Today is Presidents Day. I want to do something a little different. Rather than ranking the presidents or trying to find some historical quirk to talk about, I want to talk about my presidents. I have been alive during seven administrations. I want born during Ford and am in the middle of Obama. It will…
Towards the end of last year, I was browsing in a record store and ran across a new release of a Freddie King concert from 1968. Since I’m a fan, I took a closer look. The bulk of the album was record live at the Fillmore West in 1968. There are two bonus tracks, one from…
Today is February 12th, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, so it seems appropriate to say a little something about him. But, I don’t really have anything to say that hasn’t already been said a million times before. So, I’m going to take a different tack and use Lincoln’s presidency as a jumping off point for a more…
For starters, I don’t pay any attention to the Grammy Awards. I think the last time I watched was when Milli Vanilli beat out Living Colour for best new artist. The Grammys generally don’t bother with music I enjoy, so I don’t bother with them. This year there was apparently a bit of controversy when Beck won…
Do you ever wonder how something becomes a Thing? I wonder about it all the time. How did knock, knock jokes become a Thing? Can you imagine the first person to tell a knock, knock joke? “I’m going to say, ‘Knock, knock,’ and you say, ‘Who’s there?’ OK?” “Why?” “You’ll see. Just do it.” “But…
The title of this piece is not accurate. Hannah Davis is the cover model for the 2015 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. But every single headline I saw lead with Derek Jeter, look at Yahoo!, CBS Detroit, and the Huffington Post. In other news, Pierre Curie’s wife won the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. Oh, and…
Today is my 40th birthday. One question that I got repeatedly today is, “How does it feel to be 40?” Well, so far, it feels like I have a head cold. I guess I’ll have to wait a few days to figure out if I have a head cold or if being 40 feels like…
If a person is looking to find out what Cyrus Chestnut is all about, this is the perfect record. It is thoroughly modern, but his influences are all there. It is jazz, but blues and gospel are never far away. It is clearly improvised, but never lacks direction. The album was recorded live at Smoke,…
In part one of this post, I talked about how difficult it is to use rights as the basis of an argument and proposed some ways we can make the discussions involving rights more fruitful. Now, I’m going to talk about what got me thinking about this in the first place, guns. There are two…
I went to see Eddie Izzard the other night. It was a very funny show. He did one bit about how Myanmar, Liberia and the U.S. are the only countries that haven’t converted to the Metric System. It was a funny bit. And it got me thinking. Personally, I’m glad there are three countries that…
