Tuesday, December 30, 2014

You Can Say Yes If You Do It Right

As a sort of backhanded tribute to Robin Williams, who tragically committed suicide this past August and who struggled with alcoholism, I thought I would write a brief post in which I share some of the things I've learned about having a healthy relationship with alcohol.

Having a healthy relationship with alcohol is not rocket science. Just follow two simple rules:
(1) Always pay for it yourself.
(2) Always put an emphasis on quality over quantity.

Show me someone who follows these rules and I'll show you someone who can be trusted with alcohol. Show me someone who won't follow these rules and I'll show you someone who really shouldn't be drinking in the first place.

Let me flesh out these rules a bit more. Don't wait around for others to ply you with alcohol. (This is a very easy trap for college students to fall into, speaking from personal experience.) Don't let others make your alcohol choices for you. Go to a store, pick out a good product that you genuinely enjoy, take it home, and drink it responsibly.

There's a lot to be said for drinking at home vis-à-vis drinking in a bar.
(a) It's way cheaper. I don't know what the average bar price for a bottle of Heineken is these days, but whatever it is, I don't want to pay it.
(b) You're not hostage to a bar's alcohol selection.
(c) There won't be any waiting in line to go to the bathroom.
(d) If you end up overindulging, you don't need to worry about getting home, because you are at home. Relatedly, you don't need to worry about being a nuisance in public, because you're not in public.

You don't have to drink alone: by all means, invite one or two friends over, supplement your drinks with some music and food, and have a good time. (I myself like to drink by myself. I think of those lyrics in Billy Joel's "Piano Man": Yes they're sharing a drink they call loneliness, but it's better than drinking alone. What a crock. When drinking in bars I have never felt any sort of camaraderie with the other people around me.)

Here are some more suggestions to chew on:

• Don't drink every night: get your drinking down to one or (at most) two nights a week.

• Don't have more than two drinks in one sitting, especially if you're drinking on an empty stomach. After having those two drinks, have something to eat.

• Beer drinkers, don't drink your beer from the bottle: go get a proper solid-glass pint glass (not some cheap plastic glass) to drink it from. Here's a Photo Booth photo of my venerable "New Orleans Bourbon Street" pint glass that I bought from the NOLA Walgreens at the corner of St. Charles and Felicity for $4 back in 2002:



The quality over quantity thing

As I am a beer drinker, let me conclude this entry with some specific beer recommendations.

Lager: Don't settle for a mass-produced American light lager. Get an import like Pilsner Urquell or St. Pauli Girl; alternatively, seek out Full Sail's Session Lager if you're a "buy American" sort of person. FYI: My lager of choice is Nicaragua's Toña.

Pale ale: Reach for Anchor Steam Beer or, if you can find it, Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Pale Ale.

Stout: I highly recommend Samuel Adams' Cream Stout, which is every bit as good as (if not better than) Guinness.

Bitter: If you've never had bitter before, Sierra Nevada's Torpedo will bring you up to speed.

A final word:
Don't be afraid to experiment. Trying a variety of beers (or wines or whatever) will give you a better understanding of what you like and what to avoid.

Tuesday, December 23, 2014

I Lost the Feeling but I Try to Hold On

As you may know, there is more than one type of Top 40 radio station. Two entries ago we visited KFMB, an Adult Top 40 station. In today's post we'll visit KEGY (a.k.a. "Energy 103.7"), a Mainstream Top 40 station. For those of you keeping score on the format label front, Mainstream Top 40 is also known as Contemporary Hit Radio. For those of you with a connection to the Big Easy, KEGY is musically pretty similar to B97.

I check in with Mainstream Top 40 radio on occasion: I'll admit that this isn't the sort of music I usually listen to, but that's not gonna stop me from putting on my archivist's hat and giving you a sample KEGY playlist and chatting about it a bit. Let's get to it then, shall we? On 16 December I tuned in to http://energy1037.cbslocal.com/ and did some live listening for just over an hour and a half; like KROQ, KEGY is owned by CBS Radio, and the KEGY Listen Live widget has the same interface that the KROQ Listen Live widget has. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

Jeremih (with YG): "Don't Tell 'Em [DaaHype Remix]"
Calvin Harris (with Haim): "Pray to God"
Ariana Grande (with The Weeknd): "Love Me Harder"
Pitbull: "Give Me Everything"
Selena Gomez: "The Heart Wants What It Wants"
Paramore: "Ain't It Fun"
Sam Smith: "I'm Not the Only One"
Calvin Harris (with John Newman): "Blame"
Milky Chance: "Stolen Dance"
Hoodie Allen (with Ed Sheeran): "All About It"
Alesso (with Tove Lo): "Heroes (We Could Be)"
J. Cole: "Work Out"
James Newton Howard (with Jennifer Lawrence): "The Hanging Tree [DJ Mike D Mix]"
Jessie J (with Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj): "Bang Bang"
Don Omar (with Lucenzo): "Danza Kuduro"
Disclosure (with Sam Smith): "Latch"
OneRepublic: "I Lived [Arty Remix]"
Mr Probz: "Waves [Robin Schulz Remix]"
Meghan Trainor: "All About That Bass"
Mark Ronson (with Bruno Mars): "Uptown Funk!"
Taylor Swift: "Blank Space"


Random commentary

• It's a bit odd that Paramore shows up here but not on any of the playlists of the other radio stations we've visited. "Ain't It Fun" is as close to rock and roll as we get, and it's my favorite song in the list: funky, hard-edged, really good.

• Taking us closer to real funk is Mark Ronson's "Uptown Funk!", on which Bruno Mars sings; if you enjoy the classic hits by Morris Day and the Time, this song is for you.

• Mainstream Top 40 clearly owes a great deal to the dance remix culture that got under way in the 1980s. I may not listen to much Top 40 today, but once upon a time I spent a lot of time listening to New Order and Dead or Alive, and a hop, skip, and a jump is all that separates a song like "Blue Monday" from Calvin Harris' "Pray to God".

• Some of this music is not so easy to classify. Jeremih's "Don't Tell 'Em [DaaHype Remix]" is a case in point: it's too slow to be a funk or house song, and would be a challenge to dance to; it doesn't have the swing or warmth of R&B; it's percussive and skeletal in the way that Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" is but it lacks the latter's pop sensibility; it's not straightforwardly hip-hop in the way that J. Cole's "Work Out" is, although maybe we could call it a hip-hop song via process of elimination - I guess we'll have to let the real critics out there sort this matter out, eh?

• Hoodie Allen's "All About It" and Jessie J's "Bang Bang" have an R&B vibe. The Top 40 music I listened to in the mid-1970s borrowed a lot from R&B and soul; as you would expect, these influences have largely fallen by the wayside, but it's gratifying to know that they haven't died out completely.

• Released in 2010 and the oldest song in the list, Don Omar's "Danza Kuduro" is a lively Latin house track whose lyrics are in Spanish and Portuguese; Pitbull's "Give Me Everything" sports just a tad of Latin influence but is no less energetic. BTW, Pitbull has released more studio albums than any of the other artists in the list.

• Hmmm, what else? We've got a couple of ballads in the list, they being Ariana Grande's "Love Me Harder" and Selena Gomez' "The Heart Wants What It Wants"; Sam Smith's "I'm Not the Only One" can perhaps also be classified as such. Calvin Harris' "Blame", Alesso's "Heroes (We Could Be)", and Disclosure's "Latch" fly us into full-fledged electronica. OneRepublic's "I Lived [Arty Remix]" is anthem pop (if this isn't a recognized term, I'm coining it now) in the vein of U2. Mr Probz' "Waves [Robin Schulz Remix]" is a quiet house track: do check out the original (non-remix) version, which is even more subdued.

I think that's enough 'radio anthropology' for the time being - we'll do something completely different next time.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

A Conversation Only We Could Make

We continue today our tour of Southern California pop/rock music radio stations. Short of a college station, a modern rock station is as adventurous as you're going to get on the airwaves, and in this post we'll check in with KROQ, the 'godfather' of modern rock stations. KROQ has been in the modern rock business for almost 40 years, more specifically, since 1976, perhaps not coincidentally the year that the Ramones released their debut album.

By the way, there are at present no modern rock stations serving the New Orleans metropolitan area. I was around during the WZRH and KKND years and listened to those stations from time to time but they are long gone.

