2025-03-16 12:00:00
Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day. As tomorrow is Monday, I assume all the celebrating took place last night. Not surprisingly, given my last name, I trace my roots back to Ireland. My great-grandfather immigrated to the US in 1905 from Inishmann, the middle of the three Aryan Isles off the coast of Galway in Southwest Ireland. Maybe surprisingly, I have not typically over indulged celebrating St. Patrick's Day. I did my graduate degree at night school over 3+ years through my early 20s, and mid-terms always hit on Saint Patrick's Day, which kept me at the kitchen table studying and not in a pub in the middle of March. There was a road trip to the University of Missouri at Rolla during Spring Break my sophomore year of college that is better not spoken of. Rolla had a reputation for its Saint Patrick's Day celebration, and although my memory of that weekend is hazy, I remember the reputation being legit. Note - my memory of the weekend's activities were hazy the next morning, and have only gotten hazier almost 40 years later.
And as I typed that last line, I just realized that I went to college in fall of 1985. That was 40 years ago. So in March 1985 I was coasting into high school graduation by doing as little as possible. By March, I had already accepted my offer from Purdue University, so I knew where I was going to school in the Fall. Looking back, I'm not sure how I got into Purdue. I was a B student with no extracurricular activities beyond sports. No student council, no school newspaper, none of that stuff. I did get nominated to the Honor Society in my final semester of high school, too late to include it on my college applications. I finished high school in the Marshall Islands, where my dad worked on a highly secret missile base out in the South Pacific Ocean. I've sometimes wondered if Purdue thought I was a Pacific Islander. My high school record really should not have gotten me into Purdue as an out-of-state student on its own merits. I'm glad they did accept me, though, as I met my wife there.
On to the links.
In Defense of Unpolished Websites talks about learning HTML from looking at "View Source" in the browser, and how kids today are losing out because so many CMS-powered websites have such complicated code that you can't learn anything from it. My first website probably looked a lot like IBM.com from 1995 because I remember looking at the code and figuring out what an "h1" tag did, and what a "b" tag did, and so on."
You Are Not Free to Move About the Country starts with the enshittification of Southwest Airlines this week (your bags no longer fly free) and expands it into a wider discussion of how life as an American is undergoing rapid enshittification across the board.
The Charismatic Voice is the YouTube channel of a retired professional opera singer who does reaction videos to all the music she never heard growing up since she was so insulated in the opera world. She has an amazingly profound understanding of the technical aspects of singing and voice control and watching her analyze Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford is incredibly interesting, plus you get an expert explanation of just what makes these guys so great. This particular episode is notable not for her analysis of Ozzy's vocals in Crazy Train, but for her absolute and utter astonishment at discovering Randy Rhodes. Imagine going back 41 years and watching your friend hear the guitar solo on Crazy Train for the first time. This is that video. She goes from never having heard the song or Rhodes' name to "This might be the greatest guitar player I've ever heard" in about 5 minutes. It's just delightful, and a great reminder not only of the power of music, but just how crazy good Rhodes was at age 24. Can you even imagine the music he would have made if he had not died in that plane crash? Personally, I think he would quit rock music and revolutionized classical guitar, making it popular in a way that it has never been.
That's all for this week. In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.
2025-03-16 12:00:00
We were out running errands yesterday and I found myself staring at an end cap of Bero Edge Hill Hazy IPA non-alcoholic beer. It had been a while since I tried a new-to-me NA beer, so why not? I did not realize initially that the Bero founder is Tom Holland (Spider-Man).
The beer is not bad, it's drinkable. My initial reaction was that there was something about it that was very un-IPA like. In looking at the ingredients, I noticed that they used some wheat malt in the beer, and I think that is it. It's an NE IPA style beer, so the IBUs were never going to particularly high. Once I understood where that unexpected characteristic was coming from, the beer grew on me a bit. I drank two last night, and I'll likely finish the last two tonight. If I was out somewhere and this was the only NA option, I'd be perfectly happy drinking it. However, if the Sam Adams Hazy or Athletic Ale Hazy options are available, they are better choices.
2025-03-12 12:00:00
This is an ongoing series in which I dig into the dustier corners of my MP3 folder.
Julian Angel - Beautiful Beast
Julian Angel is a German musician / producer who I think makes his living producing events, doing soundtrack work, etc. Back in 2011 he released an album that was straight out of 1986. You can smell the Aquanet through your speakers. Is there anything mind-blowing on this record? No. Are there a couple of tunes that could have made this a platinum album in 1986? Absolutely. It's kind of a perfect encapsulation of a Sunset Strip record from 1986. One or two really fun tunes, everything else is fine but nothing special.
This tune, if it had been on the first Poison album, would have been #1 on MTV for weeks.
Verdict: Tossup. I could just put on Ratt or Poison to hear this, but there is no reason to not keep it.
2025-03-12 12:00:00
This is an ongoing series in which I dig into the dustier corners of my MP3 folder.
Adam Rotherberg- All the Whispering
This self-published CD was released in 2001. I have no idea how I acquired it. It's this guy. He has performed with Joan Baez, and was the musical director for the Linda Ronstadt Experience. He also produced Dar Williams. So he has become a bit of a big deal since he was trying to be the next James Taylor over 20 years ago.
The record is fine, it's a comfy folk-pop record.The two standout tracks for me are:
If more than a couple of you click through we are going to double his YouTube Music streams. He might even notice LOL.
2025-03-09 13:00:00
I got up at 8 AM this morning, which is 7 AM to my internal body clock because of daylight savings time. I do prefer my extra light in the evening, but if we are going to jump the clocks forward an hour once per year, 4 PM on a Friday seems like a much better time to do it. Imagine the happy hour parties we could do every year to coincide with the clock change at 4 PM. The time change does seem to mark Spring this year though. It's been 60F and sunny all weekend, and the forecast for the week is 70s and sunny, with it tantalizingly close to 80F on Saturday. I'm so tempted to pull the camper out of storage and de-winterize it, but the historical last freeze in central Virginia is the first week of April. So I will wait.
If you could use 3.5 minutes of relaxation this compilation of bird videos from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is perfect.
There have been a lot of "how to save democracy" posts lately, but this one focuses on stuff you can actually do now. Calling and writing your Congressional Representatives is important, but Congress and the courts will not save us. We need to cut the legs off the fascism stool, and those legs are mostly made of corporate money.
I don't think she is wrong here about the impact of digital marketing on everything happening in the world. That is a troubling, because I've worked in the web marketing adjacent world of web design for most of my adult life.
Instagram sucks, but unfortunately a lot of local organizations use it as their main channel for outreach. Instaloader is a command line script that will download public IG accounts to your hard drive, and keep track of what it has downloaded when it updates. I'm using it to follow the RVA chapter of the Feminist Bird Club on IG, even though I deleted my IG account last year.
That's all for this week. In a world where you can choose to be anything, choose to be kind.
2025-03-08 13:00:00
This was my first time at Cumberland Marsh Nature Preserve. It's only 25 minutes from home, so it won't be my last. We got 34 species this morning, including 7 bald eagles, a bunch of ducks, and more geese than I could count. You do have to walk a bit as the prime marsh viewing area is about a 1.75 mile hike from the parking lot. So birding and hiking this morning. That's a good Saturday.
