Bob Crespo

Spies work in obscurity, never get any credit for what they do and nobody ever knows their names. It’s sort of like being the Prime Minister of Canada.

The Department of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has, as always, been monitoring the news and general trends in America and the greater world beyond. It seems that being an incompetent executive is a safe career path only if you are in charge of gigantic banks. If you mess with the nation’s cars, however, the president puts out a hit on your career. This is, after all, America, and we’ve always been all about the cars. The banks? Not so much. This is not the first time American bankers have brought our economy down in flames. The suggestion here is that the president bring in some members of the Rothschild family to straighten things out in the banking industry. They’ve been doing the international banking thing for centuries pretty effectively.

In sewage treatment news (there is such a thing), it seems that some enterprising scientists are trying to make clean auto fuel from human sewage. DOPOTO applauds this brilliant idea for this plentiful and ever-renewable resource and expresses our gratitude that we are not the ones who have to deal with it. Sewage treatment is not for the faint of heart. It seems that the methane we humans produce in great amounts is a cleaner-burning gas than most and in just a few chemical steps our body wastes can be made to run cars and trucks. Which leads one to wonder what the new emission standards will be. For cars, that is.

In psychology news, a new study indicates that arguing in front of one’s children isn’t as harmful as once thought so long as knives, pistols and heavy blunt objects are not involved. This news comes as a relief to everybody everywhere who has ever raised any children, ridden with guilt that their incessant bickering has scarred their kids for life. Popular wisdom used to be that this sort of behavior was wrong and that parents should adopt a united and calm front for the sake of their children. For years our television shows reflected this Stepford Parent approach, showing perfect, well-adjusted parents who never let a cross word pass between them in front of the tykes. 

Well, it seems this fantasy only led most of the child stars of such shows to lives of substance abuse and crime, and these were only fictional families. So imagine every parent’s relief when it was revealed that their ordinary human natures were a better role model than the TV automatons! It seems that kids learn from watching their parents resolve conflicts, but the psychologists warn that only fair fighting is allowed, which just goes to show that they are still not in tune with reality. Maybe if people were preparing their little ones to enter a perfect world this would hold true, but DOPOTO’s own independent research has shown that it’s best for kids to learn about human treachery, duplicitousness and underhanded tactics at home. No sense sending naive fools into a world that will chew them up and spit them out.

In weather news, the Northern Plains States are considering a class action suit against Al Gore to make him cease and desist in his efforts to halt global warming. After two early Spring blizzards dumped about 4 feet of snow on them and caused the near-flooding of several cities and farming communities, their thinking is that a couple of degrees warmer next winter sounds pretty good. When told that the price of doing nothing about the melting polar ice caps would lead to a rise in sea levels that would turn Florida into an extension of the Gulf of Mexico, western residents responded that 49 states is plenty enough for any country. Some of the more enterprising among them even got busy with a new flag design.

In New York State, the governor and legislature have been busy trying to wrest back their title as the Most Corrupt State from Illinois. After the headlines involving Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich attempting to sell the president’s old Senate seat to the highest bidder and getting himself impeached for his trouble, New York legislators have responded admirably in a series of back room deals and public malfeasance that have only added to the state’s considerable problems and solved nothing. In a refutation of President Obama’s theory that government should be on the level, New York politicians have gone on record as being the lowest of the low, the most self-serving and the least concerned about the public good. The thinking in Albany is that fair and open dealing is for wimps. They don’t want change, they want folding money, and lots of it. When told that Obama is using his own money to redecorate the White House, several prominent State Senators and members of the House wondered where he stole all that dough and if they could get in on the action. So, the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious gives this week’s Not Getting It Award to the  Government of The State of New York.

The most devout preachers are Atheists. They burn with their faith and try to spread it at every opportunity.

Well, it’s official, the War on Science is over with the departure of Bush The Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney. They can now get busy on stem cells, alternative energy and trying to figure out ways to grow enough food to feed a population scheduled to hit 9 billion by the middle of this century. So there you go, Joe Dimaggio, a planet turns its lonely eyes to you, Mr. and Ms. Scientist. You people up for it? Or will you continue to not come up with anything exciting, not cure any damned diseases and not stop worrying about little Billy’s attention span? Here’s a flash for you white-coated wonders: our attention spans will increase geometrically with an increase of interesting scientific developments. So get busy.