Modern rock stations are also termed alternative rock stations. I was going to say that the alternative rock moniker was more appropriate back in the day whereas the modern rock moniker is more apt today, but on second thought I'm not so sure about that. I don't recall listening to KROQ in the late 1970s - in fact, I don't think I was even aware of KROQ back then - so I can't tell you how cutting-edge it really was at the time. (I mean, I'm sure it didn't play anything by, say, The Doobie Brothers or the Eagles, but this is setting the bar pretty low, yes?) Meanwhile, The Police's "Roxanne", The Clash's "London Calling", and Blondie's "One Way or Another" had trickled onto the playlists of many AOR stations by the end of the 1970s. I've noted previously that radio format labels have to be taken with a grain of salt, and the modern/alternative rock label is no exception.

Suppose a radio station limited its playlist to songs by classic artists on albums released in 2000 or later - e.g., The Rolling Stones' A Bigger Bang, The Who's Endless Wire, Bruce Springsteen's High Hopes - wouldn't that playlist be a "modern rock" playlist? Given that such a station would be clearly different than the typical classic rock station, wouldn't that make the station an "alternative rock" station? Inquiring minds would like to know!

Anyway, let me get down to brass tacks here... Four weeks ago Thursday (13 November) I tuned in to http://kroq.cbslocal.com/ and did some live listening for almost an hour and a half. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

The Black Keys: "Tighten Up"
The Smashing Pumpkins: "One and All"
311: "Love Song"
Imagine Dragons: "Demons"
Green Day: "Welcome to Paradise"
Hozier: "Take Me to Church"
Muse: "Supermassive Black Hole"
Lorde: "Yellow Flicker Beat"
Sublime: "Santeria"
Arctic Monkeys: "Do I Wanna Know?"
Keane: "Somewhere Only We Know"
Foo Fighters: "Something from Nothing"
Franz Ferdinand: "Take Me Out"
The Neighbourhood: "Afraid"
U2: "Song for Someone"
The White Stripes: "Seven Nation Army"
Walk the Moon: "Shut Up and Dance"
Jane's Addiction: "Jane Says"
Vance Joy: "Riptide"

The KROQ Listen Live widget offers lyrics for the songs that it plays but otherwise doesn't provide anything (bios, album discographies, etc.) for the songs' artists.

The above list is broadly consistent with the modern rock designation although there is some room for improvement, as discussed below.

Random commentary

• For better or for worse, I think of bands like The Black Keys and The White Stripes as being less raw versions of The Stooges; some people call such bands "garage rock" but I prefer to call them "dirty blues". "Tighten Up" and "Seven Nation Army" go back to 2010 and 2003, respectively. FYI: The White Stripes broke up in 2011.

• The Smashing Pumpkins' "One and All" is brand new, and is satisfyingly grungy à la "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" vis-à-vis "1979".

• 311's "Love Song" is actually a cover of The Cure's "Lovesong"; a reggae styling gives 311's version a warmth that the original lacks. (Admittedly, of all the adjectives one might use to describe The Cure, "warm" is not one of them.)

• Green Day's "Welcome to Paradise" goes back to 1994 and appears on the band's Dookie album. Green Day has released 8 studio albums since then: why not play something from 2012's ¡Tré!?

• Hozier, who is from Ireland, is one of three singer-songwriters in the list (Lorde and Vance Joy are the other two). "Take Me to Church" has some soul, a bit of gospel, and a dash of the blues in its sound, but is still very much a pop song - definitely different.

• Granted that you can dance to pretty much anything, Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole" is very much a dance track, and it's a very good dance track.

• Sublime's "Santeria" is our second reggae-pop entry. As you may know, Sublime ended when vocalist/guitarist Brad Nowell tragically died from a heroin overdose in 1996.

• I had never heard of Keane before, I have to confess. "Somewhere Only We Know" is a pretty piano-based balled, and is wistful in a "The Long and Winding Road" kind of way; it also reminded me a bit of Queen: "Freddie Mercury should be singing this," I thought as I was listening.

• You may count me among those who hold that Foo Fighters is a better band than Nirvana ever was. "Something from Nothing" is a well-written, structured song that starts slowly and builds to a charging hard-rock attack - definitely one of the high points of the set.

• Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out", which appears on the band's eponymous 2004 debut album, is as edgy and noisy a track as you could hope to hear on a commercial radio station. All right, KROQ! That said, Franz Ferdinand has released 3 studio albums since then, and 2013's Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action finds the band in altogether more rhythmic territory - why not play something from that?

• Re the U2 selection: At last, something from Songs of Innocence! And it was a good song!

• I hadn't heard of Walk the Moon before, either. Per its title, "Shut Up and Dance" is a dance-pop song; I didn't care for it so I decided to check out some of the band's other Popular Songs, specifically, "Anna Sun", "Tightrope", and "Quesadilla", all of which I thought were better than "Shut Up and Dance". There's just no accounting for musical tastes, is there?

• "Jane Says" appears on Jane's Addiction's first proper studio album, 1988's Nothing's Shocking, and is the oldest song in the list. I understand that a song like "Jane Says" serves as a bone to throw to the casual listener, but be that as it may, most of us have heard "Jane Says" and "Been Caught Stealing" enough times, so why not play something from 2003's Strays (which has a great title track) or 2011's The Great Escape Artist?

Barring unforeseen circumstances, we'll visit KEGY in the following entry.

Monday, December 1, 2014

We Can Dance Until We Die

I began my popular music education in the mid-1970s with KCBQ, a San Diego-based Top 40 AM radio station. The hits on the air at the time included Van McCoy and the Soul City Symphony's "The Hustle", Redbone's "Come and Get Your Love", Ace's "How Long", and the Bee Gees' "Jive Talkin'" - good stuff! (Admittedly, Morris Albert's "Feelings" was not such good stuff.) In due course I graduated to FM rock radio and left KCBQ behind. KCBQ is at present a talk radio station, although it hasn't abandoned music completely, namely, it broadcasts a "Sock Hop" program (some of whose past shows are archived here) on Saturday night and a "Moldie Oldies Radio" program on Sunday night.

In today's post we'll check in with KFMB-FM, which is part of the Jack FM family of radio stations and is a Top 40 station for all intents and purposes. Wikipedia variously describes the KFMB format as adult hits, variety hits, or modern adult contemporary - whatever. Vis-à-vis the radio stations I used to listen to in New Orleans, KFMB is somewhat similar to B97 and Magic 101.9 but is more straightforwardly grounded in pop music than those stations are, more specifically, it doesn't have B97's urban feel and it doesn't play nearly as many ballads as Magic 101.9 does.

The music

Three weeks ago Wednesday (12 November) I tuned in to http://www.sandiegojack.com/ and did some live listening for almost an hour and a half. KFMB says that its online streaming is unable to be heard outside of the San Diego area, regardless of device: although I live in North San Diego County and not in San Diego itself, I was able to use the KFMB Online Player without any problems. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

The Neighbourhood: "Sweater Weather"
One Direction: "Story of My Life"
U2: "Pride (in the Name of Love)"
Katy Perry: "Teenage Dream"
Maroon 5: "Animals"
Ella Henderson: "Ghost"
Ed Sheeran: "Sing"
Sam Smith: "Stay with Me"
Vance Joy: "Riptide"
The Cranberries: "Dreams"
Tove Lo: "Habits (Stay High)"
Switchfoot: "Meant to Live"
Meghan Trainor: "Lips Are Movin'"
Echosmith: "Cool Kids"
Lorde: "Royals"
Phillip Phillips: "Raging Fire"
Gwen Stefani: "Baby Don't Lie"
Taylor Swift: "Blank Space"

The KFMB Online Player also provides brief bios, album discographies, and photos for the songs' artists.

History

The oldest song is U2's "Pride (in the Name of Love)", which dates to 1984.
The Cranberries' "Dreams" goes back to 1992.
Switchfoot's "Meant to Live" goes back to 2003.
Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" was released in 2010.
The remaining 14 songs have all been released within the last two years.

Solo artist commentary

• As for our KPRI visit the list contains a lot of singer-songwriter material but this time we've got a 7:4 female/male ratio. Vance Joy is from Oz, Tove Lo is Swedish, and Lorde is a Kiwi; the rest of these artists are either American or English.

