Tuesday Tuneage
Nirvana - "Stay Away"
1991

Curbside 2021

Yes I’m that guy standing on the curb hoping somebody inside will see me. No, I don’t have a make or color of car, just wearing jeans, tee shirt, ballcap. I’d like my hoagie and chips, I already paid and tipped online. And I’m dropping off my cat who needs emergency care.

No, I don’t have a number for a parking stall that I’m in. Yes, I assure you I won’t walk through the door and be a bad guy, a villain, even though I am wearing a mask. I’d just like to pick up my chicken dinner and side salad. And pay the veterinary bill with a couple of credit cards so I can take my cat home.

I haven’t had a car in ten years, that’s why I’m standing here. Yeah, it’s been walking and buses and cabs. I don’t mind it here on the curb except when it’s cold out, then I’ll have the food delivered. Do you deliver veterinary care?

Standing curbside digging the phone out of my pocket, the folks in their cars look happy, smiles all around when the door to the building opens and staff emerges with bags of food and carriers and furry friends on leashes.

Hoping somebody will answer the phone and not put me on hold so I can get my stir fry and egg rolls. And prescription for my cat who had the urinary blockage. Help me out and then send me on my way, I’d like to get home to eat this delicious meal. And monitor litter box usage to ensure my cat doesn’t have to come back.

Please please please someone release me from this curb.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Chi-Lites - "(For God's Sake) Give More Power to the People"
1971

After Quickbooks Online Accountant, Quickbooks Ledger, Quickbooks Solopreneur (formerly Quickbooks Self-Employed), and Quickbooks Money … it’s not surprising to see Quickbooks Capital has been added to the QB roster of products. One can imagine the weekly emailed newsletters — you’ll get them whether you subscribe to them or not — and their features:

City and State Code Loopholes: The Key to Starting a Profitable Sweatshop
Hell Yeah the NLRB Is Unconstitutional: Go Trader Joe!
Pinkertons: A Timeless Classic
The United States Chamber of Commerce: Your Uncle, Your Friend

Of course with Quickbooks Capital being an Intuit product, bugs will be features. These include such things as the concentration of wealth, wage inequalities, and recessions. If you like Quickbooks Capital, you can upgrade to Quickbooks Imperial for a monthly fee. There is no Quickbooks Labor available and in a release Intuit says it has no plans to develop it, though Reddit boards indicate a shareware version is available with a Seize the Means of Production mode. 

Tuesday Tuneage
Sammy Hagar - "Three Lock Box"
1982

A short time before Sammy Hagar went for the Reagan/Sgt. Slaughter votes in ‘84 followed by the solo Diamond Dave vs. Van Hagar ‘86 debate (Dave won in our booth in Whitey’s, natch) we had to deal with Hagar’s somehow emerging from his AOR Okay Rock of the likes of “There’s Only One Way to Rock”* with a tune of relentless riffing, nifty playing, and not-dumb lyrics that weren’t bad for Hagar:

The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
To the Trinity, I raise a toast

“Three Lock Box” clocks in at just under three-thirty and dare I say … these lyrics are a revelation (sorry.) Because with Van Hagar, Sammy gave us such gems as: “Only time will tell if we stand the test of time” and “I feel like a running politician, just trying to please you all the time.” Though things could of been worse (arguably): because after singing about the Trinity, Hagar could have turned to Christian Rock.

*Though Hagar himself seems to have discovered a second way to rock.

Tuesday Tuneage
The Undisputed Truth - “Smiling Faces Sometimes”
1971

Spent my twenties at a salaried accounting job in the role as dupe roped into additional tasks and projects. Eventually a General Ledger — the accounting lifeblood of a company, in this case a new joint venture — was offered to me. Management painted it as by taking this quest I could be King Arthur, Wyatt Earp, or Lee Iacocca in a choose-my-own-adventure. No doubt involving triplicate forms and data entry. While this would likely be a handy card to have up my sleeve in future dealings with the powers that be, it certainly wasn’t desired like a Shelby Cobra Mustang or a Fender Telecaster or even a case of Heineken. More money in my paycheck? No dice.

So there was my young self, sitting in a suburban office, management acting benevolent but with smiles that were a little too pleasant. I knew this general ledger wasn’t a grand undertaking, it was just more work. I didn’t want to be in the office nights and weekends and besides my mind was still at the previous night’s Soul Asylum show. Somehow I said what I wanted to say without truly saying it, I made a crack about Tom Sawyer painting that fence. Glances were exchanged, eyes dimmed, and smiles along with any future opportunities faded.

Tuesday Tuneage
Neil Young & Crazy Horse - "F*ckin' Up"
1990

Intuit has been pushing hard to get accountants off of Quickbooks Desktop and into Quickbooks Online, switching Desktop to a spendy subscription model over the summer and then ending subscription sales on September 30th. But what are you getting with Quickbooks Online?
 
