Groovin’.

(Black) people at bars in the city really love the Robin Thicke pop song “Blurred Lines”.

Every time I’ve seen it come on the sound system at a bar, practically every (black) person there just starts grooving, putting their hands up in the air and moving about to the rhythm while sitting on their bar stools.

One (older) (black) (retired) woman who I met who DJs a few days a week (“Erma”) said she much prefers “Blurred Lines” to Daft Punk’s 70s-flavored “Get Lucky”, and agreed with my description of “Get Lucky” as “bland”, though she didn’t know that Nile Rodgers was involved with the song.

“My music really is rock, though,” she was like.  “I just get home and I put Pink Floyd on, but here you can’t do that, you have to play something smooth, for the audience.  I play for them, not for me.”

Dutch tourist.

My one (Dutch) colleague from school told me the other day that his parents and younger siblings are visiting this summer.

The last time his mom was here in the city, she went around to souvenir shops asking for faggots, since her English isn’t good and his little (impaired) brother collects miniatures of musical instruments.

(“Faggot” is Dutch for bassoon; my guess is that the word must have meant ‘stick’ at some point in a common Germanic ancestor language, since in old fairy tale collections I’ve seen it used to mean ‘firewood’, in sentences like “Hansel and Gretel were sent out to the forest to collect faggots for the kitchen fire...’)

Kids loved the trip.

My friends' kids loved their trip to the city, and they sent me a packet of photos and drawings, including one by the oldest son of everyone watching fireworks on the lakefront (he decided to draw his favorite activity).

Also, their 4 year-old daughter wants to know when I'm going to hang out with them again, and when my friend the dad said that'd be in a month when our trips to our hometown overlap, she couldn't understand why she had to wait so long.

New stylist at my hairplace.

There's been a kind of (brown)-ish transsexual with long black hair working at the Japanese hair place I go to.

As it turns out, she was the only person working last time I went in, and got to talk with her...

She just turned 21, and her dad is Mexican and her mom is from Texas, and they met at a bar (now demolished) here in the city.

For a while, she was cutting hair at a "ghetto" $5 haircut place where you worked on commissions, you only got walk-ins and made just $2.50 per haircut.

"Though I got experience," she was like.

She also said the place was totally unhygienic, and would use the same sticks for waxing instead of throwing them away, and the heated waxing pot was cloudy from all the bacteria growing that had been rubbed off of people's skin and began to be incubated there.

A friend also got a massage there, and they just set up a table and curtain in the corner, and the massage was very rough like the person didn't know what they were doing.

After that, she mentioned how over the border in the industrial section of this one city, a friend of hers went to get a massage and when he went in, they asked him to take a shower, and the woman followed him in the bathroom and started to help him undress when he went to take his clothes off.

Suddenly, he realized what kind of massage place it was, and pulled up his clothes and went out the door, and they chased him down the street.

"No, you can keep the money!", he was like, he was so freaked out.

She also said that someone she knows doesn't talk much, but once she asked her what she did, and it turns out she's a madam, and has 2 girls who do a lot of coke and she's like a soccer mom and ferries them around to different hotels.

"She makes a lot of money," she was like.

She also added that every time she sees a brothel on TV, she thinks her friend should get a house, since it's safer for the girls and better that way.

Summer Concert (2 of 2): Helicopter.

At the same free outdoor concert downtown, they had started late because of a bigger festival located south of the concert site, which had a competing concert scheduled for the normal starting time.

At the new starting time, the other concert was still going – you could hear the bass booming where we were, at least a mile away – but they held off a few minutes longer, and then that concert ended and ours could begin.

During the start of the 2^nd half, though, this helicopter kept circling the bigger festival located south of the concert site, and as it swooped north, it would go almost directly overhead and make the orchestra really hard to hear, and it did this like every 2-3 minutes for around 20-25 minutes.

And, it had a spotlight coming out of it that was focusing on something in the middle of the festival grounds at the bigger festival located south of the concert site.

Was there a crime?

After the concert I was at ended, I waded through the crowd and decided to go over by the other festival, to see if I could figure out what was going on...

As I was walking out, this old (liberal-looking) (white) couple were complaining to the concert manager about the helicopter.

“There’s really nothing we can do about it, sir,” he kept saying.

Then, the stringy old (white) guy of the couple was saying, “Did you know, we’ll have concealed weapons next year, let’s see if they do that then, I’ll shoot it right out the sky!”, and he made a gattling-gun motion with both hands.  “Enh-enh-enh-enh-enh!”

“You think you’re funny, eh?”, the concert manager sneered.  “Very funny.”

Over by the festival site, I asked some (black) motorcycle club from Toledo who were parked by the side of the road what the circling helicopter earlier was all about, but they had just got there and didn’t know anything.

(Addendum.

I wonder, what would someone say if I was at a Mexican bar and I ordered “un molino luz” [‘a Miller Light’].)

Summer Concert (1 of 2): Spanish.

My studying Spanish a bit here and there is paying off.

The other day at a free outdoor concert downtown, I looked at the song title “El condor pasa”, and I realized that it means, “The condor passes.”