• Ella Henderson's "Ghost", with its muscular R&B sound, is the song in this category I like best. Honorable mention goes to Meghan Trainor's "Lips Are Movin'", which is noteworthy in that it has one foot in vintage (circa 1960) rock and roll.

• Sam Smith's "Stay with Me" is the one point of overlap with the KPRI song list. Smith was recently profiled by the Associated Press.

• BTW, Magic 101.9 plays a version of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" that removes the song's in my skin-tight jeans lines; there was no bowdlerization on KFMB's part.

Band commentary

• Interestingly, there's a hard rock song in the list, that being Switchfoot's "Meant to Live": as Switchfoot is from San Diego, perhaps this is a "they're local boys" thing.

• I'm glad that The Neighbourhood's "Sweater Weather" is a hit because it's kind of a dark track musically.

• Echosmith's "Cool Kids" has a vaguely retro-1980s pop-rock sound, which is OK, I'd much rather hear that than a empty dance track.

The spice of radio

The Jack FM brand has a semi-smug Playing What We Want slogan. If Jack FM stations are content to play Top 40 hits with a few 'oldies' mixed in, then fair enough, I suppose, but the slogan implies that those stations should go off the beaten track some of the time, and that clearly doesn't happen at KFMB, or at least it didn't during my listening session; if a varied playlist is what you're after, KPRI is a better choice.

We'll go after KROQ in the next post.

Monday, November 24, 2014

What I Succumb To Is Making Me Numb

This post will be the second post in a series of posts on Southern California radio stations. The first post of this series was on classic rock station KLOS, and is posted here.

You may not like classic rock: "It's stuck in the past" and "It plays the same small set of songs over and over again" you might say, and these would be fair criticisms. Accordingly, today we'll check in with KPRI, a radio station that musically casts a much wider net than does KLOS or New Orleans' WKBU.

Format-wise, Wikipedia classifies KPRI as an adult album alternative station. You can't read too much into these format labels, so let's just get to the music, shall we? Two weeks ago Tuesday (11 November) I tuned in to http://www.kprifm.com/ and did some live listening for almost an hour and a half. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

David Bowie: "Young Americans"
James Bay: "Let It Go"
Smashing Pumpkins: "Tonight, Tonight"
Elvis Costello: "Pump It Up"
INXS: "New Sensation"
Dido: "White Flag"
George Ezra: "Budapest"
Jackson Browne: "Running on Empty"
Bastille: "Pompeii"
Gavin DeGraw: "I Don't Want to Be"
Sam Smith: "Stay with Me"
No Doubt: "Just a Girl"
O.A.R.: "Favorite Song"
Men at Work: "Down Under"
The Head and the Heart: "Another Story"
The Doors: "Love Her Madly"
U2: "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For"
Third Eye Blind: "How's It Going to Be"
Muse: "Madness"
John Mayer: "No Such Thing"

Some of this music was completely new to me - I had never heard of James Bay, O.A.R. ("Of a Revolution"), and The Head and the Heart before, for example - and that's a good thing: we wouldn't want to know it all by heart, would we?

Overlap with other formats

I can imagine the late Casey Kasem playing any of these songs on American Top 40: there are no deep cuts here but it's a nice mix nonetheless.

A number of these songs could fit on a classic rock station playlist: definitely the David Bowie, Jackson Browne, The Doors, and U2 songs, maybe the INXS, Elvis Costello, and Men at Work songs depending on the station.

The songs by Smashing Pumpkins, Bastille, No Doubt, The Head and the Heart, Third Eye Blind, Muse, and possibly Elvis Costello* and O.A.R. could fit on the playlist of a modern rock station like ("The World Famous") KROQ, whom we'll visit in a future entry. (*Musically "Pump It Up" is a match for a modern rock station, but this song is 36 years old.)

The songs by The Doors and Men at Work and possibly Jackson Browne** could fit on the playlist of an oldies station like New Orleans' WTIX (**I know that 'TIX-FM plays "Doctor My Eyes" but I'm not sure about "Running on Empty").

With its lo-fi indie sound, the song by The Head and the Heart could even be sneaked onto a college radio station playlist.

Playlist interface

KPRI maintains an On Air Playlist that
(a) logs the songs KPRI has played over the last 24 hours,
(b) provides lyrics (when available) for those songs, and
(c-g) provides brief bios, (not always complete) album discographies, lists of top tracks, videos, and any concert announcements for the songs' artists.
Ah, now that's what I call user-friendly radio!

Sin of commission

I cannot refrain from taking DJ Mookie to task for playing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For", the most white-bread song in U2's catalog. If you're gonna go back to The Joshua Tree - and not reach for Songs of Innocence, as you should be doing - can you grow a pair and play "Bullet the Blue Sky", please? (On second thought, the quiet "Running to Stand Still" might be an even ballsier choice.)

Sin of omission

You may have noticed that the song list features a lot of singer-songwriter material. The male/female ratio of that material is conspicuously lopsided, Dido being the only female. Can we get cuts from Chrissie Hynde's Stockholm, Juliana Hatfield's Wild Animals, and Alanis Morissette's Havoc and Bright Lights on the air, please?

We may or may not turn the spotlight on KFMB-FM, Jack FM's San Diego station, in the following entry.

Monday, November 17, 2014

His Hair Was Perfect

A while back I noted that I listened to KMET, a Los Angeles rock music radio station, during my coming-of-age years. KMET's chief competition at the time was KLOS, a rock station slightly to the right of KMET on the radio dial. Unlike KMET, KLOS is still around, so given that I am back in California I thought I would check in with KLOS to see what it was playing these days.

A week ago Monday (10 November) I tuned in to http://www.955klos.com/ and did some live listening for a little over an hour. Here's a list of the songs that I heard, in chronological order:

The Tubes: "She's a Beauty"
Robert Plant: "Rainbow"
ZZ Top: "La Grange"
Warren Zevon: "Werewolves of London"
Dire Straits: "Sultans of Swing"
Mötley Crüe: "Girls, Girls, Girls"
Van Halen: "Jump"
The Cars: "Let's Go"
Creedence Clearwater Revival: "Lookin' Out My Back Door"
AC/DC: "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"
Collective Soul: "Shine"
Toto: "Hold the Line"
Foghat: "Slow Ride"
The Beatles: "Revolution"
Alice in Chains: "Man in the Box"
Pink Floyd: "Run like Hell"

KLOS doesn't call itself a classic rock station - its slogan is "Southern California's Best Rock" - but it clearly qualifies thereas, I think you would agree.

Random notes

(1) Oh my goodness, there's actually a new song here, that being Robert Plant's "Rainbow", the second cut on 2014's Lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar. "Rainbow" has a bit of a world music feel and was a good choice for that reason. FYI, the legendary Bob Coburn, of Rockline fame, was DJ-ing at the time. (Bob was sitting in for Melissa Maxx, who was under the weather that day.)

(2) The oldest song of the lot is the Beatles' "Revolution", which goes back to 1968. DJ Gary Moore played the harder-rocking (45 rpm) single version of "Revolution" as opposed to the mellower "Revolution 1" version that begins Side 4 of the White Album.

(3) There are two nods to 1990s alternative rock: Collective Soul's "Shine" and Alice in Chains' "Man in the Box". I don't believe New Orleans' WKBU plays these songs but I could be wrong about that.

(4) The songs by The Tubes that got radio airplay back in the day were "White Punks on Dope", "What Do You Want from Life?", "Don't Touch Me There", and "Prime Time". The Tubes mainstreamed with 1981's The Completion Backward Principle, and I don't fault them for that, I really don't, although I do fault Bob, who was on the air back in the day and cannot claim to be unfamiliar with the aforementioned songs, for not playing an edgier track than "She's a Beauty".

(5) Singer-songwriter-wise we've got one entry, that being Warren Zevon's "Werewolves of London", which appears on 1978's Excitable Boy. (Something I didn't know: the "Werewolves of London" rhythm section comprised Mick Fleetwood and John McVie from you-know-who.) After Excitable Boy Zevon released nine studio albums prior to his untimely death from cancer in 2003. Have you heard anything at all from those records on the radio? I haven't.

(6) Man, it's been eons since I've heard any of Pink Floyd's pre-Dark Side of the Moon material on the radio. The KMET playlist included "Free Four", "One of These Days", "Fearless", and even "Careful with That Axe, Eugene", songs that are at least as good as if not better than "Run like Hell" (or anything else on The Wall, for that matter). Moreover, The Endless River, Pink Floyd's new and presumably final album, is out: man up and play something from that, guys.