First of all the pros. With Quickbooks Online (QBO), you can share a Quickbooks data file with your client. But with all Intuit products any improvement over what preceded it comes with downsides*. Your client will have access to the data file in the cloud and we all know what clients love to do when left to their own devices: Download bank transactions and import them into Quickbooks. In my twenty-five years of bookkeeping I’ve never seen the importing of transactions from a bank work smoothly. Usually it imports the vendor name IN ALL CAPS followed by bunch of random transaction/confirmation numbers. Worse, clients tend to click some wrong button (or just as likely, Intuit fucks this up) and the transactions get imported twice. So you spend time deleting all the duplicate transactions, which takes more time on QBO than it does on Quickbooks Desktop (more on this later.) And your client may think they can take a stab at reconciling their own statements (after all the commercials used to say that “if you can balance a checkbook, you can use Quickbooks”) and that invariably won’t go well. Because, well, your clients probably didn’t spend much time balancing a checkbook — that’s why they hired you, right?

So that’s the caveat-laden pro, what are the cons? The data entry feature will have you bogged down in no time. In desktop, you type in the transaction details, then hit “enter” on the keyboard with your thumb, and you’re automatically in the next transaction. You get in a rhythm and you start flying through data entry. In QBO, you have to move your mouse and click on the enter button at the bottom of the screen to record the transaction. So instead of doing everything pronto with the keyboard, you have to involve your eyes and the mouse as well. Deleting transactions is a three-step procedure involving a hidden drop-down menu, rather than a quick shortcut keystroke like in Desktop. Then there’s the general view of the software interface. In Desktop, you have your customer, vendor, and banking sections laid out clearly and you can add icon shortcuts for your frequently-used tasks. In QBO, the transactions menus are assembled haphazardly in some stew of nonsense. Entering checks and credit card expenses are in one section, bank deposits are in another. For some reason, reconciliation and chart of accounts are lumped in another section altogether. The reports section is overly complicated and good luck trying to figure out how to assemble a simple transaction detail. Thankfully, the Find function works quite well (hey another pro!) and has many numerous, easy-to-use filters to help you narrow your search. This will come in handy as working in QBO will probably result in errors, especially if your client starts poking around in it.

So Quickbooks Online: all in all, two stars as a bookkeeping software — and that may be too kind as a client once called it a scam — and one star compared to Desktop, which is solid until it isn’t. You long-timers out there know what I mean.

*In the first draft of this piece, I typed “downfalls.”

Tuesday Tuneage
Motörhead - "Eat the Rich"
1987

As research for my new zine/blog Troller or Controller? I dug into the April/May 2024 issue of Forbes, which has a specific focus on billionaires. My goodness. I wrote down four words: Late Stage Capitalism Porn.

Lessee, it starts out with some Steve Forbes opinion pieces. He fully supports Israel’s invasion of Gaza and claims that they have made extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties. He writes that the US should fully support Israel, which reminds me of a news story I read last winter that read like an Onion piece and said something like “US advises Israel to use smaller bombs to minimize civilian casualties.” His other editorial said the US should stop investing in renewable energies and instead invest in new businesses that create jobs. Uh Steve-O: renewable businesses are new businesses, maybe go back to that flat tax long con.

What else is in there early on? A list of upscale eateries that are all in New York City. (I’ll stick with Monk’s Diner.) We soon learn that billionaires are nicknamed “three commas,” then things lead into the main act as the prose coughs this up: “What a year it’s been for the planet’s billionaires, whose fortunes continue to swell as global stock markets shrug off war, political unrest, and lingering inflation. There are now more billionaires than ever.”

There is the list of the fourteen men (yes, they’re all men) who are worth $100 billion. We learn that “The combined net worth of the planet’s billlionaires has skyrocketed by 545% over the past two decades, to $14.2 trillion — quadruple the 111% rise in world GDP.” (The graph that accompanies this is outstanding. I mean, seriously nice work whether you think that unreal accumulation of wealth is good or bad.) I found out that Warren Buffett (number six) got into a beef last year with Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam over the price of Pilot truck stops. WTF? And oh hey: the blurb on Bill Gates (number seven) references Cheap Trick with a mention of “stiff competition.”

But enough about the established big shots. Billionaire newcomers include Magic Johnson ($1.2 billion), who was Sid Hartman’s guy before he was your guy, and TV’s Dick Wolf, who for some reason hasn’t plugged his $1.2 billion into a 24/7 streaming Law & Order channel (he blew his chance to put Homicide: Life on the Street episodes on the air with Peacock beating him to it.) Then there’s Taylor Swift ($1.1 billion), who “became the first billionaire musician based soley on songs and performances.” In your face, McCartney!*

There’s a page titled “Warbucks” that leads off with “Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has wrought death and destruction upon untold millions of people. Yet it’s been a boon, at least financially, for several members of the World’s Billionaires list.” War, amirite? Here we have eight men, three of who are war-profiteering from shipping Russian oil and sending Russia guns. There’s one Turkish gent who sent Ukraine a model of military drone so popular, troops wrote a folk song about it. If there’s one Ukranian folk song I would actually listen to, that one is likely it.

