it to buy gas. And that’s just what we can see online. Who knows what else they charged online or went to Walmart and bought. You didn’t know that when you run debit cards at Walmart that they don’t ask for a pin number? Well, they don’t.

The card has been reported stolen and it’s been cancelled, but the damage has been done. How much we won’t know until we go and talk to the bank today. Now we have to file a police report and everything. I’m a mixture of disappointed, pissed, horrified, devastated, and just plain worn out by the entire situation. Most of all though, I’m just pissed. Pissed at myself or being stupid enough to let it fall from my fingers and not realize it right away. BTW: this has NEVER happened before and I’m usually good at putting it right back in my purse. Didn’t have my purse yesterday and took the card in bare-handed. That’s what I get, I guess.

I live in a very tiny community, so I know pretty much everyone around here. We’re so small that it takes about 1 minute to drive from one end to the other. And we all pass each other at the post office, which was the scene of the crime, so I’ve probably seen whoever took it a million times before. The card was used two minutes up the road at the gas station. That means that I probably know the asshole who found the card and wasn’t decent enough to give it to the postmaster or return it to the bank. I have now made it my life’s mission to find this person and ruin their frickin’ life. I hope whatever they charged was worth it, because I’m about to rain all kinds of Hell down on their ass. Yeah, my dumb ass lost it, but you didn’t have to use it, but you did. And now, I can’t pay my rent or buy groceries. My husband doesn’t get paid for another two weeks and I don’t get paid for another week. We are screwed because of your thieving ass. You better hope gas was all that you bought.

So, my advice to you…dear reader…is to keep your debit card safe. Don’t be a dumbass like me and lose it. And my advice to whoever took it…well…I will find you and beat you within an inch of your life. It won’t be hard.

Savannah Wildlife Refuge, originally uploaded by Dizzy Girl.

Took a trip out to the Savannah Wildlife Refuge day before yesterday and despite the heat and God awful humidity, it was a really lovely time. We sat and listened to the bugs sing and we chatted about everything under the sun. Then we watched the sun go down and drove home. It was a good weekend.

You can check the pictures out here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dizzygirl

Update: Problem has been fixed. It was CommentLuv…which has been disabled.

I’m getting emails from readers saying that when they try to leave a comment, they’re getting a message about cookies and javascript. Not sure what is going on. It looks to be a browser problem, but I’m checking it out now. As soon as I do, I’ll let you guys know what the deal is. You can certainly try to leave a comment. If you’re successful, let me know which browser you’re using so I can narrow the problem down.

Or…if you already know what the problem could be because I can’t find anything online…email me please: gennieb – at- gmail.com

Gracias.

I’ve always been a fan of CMT’s “Crossroads”,which for those of you who have never seen the series, brings together a country act and an iconic rock singer or band. In the past, amazing artists have been paired together such as Wynonna Judd and Heart, Elton John and Ryan Adams, Lindsay Buckingham and Little Big Town, Melissa Etheridge and Dolly Parton, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, and Steve Earle and Rosanne Cash, just to name a favorite few. The newest “CMT Crossroads” features Georgia boy Jason Aldean and one of my all-time favorite singers, Bryan Adams.

Now, I’m not what you would call a typical country fan, preferring older country stars like George Strait and Johnny Cash to Tim McGraw, and Americana and Folksy artists like Kathleen Edwards, Neko Case, and Gillian Welch to the Faith Hills and Martina McBrides of the genre. I admit it, I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to music. I know what I like and what I don’t. And if I don’t, I tend to thumb my nose up at artists who sell out to the pop crowd and abandon their hardcore fans for a little fame and money. I’m looking at you Faith. I think you should just keep it real and be honest about your music, whatever genre it may be. If you have to bleach your hair and start doing Cover Girl commercials to sell a few albums which aren’t very good to begin with, well then you should take a break and re-evaluate where you want to be. But that’s another post altogether, so I’ll try to get back to the point.

In all the country “fluff”, I’ve found that I really enjoy Jason Aldean. He’s got a little more rock in his country, which appeals to me, and he actually sings songs with substance and real life. He’s got a distinct voice that sets him apart from the other country guys out there. So when I found out that he was doing “Crossroads” with Bryan Adams, I jumped up and down with pure joy. I listened to Jason sing “Heaven” with tears in my eyes, thinking of the first time I heard Bryan Adams sing it, and remembering how young I was at the time. I Tweeted about it, which led to a Twitter conversation with Jimmie. We started sharing favorite Bryan Adams songs, which led to Rolling Stones, which led to me thinking about my love for music and the artists I admire, which led to this post. I swear to you, I was only going to blog about the episode and then hit “Publish”, but before I knew it, I had written all of this.

I guess if I’m going to make this a proper post about my love for music, I should probably start from the very beginning. My Mom likes to tell me the story of how she would put headphones on her belly when she was pregnant with me and how I loved music as a baby. I grew up listening to a lot of different kinds of music and I have to give credit to my family for shaping most of musical tastes. From my Dad, I grew up with a deep appreciation for artists like Patsy Cline, Fats Domino, Elvis, and George Strait. From my older brothers and sisters, I was introduced to the Eagles, Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Bread, Led Zeppelin, and Fleetwood Mac. And growing up in West Virginia, I was surrounded by a lot of bluegrass and gospel, so I knew who Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, the Whites, and the Carters were.