OK, I think I've picked on classic rock radio enough at this point - we'll look at a different radio format next time.

Friday, November 7, 2014

The Post Cereal Collapse

Breakfast for me is a bowl of cereal with milk, a small glass of juice, and a cup of coffee. As breakfast options go, cereal has a lot going for it. Its simplicity and convenience can't be beat for a non-morning person such as myself. It's healthier than bacon and eggs or a doughnut. It's way less expensive than going out.

I genuinely enjoy good cereal even though most cereals on supermarket shelves are not to my tastes (I find them lacking in character, shall we say). Unfortunately, my 'cereal experience' has gone downhill in a major way over the past several years because a number of cereals that I used to buy are no longer available. The Post Foods cereal company is the chief malefactor in this regard; specifically, Post has discontinued the following first-rate cereals:

(1) Maple Pecan Crunch
(2) Vanilla Almond Shredded Wheat
(3) Shredded Wheat with Real Strawberries
(4) Just Bunches! - Caramel
(5) Cinna-Cluster Raisin Bran

A murkier case:
(6) According to its Web site, Post still makes Blueberry Morning. I go to Post's "Where to Buy" page and check Blueberry Morning's availability for my current (Vista) and previous (New Orleans) zip codes: "No stores found within 100 miles". Moreover, some Post cereals can be purchased directly from Post but Blueberry Morning isn't one of them. I run a "Blueberry Morning" Google search: Amazon can get it for you for $5-6 a box.

As intimated above, Post is not the only guilty party here: Post's partners-in-crime include Kellogg's and Sunbelt Bakery, which have shamefully discontinued
(7) Frosted Mini-Wheats: Vanilla Creme and
(8) Berry Basic,
respectively.

The (1)-(8) links lead to corresponding cereal profiles maintained by the Mr. Breakfast Cereal Project. At the bottom of the profile pages are Comments About This Cereal sections in which visitors gush about these cereals, so I know I'm not the only one who liked them. When I am shopping for cereal I look at all the crummy cereals that haven't been discontinued and think, "How can this be? Why is it that good items disappear whereas mediocre items are left behind? Who is responsible for this? Do the honchos at cereal companies actually eat cereal? This isn't a government conspiracy that aims to deaden our senses, is it?" And then I remember the age-old saying:

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Or as commenter Cyclone puts it on the Mr. Breakfast Blueberry Morning page, The executives at Post are out of touch with consumers.

Anyway, of the cereals that are still available, here are some of my favorites:

Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats Blueberry
With the Vanilla Creme variant gone, this is the next best thing.

Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats Little Bites Chocolate
The "wheats" part of this cereal gives it enough heft to be satisfying, its sweetness notwithstanding.

Kellogg's Müeslix
This cereal is pretty grainy but that's what I like about it.

Quaker Life - Maple & Brown Sugar
Much better than the Original and Cinnamon versions.

• Quaker Oatmeal Squares - Brown Sugar or Golden Maple
Forget Cap'n Crunch and Quisp - this is Quaker's flagship cereal.

Quaker Granola - Oats, Honey, Raisins, and Almonds
I'm a big fan of mixing cereals, and this cereal makes a great base on which to layer a second, less dense cereal.

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Take Me to the Comments

Once a week or fortnight I pay a visit to Nick Corcodilos's Ask The Headhunter (ATH) blog, which addresses any and all issues relating to the world of work. Several months ago I wrote to Nick to notify him about a problem with the Comments links on his blog's home page. Nick replied, Thanks for your note, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. Those links work fine. I was going to send a "No, those links are not fine, here are the details of what's going on..." follow-up but then thought, "If no one has brought this to Nick's attention and I'm the only one in the world who cares about it, why bother?" In lieu of that second email, today's post will briefly discuss the Comments links problem and its very simple solution.

Anchor AWOL

So, I'm looking over a post on the home page of a blog and there's a Comments link below the post. Upon clicking that link, I expect to be taken directly to the Comments section of the individual post page; perhaps other users have other expectations but this is my expectation as a seasoned Web surfer. This isn't what happens at Nick's blog: clicking a Comments link on the ATH home page takes the user to the top of a post page, not to the Comments section that follows (the ad below) the post.

Let's look at the HTML for the Comments link at the bottom of Nick's most recent post, "The Indeed.com Game: Are you as dumb as HR?".

<a href="http://corcodilos.com/blog/7571/the-indeed-com-game-are-you-as-dumb-as-hr#comments"
title="Comment on The Indeed.com Game: Are you as dumb as HR?">Comments (2)</a>


Note that the href attribute's URL value ends with a #comments reference. The comments part of the reference specifies the name of a destination anchor within the http://corcodilos.com/blog/7571/the-indeed-com-game-are-you-as-dumb-as-hr document. (The comments string is technically known as a fragment identifier - now there's a term you can throw around at your next networking event, eh?)

I accessed the source of the post page and searched for a comments anchor: per my suspicion, nothing came up. The http://corcodilos.com/blog/7571/the-indeed-com-game-are-you-as-dumb-as-hr#comments URL effectively points to a resource that doesn't exist. In following the Comments link, the link URL resolves to that for the page as a whole, and that's why the user ends up at the top of the page.

Try it yourself by clicking the link below:

Comments for the "The Indeed.com Game: Are you as dumb as HR?" post

I've added a target="_blank" attribute to the anchor element start-tag so that the link opens in a new window.

Getting the target

As you may know, the HTML id attribute can serve "as a target anchor for hypertext links", quoting the W3C. A class="commentWrap" div element holds the Comments section of an ATH post page: giving the commentWrap div an id="comments" attribute is all that is necessary to solve our little problem.

<!-- You can start editing here. -->
<div class="commentWrap" id="comments">
<div class="commentDate">
...


I first learned about internal anchors from HTML Goodies's "So You Want A Page Jump, Huh?" tutorial, which discusses the classical way to link to a document fragment, that is, linking via an <a name="codeword"></a> element. (Actually, the tutorial leaves out the </a> tag, which does need to be present, as commenter Eric points out.) Accordingly, Nick could deploy an <a name="comments"></a> anchor

<!-- You can start editing here. -->
<a name="comments"></a>
<div class="commentWrap">
...


rather than an id anchor although I myself would go with the latter given that ATH pages are served as XHTML 1.0 Strict

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


and that XHTML deprecates the name attribute of the anchor element.

For all I know, Nick may have said to his Webmaster, "When users click on a Comments link, I want them to go to the top of the post page and not to the Comments section" - if so, fair enough - but if he'd rather have them go straight to the Comments, then that's pretty easy to arrange, as you can see.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Inky Fingers

When I was growing up, my family subscribed to two newspapers:
(1) Vista's The Vista Press
(2) Oceanside's The Blade-Tribune

As a traditional, printed newspaper, The Vista Press stopped its presses in 1995. However, since 2012 Kathy and Terry Woods have run a theVistaPress.com Web site that brings the original publication into the modern era.

The Blade-Tribune's recent history is more complicated. In 1989 The Blade-Tribune was merged with The Citizen to form The Blade-Citizen. In 2005 The Blade-Citizen was merged with Escondido's The Times-Advocate to form The North County Times. In 2012 The North County Times was taken over by U-T San Diego. As of this writing, U-T San Diego is the only daily newspaper serving San Diego's North County.

My first job

For a little over a year - from June 1977 to July 1978 - I was a Blade-Tribune paperboy. My district manager supervisor was one Barbara H. Ramsey, a hard-working, hustling woman who often seemed on the verge of physical collapse. I think I got along with Barbara reasonably well even if she was a bit unhappy with me because I never did any soliciting.

Most of my paper route lied in Vista's Buena neighborhood. I did my paper route on a chestnut Schwinn Varsity 10-speed, I bike I still have; a paper route bike should be sturdy enough to handle city streets, which are (ahem) not always in the best of shape, and a low-end Schwinn bike is ideal in this respect.

At the time I started my route, a monthly Blade-Tribune subscription cost $3.25; it was up to $3.75 at the time I quit. I initially had about 60 subscribers - almost twice the normal route size, I was told - the 60 number crept up to 80 or so after a few months. At some point I handed over half of my route to another carrier; I had 41 subscribers on my final day (yes, I still have my final carrier billing invoice). I earned $50-$70 a month, depending on the number of subscribers.

