I just finished researching an Ibanez acoustic guitar that I have been playing since about 1980. I got this guitar in trade for moving a ballerina I knew from one apartment to the other. She had this guitar sitting up in a corner as part of her apartment decor and after some quick bartering I ended up with it. It is a 1972 Ibanez model 627 acoustic guitar patterned after the Martin D-18. Now on the grand scale of guitars, this one is a beginner model and is not much in demand. What makes mine different than most of these model is the history.

This guitar is the predominant acoustic guitar on Pizza Deliverance by the Drive By Truckers. In 1999, I was living in Athens, Ga and had written several articles reviewing the Trucker's first single and their first CD. Patterson Hood and I were fairly well acquainted and so when he ran into me at the grocery store, he asked if I had an acoustic guitar they could borrow for an upcoming session. I brought my guitar to the house on Jefferson Road a few days later and stayed for most of the day. I sat there in the living room while they recorded a good part of the album.

On several occasions, I have considered selling this guitar but I always hesitate and I am glad I still own it.

It has been a little over two years since I last posted on Sordid Tales of the New South and I am way overdue in restarting this blog. I have been traveling through the past two years in a relative upside down orientation. 2008 was a really bad year for me as I almost died after a bout with antibiotic induced colitis, my mother got sick and almost died and my brother did pass away from an accidental drug overdose. I lost my job as a result of my getting sick and I had to have back to back surgeries -one to remove my damaged colon/give me a colostomy and one to reverse the colostomy. I had to shit in a little plastic bag for 8 weeks and that ain't no fun. My wife and I joined the ranks of millions who filed bankruptcy because of medical bills. I know first hand that health care need reforming but my Republican congressmen are busy helping save everybody from socialism. Way to go Paul Broun! Save me from the socialists but send me to the poorhouse too.

2008 wasn't a total loss as my granddaughter, Mary, was born right before Mom and I got sick. More good news came as my father and his certifiably (really) crazy wife got a divorce. It was mixed news however, as they lived in SC and had to wait a year to get it finalized. You have to wait in SC to see if Jesus will intervene and save your marriage! She finally signed the papers this week but not before bleeding him dry with lawyer fees.

2009 started off a little better when Phillip Cartledge called me from the bus station and asked me to give him a ride home. This time he meant for good. I didn't have to take him back to the terminal to catch a return bus. After he got settled we got to talking and decided to get the band back together. He had to start from scratch as he sold his drum kit a long time ago and he was a little rusty.

We have been working hard trying to build our fan base and increase our number of shows. We played about 30 shows in 2009 including one at Little Kings Shuffle club in Athens, Ga.
In late 2009 I started my own internet radio show called Voice of Harrisburg. It airs on Saturday nights from 11p-12a on blogtalkradio.com It is an hour of pulchritude and despsir broadcast live from the Terrace Room at the historic Bon Air hotel in Augusta, Ga.
Come visit Willie and the Hand Factory on myspace at myspace.com/billscoggins
We are on Facebook and Twitter too. We have a website at http:/wathf.com
Voice of Harrisburg has a page on Twitter too.

Dear Landlord,

It's been almost two years to the day since I posted on this blog site. So much has happened that I don't have time to go into it. We are in a New Year and as Bob Dylan put it " leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you. forget the dead you've left they will not follow you. go strike a match, go start anew, cause it's all over now baby blue." Speaking of Bob, I guess he had a pretty good year in '07, Todd Haynes made a movie called I'm not there based on his life. I haven't seen it yet because it hasn't run in Augusta. Ga. I've seen the trailers for Cate Blanchett's portrayal of "Jude". She nails Bob during his Carnaby street clothes wearin', wild thin Mercury days. I think I'll make the drive to Athens, ga for a big screen viewing before I plunk down my money for the DVD.
I must be a Bob fanatic. I get up every morning and get on the 'net to visit Expecting Rain.com. It is probably the best Bob site on the web. I do this just be sure 1) he is still alive 2) to see what other people like me have written and posted.
I'd like to see Bob's art exhibit over in Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (Germany). It's called Drawn Blank but I guess I'll have to wait for the American version.
I hear he's headed back to the studio this month with Rick Rubin and some other super producer Super Friend- I can't recall who?And Maybe Jack White is involved somehow.

