KaBar2

Very articulate, xen. I bow to a superior argument. However, I still don't agree with stealing, LOL. The problem is a lack of a decent distribution system for the work of artists, writers and musicians that doesn't go through Hollywood, New York, and the lawyers at BMI, SESAC and ASMC. I've seen signs up in the "back room" at clubs that said, "Please! No BMI or ASMC material!"

Speaking of copywrites, this: http://online.wsj.com/articles/pirate-bay-spokesman-arrested-in-sweden-1401578955

I know there are a lot of people who have some sort of cultural commitment to violating copywrites on music, DVD movies, books, etc. but I've never really understood this. The people who write the books, create the music, make the movie, etc. are not millionaires or anything for the most part. (Okay, major Hollywood stars, yeah, they're millionaires, but I'm talking about the little guys.) They write a book or make a CD, and they're getting like a quarter on each CD that sells. Obviously, they are trying to make a living like everybody else, but one in which they don't have to go punch a clock every day. Without a copywrite, they don't get paid. If they don't get paid, then they stop making CDs and writing books, because in the real world, nobody does anything without getting paid to do it, one way or another. I don't object to paying for the stuff I get, because I want that stuff to continue to be available to me. If everybody started stealing Fritos instead of paying for them, pretty soon the Frito-Lay company would go out of business. A few blocks from my house there used to be a Kroger grocery store. The neighborhood has gone through demographic change since I moved here in 1990 or so. It used to be about 95% white, now it's about 95% black and Latino. One day, the Kroger store announced they were closing. I went to the manager's office to find out why. I always liked the store. It was clean and well-stocked, the prices were reasonable and the people that worked there were great people. The manager told me the reason they were CLOSING THE STORE was that the shoplifting had gotten so prevalent that their profit margin went below acceptable limits and the Kroger Corporation was shutting it down. I asked the guy, "Are you saying the shoplifters drove this store out of business?" and he said, "Yup. That's about the size of it. Kroger is not in business to give away free food." So now I have to drive 2-1/2 miles to a Wal-Mart to shop for food. When there is a culture of entitlement and criminality in a neighborhood, the honest people say, "Screw this. I'm not living here with all these thugs." Here in Houston they talk a lot about "food deserts," areas of town, usually minority areas, where there are no grocery stores. This Kroger store is an excellent example of why this is so. Businesses go where they can do business. They don't exist to give away free shit. If people want respect, they have to give respect. Unfortunately, the idiots in my neighborhood have no respect for themselves and no respect for other people. And no grocery store, either.

None taken. But Duffy Littlejohn is an attorney. And he's trying to make a living writing books and selling them. For money. So if you take his book and make .pdf copies, you are taking the bread right out of his mouth. He probably won't like that. Did I mention that he's an attorney? Who rides freight trains? Just sayin'.

Flatcar, thanks for the correction about Steamtrain, Feather River John and Hood River Blackie. Every year that I did go up to Britt, people drank in the jungle on the sly, but kept it kind of on the down low. The cops will not tolerate any fighting, they will not tolerate people carrying open containers and they will not tolerate drugs. Do people drink? Of course. They pour it into a big coffee mug with a lid. Do they get high? Yes, but they do it discreetly, not right in the middle of camp. People who just want to get wasted would probably be happier at Trampfest, if it's still going. (Some people call it "Drunkfest.") There are good points and bad points to every single thing under the sun. Britt has its good points, and it also has its bad points. Quite a few of the old hard core riders have died. Shot Down Wills, Space Man John, Preacher Steve, 8-Ball, Dog Man Tony--these guys were the hardest of the hard core, but they also knew how to behave in town. Some of these younger guys just don't seem to get it, and their deliberate misbehavior brought down the Law on everybody.

