• Pearl Jam's "Wish List" - I really hate to knock Pearl Jam, they're always such an obvious target, but the reference to a Camaro hood in this song is, to me, an atrocity (for some inexplicable reason). Other than the virtures of its simplistic lyrical structure, the song is not so great to begin with, but that one line drags the whole thing down to very near dreadful.

• I still hate the blues, no matter who plays 'em. My Dad, on the other hand, has recently developed a fancy for an evening blues show on Public Radio. He was hanging out with me in the Shaque this evening and various popular 90s rock and roll was playing. He asked if it was an obscure college radio station, and I said no, that it was just a regular commercial rock and roll station. He was surprised, saying the music (much of it with distinct punk rock, hip-hop, techno, industrial and speed-metal influences) was actually pretty good. Even he, virtually the anti-student of popular culture, a man who could be said to have lived under an anti-cultural rock since he got back from World War II, has noticed that rock and roll has undergone a shift here in the 90s.

• Credit where credit is due: That new Aerosmith song with the Middle Eastern sound is actually pretty impressive (better than anything they've done since "Dream On"), though there's another Aerosmith song out there that is always enough to motivate me to change the station.

• Dave Matthews is irritating, especially this latest album, and not just because he comes from Charlottesville and gets his coffee at Higher Grounds. "Don't drink the water" indeed, you've never lived here at Muellers' Mountain.

Of course, then there's Lowes Hardware itself. I've mentioned before how Lowes moves every three or four years in a game of tag with equally-mobile Walmart. Normally this entails digging some new notch in a mountain and leaving behind a vast empty building that eventually succumbs to a mysterious fire. It seems like it would be more worthwhile for them to operate out of a circus tent. My Dad brought up the point that the real crime lies in the fact that, under local ordinances, it's actually more economical for corporations to chew into virgin hillsides than it is for them to recycle the many existing abandoned buildings and flatland in already developed areas.

And then, as a distraction from their many misdeeds, these corporations, with embarrassing fanfare (covered on the front page of the abetting local newspaper), give donations to charity that, if I were to give proportionally, would amount to a nickle. Such is the way of business here in Redneckistan.

Back at the house, I spent a lot of time installing the new mechanism in the toilet. The task was more difficult than it would have been anywhere else. Among other problems was the fact that a good two inches of stream sediments had accumulated in the bottom of the tank, and much of this had to be scooped out before I could proceed with the installation. But when I was done, it worked well. I went off to take a nap; I'd stayed up late last night.

By the way, someone wrote me last night asking if I add these little technological bits just to spice up my usual tales of social decadence and tussin-enhanced mayhem. He thought I was entirely making them up, imagining me to be, in actuality, technologically inept. (What made him suspicious was my using diodes as resistors, a bit of resourcefulness he mistook for foolishness.) If only it were so. I don't really think this technologic stuff makes very good reading, but I want people to have an idea of the machines and struggles therewith that underlie the operations here at Musings of the Gus.