Quadrophenia - The Who

it's very depressing when your childhood heroes begin to die of old age.

John Entwistle was the most amazing bassist to play in any rock band. ever.

i'm listening to "The Real Me" at this very moment and it's bringing tears to my eyes.

ok, she's not really in jail...yet. i can't wait to see how this thing plays out. her image is all about being smart and ambitious (as well as fastidious, creative and oh-so-foofy). it just doesn't seem possible to me that she would be stupid enough to engage in insider trading. especially not under such boneheaded circumstances (her stockbroker is a former employee of the company whose stock was unloaded...i mean, come on!).

oh well, maybe she can teach the gals in prison to transform their worn out uniforms into festive holiday napkins.

a rose-breasted grossbeak was hanging out on my feeder this morning. it was so dang beautiful that it made me leave my cynicism home for the day.

even though the recording industry didn't get what they wanted, they will get what they deserve. recently,the royalty rates for webcasters were set at 70 cents per song per 1000 listeners. this will effectively put most webcasters out of business.

this will shut down yet another outlet for new music. ironically, the recording industry has been complaining about lack of access to the radio waves because of the well known payolla issue.

nobody's listening to your product? fine. i hope you enjoy your mornings standing on the unemployment line.

Symbolic Gesture - Joe Morris Trio

angular guitar to the extreme.

so...Los Lobos has a new recording out. it's called "Good Morning Aztlan" and i wanted to know if the song "Hearts Of Stone" was a cover of the old Southside Johnny tune. so i end up on the Mammoth Records website and they have a windows media download of the tune. i download it to my machine. when i attempt to play it using winamp an internet explorer window pops up pointing to the following url:

http://drm1.rioport.com/promotional/license.asp?content_guid={8E73681F-46FC-11D6-9D4F-0050DABD914D}&challenge=AAEAAaDY4nYR*Sx4fAoxJpPa0XikCT0aGD0bvp8CIxz1ijkZWVVYDsnLnE2Bbyzx2Vkxkzh0pzDtMBDwLOQ8DfsyPupC1PFWBr1tzX!6nscmEEU!A3bPStwsF9RHQh4bZuBBDsF7FN*Atww0qLK7B2qGS9nVxCbFt3Smk88JJSIhlgA*cqncwiJqSxhbCFDB*UAkv22JrSFFnhfbRJqBU*rrN47Ae2j2EYtTkkZfHqesXYvVCyzNo7MFJynz3TXyveel71E52RDz&DRMVer=1.3&filename=file://C:%5chome%5cmedia%5clos_lobos-hearts_of_stone.wma

the webpage says "Thanks for registering! You may now play this song".

well thanks a fricken' lot. i didn't know i was registering. and did you really need to know the exact location of where i stored the file on my machine?! this is one more strike against the damned recording industry. i know that all those exec's will be crying about Napster while they're waiting in the unemployment and welfare lines...but who cares?! screw them.

man, this stuff makes me nervous. yep, terrorism is a nasty thing. and surely saddam has been a big part of lots of nasty activity ( "nasty activity" doesn't even begin to describe what he did to the kurds).

i may be in the minority of americans when i say that attacking iraq is a mistake. but if you look at what's going on with the usual instability in the middle east and the growing anti-american sentiment there...and how this situation is depressing our economy (c'mon, you've gotta know that uncertainty with what's going on has a lot to do with the stock market slide)....then it just seems insane to go over there and attempt this. there's no support for it over there. it'll be like kicking over a freakin' bee hive.

don't get me wrong...i'm not saying that we shouldn't do this because it'll hurt the economy. i don't really give a crap about that. it just wrong. we want to go over there and take out saddam. what the hell ever happened to "thou shalt not kill"?

i guess this is another one of those god-bless-america-eye-for-an-eye kinda things.

very sad.

i'm listening to Weather Report's first recording. the electric piano sounds kinda dated but cool at the same time.

at least it's not that danged cheese wiz protools manufactured stuff that's so popular as of late.

the recording industry is now proposing a royalty scheme for used cd sales.

you gotta be kidding me. the greed and unbounded arrogance is truly astounding.

totally, totally enjoying the new 'Apple-Switch' ad campaign. favorite quote:

Using my PC was like being stuck in a bad relationship

yep.

Octave of the Holy Innocents - Jonas Hellborg

Hellborg's cool bass combined with Buckethead on acoustic guitar.

gees...i got up before 6AM this morning. how the hell do people do that every day?! plus, it was raining. i tell ya, if i lived up in the pacific northwest, and the weather is anything like what i've been lead to believe...i'm not sure i could ever get out of bed in the morning. i'd need the heavy duty BedCrane™ to get me outa there.

i just got tired. sometimes you want a little peace and quiet. and there was none to be found. the blaring tv, the washing machine, telephone. even the low hum of the fridge...normally things i can tune out - they were driving me crazy.

so i dragged a dining room chair (not sure why...this particular chair...i'm feeling a little deranged) out to the middle of our cow pasture (love callin' it that...there haven't been cows there for years).

a few paragraphs in the book i'd brought along the world began to tilt. or...the right-front leg of the damned chair started slowly sinking into the turf.

slight adjustments (and a little swearing) solved this problem.

pages later a deer fly decided to either make a meal of me or use me for taunt-the-human practice.

i gave up. went back inside and watched infomercials for the rest of the evening.

the next day it got ugly.

...this is what happens when you make the mistake of not having an interesting speaker at graduation:

Uninvisible - Medeski, Martin and Wood

jazz, blues...and a mess of other stuff.

"we report, you decide". ya...sure.

there was an ap article yesterday describing the new york regents english exam. specifically, how it had recently been revised under the state's "sensitivity review guidelines". ok, this is bad enough. they did things like substitute "heck" for "hell" and "heavy portuguese" for "fat portuguese" (in excerpts from Frank Conroy's Stop Time and Ernesto Galarza's Barrio Boy). some passages were also omitted: Annie Dillard's references to African-American's were removed from an excerpt of An American Childhood. from a speech by un secretary general kofi annan: remarks about the united states debts to the united nations were removed. (as well as a reference to "wine"...what the?!!!)

just plain stupid.

so fox news labels this "PC", as they love to do. "PC" was not part of the original ap story. what's more, fox conveniently dropped reference to the kofi annan remark.

so who's deciding?

flipped on the tube late one night last week...it happened to be on vh1...and i see Celine Dion, Meredith Brooks, and Anastacia doing AC/DC's "You Shook Me All Night Long".

kinda surreal.

just how the hell did it get to be june already? i'm not complaining or anything. i mean, i love the weather (except for the pollen that makes me sneeze what's left of my brains out). i love the cool nights with the windows open. i love the red sox and the yankees beating the snot out of each other like two punch-drunk boxers.

ok, i don't really love the black flies. but hey, it's new england.