All in all I did not like being a paperboy, for the following reasons:

• I disliked the tedium of folding and rubber-banding all those papers before hitting the road. Fortunately, my grandmother, who lived next door, often helped me with these tasks.

• Collecting at the end of the month was a hassle more often than not. I don't have any money, can you come back later? was a common refrain. Some subscribers weren't home at the time I made my rounds, or were home but wouldn't answer the door when I knocked (maybe they just didn't hear me).

• I intensely hated getting up at 5 AM Sunday morning for the paper's Sunday edition. I had some familial help here too: my father was charitably willing to take half of the Sunday papers to a midway point on the route as they wouldn't all fit in my carrying bag.

However, on a normal delivery day when I was out riding around on my bike, being a paperboy wasn't so bad. There are definitely worse jobs out there.

From means to end

I have a spotty history as a newspaper reader: at times I have read newspapers at least once a week or even daily but at other times I haven't read them at all. As for many people, my newspaper reading, such as it was, took a major hit with the advent of the Web.

I frequently read a newspaper in a coffeehouse - primarily Starbucks, to a much lesser extent CC's - when I lived in New Orleans. I would amble in during the 11-12 AM hour and parts or all of the day's The Times-Picayune would be sitting in a little paper holder or strewn about the furniture/tables. With a large dark roast in hand, I went after the sections that held the comics and the op-eds. Many of the other patrons were staring into their laptops; I was there in part to get away from my computer. I have fond memories of reading the full-color comics on Sunday morning at the Maple Street Starbucks after making a recycling run.

Friday, July 11, 2014

Jeopardy Isomerism

Last night on Jeopardy! there was some organic chemistry sloppiness that I, a former organic chemistry instructor, feel a desperate compulsion to sort out.

The sloppiness occurred in the Final Jeopardy segment. The Final Jeopardy category was "In the Dictionary" and the Final Jeopardy clue was:
This adjective can mean "delicate", "heavenly", or, in chemistry, "related to C4H10O".
The correct question is "What is ethereal?" "Ethereal" and the "related to C4H10O" part of the clue point to ether - more specifically diethyl ether (ethoxyethane), CH3CH2OCH2CH3 - whose molecular formula is indeed C4H10O. However, there are actually six other compounds that C4H10O could refer to:

Alcohols
(1) butanol (1-butanol): CH3CH2CH2CH2OH
(2) isobutanol (2-methyl-1-propanol): (CH3)2CHCH2OH
(3) sec-butanol (2-butanol)*: CH3CH2CH(OH)CH3
(4) tert-butanol (2-methyl-2-propanol): (CH3)3COH
(*I am ignoring R/S stereoisomerism here.)
Ethers
(5) methyl propyl ether (1-methoxypropane): CH3OCH2CH2CH3
(6) isopropyl methyl ether (2-methoxypropane): CH3OCH(CH3)2

(Hmmm, maybe we could make an exam question out of this...)

In sum, the Final Jeopardy clue should have been disambiguated by specifying ether's condensed structure vis-à-vis its molecular formula:
This adjective can mean "delicate", "heavenly", or, in chemistry, "related to CH3CH2OCH2CH3".
Clearly, it's time to send Alex and the Clue Crew back to school for an organic chemistry refresher. ;-)

There. I feel better now.

Monday, July 7, 2014

The Song Doesn't Have to Remain the Same

Ever since Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980 in the wake of John Bonham's death, the music press has continually queried the band's surviving members - Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones - as to whether they will ever get back together. As of this writing, the odds of a Led Zeppelin reunion are slim. The 'word on the street' is that Page is eager to at least tour, Jones is ambivalent about a reunion but could probably be talked into it, and Plant is the one who says "No".

Led Zeppelin is of course not unique in this respect: the reunion thing comes up with all well-known bands that fragment completely or partially. Will Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr perform together again? Will Steve Perry rejoin Journey? Will David Byrne ever bury the hatchet with the rest of Talking Heads? The press even pesters Brian Eno about a possible Roxy Music reunion. However, I think that Led Zeppelin is the most interesting of these cases, and that's whom I'm going to talk about in this post.

Plant has nixed a reunion because, he says, "I'm not bored" and "I'm not part of a jukebox", and I understand where he's coming from. Nonetheless, I look at Led Zeppelin's musicianship, its presence, its catalog, and the auxiliary material it could draw on, and am intrigued by the performance possibilities: If I could mastermind a Led Zeppelin concert, what would it be like?

Led Zeppelin last performed in 2007 as the headliner for the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert (AETC). I look at the band's AETC set list and my heart sinks: "Oh my goodness, what a frightfully predictable collection of songs." Most of the band's standards are there, in particular "Stairway to Heaven", "Whole Lotta Love", "Rock and Roll", and "Dazed and Confused". If these guys feel an obligation, out of a sense of showmanship, to roll out a 'greatest hits package' when they play, then yes, they really should find something else to do.

We can do better than that. Here are some suggestions for mixing things up:

(1) Led Zeppelin rose out of the ashes of the Yardbirds. Kick "Dazed and Confused" out of the set and replace it with "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor" from Little Games, the last 1960s Yardbirds studio record and the only one to feature Page.

(2) During the AETC the band performed "Ramble On" and "For Your Life" in their entireties for the very first time. There are various other Zeppelin tracks that have never been played live, e.g., "Hats Off to (Roy) Harper", "Night Flight", and "Candy Store Rock": get them in the set.

(3) We've all heard "Kashmir" enough times: replace it with "Slow Dancer" from Pictures at Eleven, Plant's first solo record.

(4) The AETC set didn't include anything from In Through the Out Door or Coda. "South Bound Suarez" is one of the best songs on the former record but has never been played live, so play it; from the latter record I'd recommend "Poor Tom", which has also never been played live, as Led Zeppelin III has historically been given relatively short shrift in the band's concerts.

(5) "Hummingbird" from Page's 1988 Outrider solo record is a cool song: let's hear it.

(6) What about the 1990s Page-Plant partnership? "Wonderful One" is the best of the four Middle Eastern tracks on No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded whereas "When the World Was Young" would be a solid choice from Walking into Clarksdale: get them in the set.

(7) We wouldn't want to leave out Jones's solo material. Robert Fripp solos on The Thunderthief's "Leafy Meadows". How would Page play it? It's time to find out!

Actually, I'm sure that the band is up to the task of culling their own favorites from their various extracurricular projects, but I'm the one who dreamed up all of this, so it's up to me to 'prime the pump', yes?

Needless to say, a lot of fans, critics, etc. would be upset by a show of this nature, to which I say, "Too bad": they should just be thankful that they got to hear four musicians at the very top of their game, which, as Page himself would tell you, is what Led Zeppelin has always been about.

Finally, if Plant persists in being uncooperative, then Page should call up Jones's good friend Diamanda Galás and commandeer her to front the band. Ah, what a performing ensemble that would be!

Upon reading this post, most people - perhaps including Page, Plant, and Jones themselves - are likely to say, "This bloke is mad." Maybe I am. For the sake of the music, however, this is how it should happen, speaking as someone who hates to see great talent and opportunity go to waste.

P.S. You'll notice that I didn't address "Stairway to Heaven" in my suggestion list. As you might guess from the preceding discussion, I agree with Plant that it's time to retire "Stairway" but would be willing to sit through it if the band were willing to work some obscure material into the set.

P.P.S. I favor holding onto "No Quarter" because Page's "No Quarter" solo on The Song Remains the Same is IMO one of the most masterful solos in rock music history. (One of these days I'll have to write up my own "Top 10 Guitar Solos" list.)

Saturday, May 24, 2014

Mystery Music

As long as I'm sounding off about the current state of popular music radio, let me sneak in one more post on something else that gets my goat about it.

When I lived in New Orleans I sometimes listened to WTIX's repeat broadcasts of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem on Sunday morning. If you have the patience to sit through an AT40 program from yesteryear - and I can see how you might not have that patience - you will hear 'diamonds in the rough' thereon, e.g., Aretha Franklin covering "Bridge over Troubled Water", early Kool & the Gang, that sort of thing. However, I'm not going to talk about AT40's music today as Kasem's presentation is the part of the show that really interests me.