Xen-- I missed answering a couple of your questions. No, the people who get crowned Hobo King and Queen do not keep the crown. The crowns are pretty old, they were made for the election of the King and Queen years ago and they don't travel well. They are kept in the Hobo Museum in Britt. Frankly, they are pretty cheesy and should have been replaced with something better years ago. I've seen photographs of the King and Queen taken in the 1930's and it looks to me that they were wearing cardboard "crowns" covered with aluminum foil or something. Several "traditions" up at Britt were invented in the 1980's by a couple of old timers--Steamtrain Maury Graham and Fry Pan Jack, I think. The Hobo Convention didn't have much in the way of activities for tourists to observe. Tourists mean money. Money means the Convention has a reason to continue. Steamtrain convinced the town fathers to create the Hobo Museum. He also "invented" the Hobo Shuffle and all the rest of the "traditions" (like the Four Winds thing) that have become much beloved antics by people who regularly go to the convention. I got dubbed a Crown Prince of the Hobos once because I served as crumb boss. I didn't seek it out, but I didn't want to refuse and embarrass everybody so I went along with it. It's kind of silly stuff, sort of like Boy Scout ceremonies or King Neptune celebrations when a ship passes over the Equator. The tourists love that kind of stuff. I guess they think they are seeing "real hobo culture" I don't know. It kind of reminds me of Mardi Gras parades or the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo--a lot of corn for tourist dollars. The West Coast Hobo Gathering is a lot realer, but it has it's drawbacks too. It embarrasses me that the same town that brags about hosting the National Hobo Convention won't let tramps drink in camp or let hobo dogs run loose. They want the tramps to be picturesque and be pleasant to tourists who are sometimes pretty rude. Still, it's the only Convention we've got.

I don't know what they call this kind of music--some kind of retro-Gay Ninties/ Roaring Twenties music. It reminds me of the band Old Crow Medicine Show. Garbage Man Blues (awesome) Anyway, this guy's name is Pokey Lafarge and his band plays some cool old blues music. The La La Blues In the Jailhouse Now Also Dom Flemons. The guy is phenomenal on the tenor banjo. He was in a band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops that played music from the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Going Back to Arkansas Your Baby Ain't Sweet Like Mine Pretty Girl With A Blue Dress On San Francisco Baby

More homemade banjo stuff. This guy plays "Julianne Johnson" clawhammer style on his fretless Appalachian banjo. Here's the same guy, playing "Walk Right In" on a six-string guitar made from a gas can. "Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down" on a three string, cigar-box guitar tuned D-A-d. Awesome! "Here Comes the Sun" on a short-scale, home-made six-string, cigar box guitar. "Angel From Montgomery" on a home-made, cookie-tin banjo. "Cold Frosty Morning" on a home-made, cigar box fiddle. "When the Roll is Called Up Yonder" on a cigar-box mandolin. Awesome!

Homemade banjos I think I've mentioned my interest in homemade musical instruments on here before. I've made about ten homemade banjos out of stuff I found. A lot of the wood I got from what I call "curbside couches," abandoned furniture that people throw away. Building homemade, "found object" banjos got to be a sort of a hobby, and I set myself some rules. I could use anything I found on the street or in a dumpster. I could use anything I could buy in a hardware store, and I could use strings and tuners from any source. As time went on, I scored a violin peg shaper from a dumpster behind a violin store in west Houston, and later I bought a violin peg reamer (to ream the holes the pegs fit into.) I tried various things for frets, including finishing nails, copper wire and the stiffeners out of discarded windshield wiper blades. None of those things worked satisfactorily, so I went to a music store that a high-school buddy owns, and he gave me some banjo fret wire just for the hell of it, and also gave me permission to dumpster dive their dumpster anytime I want. Obviously, I can afford to buy a banjo anytime I want, but the fun part of building them from junk is looking for the needed parts and pieces. I built a couple using the rawhide from large "dog chews" I bought at the grocery store for the banjo head. Worked pretty well, too. (To make a dog chew, they take a piece of rawhide about eight by twelve inches and roll it into a sort of cigar shape, then tie a knot or two in it. Soak it in water, and presto--you can untie it.) Anyway, below is a video from a good ol' boy from Indiana named Bill Withers who makes his own instruments, and plays pretty well, too. He plays "clawhammer style" in this video, but I think he also plays three-finger Monroe style. ( Clawhammer is appropriate for a fretless banjo.) "OLD SCHOOL." Same guy, with his homemade frettless banjo made from a salad bowl from Goodwill and cherry wood from his dad's corn crib. Here's the same guy with his homemade "lap steel" guitar. Damn, I like this guy. "Lean On Me, " on an Epiphone ulelele. Wow.

I know that it sure don't look like it, but when I got out of the Marine Corps in 1981, I was lean and mean, Xen. I must have run ten thousand miles in the Corps, and probably half of them wearing a flak jacket. I weighed 185 pounds when I got out and there was very little blubber, if any. We went running every day at lunch and worked out with free weights every night. Now I weigh about 265, and I definitely need to lose weight. Wow. What a lard ass. I chalk it up to three things--one, Zoloft. I started taking Zoloft when my mother passed away in 2003, and I took it for about ten years. Zoloft can make you gain weight, but it's just one element. It helped with the depression, certainly, but it has its drawbacks too. The second thing is (I hate to admit this) the internet. The net is interesting and leads one to a sedentary lifestyle. I'd rather surf the net than exercise, and you can see for yourself where such laziness leads to. The third thing is my work. The nature of my work is very low impact in terms of exercise. The last time I caught out with Stretch I lost thirty pounds. Maybe it's time to retire and go ride a few trains!

