My Epiphany

By reading something in a book I recently bought and by listening to an audio clip made several decades ago by Abbott and Costello, the one called Who’s On First, it is easy now to believe in the Lord and to clearly see for the first time what He has for me in the future.

If you listen to the clip, and I hope you do, the question and answer is Who, First Base remains to be faith and all you have to do is round the track of life with God nearing each base and God is not only the question but also the answer. That’s what was so funny about the skit because poor Lou seemed to get upset by the notion that you couldn’t answer a question with another question or in this case the answer. Isn’t that what people have told you in the past? Life is that simple dude and dudettes, a goddamn skit about a game of baseball. AHH Blasphemy!! No I didn't; I didn't capitalize His name and that's the difference. Grow up people.

We all are searching for an answer to our questions of Who, what and where but we get frustrated when we are given the answer that is right there in front of our faces. That is the premise of the skit and that of life. God is the answer as well as the question in every facet of your life and all you have to do is to stop thinking in one dimensional thinking and open up to the word of the Lord.

I urge you to bring up another browser and to listen to the Abbott and Costello routine at http://www.abbottandcostello.net/ I also urge to go out and buy Stephen Baldwin’s book at Amazon or directly at his site at http://www.stephenbaldwin.com. I give these two plugs free of charge because I am walking with the Lord these days and not with my pocket book. I have tried to contact Mr. Baldwin with an idea about a new of a T.V. series that will be just as well written, entertaining, suspenseful and successful as the X-Files. (As an example) I had also picked him as the star of this "PG" rated TV show in which there is no crappy political agenda, there is no partial nudity but the ages 14 to 35 will love this show, and there is no reason for bleeping out any language because Jesus Christ did not speak English. The main message of the show however is to teach the word of God and the story of the Bible (subliminally) I can’t say much more or I will blow it. We will take our script to the censor on that basis, "Jesus didn’t speak English" so if we don't use a word against another person, it isn't cussing. We just do little shit like that sparingly, get it? If and when he gets back to me it's fine because I now see that my mission is bigger than him and bigger than I could have imagined.

I must go out into the world and take the word of God with me. I must keep writing this blog to reach as many of you as I can to spread His word. “Shucks, I may be a simple man but kids like me and dogs follow me around;” I love that, I heard that on a Twilight Zone, but it’s true for me. I really am just a simple guy with a simple message; Love God. Be good to yourself and to others. It’s not such a hard thing to do, shit we all learned how to be good as little kids when we wanted something from our parents right? Well God and Jesus are our ultimate parents and if we want salvation then we must act like decent human beings and He will give us those things.

I ain’t saying that every day is a bed of roses. Everybody has a bad day and has to deal with assholes, I know I do, but my point is that even that person is the son or daughter of God so try and be nice would ya? As you can tell I am no Shakespeare when it comes to preaching the word of God. I use language that may not be appropriate in some cases; and I do know when not to use such words of the English language. There just comes a time when you have to throw off the gloves and say THAT’S IT! I can’t take this shit any longer and just start typing. That’s what I have been doing for years but I didn’t know it until just a few weeks ago. God has been telling me what to do and has guided me into this very moment. GOOD GOLLY MISS MOLLY!!!

Well, my fingers are tired and I have other things on my mind right now but as I said please go to those sites and pick up what I said, you won’t be disappointed.

That’s the Lazlo Report for Saturday February 17, 2007

The War is Getting Even More Local

Ben Carnahan, Oakwood Ohio graduated from high school just last year and finished boot camp just a few months ago. He got the word just a few short weeks ago that he was off to Iraq and he is gone now. He’s over there not knowing much but he’s a full fledged ass kicking US Marine and you can bet that Ben will be coming home when his tour is over.

I’ve known Ben since he was just a small kid and he was bouncing off of the walls at his dad and step-mom’s house here in the town that I live in. His real mother lives in the town just near to us and I swear that she is a great American and while I may not know her very well I’m pretty sure that Ben got a lot of his teaching of honor and honesty from her. She is right now on a …Oh wait, I don’t want to spoil a birthday surprise!!