And if you want to be a scientist worth your salt, be a Mad Scientist! We love those kind, the deranged types with the crazy hair and their glasses on practically sideways, clothes all mismatched and rumpled and with that wild look in their eyes, all fired up about something that makes no sense at all to the average human being. How about looking to correct the flaws in solar power by coming up with cloud power or rain power? Or maybe having those electric cars recharge themselves by the act of driving, like the cars we have now do? Driving a car at 60 miles per hour produces a hell of a lot of unused energy that could be used to recharge the batteries, just like the alternator on a regular car does when we leave the lights on all night and need a boost to get them started. All you do after that is run the engine for a bit and Bingo!, the battery is recharged! So what’s with all this 200 to 300 mile limit to your proposed electric cars? And what’s with the $100,000 price tags when some guy in India is producing a $2,500 car that a ton of people will buy and burn a ton more gas driving? Can’t you compete with Indian technology, where most people still travel on foot and farm the same way they did 1,000 years ago?

But that’s a matter of practicality and not a concern to a true Mad Scientist. A Mad Scientist comes up with the whacky ideas and leaves it the bean-counters and the engineers to make them practical. Take that Hadron Super-Collider they just built in Europe, the one where scientists hope to create mini-black holes, and where other scientists warn that this kind of thing could suck the whole earth into it for a little blink-of-an-eye oblivion. These spoil sports say that even mini-black holes have a way of expanding into star-eating chasms in a nanosecond. But the Super Collider Mad Scientists insist they can control the time of the holes’ existence to just a hair under a nanosecond and manage to avoid total oblivion. Over and over and over again. Really? Lucky for us the thing doesn’t work. Maybe somebody should super collide these people’s heads together and knock some damned sense into them.

Why would they attempt something like this? Simple. Because they can! And if killing us all and our entire Solar System by creating a black hole that lasts longer than a nanosecond is what it takes to prove them right, well, so be it, that’s the price of science. The rest of us are sort of grateful that this stupid multi-billion dollar toy doesn’t work and hope they never get the kinks worked out. But that’s just us, the non-scientists, who display a maddening insistence on not getting sucked into a black hole if we can possibly avoid it. But don’t mind us, science guys and gals, we’re just rubes in the peanut gallery counting on James Bond to come in with an awesome babe and wreck the whole complex in the nick of time. Mad Scientists hate James Bond.

What else can science do these days? There’s always AIDS research, or that pesky cancer cure that seems to elude your scientific prowess. All you guys have come up with is toasting us from the inside out with radiation and poisoning the crap out of us with chemotherapy and cutting us into little pieces. Future generations of doctors and scientists will look back on this approach like we do to the Barber Surgeons of the MIddle Ages blithely bleeding and amputating their way through humanity trying to rid us of our Ill Vapors. And how about diabetes? Anybody on the ball with that, or is the research dough still pouring into the people inventing some bogus attention-related syndrome that can be cured by expensive placebos?

Anybody doing anything about global warming other than holding another conference about it? The conferencing part has been pretty well covered at this point, so just maybe a little lab work is in order here, maybe come up with something like the Super-Collider that cools the planet a drop instead of making black holes. Is it too late to convert that thing to something useful? We all realize that for 8 years the Mad Scientists have been shoved aside so maybe they’re out of practice at providing us with cool stuff like space ships, plastics, penicillin, fiber-optics and Double-Stuff Oreos. But now the War on Science is over and our expectations are high. Whether that’s fair or not, the challenges are there. It was your idea to become a scientist in the first place, so don’t complain when the rest of us ask you to actually put those expensive educations to some practical use. And if you can possibly manage to be a whacky Mad Scientist for added entertainment value, so much the better.

What gifts you have been given are meant to be shared. Except, of course, if your gift is being a pain in the balls. Keep that one to yourself.

Today’s tale is about making music. I’ve been in the recording studio again with a new song, this time with two new partners in crime, a fellow named Dave Forman, and Michael Crespo, my son. Dave is a talented drummer and singer I met when we were both teenagers back in the Bronze Age, when hair was long and amplifiers the size of refrigerators. He and I were in different neighborhood bands, young kids learning our craft and having some serious fun. The years passed and we went our separate ways, surprisingly enough never getting to work together except for a recording session 25 or so years ago. The Brooklyn music scene, while not exactly small, is one both of us have been hanging around for a long time and know a lot of the same people so you’d figure we would hook up sooner or later.

Turns out it was much later. I was delighted when my old friend Gary Kroman the great guitarist put together a gig with Dave on Valentine’s Day of last month and it came off quite well with just a few rehearsals. With Gary, our buddy Ian (the vowel-challenged) Zdatny on bass and Dave on drums we knocked them out. Then Dave invited me to record in his home studio and I jumped at the chance. It’s a small room wired for sound, a hybrid analog/digital set-up that Dave has fingertip command over. He can get any sound you describe, and pronto. Working in a studio with him is fast and seamless. He also surprised me by providing piano and bass tracks for the song. This guy has even more talent than I realized.

