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Greetings 405 listener!
The 405 airs over KMMR Radio Station. At 5 Minutes past 4 PM each M-F week day of the year. Here on the website we strive to have it posted within a few hours afterwards.
Your neighbor and website maintainer,
D.J. Rasmussen
Thanks for stopping by and listening to the shows.
I want to again welcome you to The 405 Coffee Break. Guys, get you a cup of coffee, glass iced tea, bottle of water. If you wanna make a snowman, go out and do it today. It's perfect snow temperature. Let's see what's happening.
OK Solberg:Spring Wheat $5.44 a bushel. 550lb steer calf $4.07. Butcher hog in Iowa 64¢ a pound, and a 100lb fat lamb in Billings will fetch you $2.20. But, guys, there's more much more.
OK Solberg:Okay then. Thanksgiving has passed us up, but Thanksgiving is still on my mind. Let me share a verse that correlates with thanksgiving, and then I'll tell you what I wanna tell you. Here it is. Give thanks to the lord for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. Psalms 136:1 Yeah. Give thanks to the lord. Thanksgiving is about being thankful.
OK Solberg:Now, guys, when's the last time you went without food? I mean, when is the last time you went two days or more without a bite to eat? Right? I can never remember in my whole life not one day where I went without food. Not even one day. We have it good.
OK Solberg:You know, I have a plaque on my office wall that reads, breakfast has to wait till the chicken lays her egg. Really? That was told to me personally by a man who had heard his mother state it as a cold hard fact. Now that's rough. Then also on that plaque, it is written, hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times. Let that sink in for a moment.
OK Solberg:It says different things to different people. But above all else, I do know this, we live in good times. I've never gone without food in my life. Now thanks to my friend down in Longmont, I got a Thanksgiving story, and I received it on Thanksgiving Day. My friend in Longmont is very timely. But here's what I should have known before.
OK Solberg:There was a song, and it came out in 1965, and it's titled Alice's Restaurant. Now, in 1965, I was only 8 years old, yet it did happen in my lifetime. I'd not known the story until a few days back on Thanksgiving Day. So here's the way it played out. Oh, wait.
OK Solberg:You have to understand that the song itself is 18 minutes and 16 seconds long. I hope to shout. That's even longer than Innagada de Vida, which comes in at 17 minutes and 5 seconds. So Alice's restaurant is based upon a true story, and it happened to Arlo Guthrie. And Arlo was still alive and well at the age of 78, and he's the son of Woody Guthrie.
OK Solberg:So way back in the 1965 in a town called Billings, Montana, this young Arlo went to Rocky Mountain College for forestry. Now that's a big move from Massachusetts where he grew up to Montana. Anyway, it's true, but it didn't last very long. Arlo dropped out at Thanksgiving break. He headed back to Massachusetts and had Thanksgiving with his old friends, Alison Ray Brock.
OK Solberg:Well, Alice had a restaurant, but she also, her and Ray, had bought an old church to convert into living quarters. So the crew had Thanksgiving with Allison, to be thankful, Arlo and his guys, they cleaned up the garbage in the old church. Well, they loaded it on a Volkswagen microbus and proceeded to haul it to the dump. But the dump was closed for Thanksgiving, And Arlo and his friends hadn't anticipated that, so they found another pile of garbage at the bottom of this 15 foot cliff. They figured one big pile of garbage was better than two small piles of garbage.
OK Solberg:Anyway, shortly afterwards, the police tracked them down and handcuffed them and hauled them down to the police station and threw them in jail, and I'm not kidding. Well, Alice came and bailed them out, that was that for the time being. But now remember, historically, this is 1965 and there was a conflict going on and that conflict was called the war in Vietnam. Well, Arlo couldn't claim his college deferment now that he quit college in Billings, Montana, so guess what? He got his draft notice.
OK Solberg:Well, in the song, Arlo dresses it up a bit and tells how he desires to go to war, and he's their man. And he stood in line after line after line after line. And you guys you guys who remember know the army has a lot of lines. Anyway, he's almost through, and the final step is to go into room whatever. And the man in there asked if he'd ever been arrested.
OK Solberg:And Arlo had to tell him about the garbage that got dumped on Thanksgiving Day. And the guy asked, have you ever been in court? And sure enough, because of the garbage dumped on Thanksgiving Day, he had been in court. So Arlo Guthrie wrote the nicest Vietnam protest song I have ever heard, gentle and calm. And he made it into a parody in the song Alice's Restaurant.
OK Solberg:And it all boils down to he's gonna get shipped off to Vietnam to go to the war in Vietnam until they found he had been arrested for littering. The song points out the absurdities of our rules and regulations. The song was released 60 years ago, and I just found out from my friend in Longmont, You gotta take a listen to the song Alice's Restaurant and see if you agree with me that it's the gentlest protest song I have ever heard. Enjoy the 18