Self Help Radio 101223: Medicine

(Original image here)

A spoonful of Self Help Radio, I am told, is far worse than any medicine. Oh dear how awful must an episode about medicine go down? I should attach one of those poison control stickers to this show!

Nonetheless, unregulated by any government agency (unless you count the FCC), Self Help Radio dispersed medicinal programming this week & would do it again if only my dealer would call me back. I always forget that when your dealer asks for your "honest opinion," he doesn't really want that. Darn.

You can take your medicine whenever you'd like at the Self Help Radio web page. Tell the pharmacist your date of birth & use the username SHR & the password selfhelp. If you need details, they're below.

It's only two hours long! No way you'd overdose!

Self Help Radio Medicine Show

"Medicine County" Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs _Medicine County_

"Medicine Man" Syl Sylvain & The Teardrops _Syl Sylvain & The Teardrops_

"Papa's Medicine Show" Bobbie Gentry _Local Gentry_

introduction & definitions

"Medicine" Rumblefish _The Sound Of Leamington Spa Volume 6_

"Medicine" Hummingbirds _Va Va Voom_

"Medication" The Standells _Dirty Water_

"Music Is Medicine (feat. Shungudzo)" Captain Planet _Sounds Like Home_

interview with matchmaker Jennilee Bowen

"The End Of Medicine" The New Pornographers _Electric Version_

"Medicinals" PJ Harvey _The Hope Six Demolition Project_

"Hide The Medicine" The Psychedelic Furs _Made Of Rain_

"Medicine" The Sundays _Blind_

interview with Pastor Jeff Burrows

"Medicine" Christmas _Vortex_

"New Medication" No Frills _Downward Dog_

"Drunk Medicine" Sons & Daughters _Dance Me In_

"Medicine Show" Big Audio Dynamite _This Is Big Audio Dynamite_

interview with Dr. Jack Broad

"A Spoonful Of Sugar" Julie Andrews _Walt Disney's Mary Poppins (Original Cast Sound Track)_

"Medicine Man" Bobby McFerrin _Medicine Music_

"Medicine" Love Positions _Billiepeebup_

"Extra Medication" The Manhattan Love Suicides _The Manhattan Love Suicides_

interview with health advocate Jay Bellman

"Medicine" Momma _Household Name_

"Faster Than The Medicine" Lael Neale _Star Eaters Delight_

"The Medicine Show" The Dream Syndicate _Medicine Show_

conclusion & goodbye

"Edison's Medicine" In Letter Form _Fracture. Repair. Repeat._

"Fast Food Medicine" Tsunami _The Heart's Tremelo_

Whither Medicine?

(Creaky old meme whose origins are lost to time; found here)

If there's one thing the average person doesn't want any insight into, it's the mind of someone like me. By "someone like me," I don't necessarily mean "deejay." Or "deejay who does a radio show based on themes." Or anything like that. I mean, "Someone who becomes unnecessarily fixated on something that can ruin their entire day if they don't learn to focus it somehow." Is this a form of OCD? Is it akin to anxiety? Should I be talking to a professional about it? I don't have any answers, I just have this thing I do.

Which is this: one day something reminded me of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." It's not a song that I have memorized in toto. If I had to recite it I might get 70% of the lines right but I'd almost certainly get them out of order. But the song popped into my head one day while I was feeding my animals & I somehow got stuck on the first lines, "Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine." This took many forms - like, reminding myself how terrible a rhyme "government" is for "medicine" in a song where there's brilliant rhymes like "the phone's tapped anyway Maggie says that many say" - but mainly I focused on the "mixing up the medicine." I wasn't all that interested in what the word medicine means in the song, if Dylan's referring to drugs (he is) or what, I just like the phrase "mixing up the medicine." It made me think of mortars & pestles, of homemade pharmacies with bubbling beakers, bunsen burners aflame. Needing somewhere to put all this, I thought, "What would a radio show about medicine be like?"

What it wouldn't be like would be too broad. I didn't want to have specific medications. I wanted it to be about the idea of medicine - from whatever uses one could find. & I probably wouldn't play the song that started it all. But I could tell you about it!

Self Help Radio's show about medicine airs today, Thursday, from noon to 2pm, on 90.3+98.3fm in Portland & online everywhere at Freeform Portland dot org. It is not a substitution for actual medical advice. As if you needed to know that.

Preface To Medicine: A Funny

By Hugo Tamzarian. His comics live now here (unlike the url at the bottom of the comic, which no longer exists).

Church Use Only

In general, my wife lets me pick the routes we take when we walk our dogs. She only asks that they be a certain length (so she can get her "steps") & that they're "pretty." I am not always certain about her aesthetic sense so for example recently I had to adjust one of our walks because she decided the area we were walking through was "dirty." Dirty is the opposite of pretty in this case. Anyway, I like to have a couple different circuits to take so they don't get too boring but that wasn't necessarily the case in Kentucky, where the picture above was taken on this day in 2015.

What makes this picture interesting to me is that it was taken on a dogwalk but not on one of our regular dogwalks. In fact, we had to detour quite a bit to get to where this picture was taken. Where was it taken? Let's see if I can find the general area on Guggle Merps. This is the closest I can find:

That's the driveway into Redeemer Community Church. I don't really wanna link to it, but you can find it pretty easily if that's something you need. The dumpster would be kind of straight ahead & on the right. We must've strayed from our regular path that day because it was a particularly nice day. It was also a Saturday, so perhaps we had more time to walk. In any event, I had never walked behind that church before, so I did. & I found the funny sign & the discarded tires. Because churches always have tires they need to get rid of.

It's sad to note that two of the dogs that walked with us that day are no longer with us. Luckily the other two still are & they walk more in Portland than they did in Lexington - we go on two dogwalks a day instead of one. Alas, October 10 in Portland was not a particularly nice day. We got rained on during both walks. & I don't think there's a nearby church whose parking lot we might walk through on either of the walks I took today. Hm.

Books About Painters

(images from Goodreads)

If you happened upon last week's show - which was our 21st anniversary show (!) - you heard our favorite librarian Carole stop by to talk about books about painters. (Painters was the theme - a theme from 2006 revisited for the anniversary.) If you didn't listen, & I'm sure you've got a good reason for it, but you should do so now - go to the Self Help Radio web page & listen! Then, come back here to find out more information about the books Carole talked about.

What were those books? They were:

Pigskins To Paintbrushes: The Story Of Football-Playing Artist Ernie Barnes by Don Tate

Out Of This World: The Surreal Art Of Leonora Carrington by Michelle Markel & Amanda Hall

&

Rosa's Animals: The Story Of Rosa Bonheur & Her Painting Menagerie by Maryann Macdonald

Follow the links! Grow your library! Hope Carole returns soon!