Temple's Longtails and Fur

      I'm a child of the 80s.  But growing up in The Village, before the internet, it might have still been the 70s there when I was born.  Trucks, the few there were out there, had 8 tracks, the newer ones, the two of them, had radios with cassette players.  Portable radios were the size of five gallons buckets, and took at least a half dozen C batteries.  Today, as I write this, I'm listening to Pandora streamed from the internet to my smart phone, "piped" into my wireless Bluetooth headphones, on which I can also take phone calls, and village kids share their adventures on Tiktok.  At least I hope they're doing that, and not wasting time doing the Tiktok dances when they could be having adventures.  Who am I to talk though?  I spend too much time on The 'Gram and 'Book myself.    You young'uns in the class may not remember camcorders and those big boomboxes.  But cameras used to be that big, and stereos had carryin...

  Hurt Covered by Johnny Cash in 2002 Written by Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails (hereafter referred to as NIN,) released in 1995.     This song shook me to my boots when I first heard it twenty years ago.  I had no idea at the time that Johnny Cash didn't come up with it, and later struggled to listen to the NIN version after I learned it originated with them.  I have no doubt it meant a lot to them when they wrote it, and that the moments in their life that inspired it were substantial.       But those lyrics, emitted in that worn gravel baritone, from that aged face with it's weary eyes, I mean it's his damn song.  Trent Reznor of NIN said it himself, though he did describe his realization as feeling "like I lost my girlfriend." (Uitti, 2022.)         Overall the song has a slow rhythm, maybe because Johnny Cash couldn't sing any faster given his deteriorating state.  But even the original perf...