BLOG FOR ADAM: I used to work with a young guy named Adam. Adam was a construction guy thru and thru. He did his time out in the cold swinging hammers and saws and paint buckets and all that stuff, and was mostly a foreman by the time I met him. Adam was a leader of men — construction men, real men. I was the grant writer for a non-profit group that had a lot of low-income housing, and Adam kept the properties from falling apart. Even though I wasn’t quite as much of a “real man” as Adam and his cronies, we still got along pretty well.

Adam was quite outgoing and had a lot of interesting things to say about the construction trades and the world in general. One interesting Adamism was that you could never trust a contractor whose name started with “Garden State”; e.g., Garden State Excavation, Garden State Tile and Marble, Garden State Heating and Cooling, Garden State Whatever. I’m not sure what his logic was there, but the day went faster when Adam was around, sharing his pearls of construction wisdom.

I’ve made Adam sound like the stereotypical lug. But in fact, Adam came from a rich family and had a college degree. He could be tasteful and classy when he wanted to be. And he was high tech; he taught me how to use the web, how to use search engines, how to use FTP, etc. Adam was both a stereotype and a stereotype breaker. But aren’t we all these days.

And then there was this guy Rudy, another construction guy I remember from the non-profit. Rudy was an older guy, but he also broke the mold a bit (and sometimes, he and Adam almost broke each other’s heads). But that’s another story for another day.

ONE LAST THING: If you like old TV show theme songs, here’s a page where you can download some free (albeit low quality) mp3’s from classic shows. www.melaman2.com/tvshows/mp3/. I don’t guarantee that it’s legal; you’re on your own in that regard. But the selection is quite good. I especially liked the theme from the Green Hornet, a jazzy trumpet version of “Flight of the Bumblebee” by Al Hirt. I don’t recall what an episode of the Green Hornet was like (I was drawn more to the Man From Uncle), but I clearly remember that dynamic song at the start of the show. I didn’t see the Kill Bill movies (too dark for me), but I read somewhere that they used “Flight of the Green Hornet” for one scene. Yea, nice to know that a cool song from 1967 can still be considered cool today. (I mean, back in 1967, which I remember only too well, a song from 1930 could definitely NOT be considered cool — or was it just that the recording equipment was so crappy back then?).