We recorded a simple, country flavored rocker of mine, called “Jenny Take A Ride,” sung by me and my son Mike. Now, Mike I know quite a while too, what with him being my son and all. He’s quite a guy, if I do say so myself, and I sure as hell do. Anyway, the song is being mixed by Dave and will be put up on bobcrespo.com very soon. I haven’t prevailed on Dave to sing yet, but hope to in the future. What I also hope to do is play more often with the man on live gigs. He’s a pro’s pro, and adds exactly what the song needs, no more, no less. We’ll be playing next on April 26th at D.J. Ryder’s Rhythm & Brews in Oceanside, Long Island at a benefit show to help fight breast cancer. I’ve got Mike on board too, who’s threatening to make me the second-best singer in the family, the big rat. I’d spank him, but he’s 190 pounds of grown man muscle. Oh well, at least I can still write the songs.

I’ve learned in the music scene to not take anything for granted so I’m very grateful to have finally hooked up with Dave Forman, even if “Jenny Take A Ride” turns out to be our only collaboration. When you’re a musician you find people here and there who just seem to get you and you get them and you can work together real smooth, a pleasure within the privilege of making music. Often recording sessions are stressful and tense, but not this time. Not that stress and tension are always a bad thing, depending on the piece of music, but in general your best work comes out of good vibes. 

Dave being the man at the helm of all the dials and switches and generally directing the action, the good vibes flowed and the music shows it. The man has it all; a ton of talent, great instincts, complete command of his equipment and a great personality. Great ears too, and I learned quick to ask him if he’s hearing something I’m not. When he hears something the song might need or something it has but doesn’t need (equally important), he speaks up and he’s right on the money. He knows what I know, that the song tells you what it needs, not the other way around. That’s how it is with a fresh piece of music. I wish I’d have worked more with him over the years, but for this guitar slinger and songwriter, the wait was well worth it. 

Keep your eyes on this space for upcoming live gigs and on the MUSIC section of bobcrespo.com for new Crespo songs. Hopefully, Dave, Gary, Mike and I can get a good thing going with the songs and some good live gigs. I’ve got a whole bunch of songs I’m dying to record and share, and more to write. Guys like me, Gary and Dave have a lot of rock & roll shows left in us. Mike, he’s no beginner but compared to the rest of us he’s just getting started. He’s got one hell of a voice, so hopefully something good is shaping up here. Bands being bands, I don’t want to jinx anything by wanting it too much, but all I know is that music is exciting and new again, even if I’m only dreaming out loud. I can think of worse things to do with myself. 

And I sure have done worse things, abusing myself and making all the boneheaded mistakes I possibly could, went down in flames a few times and got back up and did it again. For a long time I was pretty thorough with that. Life’s been an adventure, no doubt. But I’m also really, really good at music and picking great people, so wish us luck. And if it blows up in my face again, well, that’s rock & roll, and sometimes that’s pretty damned glorious too. Come see us walk the razor’s edge on April 26, a beautiful Sunday afternoon to catch some expert rock & roll and help some women who are terribly ill. I guarantee a great show you won’t soon forget and the good feeling that comes from helping people who are hurting bad, like we would hope for if it was us in pain. See the ad at the top of this page for the details. We’ll be working hard since we don’t know any other way. Like the man said: “Hey kids, rock & roll, rock on…”

When history gives someone the nickname “The Great,” odds are that person was only great at killing people and stealing their stuff. It sure doesn’t refer to them being great company.

The latest high-profile kidnapping in Mexico? A renowned kidnapping consultant. Wonder who will consult on his case?

A large number of sour grapes Republicans have attacked President Obama for using a teleprompter in public speeches. They held press conferences on this urgent matter, where they read their carefully prepared statements from a teleprompter.

One of the leading advocates for sexual abstinence education is Sarah Palin, she of the 18 year-old daughter with a baby and a Baby Daddy.

In other sex and celibacy news, Pope Benedict stated erroneously while in AIDS-stricken Africa that condoms increase the spread of AIDS. And who would know better than an 81 year-old lifelong celibate with no medical training?

The Federal Government, in an effort to curb cigarette smoking, raised the tax on each pack of cigarettes by sixty two cents, thus making the Federal Government the largest single profit-maker from cigarettes by far. No word yet on their legal liability stemming from the many wrongful death suits lodged against tobacco profiteers.