For each song that he plays, Kasem articulately states the song title and the name of the artist both before and after the song (if the song appears on an album he normally doesn't give the album name, but then again, his program's focus is hit singles); if the song is a cover, he'll tell you that, and who did the song originally; moreover, he often says where an artist hails from. I sincerely think that all of this is a wonderfully pro-artist thing to do and that all DJs everywhere should follow Kasem's example.

Regrettably, the management/DJs at most commercial music radio stations are pretty slack about relaying song/artist information to listeners. Maybe these people think, "Listeners who care about that stuff can go to the station's Web site or call us up." Maybe they assume that the listenership 'knows it all already'*, so to speak. Maybe they just don't care.

*This assumption is not wholly unreasonable for a classic rock station that plays a small set of songs over and over again. Everyone knows that "Another Brick in the Wall" is by Pink Floyd and appears on The Wall, right? To be sure, a majority of listeners will know this, but some listeners won't, and the station should be willing to cater to the latter group.

A true story:
For the longest time I did not know who Jewel was. I had heard her hits on the radio a zillion times but NOT ONCE did I ever hear a DJ say, "We were just listening to Jewel, doing Song X from her most recent record." This drove me absolutely nuts. If I recall correctly, I finally solved this mystery by latching onto a lyrical snippet from one of those hits and then running a Google search on that snippet - this is what I'm reduced to when I want to find out who does a song these days - pathetic, huh? (Don't ask me to watch a video channel to learn artist names: I detest music videos.)

At non-commercial music radio stations the information situation is also often problematic. College radio DJs are notorious for playing 30- to 60-minute music sets without interruptions of any kind: before the start of a set they'll tell you the first song they're going to play; after a set ends they'll usually give you a list (not necessarily a complete or correct list) of what they just played. What if you really like the fourth song of a 10-song set and can't hang around until the end of the set and are unable or not inclined to check in with the radio station to get the skinny on that song? You're out of luck. Deeply uncool.

Not-so-popular music radio

Classical music radio hosts typically do a good job of keeping their listeners informed. The presentation of jazz music radio is a mixed bag - it ranges from conscientious DJs who announce song/artist information every couple of songs to DJs who adhere to the 'let's play a whole bunch of songs in a row' model - but is generally better than that of popular music radio.

My criticisms of music radio's content and presentation will of course be irrelevant for those to whom radio is little more than a form of 'aural wallpaper', which seems to be the case for a lot of listeners out there. However, if you are interested in broadening your musical horizons - as worthwhile a pursuit in life as any, IMO - then at some point you will need to move your quest to the Web, if you haven't done so already. My reproach of WKBU two entries ago notwithstanding, Web sites of traditional music stations are a good place to start. WWNO.org offers two (NPR-free) audio streams that WWNO-FM does not. WNOE.com is a step up presentation-wise from WNOE-FM. Get going.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

I'd Like to Make a Request

I am not going to discuss the Grooveshark music service in detail - you can go to the service's Wikipedia entry or to the Grooveshark.com site itself if that's what you want - but will merely say a few things about my experience with the service in this post.

I did a fair amount of music listening at MP3.com during its heyday. MP3.com's music offerings were mostly chaff and not so much wheat, but that never bothered me: swimming through the chaff was all part of the listening experience, as I saw it. The MP3.com site is still extant, although it is only a faint shadow of what it used to be. It hosts 250 songs that can be streamed or downloaded; there are no selections from big-name artists as there once was. Parts of the site are dysfunctional or haven't been updated for a couple of years.

I had a small collection of MP3.com favorites that I listened to time and again. I was able to download some but not all of these songs - I still have those .mp3s, BTW. One favorite that I wasn't able to download was This Holiday Life's "Come and Remain", which I like for its U2-ish anthemic feel. Fast-forward to the present: after I sorted out my Internet situation here in California, I did a Google search for "Come and Remain" on the chance that I might find a site at which I could play it. Gratifyingly, my search turned up a Grooveshark.com page that hooked me up with the listen I was looking for.

Grooveshark is a service that allows its users to freely stream songs but not download them, and that's just fine with me: believe me when I say that I don't want a bunch of files cluttering up my hard disk. A wide variety of music is available at Grooveshark.com. If you're up for a Muzio Clementi sonatina, a Luciano Pavarotti aria, or a Hossam Ramzy belly dance (you'll have to supply the dancer ;-)), Grooveshark's got you covered.

Ah, but what about the depth of the Grooveshark library? I can report that it's pretty impressive, at least as far as popular music is concerned. Let's put the Grooveshark "Search for songs, artists, genres" widget to work:

• "Killing Me Softly (with His Song)" was made famous by Roberta Flack but was originally recorded by Lori Lieberman. Never heard Lieberman's version? Grooveshark's got it.

• In the late 1970s, "Responsibility" and "I'll Be Waiting" from Robert Johnson's Close Personal Friend got a lot of airplay on KMET, which I briefly discussed in the previous entry. Johnson is a relatively obscure artist and Close Personal Friend is his only record, and I wasn't expecting to find Close Personal Friend's tracks at Grooveshark.com, but they're there. Wow.

• When Huey Lewis and the News released "Heart and Soul", I thought, "I've heard this song before." "Heart and Soul" had in fact been recorded twice previously, and the first of these versions, by Exile (the "Kiss You All Over" guys), did indeed get a bit of airplay. Exile's "Heart and Soul" is longer and more interesting than Lewis's version; you unfortunately won't hear the former on the radio today but you can listen to it at Grooveshark.com. (The second "Heart and Soul" was by The Bus Boys: I couldn't find this version at Grooveshark but I did find it here.)

Imagine being able to call up a radio station and request a song and get it played immediately, without having to worry about the 'tastes' of the station's DJs, management, and advertisers - Grooveshark is somewhat like that.

I say "somewhat" because there are some conspicuous gaps in the Grooveshark library - run a Grooveshark search for the Beatles and see what happens - prompting the questions:
(1) Where does Grooveshark's music come from?
(2) Is the Grooveshark service legal in the first place?

To my understanding, users provide the great majority of Grooveshark's content although, per the Copyright subsection of Wikipedia's Grooveshark entry, Grooveshark employees seem to be responsible for some of it.

I can't answer the second question with certainty, but I suspect the answer is "no".
• Wikipedia notes that Grooveshark has been sued by all of the major music companies - this does seem like the sort of thing that would put the music industry in high dudgeon, doesn't it?
• Some Grooveshark song listings are in disguised form: for example, one "21st Century Schizoid Man" listing is for a song from Kkiinngg-Ccrriimmssoonn's Ttthhee-Ccoouurrtt-ooff-tthhee-Ccrriimmssoonn-Kkiinngg album - listen to it here (Robert Fripp has locked horns with Grooveshark over its hosting of his music). Would this be the case if the Grooveshark service were completely lawful? I don't think so.

I can see why record companies and artists would be upset with Grooveshark, but there's very much a limit to which I can sympathize with these parties given the awful state of today's radio listening experience. Moreover, I own hundreds of records and have been to my fair share of music shows, so it's not as though I don't have any 'skin in the game', so to speak. Grooveshark's detractors can throw stones at me if they want but as long as Grooveshark is around I'm going to avail myself of it.

Leading by example

Let me conclude this entry by noting that you can listen to "stations" at the Grooveshark Genres pane. I listened to the "Classic Rock" station for a while today: in addition to hits from Rush, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Steve Miller Band, I heard off-the-beaten-path songs by Styx ("Edge of the Century"), Thin Lizzy ("Brought Down"), Mountain ("Roll Over Beethoven"), the Grateful Dead ("Little Nemo in Nightland"), and Fleetwood Mac ("Morning Rain") - there was even a song by The Tragically Hip ("Pretend"). Can you now see the difference between programming that is run by music fans vs. programming that is meant to maximize advertising revenue?

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Checking In with the Narrowcast Media

For today's post, your humble narrator heroically listens to some "classic rock" - so that you don't have to.

I have a couple of questions for those who listen to FM rock radio:
(1) When's the last time you heard Procol Harum's "Whiskey Train", Joe Cocker's "High Time We Went", Roxy Music's "Out of the Blue", or Jackson Browne's "The Fuse" on the radio?
(2) Are you familiar with these songs?