At the end there’s a quite good article skeptical of crypto currencies and their ilk that has a compelling page-long graphic and ends with the warning: “Buyer beware. The lunatics are running the crypto asylum.” Huh, actual investigative reporting and a takedown of the dudebros behind the various scams that are crypto. Bravo, even if it is buried in the back of the issue.

Finally, here’s why I love printed magazines. There’s an Aristotle quote on the spine. It reads: “Inferiors agitate that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior.” I may not make much money, but Forbes gets me.

*A separate small feature shows that Gibson is releasing a version of non-billionaire Jimmy Page’s 1969 double-necked guitar with a mere $50,000 price tag.

Tuesday Tuneage
Krokus - “Long Stick Goes Boom”
1982

Along with Motörhead and Aerosmith, Krokus also had a song titled “Eat the Rich*”, but this one treads a more familiar path. The beat, the riffs, the vocals, the guitar simulating Pete Townshend’s Who’s Next synthesizer riffs ala “For Those About To Rock”: It’s a state of the art AC/DC knockoff. Not to mention the title is a har har phallic metaphor, just like the masters. This anticipates AC/DC-run-through-the-Xerox from the likes of Cinderella and Dirty Looks just a few years later … but I’ve the survived the eighties one time already.

*For it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. - Luke 18:25

Tuesday Tuneage
Terry Reid - “Rich Kid Blues”
1969

In my twenties I worked for a general contractor and one of the projects the company worked on was building out a new space in downtown Minneapolis for Smith Barney. They were famous in the early eighties for having TV commercials where spokesman John Houseman would eloquently state: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.” When in a meeting, an always-aim-above coworker in an aside said: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They inherit it.”

I always think of that quote when Dean Phillips comes to mind.

Tuesday Tuneage
Houston Oilers Fight Song
late 1970s

During an Eagles vs. 49ers game in December, Fox caught a member of the San Francisco staff obviously stuffing a large plug of chewing tobacco into his mouth. Which made me wonder: where have all the chew fiends gone? There was a time when you couldn’t escape the stuff. Every big league ball player used it: Rod Carew flirted with batting .400 while having a chaw in his mouth the size of a small tangerine. There was usually some dude in your circle of friends who had a worn circle on a back pocket of his jeans signaling that he indulged. Invariably, someone would be encouraging you to try Skoal Bandits if you wanted to get your feet wet. Hell, they used to advertise the stuff on television. Who can forget the classic Copenhagen/Skoal/Happy Days “a pinch is all it takes” commercials where you could choose your own adventure? The best chewing tobacco commercial featured maybe the best running back in football, but I’m getting ahead of myself …

The Houston Oilers were one of the more enjoyable NFL teams of the late seventies. Great uniforms, a character of a coach in ten-gallon-hat-wearing Bum Phillips, a devastating running back in the great Earl Campbell, irrepressible kick returner Billy “White Shoes” Johnson, and a quarterback who was known to wear a flak jacket to protect his injured ribs in Dan Pastorini. But they couldn’t get past great Pittsburgh Steelers teams in two straight AFC Championship Games, leading to the great Phillips quote: “Last year we knocked on the door. This year we beat on it. Next year we're going to kick the son of a bitch in!”

Earl Campbell was one of the all-time great runners, he’d just as soon run over you instead of flashing his breakaway speed. He appeared in a great Skoal commercial that finished with him saying “Skoal, brother” to us as he walked off with a beauty on the beach.

And the Oilers had a fight song! It featured lyrics such as:

We’ve got the offense
We’ve got the defense
We give the other team no hope

We're the Houston Oilers
Houston Oilers
Houston Oilers number one

It also had an incessantly catchy melody. My brother and I spent too much time one afternoon reciting this fight song after hearing it. Thing is, a week or two later a Miami Dolphins game was on NBC and they were using the exact same song with “Miami Dolphins” being used in the lyrics for the team name. Weird, and somehow further cemented the legend of The Houston Oilers Fight Song in my mind.

So circa 1992, I was helping my cousin and his wife move their belongings out of their apartment and into a moving truck. His friend Steve and I got into a rhythm of putting boxes onto a cart and shuttling it on an elevator and down to the parking lot. Steve is a total goofball, the best. He started talking about the Houston Oilers of the late seventies and asked me if I remembered their fight song. Ummm, yeah! He suggested we sing it, so we started in but after a bit he stopped me. “You’re going down in pitch for the ‘Houston Oilers number one’ but you’re supposed to go up, like this …” So we started over and I got it right. We sang the song for the slow ride down the four floors. The elevator and its shaft didn’t have much for insulation. The doors opened on first floor and there was a dad and his young daughter staring at us in disbelief and probably some suspicion. We said hi and continued on with our work.