Anyway, Ben was the sort of kid who got pretty good grades and was pretty good at the computer, mainly because his dad built them and I can profess to that because I was down there allot helping him or he was helping me build computers from scratch and we could also write primitive programs. As a matter of fact many people from the neighborhood would come over to our houses to get a computer fixed or call Ben’s dad for advice so much that Ben picked up on it and began learning how to answer the questions himself.

As for what he does in the U.S. Marines I don’t know yet but I will edit this page when I get the information. Just check back as often as you like and read the comments from Ben and others, hopefully he will see this and his pals over in Iraq won’t razz his ass too much. We do love you Ben, you know who Mr. & Mrs. Lazlo are, just don’t publish our real names please. By the way Ben, I got rid of that crappy old van and got myself a bitchen new Pontiac Grand Prix, fully loaded…it’s even got a 1000 watt sound system, an old fart like me with something like that :-)

That’s The Lazlo Report for February 15, 2007

Lazlo on the Beatles into the 12st Century

So who doesn’t still love the Fav four? Anyone in the age group between 35 to 70 can still pick out their favorite song by the band that took America by surprise in the 1960s. but it’s the release for our newer generations that I guess we’re all counting on to bring their music to a new generation and into the 21st century bigger and just as big as they were over 50 years ago. If I were a total snob I would take credit for the next couple of pages but I can’t. I found allot of what you’ll read, plus my comments, at an anthology site; so my blog readers, please enjoy.

In the Christmas season of 2000, the hottest-selling CD in America consisted entirely of music by a rock band that stopped recording more than 30 years ago. The Beatles’ “1,” a compilation of 27 hit songs from the band’s seven-year run atop the charts in the 1960s, sold over five million copies in the last few weeks of the year. It sat at number one in the “Billboard 200” for eight weeks, and as of this writing has spent six months on the charts, reaching more than seven million units sold. (Worldwide sales are said to have topped 20 million.) While this success is unique--every other CD with comparable commercial success in recent years has been by a currently active group or performer--it is not surprising. The Beatles’ three double-CD “Anthology” releases in 1995-96, which offered a variety of out-takes and alternate versions of their songs, were all on the Billboard charts for months. And their long-awaited book, The Beatles Anthology, was among the best-selling books of 2000, selling over a million copies. In short, the unequalled popularity and success that the Beatles enjoyed nearly four decades ago show no real signs of abating.

Allot of explanations have been offered for the unprecedented explosion of fan crazyness in the 60s that everyone called Beatlemania. Some writers said that the Beatles benefited from good luck: they unwittingly capitalized on the existence of an unusually large and increasingly affluent cohort of teenagers, the marketing potential of which was just beginning to be understood. (Even the use of the term “teenager” dates back only to the 1940s, when advertisers first began to target young people as a distinct market in their own right.) Another view is that the Beatles were valued primarily for their charisma and visual image: their mop-top hair (a symbol of rebellion in the stiff world of 1963) combined with suits and ties made them threatening but not too threatening, and their offbeat, witty replies to questions from the press won over even the most cynical reporters. Still other people still argue that their fans just loved the them because their of music, while not perhaps all that great, it was still vastly better than what else was playing on Top-40 radio at the time. (Anyone who can bring to mind the Singing Nun’s rendition of “Dominique,” which was a number-one hit for weeks in 1963, will scarcely dispute this proposition.) Lazlo’s wife, after using the bathroom at the conclusion of the show, had the same feeling about Bettlemania as did I, it needed some work on stage the first time I saw it but the music itself was timeless.

But none of these explanations can account for the great success of the Beatles in 2001. Nor is it merely the group’s aging fans from the 1960s who continue to buy their music. For one thing, the new “No. 1” CD is merely a repackaging of favorite songs from CDs that most older fans have owned since the late 1980s, when they first became available in that format. And the constant presence of the Beatles on the playlists of a wide variety of radio stations, not just those that play classic rock of the 1960s, makes clear that young listeners in the new century are still responding to--and buying--the Beatles’ music, along with their books and calendars.

We need to consider what may be breathtakingly obvious: that the Beatles survive today because of the music itself. The group’s music continues to be heard, and continues to delight listeners, because it is some of the best music of the last century. Just as it stood out from most of the popular music being made around it in the 1960s, it continues to be more rewarding and sometimes more challenging than most of the popular music being created in 2001, or in the 40 years in between. The word “challenging” is crucial, because our culture values most highly those works of art that offer a degree of challenging complexity. We tire quickly of pieces of music that reveal themselves fully on first hearing and cherish those (whether popular or classical) that seem to offer new details as we listen to them over and over.