I am going to try my damndest to have a good year in '08. It don't look too good with two weeks outta the chute- the Stock Market sux, Bush is still the Pres, A recession is looming, my supervisors at work have been back just one week and already are bitchin' up a storm. My ass is chapped, migraines are back, and still nobody pays their rent on time. Can this mess go anywhere but up?
Pay me a visit at http://billscoggins.net

It's still good, it's still good!-That the name I assigned to the Valtrex commercials that used to run ad naseum on any given cable channel. Valtrex is a treatment for genital herpes. You know the ad where this attractive brunette and her boyfriend frolicked in the sand, rode bikes and went for romantic walks? They played in the surf and looked longingly into each others eyes and all I thought about was adding a voice over that said "It's still good, it's still good!"Of course, I am making a possibly incorrect assumption that she is the one with the gift that keeps on giving. Maybe he's the one whose carrying around a sack full of herpes virus. Perhaps her yammi's as clean as day she was born! Who knows? Anyway, the implied message of the the commercial is that you can have cock rot or a coochie full of bugs and still have an active sex life with the hunk/hottie of your choice.
I am going out on a limb here. I think the brunette in the Valtrex commercial is an actress named Michele Hicks. I say this because the actress that played Mara Sewell on The Shield in the third season bears a strong resemblance to Ms. Sand Frollicker from the ad. I got hit in the head with the Valtrex thing so often that I started to put two and two together. I looked it up on the net but I can't find a website that lists what actors do which commercials.

The Liberal Media and other Fairytales: The Liberal Media has reared its ugly head since the disasters in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. It pulled a sneak attack by playing opossum since the election of 2000 and thereby convincing everyone that it had indeed died a lonely death. The Liberal Media apparently died shortly after George W. Bush stole/bought the 2000 election and proclaimed himself the legitimate leader of the Free World. How do you come to such conclusions you might wonder? Reason and some logical thought may lead to such decrees. Situation: The World trade Center gets attacked on Sept 11th and what does our esteemed leader do? He sits in front of a class of school children for SEVEN MINUTES!! and appears not to have a clue as to what comes next? Shouldn't the Liberal Media have jumped on him and screamed "Do Something! Act like a leader!" No criticism from anyone (except Michael Moore and look how far out of the mainstream he is!) Situation: After the invasion of Iraq no Weapons of Mass Destruction were found. Further the Downing Street Memos indicate that there never were WMDs in Iraq. Even further, the alleged uranium Saddam was trying to buy from Africa turned out not to be true. So we have a sitting Republican President who has at least is in an embarrassing position and where is the Liberal Media? If they are indeed the enemy of the Republican State then they should have been jumping on this like white on rice. . Situation: The Tsunami hits Christmas 2004 and about a half a gajillion people in Asia die. Bush is on vacation and it takes about four days for him to dig himself outta of the snowbanks at Crawford TX and get some aid to those folks. Where's the outrage? Where was the Liberal Media? Situation: Too many soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq to support policies that vague and always changing. We got Saddam and we didn't get the WMDs let's go home. Maybe the real war in is Afghanistan or maybe North Korea? No Liberal Media here either! All of a sudden after Katrina, the Liberal Media is back with its nasty leftist agenda to smear the good names of Mike Brown and George Bush. I hear this bullshit from people who can't accept that their esteemed leader is not well versed in leadership. He chose poorly when he promoted Mr. Brown from the President of the Arabian Horse Club to the head of FEMA. I hear Brown is a swell guy, a great trial lawyer and he knows boccoos about Arabian horses. He didn't know how to respond to a disaster like Katrina and people died. It also appears to some that Mr. Bush may be a racist! I don't buy that argument. He's not a racist because a racist sees only the color of a person's skin. The only color that Bush and his kind are predisposed to favor is the color of money! If your bank account hasn't got enough zeros then you don't count in their book! So maybe there is no such thing as the Liberal Media. If there were ,do you think they would have had a field day since 2000? No Virginia, the bad old Liberal Media is a myth that is as old as the country. One of the chief proponents of the Modern Myth, Reed Irvine, died not too long ago. You think maybe the myth follows the man.