K-Bar up at Britt cooking Pizza Soup HOLY SHIT, what a big, fat tub of lard I am! I found this video by accident on YouTube. What a disgusting fatbody. This video guy was bugging me to show him about pizza soup. I had mentioned it, and he just insisted, so I did it. It was pretty tongue-in-cheek, but I didn't think it ever actually was put on YouTube or anything. So here you go, the Hobo Convention up at Britt, Iowa. It was several years ago. I'm probably a bigger tub 'o lard now than I was then. ("Does this tee shirt make me look fat?") Jesus. They say the camera adds ten pounds. In my case it must have added eighty. I know pretty much everybody in this video.

Here ya go. The Cool Life on Heroin. I like the guy with the bone hanging out of his arm from an unstoppable flesh-eating bacteria infection he got from shooting up. Nice, eh? Stupid assholes, all of them. http://photobucket.com/images/heroin+addict/?page=1

Or maybe they're just stone cold dead from an overdose, or dying of HIV. Fuck needle drugs and the morons who use them.

I do not know a single trainhopper that uses heroin. What kind of bullshit is this, anyway? Anybody caught with heroin is going to prison for a serious sentence. If you are travelling with somebody hooked on this shit you are taking a bigtime risk. If the cops have enough dope to charge him, there might be enough to split and charge you too. "Oh, the police would never do that, falsify evidence." Really? Are you sure? 'Cause in my experience, uh, yeah, they do. Heroin addict? As a road dog? Absolutely fucking NEVER GONNA HAPPEN. Ditto for any other hard drug. Marijuana, okay maybe. But cocaine, or any of that other shit? No fuckin' way. "I don't judge." You gotta be kidding me. What a moron.

Did you really use the word "bomb" in a post about Washington D.C.? That knock at the door is the SWAT team from NSA . . . If you aren't actually a , um . . . officer of the law, I would say that as long as you live in D.C. your graffiti career is over. Dude, you are in the hottest area on the planet Earth. There is a video camera every block. Use your head, fella. Probably 5% of the people you see on the street are employed by Federal law enforcement agencies. Get a clue, okay?.

Pete Seeger kind of exemplifies the late-1950's/ early-1960's folk music/protest music scene. He also pioneered a particular type of banjo, one with an extra-long neck, which gave the instrument another, lower octave, if memory serves. RIP Pete, ya old commie.

WHAT A COUPLE OF FUCKING MORONS. He should have just waited for the train to pass over him. Going out between moving trucks (the assembly with the wheels under it) was galactically STUPID. As long as he wasn't hit by dragging gear, he would have been relatively safe. WHAT A COUPLE OF FUCKING MORONS. NEVER DO THIS.

Flatcar Frank volunteered to keep the Grapevine running, and was authorized to do so by Fran's daughter, who "inherited" Fran's server and website. You're a good guy, Flatcar. Many props.

I got on a junk train in Cicero Yards one time that took eleven days to go from Chicago to Livingston, MT. Jeez, it was like being tortured. I finally just hitchhiked to Butte.

Flatcar Frank, Stretch Wilson and I all know Connecticutt Shorty and her sister, New York Maggie, personally. They are the daughters of a famous tramp, and they are very active (and I would say, influential) in the tramp community. They are not trainhoppers, of course, being "ladies of a certain age", but they do meet the definition of a hobo, i.e. "one who travels to work." They own a home in Britt, Iowa, and they travel down to Arizona and Florida in their little RV motor home (like a van with a camper body) in the winter to jobs down south. Maggie and Shorty are decent, honorable women. You can trust that any money you send to Connecticutt Shorty will be used EXACTLY for the intended purpose, I guarantee it. K-Bar

