Visions of Johanna

No particular reason...

Visions of Johanna -- Bob Dylan

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're tryin' to be so quiet?
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the "D" train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's really insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He's sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall
How can I explain?Oh, it's so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, "JeezeI can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel

The peddler now speaks to the countess who's pretending to care for him
Sayin', "Name me someone that's not a parasite and I'll go out and say a prayer for him"
But like Louise always says"Ya can't look at much, can ya man?"
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain

Jeter Swallows

God this pissed me off. Derek Jeter (left, making an error), by all accounts a decent-but-not-great shortstop, has won another Gold Glove. He beat out, among others, Alex Gonzales (below right, turning a double play) of the Boston Red Sox. AGon was the anchor of a Red Sox infield that was the second best of all time. His defensive play was the talk of baseball all year (he made 7 errors to Jeter's 15). He set records for consecutive games without an error. Because he only played in 111 games, I guess he got overlooked for an overrated player. Jeter had a great year at the plate, but in the 6 hole, he was just run of the mill.

The word "easy"

Our client (the makers of a certain brand of calcium citrate supplement) is having issues with the word "easy". "It doesn't sound technical enough," they say. Doctors don't, apparently, want to hear that something is "easy". They want to hear about its "ease of use" for their patients. I loathe this need for certain groups to use jargon in order to feel that their degree is worth something more than the paper it's printed on. As if the 6-7 figure salary isn't enough. I don't know what I'm trying to say. All I know is that "easy" worked about as well as any other word in the English language at performing its function in the headline. The fact that the word appears 3 times on the page may have something to do with it.


Wait! Our copywriter has just sent us some other options, and... they're all crap. Good for her.