Toora, loora, loora muthafuckahs.

Which kinda sums up my upbringing, if I think about it. Irish kid moves to ‘70’s Ghetto.

In Ireland, Patrick’s Day was traditionally more of a religious deal than a major blow out‘certainly there are no green rivers of beer and all that nonsense in my memory bank. I don’t really go on about Irish Culture all that much but St. Patrick was a heck of a guy and it’s worth noting who he was and what’s really all about.

Patrick was not Irish and he did nothing about the snakes because, as far as I know, Ireland never had snakes.

But Naomh Pádraigh was known for tolerance. He outlawed slavery in Ireland a thousand years before anywhere else in Europe. He also demanded equal rights for women and in fact many women were leaders of the Church in Ireland until the 10th century. These are achievements that should be better known. My guess is that the reason they are not has a […]

I wrote that line back in 1994 as a response to the then current downsizing of GM. Ten years later, that ended up on What A Wonderful World, one of the most popular songs from Superpower.

The guy who screams:

“I’m fifty one years old… Are you gonna pay these bills?”

Is my best family friend of that era. He worked at Clark Street (Cadillac) in Detroit and although he himself did not lose his job (well… at least not until he got leukemia) he was fifty one years old and it was easy to channel the proper emotions from his experience (and those of many Detroiters; the air literally reaked with the smell of a dying era.)

As the auto industry continues to die in America, I’m struck by how even more poignant the lyric is today. Sorry if that sounds conceited, but that was the right song at the wrong time. The thing I’ve noticed about that song is that it was never as popular with Detroit crowds as, say, an […]

Merry Christmas!

As we bask in the holiday season, we’re pretty well deep frying in so-called Christmas music. (A guy was telling me about the latest Black Eyed Peas Christmas record. I dunno if he was kidding or not, but I sure hope so.) This in turn has gotten me thinking about ‘religious music’ in general.

As many of you know, I’m a practicing Catholic. Which doesn’t mean that I’m hoping to get a Learner’s Permit to say the Rosary by end of summer. Rather it means that I am active in my Church. I attend Mass and involve myself in various parish activities. I rarely mention this because:

a) It’s none of anyone’s darned business

b) It seems to scare people in our increasingly secular world

But I mention it today because I do attend Mass and when I do? I literally pop in ear plugs during the musical portion of the show. It’s that bad.

When did the ‘universal church’ go from having the coolest music ever to having the absolutely crappiest? (1348? 😀 […]

OK, what is it supposed to be.

Great question. I’ve heard and seen numerous ‘retrospective’ radio shows and books which try to even-handedly discuss ‘prog’. The latest, and perhaps one that really did try to be even-handed was on the Public Radio show Sound Opinions (Show #207). What prompted me to write this was that they were trying so hard to be ‘fair and balanced’ but they can’t help themselves; they just gotta emphasize the ‘camp’ aspect. And that’s not only hosed the music’s image, but even more sinister, it’s had a horrible effect on the current range of bands that claim to be ‘prog’. In other words, prog bands today are as much defined by what they are trying not to be.

Why So Serious?

As The Joker says. Most of prog over the past two decades has been progressively (no pun intended more and more serious. And hard. Part of this is because of the connections with metal. After all one of the main roots of prog was King Crimson’s […]

…a joke. A bad joke, I might add.

As I previously wrote, I’m currently spending no small amount of effort to ‘push content’—timeless prose such as this—onto various ‘social networking’ sites. The idea being that many people now ‘live’ inside portals such as Facebook and can’t be buggered to visit individual sites such as mine.

If that is the case, then, in all seriousness, I need someone to educate me as to why I would want to live in such a virtual Newark, NJ. And by that, I mean that nothing works very well.

First off, and this in itself is fatal: It’s slow.  I mean really slow. I cannot even imagine using it over dial-up. Or maybe I can because it responds over broadband like Compuserve used to over dial-up. Now that’s progress!

And then there are the crashes. Various ‘apps’ crash all the time. To their marketing credit, they don’t feel all that bad because you get these nice calm messages saying that ‘something went wrong’, which is, I guess, progress over […]