The Crew Change Guide was never intended to be distributed wholesale to any- and everybody. It was created by Train Doc and a few of his closest associates. They would camp out near crew changes, accumulate information, bundle it in an email and send it to a friend of Train Doc who is not a trainhopper, but who likes the idea of the CCG. Once a year, in August, they would edit out old or outdated information, publish a new issue of the CCG and distribute it to the select few. Those select few people are, essentially, the gatekeepers. Despite being a tramp and a trainhopper, Train Doc is not some malevolent idiot who wants to see 15-year-olds out risking life and limb trying to hop freight trains. He required the gatekeepers to be very selective in TO WHOM they distributed the CCG. They required the people to whom they gave it to raise their hand and swear that they would not give one to a kid, a railroad special agent, a police officer, sell it for money, or publish it on the internet. For years and years, the only way to get one was to know a genuine, experienced tramp who judged that you were dependable enough and honorable enough to deserve one. Until Ray Tylicki. Tylicki is a sociopath. He thinks ONLY ABOUT HIMSELF. He wanted to rip off Train Doc's CCG and publish it for money, to provide himself with an income. He did NOTHING to contribute to the CCG. He was not ever part of the group that collected the information, collated it, edited it, updated it and published it. HE IS STRICTLY A THIEF AND A RIP-OFF ARTIST. I don't know how Tylicki ever got a copy of the CCG. The edition he did get was out of date (2006) and PirateBay, those stupid assholes, refuse to acknowledge TrainDoc's copywrite, but of course, they refuse to acknowledge ANYBODY'S copywrite. This is how people think who feel that nobody can find them and that they are above consequences. Definitely a sociopathic viewpoint, but an unrealistic one. Nobody is completely anonymous on the internet. They CAN be found, by people who may be willing to do the work. When people provide a copy of the CCG to another person, they are only allowed to charge what it costs to photocopy it. The last one I gave to somebody cost a little over ten bucks. I made him raise his hand and swear. He told me he would never, ever violate that oath, and I believe him. He's an honorable person. Ray Tylicki, on the other hand, is a despicable fucking asshole, and someday his luck is going to run out.

This is why you should NEVER ride a stinker, or on a car anywhere close to a stinker. http://news.msn.com/us/mayor-nd-town-dodged-a-bullet-in-train-derailment

Tylicki has about twenty aliases, so I'm not surprised he's not easy to find. Right now I understand he's in jail. Good. I hope he stays there. The Crew Change Guide is not Tylicki's to publish anywhere. IT BELONGS TO TRAIN DOC, AND TRAIN DOC SAID DON'T PUBLISH IT ON THE INTERNET. That's all that needed to be said about it. Tylicki wanted to rip off the CCG and sell it for money. Flatcar and Train Doc successfully stopped him from doing so with a lawsuit, or the threat of a lawsuit, because the CCG is COPYWRITED. Tylicki then published it on Pirate Bay as payback for being thwarted in his efforts to rip off Train Doc. People have been talking trash for years about smoking Tylicki, but so far, nobody has followed through and from what I can see, we're all too law-abiding to actually do it. At least I am. I think. He's an asshole and a yegg, he steals from tramps and cannot be trusted. Someday he's going to get what's coming to him. I hope he falls under a train. Soon.

Among other transgressions against the tramp community, Tylicki is responsible for ripping off the 2006 Crew Change Guide and publishing it on the internet--a clear violation of the honor agreement every recipient of a copy of the CCG must make. The first copy of the CCG I got, the tramp that gave it to me made me raise my right hand and swear to not give it voluntarily to law enforcement, railroad police or kids, and to not publish it on the internet. I don't know if they are still doing that or not. I hope so. I still feel honor bound by that agreement, and although I do not have a current copy of the CCG, I am very careful about who I allow to make a copy of the latest version I do have. There are no courts or contracts among tramps. Either you have honor, or you don't. Being an honorable person isn't some extraordinary thing, it's supposed to be the AVERAGE, EVERDAY thing. The loss of a sense of honor and self respect is destroying the United States. Ray Tylicki, also known as "Transit Train" is a person who apparently lacks all sense of propriety and decency. He is a streamliner and a yegg. He is persona non grata among tramps, and I look forward to the day when I hear he has gotten what he deserrves.

Looks good, Frank. My only suggestion would be to add captions below photographs, etc. to identify who or what it is and the date. There are a lot of name-brand musicians, singers and songwriters who perform up at Britt. For the well-known guys it's good publicity for them for their pro bono performance to be noted and publicized. It's good for Britt itself, to let potential newcomers know that name acts perform there, and for the neophyte acoustic musicians, it's a feather in their caps to be able to use performing at Britt as a resume' item. We all owe you a debt of gratitude for volunteering to operate the Grapevine. It would have been really sad to see so much of Fran's hard work just disappear. It's the curse of the Internet. (BTW, this is an area where Blackie really shined. He published his stuff in book form. No doubt fifty years from now he'll be a celebrated Iowa poet, and lionized by the very establishment that scorned him while he was alive.)