In their seven years of recording, the Beatles exhibited an astonishing degree of stylistic development--a comparison to other great artists of the last century, like Picasso or Stravinsky, is not far-fetched. Their early music was straightforward but electrifying, a fiercely energetic presentation of American blues styles (think of “I Saw Her Standing There”). It was a revelation to white audiences, here and in Britain (as Elvis Presley’s take on the same elements of African American music had been nearly a decade before). But this early Beatles music is for the most part not what continues to be heard and admired today. Listeners are attracted to the greater richness of their later music: songs like “Eleanor Rigby,” which treated subjects largely foreign to rock and roll (death, social alienation) and which employed classical string instruments rather than the guitars and drums of the rock band. Then came the songs, psychedelic both in inspiration and in effect, that explored unfamiliar states of consciousness with cryptic words and innovative new sounds and textures: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” say, or “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The most memorable song on their most memorable album (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”) is “A Day in the Life.” With its juxtaposition of instrumental combinations (the acoustic guitar, the full rock band, the symphony orchestra) and its unprecedented form, the song painted a disturbing picture of modern life in the world of mass culture, culminating in the nightmarish explosion of its final chord--a brilliant, wordless comment about our fearful lives in the age of the Bomb.

By the end of their careers, the Beatles had utterly demolished any limits on what rock music could be. They created children’s songs (“Yellow Submarine”), tunes inspired by 1920s vaudeville (“When I’m Sixty-Four”), screaming hard rock (“Helter Skelter”), acoustic ballads (“Blackbird”), sophisticated multi-song medleys (on the B side of Abbey Road) and avant-garde sound collages (“Revolution 9”). But what has not been remarked on enough are the more subtle complexities of their music--for example the way that successive choruses of a song are enriched with additional musical elements, so that each return of the “same” music offers more to the ear.
In Lennon’s famous and controversial “Revolution 1,” from the White Album, the group makes subtle changes in texture both between verses and within each verse, nearly always by adding new elements. As the song progresses, the ironic “shoo-be-doo-wah” back-up vocal appears more and more frequently, along with harmonized singing of what was at first a solo melody. An added brass section, initially quite discreet, takes an increasingly active role; by the third verse it is playing jaunty syncopated chords that decisively undercut the serious message of the words. The effect is that the song’s meaning actually appears to change, from a preaching sincerity to a kind of light-hearted rejection of the political world. Another sort of hidden complexity is illustrated by the back-up vocals of “Paperback Writer.” At first, we notice only that they are sung high, in the falsetto range. But after a few more listening’s, we hear that the back-up voices are actually singing the children’s song “Frere Jacques”--perhaps an ironic commentary on the adult ambitions of the song’s protagonist.

Finally, these two examples illustrate an attribute of the Beatles’ music that should not be undervalued: its humor. A great deal of music created for or by adolescents is earnest, sometimes appallingly so. But the Beatles knew how to be serious without being earnest (for instance, in Lennon’s moving “In My Life”), and a great many of the Beatles’ great songs have a kind of unspoken wink to them--they remind us that life and music are supposed to be fun, “nothing to get hung up about.” In their extraordinary range of styles, the combination of sophistication and accessibility in their music, and their light-hearted spirit, the Beatles created a body of work that survives on its merits. Like the music of other great artists of the past (be it Duke Ellington or Ludwig van Beethoven), it will continue to be heard and appreciated for many generations to come.
Credit must be given to the man who helped write most of this article. I found this on the web at an Anthology website by I found it so important to share that I just copied and pasted allot of it. It’s not plagiarism unless I say that it was my own. It has such great information about the Beatles that I needed to share it will all of you. The bummer is that I can’t remember who it was or I would have pasted his or her link.

