| More Fun with Teenagers ... |
[Jan. 6th, 2010|12:28 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Mojo Nixon - You Can't Kill Me | ] |
Last Sunday, my wife and I and another parent were supposed to chaperone my daughter and seven of her friends on a trip to Little Tokyo in LA. The plan sounded pretty good; we'd ride Metrolink into LA, then hop on the Gold Line train to Little Tokyo. The ratio of parents to teens sounded good too; three parents vs. eight teens seemed like a controllable situation, even in downtown LA.
But then on the Saturday before the trip was supposed to take place, we discovered that the group of eight teens had grown to "at least 20" and that no additional parents had volunteered to help us shepherd the additional kids to LA and back. To make matters worse, my daughter's friend (and president of the schools "Japanese Culture Club") had taken it upon herself to post our phone number and address on a Facebook account, and basically invited all 3,000 students at my daughter's high school along with us.
While we were discussing the plan for the trip, I suddenly had this image of myself, trying to herd an unknown number of teenagers back to Union Station in time to catch the last train back to OC at 7 pm and decided that the trip was a bad idea. We've had past experience with this same group of teens, and although they're basically good kids, we've also seen that they: A) Won't listen to parent's instructions, B) Have a tendancy to wander off on their own and not stay in one group, and C) Refuse to worry about schedules, timing, or other annoying little details like catching trains before they leave.
My daughter was heartbroken (and probably pretty mad at me too), but my wife and I made her call her friends and cancel the trip. Next, my wife called up the other parent who was supposed to go with us, and several other parents of the "ring leaders" of the group and explained the situation; the other parents agreed with us that it would just be too much trouble and that the trip would be just asking for major trouble given the teenagers' unwillingness to follow "orders" and direction from the parents.
I mean, fuck! The damned high school won't even take a bus load of teenagers across the street for a field trip without a signed permission slip for each kid, and here we were, getting ready to take "at least 20" kids all the way to goddamned, big, ugly Los Angeles, without any permission slips, waivers of liability or even any gaurentee that the kids' parents had given their consent for their kids to attend. The last thing I wanted, was to get sued for big bucks because somebody elses' dumb-ass kid had wandered off from the group and gotten jumped by bums in the nearby skid row area.
So in the end, the trip was cancelled, the Facebook posting was removed and replaced with a notice that the trip was off, parents were called, feelings were hurt and one of my daughter's friends came pretty damned close to getting a third-degree ass-chewing from my wife when the kid decided to argue with us about the wisdom of the trip (instead, she got a scowled lecture from myself, where I listed all the reasons why we wouldn't take the trip, regardless of whatever some dumbass 17-year-old might think.)
In lieu of the group trip, my wife and I decided that just the four of us (wifey, me, son and daughter) would take the trip by ourselves. We had a great time, and enjoyed riding the brand new Metrolink train from the brand new station in Laguna Niguel and then hopping the brand new Gold Line train to the brand new Little Tokyo station.
When we got to Little Tokyo, it also became extremely apparent that leaving the group behind had been precisely the right decision. The "Japanese New Year" event that we had planned on attending at the Japanese American Art Museum in Little Tokyo turned out to be nothing more than about a dozen tables with crafts exhibits, coupled with a drum circle. Obviously, this would have only kept the army of teenagers interested for about five minutes, then they would have ran off on their own, all over goddamned Little Tokyo, and it would have then been up to myself, my wife and one other parent to attempt to herd them all back together in time to catch the last train back to LA. Even my daughter agreed: it just wouldn't have worked out at all.
That's just one of the things that's kind of a drag about being a parent; sometimes, even when you do the right thing, you end up being the bad guy ... but I'd rather be the bad guy, than be stuck in LA all night long, looking for somebody else's bone-head kid who was too self-absorbed to bother showing up at the station in time to catch the last train. |
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| Greensleeves Records, First 200 12" Singles ... |
[Dec. 27th, 2009|10:50 am] |
Meanwhile, over at the hippy tape trader email group, somebody posted this link to a mammoth pile of reggae MP3s, along with this brief description:
"The first 200 12" of their catalogue from 1978 to1986incl. artists like Keith Hudson, Dr. Alimentado, Ranking Joe, Heptones,Junior Delgado, Capital Letters, Johnny Clarke, Clint Eastwood, BarringtonLevy, Augustus Pablo, Eek-A-Mouse, Hugh Mundell, Mighty Diamonds, LinvalThompson, General Saint, Ranking Dread, Yellowman, Ken Boothe, John Holt,Dennis Brown, Wailing Souls, Gregory Isaacs, Johnny Osbourne, Beres Hammond,Delroy Wilson, Junior Murvin and much more...
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=d903113e679f8879ab1eab3e9fa335ca3494cbce57a85f2a
"
... I haven't checked it out myself yet, but it looks like quite a treasure-trove of reggae music. Unfortunately, there's no file descriptions beyond the above, so there's no way of telling which file has which tracks. |
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