Tom Waits is a hero of mine...

In response to the question, "Can you tell me an odd thing that happened in an odd place?", Tom replies with the following:

"A Japanese freighter had been torpedoed during WWII and it’s at the bottom of Tokyo Harbor with a large hole in her hull. A team of engineers was called together to solve the problem of raising the wounded vessel to the surface. One of the engineers tackling this puzzle said he remembered seeing a Donald Duck cartoon when he was a boy where there was a boat at the bottom of the ocean with a hole in its hull, and they injected it with ping-pong balls and it floated up. The skeptical group laughed but one of the experts was willing to give it a try. Of course, where in the world would you find twenty million ping-pong balls but in Tokyo? It turned out to be the perfect solution. The balls were injected into the hull and it floated to the surface, the engineer was elated. Moral solutions to problems are always found at an entirely different level; also, believe in yourself in the face of impossible odds."

If there is an artist that never fails to make me think and steers my imagination to new and wonderfully strange places that are so wholly American in both place and style, it's Tom Waits. Go on, give him a good LONG listen and you can thank me later for it. If you want a place to start, try his album "Mule Variations". It's among his best and where I started his catalogue. He may even be the only American poet/artist that could come close, if not equal, the American treasure that is Bob Dylan. It's not surprising that they both highly regard the Beat Generation and don't burden themselves with sticking to only one genre of American music, but celebrate blues, jazz, spoken word, rock, experimental, country and folk.

Here's to a wonderful, cloudy, rainy day that just screamed for Mr. Waits.