Tuesday Tuneage
Tygers of Pan Tang - “Tyger Bay”
1981

Part One: Michael Moorcock As Secret Influence in Seventies and Eighties Metal

“Let’s go to Down in the Valley,” somebody said. Cool, some random weeknight fall of ‘88 with my three roommates. I hit the used racks, found omigod Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited in great shape, cover beat up but who cares if the vinyl is nice? I spotted a used Tygers of Pan Tang album while walking to the register, sitting right there in the front of a rack. Tygers of Pan Tang … had never heard them, just knew that my new faves Metallica raved about them in magazines I flipped through at Shinder’s and the library. But I didn’t pull the trigger on buying it, likely I didn’t have much money in my checking account, maybe I didn’t want to risk it, maybe I was too cheap to pay the eight-dollar price. And maybe I wanted to quit while I was ahead — how often do you find an all-time great Dylan LP in the used racks?

Over the years, Spellbound became a white whale, especially when I scored the two-disc New Wave of British Heavy Metal 1979 compilation about fifteen years ago and it featured the Tygers’ “Killers” on it. And I didn’t want the album on CD (yawn), I wanted it on vinyl like that beauty I saw in the store years ago. Occasional trips through the used racks around town didn’t materialize in a find. Then up stepped the great equalizer, eBay. Spellbound was almost always available on their site, but it usually went for twenty bucks or more and then usually another fifteen bucks or so for shipping because the seller tended to be in the UK. But last fall a copy popped up from an American seller, in Very Good (VG) condition for fifteen bucks and nobody had yet bid on it. I contemplated making a lower offer but ending up winning it for that price. And no other bidders, suckers! Were they scared off by the VG grading of the vinyl, that it wasn’t Very Good Plus or Near Mint? I’ve had good luck with VG albums on eBay, they usually have some surface marks but play quite well. This LP also had a sticker on the cover, who cares I just want something that sounded good via my eighties dorm room stereo system of Audio-Technica turntable, Technics receiver, and ancient JBL speakers. VG = Virtual Gold.

So what about the music? As Chuck Eddy wrote on the New Wave of British Heavy Metal: “(The artists) had Learned Lessons From Punk: Gone were the bloated excesses of yesteryear’s dinosaurs; in their place were shorter, faster, hookier, angrier songs.” So it goes with the Tygers. The riffs are played at breakneck speed with fast fast fast solos thrown in. The singer isn’t obnoxious — many times a crucial metal differential. And cooly, titles like “Gangland,” “Minotaur,” “Blackjack,” and “Tyger Bay” all point to some tough Thin Lizzy-like street-smart universe*.

Part Two: I Shun Microeconomics Unless It Favors Me

So Spellbound ended up being $20.63 total after shipping and sales tax. (An eBay vendor charging sales tax? Go figure.) How does this compare to what I would have paid thirty-five years ago? Back in ‘88, the album was $8.00 and I think the sales tax then was about five percent. I took a “how much is a 1988 dollar worth today” calculator I found online — a dollar then is $2.54 now — and I came up with this:

Eight dollars plus sales tax is: $8.00 x 1.05% = $8.40. And then taking that sales price and multiplying it by how much a 1988 dollar is worth in 2023 is: $8.40 x 2.54 = $21.34.

So Spellbound would have cost me $21.34 in 1988 and I “won” by playing the long game and paying $20.63 in 2023. I saved 71 cents hoo-boy but missed out on thirty-five years of Tygers of Pan Tang fandom while also annoying folks with my raves about the band. As John Maynard Keynes once wrote: “In the long run we’re all dead.”

*Here’s the part where I admit to failing at describing music, which is why I’m moving on to write about accounting, business, and economics in my new zine/blog Troller or Controller? (Not to be confused with a rumored under-the-counter zine allegedly titled Bookkeeper or Bookmaker? It will have features such as “Bill T’s Guide to T-Bills,” “What Your Chart of Accounts Says About Your Love Life,” and “Shutout? NHL Teams May Found the Key to Not Having to 1099 Emergency Backup Goalies.”

Tuesday Tuneage
Kansas - "Everybody's My Friend"
1983

New dictionary entry for 2024: "Socializing creep":

1) I now say “hi” and exchange the smallest of talk with 3-4 people at the gym, I have succumb to socializing creep. 2) If this evolves into full-blown chatting, I will have become a socializing creep. 3) The latest name for my imaginary punk-metal band is Socializing Creep.