Every year that I got older, I developed my own tastes which included everything from Ella Fitzgerald to David Bowie and Depeche Mode to Dean Martin. I wasn’t born with a musical bone in my body, much to my ever present disappointment, but I’ve always appreciated it. Not just appreciated, but absorbed and breathed in. I just couldn’t get enough of it. I spent hours reading liner notes on the back of albums and from tapes, which has led to a sort of a photographic memory when it comes to music. I’ve always been able to ramble off random music facts, such as dates and artist history and crazy little things like “so and so” sang backup on this song or “this song was released in this year and it peaked at this position on the charts”. Even today, I’ll literally spend hours on Wikipedia reading up on musical history. My husband has always picked on me about this weird catalog of musical history and facts in my brain. If I could find a way to make a million bucks off of it, believe me, I would. It’s pretty useless information unless they ever revive “Rock and Roll Jeopardy”.

I can remember with perfect clarity where I was and what I was doing when certain songs come on the radio. For instance, I remember the first time I heard “Sweet Dreams” by Patsy Cline. I was five years old and I was pretending to be asleep in my room as I listened to my Dad put the record on in the living room. My Dad was a bad alcoholic and we never knew when he was going to bust into our rooms in a fray, so we didn’t sleep well at night. So I was lying in bed, awake and alert and listening to Patsy, and feeling the emotion in every syllable she sang. I spent a good hour sobbing like a baby in my bed feeling like I had just had my heart broken for the first time. After that, I became completely obsessed with Patsy, her music, and her tragic death. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I can remember crying to Patsy Cline for the first time.

The first record I ever owned was “The Best of Bread”, a hand-me-down from my sister. The first tape I ever owned was “Touch” by the Eurythmics, another hand-me-down from my sister. The first tape I ever bought with my own money was the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975)”. I was 10 years old. The first CDs I ever bought with my own money were Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” and the Eagles’ “Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975)”, which replaced the tape which I wore completely out. I was 14 years old. The first mp3 I ever downloaded was Bonnie Raitt’s “Love Me Like a Man”. Again, I couldn’t tell you what I did an hour ago, but here I am rambling off my musical firsts.

My dream job has always been to own my radio station so I could play the songs that I love. I remember being nine and ten years old and having handwritten playlists for every day and I would make mix tapes of music and play them according to my playlist, complete with “Classic Rock Blocks” and requests, which usually came in the form of my Jem and Rainbow Brite dolls.

When I turned 14, I knew for sure that I wanted to go into radio. I started my first job at J104 and KICKS in Bluefield when I was 17 and when I moved to Savannah in 1996, I worked at 98.7 The River and 94.1 WCHY. I enjoyed working at The River more than I did WCHY, only because I got to play the music that I grew up, like Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac. I left radio in 2001 after the birth of my son and never went back because of the use of automated music and cross-country announcers, which made local DJs pretty much obsolete. My dream is to still own my own radio station, or radio stations, and if I ever win the damn lottery or have some mysterious rich uncle kick the bucket and leave me a ton of money, I’ll get back in.

So the entire point of this very long blog post is basically about my lifelong love affair with music and how the smallest thing, like seeing a video of Jason Aldean and Bryan Adams sing “Heaven” brings back a flood of memories of all the artists I’ve grown up with. And it’s artists like Bryan Adams who have been there through every step of my life, teaching me about first love, soothing my soul after breakups, and teaching me a little about life. And it’s a testament to how extraordinary they are as musicians that we’re still talking about them today and remembering the first time we heard them.

On that note, I’ll end this blog post. Any of you who actually read this thing in it’s entirety need to be commended for sticking it out. As a reward, I give you this…the video that created this blog post and the 15 minutes you’ll never get back. :)

Click here if you have problems viewing it.

And the original…

You know, the one thing that really bothered me about the whole Clinton/Lewinsky scandal was this idea that because he had an affair, he was a bad President and that he should’ve be impeached. I never agreed with that sentiment and I tend to roll my eyes when I hear it today. Just because someone has an affair doesn’t mean that they are a bad President or a bad Governor, it means that they are a bad husband and father. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are bad at their job. On the contrary, I believe you can do your job and serve your constituents and still be a piss poor excuse of a man.

What makes these cheating politicians a liability for the state and the people they represent are the blatant lies they tell and the trickle down lies that their staffers feed the media to cover up the affair. Sanford isn’t a bad Governor because he was screwing around on his wife with an Argentinean mistress, he’s a bad Governor because he was MIA for an entire weekend and refused to account for it. He wasn’t representing his state during this time and he was nowhere to be found. Why? Because he didn’t want to be found. And because of that, staffers lied about his whereabouts to the media and to the very people who elected him. I could care less if he’s cheating, but if I were a resident of South Carolina, and I’m close enough to be, I’m be beyond pissed and I would be calling for his resignation.

That’s what makes him a bad politician and that’s why he should resign. Not because he can’t keep it in his pants, because let’s be honest here, if every cheating politician was forced to resign, well, who would represent us? It’s a simple matter of the fact that he can’t be trusted to serve his state and handle his personal matters at the same time. End of story.