I spent my high school years listening to the long-gone KMET, which was based in Los Angeles but whose strong signal easily reached my home in North San Diego County. KMET aired a reasonably satisfying mix of 'hits' and deep cuts from the world of rock music, broadly defined. KMET wasn't that adventurous - I can't recall it ever playing "21st Century Schizoid Man" or "God Save the Queen" - but it was nonetheless a good place to begin one's musical education.

Fast-forward to the present: What is FM rock radio like today?

To research this question, I listened to WKBU, "New Orleans' Only Classic Rock!", on the Web for about an hour and 15 minutes last Friday afternoon. During this time I was treated to 15 songs, about 20 commercials, various forms of station identification, two traffic reports, and a very small amount of chitchat from Kat, the station host.

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Do Me Like That" was playing when I tuned in. Here are the other artists/songs I heard, in chronological order:

The Police: "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic"
Lenny Kravitz: "American Woman" (the Guess Who classic)
Scorpions: "Rock You Like a Hurricane"
Fleetwood Mac: "The Chain"
Led Zeppelin: "Black Dog"
Don Henley: "All She Wants to Do Is Dance"
Pink Floyd: "Another Brick in the Wall"
Lynyrd Skynyrd: "Simple Man"
Def Leppard: "Bringin' on the Heartbreak"
Journey: "Faithfully"
Metallica: "Enter Sandman"
Van Halen: "Unchained"
Stone Temple Pilots: "Plush" (unplugged version)
Free: "All Right Now"

Pretty standard fare, eh? Not a deep cut in sight. The closest we get to a 'surprise' is the Stone Temple Pilots selection: STP came out of the 1990s alt-rock era and IMO does not really count as "classic rock", at least when compared with Free and Led Zeppelin. (Don't get me wrong: I am definitely not faulting WKBU/Kat for playing STP.) You might also find the Journey selection a bit surprising in that "Faithfully" is now a staple of "soft rock" radio - I know for a fact that WLMG plays it.

WKBU's "Listen Live" widget features a Song History page that maintains a running log of the songs that are aired. For whatever reason, "American Woman" and "Plush" were not entered into the log - make of that what you will.

History-wise, the oldest of these songs is "All Right Now", which dates to 1970, whereas the newest is the "American Woman" remake, which dates to 1999, which by my arithmetic was 15 years ago. Most of the above artists have released one or more studio albums during the 1999-2014 period: Lynyrd Skynyrd has made five such records, for example. Have you ever heard any of this new music on the radio? I haven't. Maybe WKBU should call itself an oldies station, à la WTIX.

With no deep cuts and no recent material, WKBU offers a listening experience decidedly inferior to that provided by KMET back in the day. How can this be?

In her station bio, Kat says that her musical favorites include David Bowie, U2, Foo Fighters, Pearl Jam, Van Halen, and Frank Zappa. Left to her own devices, could Kat put together an interesting set list of songs from these artists on the spur of the moment? Has she ever played "Dinah-Moe Humm" during her program? Intriguingly, Kat also says that she's a fan of Patsy Cline and Frank Sinatra. What response would Kat get if she played "Strangers in the Night"? (C'mon, Kat, let's do this...)

Of course, it is extremely unlikely that Kat is left to her own devices: almost certainly someone higher up is telling her what to play. Let's assume for the moment that Kat is indeed a bona fide music fan and is not just a 'personality'; for all I know, she may own hundreds or even thousands of records and have a comprehensive knowledge of popular music. Whether or not this is true, however, it is clear that the shot-callers at WKBU and other stations of its ilk are NOT music fans, and THAT, my friends, is the real problem that plagues WKBU and FM rock radio more generally.

Actually, I can't say with absolute certainty that KMET's management/DJs were music fans either, but they were at least willing to take some musical chances, and a willingness to take risks goes a long way in determining the quality of a commercial music radio station.

Ah, but what about WKBU's advertisers? Does WKBU's management worry that those advertisers would bolt if Kat and her fellow hosts 'went rogue', so to speak? Is sheer cowardice to blame here? My listen featured ads by Terminex, New Orleans Audi, the Silver Slipper Casino, and Progressive Insurance (at this point in my life I think I would rather hear "Flo" sing than hear "Another Brick in the Wall", but that's another post for another time): Would these businesses really be scared away if Kat were to play Bruce Springsteen's "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)", or the title track of Heart's Little Queen, or something from U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (a 2004 release that song-for-song is much better than The Joshua Tree)? I highly doubt it, although their representatives are welcome to contact and correct me if I'm wrong about that.

FM rock radio does not have to be as bad as it is - diversifying its output would attract new listeners and maybe even more advertising revenue, who knows? But it is really bad, and that's why people like me are driven to streaming services like Grooveshark, which I'll discuss in the next post.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Musical Loose Ends

My NOLA Library CD tour did not end with Norah Jones. I was able to sneak in two last listens before my time ran out:
(1) Actual Sounds + Voices, a 1998 release from Meat Beat Manifesto
(2) The Next Day, the most recent release from David Bowie

Actual Sounds + Voices

Rather than reach for a term like "electronica" or "industrial", I'll characterize Meat Beat Manifesto's output as "abstract beat music that makes liberal use of samples", which is not always the case but that's the description I'm gonna go with. MBM is a band that you find out about from college radio or a video channel or perhaps most importantly word of mouth - you won't hear it on a commercial radio station. (If you have heard MBM on a commercial station, you are welcome to correct me.) I myself was acquainted with MBM in 1989 or 1990 by WKDU, the radio station of Drexel University in Philadelphia, when one night DJ Chris Vecchio played "Strap Down (Part 1)" from Storm the Studio, MBM's debut record, which I subsequently purchased at Third Street Jazz and Rock, which sadly went out of business in the late 1990s.

Fast forward to my time in the Big Easy. From January 2006 to August 2008 - up until the time we were 'swiped' by Hurricane Gustav - I satisfied my listening fix via the CD collection at New Orleans' Main Library, from which I checked out MBM's Subliminal Sandwich in February 2008. Subliminal Sandwich is a sprawling 28-track double CD whose second, more experimental disc contains some seriously mind-blowing music.

That brings us to Actual Sounds + Voices, which I checked out from the Latter Library last July and which is similar in style to the first Subliminal Sandwich disc. My favorite Actual Sounds + Voices track is the eerie "Hail to the Bopp", whose Come [and] join us spoken-word sample may be from Marshall Applewhite of the Heaven's Gate cult, but don't quote me on that. A second highlight is the 11-minute "The Thumb", which comprises
(1-5) five minutes of jazz* and then
(6-8) three minutes of spaciness that could have been written by György Ligeti and then
(9-11) an aggressive groove for the last three minutes.

*"Let Go" also has a jazzy feel: given the free-form nature of many MBM compositions, one could be forgiven for suspecting that, deep down, MBM leader and mainstay Jack Dangers, who plays the clarinet, is a Miles Davis wannabe.

The Next Day

David Bowie has been on the scene for almost fifty years although he hasn't been making music for all of that time. A 10-year gap separates The Next Day and Reality, Bowie's previous studio record, and I believe that Bowie himself was putting out an "I'm retired" vibe for much of the 2000s. Is The Next Day a one-off or is there more to be drawn from the Bowie well? Only time will tell.

On my Blogger profile page I state, My favorite record of all time would probably be Jeff Beck's Wired. However, if I were to choose a favorite set of records it would be the Bowie records running from Station to Station to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps), inclusive; excluding the live Stage, I own all of these records plus Never Let Me Down and Outside. I have heard Young Americans and Let's Dance in their entireties and, like any self-respecting music listener, know Bowie's 1969-1974 hits like the back of my hand. Adding it all up leaves plenty of Bowie territory that I am unfamiliar with.

So what did I think of The Next Day? The Next Day is a modern rock record with as much edge as could be expected from someone in his mid-60s; it's a good record but not as groundbreaking as Bowie's best work (but what is?) - quality-wise it's much closer to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) than to Let's Dance. Favorite tracks: "The Next Day", "Valentine's Day", and "Dancing Out in Space".

Bowie is one of many artists who got a lot of radio airplay back in the 1970s but have now all but vanished from the airwaves (at least this is so in New Orleans). I will take aim at the dreadful state of FM rock radio in a future post.

Ah, it was a glorious run, but all good things must come to an end. There were a number of CDs in the Latter stacks that I wanted to get to, but didn't: Reba McEntire's Keep On Loving You, Atoms for Peace's Amok, and Jennifer Hudson's eponymous debut were on my short list of items to check out. C'est la vie.