The only criticism here is that I played Paper Back Writer over and over and I did not hear Frere Jacques in the background. All of the other subtle things, well I knew of them already but, I was able to teach my 15yrld niece and she was a better person for it and I could tell already because the next thing I know she was asking me to download some Beetles songs for her MP3 player only a short three days later.
The Beatles will live on, for centuries I hope and for me I hope to be writing about them for at least a couple of more decades. My hearing is getting worse by the day but recently I bought a new car and in it I got me a 1000 watt stereo system and put my Beatles CDs. It comforts me to know that I will be able to listen to them for many more years to come even if the car stops running the music will play on and on. Cars may come and go but Rock & Roll will live forever.

That’s The Lazlo Report for February 14, EST 2007

A Declaration of Independence to All and to All a Goodnight

No, not goodbye to you, my loyal fans of The Lazlo Repot, that’s not what I mean at all. While I have been a bit busy as of late and missed a few posts here and there I have no plans as of yet to stop producing my blog. No, It’s the blood suckers and the hanger-on’s in my life that I’m talking about ever since the word of God found came inside of me and brought forth such an energy that frankly Mrs. Hoffstedder and I have enjoyed good luck ever since and we are not looking back to find out who is trailing behind us. Fuck’m

(remember Jesus doesn’t speak English)

For way too many years, too many than I want to remember, she and I have taken care of one person or another in our personal lives and it has effected us dramatically. Remember we have been living together for 25 years and married for 22. Be it a girlfriend of one of my children to one of her relatives or in the last several years it’s been my children or her niece but the point is that we have had someone else in our lives for over twenty years. That’s someone else living in our home folks besides Mrs. Lazlo after our children have grown up.

To make matters worse we were the sort of people that would help anyone because we knew that some day it would be our turn and the Lord would pay us back for our hard work and dedication to him. Well, we feel that the time has come and we’re taking it.

We’ve sold my old vehicle to my wife’s brother for little money since that’s what he has, and I bought myself a new car for the first time ever. We will never again take in someone to live with us here at our home, we are finally a couple again and it feels good. The only one other than my wife that I have any sort feelings for is my niece who has a multitude of problems. Not to say that this fine upstanding little teenager doesn’t deserve to be shipped back off to her crack-head mother, who lives in Las Vegas and probably only wants the girl to come there and become a call girl too, because she does, but her life has been torn between two parents that had little or no education, the mother of the child did drugs and had sex in front of her at such an early age that this was a prerequisite to her training later in life, she now lives in poverty (or so she thinks) and to make matters worse she is an exact copy of her rude and crude, foul-mouth mother.

She is so out of control that she has called the police on her father for supposedly hitting her when all he did was to threaten her. She not only tells him to “Go ahead and hit me I’ll just have you thrown in jail again” that she now tells him that “she’s glad to be going to Las Vegas where her mother’s boyfriend will be her new father”; daddy is more like it. I hate to say it because she’s only fifteen but a hearty good ridden to a problem that will haunt him for many years to come. This is the same sweet child that we tried our best with for over nine months with when her brother went to jail. I spent hours coming up with ways of working with teachers and projects here at home trying to bring her grades up, it’s all now a waste of time, well I hope not. I hope some day she remembers us.

Our twenty-five year old son also took us down a similar path but not with such evil varsity. His was just plain old fashioned laziness mixed with pot smoking, beer drinking and loosing jobs so we were stuck with a perpetual looser or so we thought. One day, not too long ago, he was told that if he was lying about having a job to not even to come home that day. Well we haven’t seen him in over seven months and we’ve made it clear through his so-called friends that he is not welcome to move back in with us. We were however looking for him for the first four of those months and once we found him we were just content in knowing that he was alive and was not in jail. Imagine how a parent feels that their child just bails one day after living with them for years. Years of buying yourself cars that get broken by your son. Years of loaning them hundreds upon hundreds of dollars knowing that you don’t really want to be paid back you just want to be thanked by a little help around the house but never get any even though you’re disabled. Years of paying all their bills, years of having gone through their kid in jail and the shit that goes with that, taking them $20 a week, him getting beat up and then one day just up and leaving and having no contact for no reason except that this twenty-five year old is a spoiled, lazy, selfish son of a bitch who didn’t learn those traits from me.