Although this news is a few years old, the irony of the death of the Crocodile Hunter by a sting from a sting ray still blows crocodiles’ minds. They’re still kicking themselves over missed opportunities.

Irony in disguise is the record low prices of gasoline at a time when the world threatened to go into scientific overdrive to invent its replacement. The only irony there is that some people think this is a coincidence.

The approximately 300 Chinese people who signed “Charter ‘08,” a list of demands calling for greater democracy in China, have been cited as being among the most influential people in the world. Outside of China, that is, where news of their existence is practically non-existent.

Speaking of China, it looks like they’re stuck with a trillion and a half dollars worth of U.S. Treasury notes, thus having as big an interest in the economic recovery of the United States as anybody. Time to double down on the Walmart sweat shops and copyright piracy.

Former President Bush The Younger has signed a seven million dollar deal to write a book about his 12 toughest decisions while in office. Most of them involve him working up the nerve to ask permission of his boss Shotgun Dick Cheney to be allowed to attend meetings, while one or two deal with deciding which part of his ranch to clear of brush first.

There is a campaign called Earth Hour where households are being urged to turn off their lights for one hour to highlight the worldwide energy crisis. First up was Sydney, Australia. The cost of promoting this campaign has been millions of dollars in both currency and non-renewable energy resources. To say nothing of missing American Idol.

You can be either a rose or a thorn. Just remember that thorns last a whole lot longer than roses. It takes courage to be a rose.

You want to balance the United States budget, create universal healthcare and cut back drastically on poverty and unemployment? Well, who doesn’t? Here’s some suggestions that nobody seems to be thinking about:

Abandon the Empire: The United States has over a half million troops stationed in 150 countries throughout out the world. Why? There’s only 192 countries in existence. Are we looking to make it unanimous? Is it safe yet to end the occupation of Germany and Japan 64 years after their unconditional surrender in World War 2? At least those two nations were ones we actually conquered. The others? Who knows what the hell we’re doing there? We have no business being a damned empire when we didn’t conquer the world like the Romans and the British did. What’s in it for us besides a huge expense? At least the Romans and British called a spade a spade and stole everything they possibly could from their empires. So if we are an empire, we’re the lamest one that ever was, since ours costs us money! We should quit that expensive racket.

Declare war on war: Make it against the law to go to war. It won’t work any better than the war on drugs, but at least it will identify war as an illegal activity. None of them ever work out, even the ones we win. If we cut our military by 25%, that will save us trillions annually and we will still be spending more on our military than the next 20 nations combined. As it stands now we spend more than the entire rest of the world combined! That’s ridiculous. And the hell with Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the crazier wars in that most insane area of human endeavor. Put some politicians and generals in jail and see how fast the next guy decides there’s a pressing reason to get a bunch more of us killed.

End the war on drugs: Another war we lost before it began. People like drugs and will obtain them under any circumstances. The prisons are full of the proof of that statement. If it were a moral issue then alcohol would be banned too but it is not even though alcohol addicts far outnumber drug addicts. The fact is that 10% of the population is addictive, and there would not be one extra drug addict tomorrow if drugs were legal, any more than there is a single extra alcoholic because booze is legal. And like alcohol, drugs are cheap to make and will bring in incredible amounts of taxes to the treasury, as well as the agricultural jobs and benefits to states whose climates are suited to growing the plants that produce drugs. 

The prison system expenses will be more than halved and the drugs can be monitored to ensure they are made in a clean environment, just like the government inspects whiskey distilleries. Who are we kidding when we demonize one vice and legally sanction another? To legalize drugs is not to condone their use, anymore than anyone condones cigarette smoking. Cigarettes, by the way, produce more income for governments through taxation than is earned by all the tobacco companies combined. Or do we continue to send these potential tax billions to Columbia and Afghanistan and having drug problems anyway? End the 30 Years War.

Legalize prostitution: See above. See Scandinavia. And what’s wrong with one of the strongest natural urges we humans possess? Might as well outlaw getting hungry or breathing for all the good it will do. Neither prostitutes nor their patrons are doing anything wrong, and like using drugs, no one will be forced to participate in this activity.

Tax corporations: In the 1930s, during the height of The Great Depression, corporate taxes made up over 30% of Federal tax revenues. Today that figure is less than 10%, even though the United States economy since then has grown into the largest the world has ever seen. What’s the deal there? Corporate welfare has far outstripped welfare payments for the needy. There are instances of profitable multi-billion dollar corporations legally paying no income tax at all. There’s something wrong when a bus driver pays more income taxes than the corporation that manufactured the bus.