I got to wondering if anybody has addressed the issue of the "Lyndon Johnson" in cell phone etiquette. I think nobody has addressed it in these terms because I hope I am the first person to bring this up.
You are probably what wondering "what is a Lyndon Johnson?" and what does it have to do with my cell phone? I got this from a friend of mine who swears it was true of our former President. It seems that when LBJ ( that stands for Lyndon Baines Johnson for you young folks and trivia buffs) was President and he took a dislike to someone, he would meet with them when he was on the commode. He'd call them in right about time for a Presidential sit down, prop the door slightly ajar and conduct his meeting while doing number 2.
I got to studying about the "Lyndon Johnson" and how it pertains to cell phones. There are two kinds of "Lyndon Johnson's" for our discussion. First is the "unintentional" Lyndon Johnson. You are caught in the moment while doing your thing and the damn cell phone rings. You are struggling whether you should possibly breach etiquette and answer the damn thing (thus creating the unintentional LJ) or should you let it ring and go to the voice mail? If you like the person on the other end you might just let it ring. But if the caller has juicy gossip, the location of the WMDs or other pertinent info you may want to risk the breach of etiquette. However, if the person on the other end is Brutus to your Caesar then by all means give'em an unintentional LJ.

How about the intentional LJ? This is a special form of passive aggressive behavior and should be used in moderation. Let's say last week somebody ( not you!) totally fucked up some big case at work and you got the blame for it. You got reamed but good by your boss. You know he/she is mental midget with the cranial capacity of walnut and he/ she believes anybody but your sorry ass.
This week you know you have important info that the boss needs. When do ya give it to him? What do ya do? You get your cell phone and call him right in the middle of a good dump. Make it as noisy as you want. He may not ever catch on but you got the last laugh by giving him a Lyndon Johnson!

"Let's go home and have sex- my coochie's clean and it smells GOOD!"- Peaches.

What is the value of a clean house? Well, not owning one limits my knowledge of the subject. I have visited several in the course of 46 years and as a frequent visitor, I can say "Please clean the foyer on a regular basis!" Poor Vickie from Ponderosa was lax in that department and she (we) missed out on some great sex when we were 16. Vickie was everything any 16 year old boy could want -she had a pulse and she wanted to get it on! She really was sweet and she thought I hung the moon ( I still don't know who told her that!). Her foyer was not prepped and the ambiance was unpleasant. It reminded me of Venice, Italy (the old city by the sea) with the canals and the sea water and the eels. Did you know Venice had eels? I found this out when I walked through the ancient streets and saw the fishmongers with their wares for sale. The eels still had the heads on and one stood up and " Do I look familiar?"He sounded just like Big Pussy Bompensaro from The Sopranos.
Actually, I copped that last gag from the episode of The Sopranos after Pussy got whacked. Tony, Paulie Walnuts and Sal took Big Pussy on fishing trip and now Pussy sleeps with the fishes. Tony has a dream where he walking by a fishmongers cart and one of the big fish starts talking to him. It is the voice of Big Pussy. Actually, it's Tony feeling guilty for whacking his best friend but that's business.
We had a great discussion the other day about The Sopranos- Church Lady , Hermes and I. CL watched 10 minutes of an episode at a friend's house and decided the whole lot of 'em were going to Hell in a Handbasket in the Express Lane. I'm not sure who's going to Hell and who's not- it's not my job to decide that. It would appear that anyone who could kill another for money or to keep from going to jail must be a heartless sociopath. But that's what The Sopranos is about-the moral struggles of someone who kills, steals, and brutalizes people in the course of their business dealings. It like Tony Soprano said "You're born into this shit!"
In my humble opinion, lots of people get screwed in business deals every day- it's the American Way. Look at the Enron scandal, the Tyco rip off and Haliburton. At Enron and Tyco, the leaders ripped off the shareholders and made off with lots and lots of bucks. In an incident like that, there almost surely was bribery and lots of lying going on. Maybe nobody got whacked but still the wolves raided the henhouse.
Bob Dylan once said "To live outside the law you must be honest". Tony Soprano, even though he exists only on a soundstage in Burbank, is more honest to me than the pirates of Tyco and Enron. With Tony, what you see is what you get, and with these other thieves, you never know.