For the sake of the boys and because I thought there was some sort of legal reason I never spoke of my divorce before but when I divorced I took custody of my two sons because my fist wife said she wanted her own life and didn’t have time for the boys in hers; with good reason too, I didn’t want to let my boys find out what an asshole their mother was.. I lived in a one bedroom apartment in Palm Desert, California with the woman I left her for. I had caught her sticking her finger down her throat to make herself throw up when we argued and then would say “see how upset you made me”. She was also a terrible mother who didn’t like changing diapers and made me do it all the time, which I didn’t mind since they were my own children but all the time, come on!
I had had enough and left. Shortly after she literally dumped the kids on our doorsteps one weekend and I had no choice but to file for custody.

When my present wife and I moved back east the first wife and I made an agreement that I would let the boys finish their schooling out at her house and in the summer they would hop on a plane and move back with Mrs. Lazlo and I. That was the third to the last mistake I made concerning her, actually taking the word of this woman because she was lying through her teeth. During the prior three and a half years this woman paid me a sum total of $10 and a $10 poker chip from Laughlin Nevada for child support. I was within my rights to sue her for child support but I didn’t and that was the second to the last mistake.

After I got all moved in and set up with a job back her it was ready for my sons to move here too. To make a long story short, she waited until six months until the day to file abandonment papers to tell the court that I had just left them there in California with her and wasn’t coming back. That Bitch! Nothing was further from the truth and I hopped on an air plane to California where I met with an attorney who advised me to go to Indo court, get my custody papers, to take a CHP with me, and go over and get my kids. Because I didn’t want to use the police in a custody battle with her and I chickened out, and I suppose she was betting on that. I regret that to this day, however I did that for my son’s sake and I don’t regret that.

What I do regret is that they were raised by a pot smoker and a woman who didn’t really want them anyway she just didn’t want me to have them. Although my oldest son is a really nice boy now, is married to a very nice young lady and is headed in the right direction, she had his head full of all sorts of bullshit and unfortunately still has a grasp on him with him living in California. Not to say that he isn’t his own man because he is and that’s great. I could never be more proud of a son than I am of him. I’m just worried, as any father should be, that my ex-wife will somehow fuck up his marriage to my new daughter in law and that would be such a shame since they are such a nice couple and she is so nice.

I would have also never raised my younger boy to be a sneaky pot smoker which he learned when he was young because he was hyper active but his punishment was to be locked into his room for it, just for being hyperactive. Now when I was a teenager I used to be just as rambunctious but I wasn’t locked into my room for days on end like he was. He in turned to sneaking out his window and seeking out fellow trouble makers and smoking pot and hash just like his step-father did. He later told us of these stories. When I was his age and I was feeling this way my mother and father would find things for me to do instead of locking me into a room. This is also what I would have done instead of my ex-wife.

But other than the $22,000 that we lost in trying to keep our sons that we eventually had to pay my father back for, the last mistake that I made was in court. Good or bad, win or loose I will not apologize nor will I give that woman the satisfaction of thinking that there is any arrears coming her way; in fact I told the Judge that he could “contempt me until the cows come home but I won’t pay her a dime” but that isn’t it. No, my mistake was calling her a bitch in the arbitration that they make you do in a custody trial. The mediator was a woman and as soon as I asked why she had to be such a cold hearted bitch about everything, my case was lost. I had no chance from that moment forward. There was monitored visitations set up, the whole shebang.

However I got the last laugh because when both of my boys turned eighteen they both moved back east with me and told me that they never wanted to live with her anyway so I was happy. The only drawback from this is that my ex-wife has not returned a phone call nor an email concerning the boys well being in over twenty years and it further proves that she is not a mother she is just an old bitter man hater that has now gone through her second marriage, countless boyfriends and so many fake illnesses that some have came full circle and she is using the same ones again.

This is the complete opposite of my present wife of over 22 years that I adore and I buy flowers celebrating Wednesdays at times. She may have her small quirks but I love her even more with them than I would without them. Like I side however these are all things that are far behind us and we are not looking back. With the new love of Jesus Christ in my heart, the new car in the driveway and the two of us being a real couple again, life has changed for us and I refuse to others bring us down like they have before.

See ya later hanger on’s, blood suckers and the rest. We won’t be your stepping stone any longer. We may be your friend, we may give you advice, we may even point you in the right direction but don’t ask for much more than that because otherwise you’re asking us to be rude and that would not only be unfair to you but it would be unfair to us, even more so.

That’s the Lazlo Report for February 13, 2007