I am no longer within walking distance of a library but I do now have a broadband Web connection and for the last couple of months I've been wading through the musical archives at Grooveshark.com, which I'll write about when I can get around to it.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Confessions of a Pedestrian

If you've been following the news lately, then you know that New York City's new mayor, Bill de Blasio, intends to take a hard(er) line on jaywalking. I understand why he's doing this, but speaking as a longtime urban pedestrian, I think it's a bad idea - and then some. It's a bad idea because, 'all things being equal', it is in fact safer to jaywalk than it is to walk across a street at an intersection.

Let me begin by getting an acknowledgement out of the way. Crossing a street on foot does require you to pay attention, and if you're not willing to pay attention, then you really shouldn't expect anyone to feel sorry for you if you end up getting hit by a car. Crossing a street should be a 'dedicated' activity: you shouldn't be doing anything else - making a phone call, texting, whatever - while you're doing it.

My argument parallels an observation made by Tom Vanderbilt in a "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" op-ed that was recently published by The New York Times:
I routinely jaywalk across one-way streets with my young daughter in our Brooklyn neighborhood. I do this not as an act of vigilante pedestrianism, but simply because the times we came closest to being hit by cars were when we had the “Walk” signal and a driver attempted to make a turn.
Yes! A fellow veteran of the streets who gets it! As a public service of sorts, allow me to flesh out the preceding blockquote with the following scenario:

(1) You are on the southwestern corner of an intersection and you want to walk across the street from south to north, and you have a green light.

(2) Directly in front of you is a western motorist who has a red light and who wants to make a right turn and go south.

(3) Directly to your right is a one-way flow of traffic that runs from north to south. The western motorist is looking northward, watching the traffic, and is completely oblivious to you, the pedestrian at the intersection. You begin crossing the street. Meanwhile, a brief break in the traffic spurs the motorist to begin turning right.

Folks, I have come exceedingly close to being hit in this exact situation. (If there are any NOLA readers in the audience, this happened to me at the corner of St. Charles and Louisiana in the course of walking from the Exxon corner to the Rite-Aid corner.) So let's say it one more time, <strong>ly: It is simply not true that it is safer to cross at an intersection than it is to jaywalk; show me someone who holds otherwise and I'll show you someone who is not a pedestrian.

The "When Pedestrians Get Mixed Signals" article concludes with a cynical comment on law enforcement's attitude toward pedestrians:
The Los Angeles Police Department may be patrolling on foot in downtown Los Angeles, but it is still looking through the windshield.
It's not just the police, Tom: as long as society in general is looking through the windshield (as you intimate earlier in the article), it should be legal to jaywalk.

And now for something completely different…Everyone else has commented on Arthur Chu's spectacular run on Jeopardy!, so I thought I would as well, being the loyal Jeopardy! viewer that I am.

Arthur Chu was a formidable contestant, and he played to win, as was certainly his prerogative; there was nothing stopping other contestants from adopting his unorthodox tactics and trying to beat him at his own game. As he worked the board, Chu exuded an air of confident competence, and I enjoyed watching him and rooted for him for that very reason, and I'll miss his presence in tonight's show. (Indeed, I suspect it was his demeanor, vis-à-vis his hopscotch approach to the clues, that actually annoyed his detractors.) However, I knew it was only a matter of time until one or more bad bets knocked him off his throne, as happened last night.

FWIW, I missed Chu's first win because the 28 January episode of Jeopardy! was preempted by President Obama's State of the Union address; why anyone would substitute the latter for the former is beyond my comprehension but evidently the directors at NBC felt differently.

Monday, March 10, 2014

Wired for Speed

I noted last time that my NOLA-to-Vista move did not include any large appliances. However, I did bring with me a large (5' x 28" x 24") desk that I got from a thrift store in Philadelphia for $35 in a real steal of a deal not quite twenty years ago. Shortly after my belongings arrived, I and my father moved my desk into my bedroom, and then I set up my computer.

If you've followed my blogging efforts, then you know that I've been embarrassingly procrastinative about upgrading my dial-up Internet connection to a broadband Internet connection. Now, here in Vista I could continue to access the Web via my EarthLink dial-up service if I really wanted to, but anyone who has gone from dial-up to broadband can tell you that surfing the Web with a dial-up connection is akin to working with one hand tied behind your back, and I have rather had my fill of the dial-up experience, as you can well imagine.

My Intel Core 2 Duo iMac is equipped with an AirPort Extreme card via which I can piggyback on a neighbor's Cox cable Internet connection, but I don't want to do that either. My father himself has an AT&T U-verse DSL Internet connection, however, and I'm thinking, "There's gotta be some way I can hook up my computer to his system, right?"

An AT&T technician who we'll call "James" set up my father's U-verse system in June 2013. When James was done setting up the system, he didn't give my father a manual therefor but he did leave behind a four-page leaflet containing an AT&T "pledge" - It is my goal to provide the best service experience possible … blah blah blah - and a brief survey and other information. The leaflet's second page features James' work phone number, so I called the number and left a relevant message on his voicemail; my intuition told me that running an Ethernet cable from my computer to the system was all I needed to do, but I thought it would be a good idea to check with him to make sure.

While I was waiting for James to return my call, it occurred to me: Dude, why don't you do some homework on this? Whenever you are having some kind of problem with a computer, you can take it to the bank that someone out there has experienced that exact same problem - there are no new computer problems under the sun. So I went to Google and did a U-verse connect second computer search.

As it happened, I didn't need to get any help from 'someone out there': my search's first page of results linked to a series of articles from AT&T itself addressing my issue. The first of these hits, a "Connecting a computer to your Wi-Fi home network" article, recommended:
Try This First
Once you've switched your wireless to On, have your Wi-Fi Network Name and password (found on the side of your AT&T provided gateway) available to enter into your network connections.
I myself am a big believer in trying the simplest things first. I trotted over to the 2Wire i38HG residential gateway connected to my father's computer and wrote down the SSID and WI-FI KEY values that appeared thereon (below the third bar code). I went back to my computer, opened the Network pane of the System Preferences application, selected the AirPort option in the pane's left-hand menu, and turned AirPort on. Gratifyingly, the SSID value appeared in the pane's Network Name menu; upon selecting the value I was prompted for a password. I entered the WI-FI KEY value into the Password field and clicked the button. Within a few seconds the pane displayed an AirPort is connected … message. Yes!

FYI:
• The second U-verse connect second computer result, a "Connecting Computers to the AT&T U-verse Gateway" .pdf, confirmed that I could indeed interface with the system by Ethernetically connecting my computer to the gateway.
• An i38HG gateway manual Google search led me to a user guide applicable to the system.

James never did return my call - let's hear it for AT&T's award-winning customer service, eh? But all's well that ends well. I now have a DSL connection to the Web; it's not that fast of a connection in absolute terms - AT&T's own High Speed Internet Speed Test page clocks its download speed at about 7.6 megabits per second - but it's waaayyyy faster than dial-up. At long last I can watch YouTube cat videos! ;-)

An elephant remains in the room: What am I gonna do about my EarthLink dial-up account? As of this writing, I am paying $21.95/month for a service I would seem to not be using. However, I am actually getting something for that money:
(1) EarthLink's home.earthlink.net server hosts about 7 MB of external files - demos and images - for my blogs.
(2) Much less importantly, I still use the email part of the service to some extent, although I have now routed most of my email traffic to my apeak02@gmail.com address.

If I were to cancel my EarthLink service, then EarthLink would immediately pull the plug on the home.earthlink.net material, which would leave 'holes' in many of my blog entries, and that would really bum me out, to put it mildly. Given the time and energy it would take to migrate my stuff to another Web hosting service, is it worth it to stay with EarthLink, at least for the short term? Stay tuned.

Monday, February 3, 2014

History in Motion

Moving is always a headache, whether you are moving across the country or overseas or just across town, whether you are moving a lot or just a little bit of stuff.

There is a vast amount of moving information out there and it is not so easy to sift through. An argument can be made that the Web has made the moving process more difficult in that it has greatly enlarged the information haystack; moreover, the Web is not a substitute for speaking with a 'relocation consultant' on the phone. I nevertheless began my own process for moving my belongings from New Orleans to Vista with a long distance movers new orleans (or something like that) Google search.

The moving business has diversified: in addition to the
(A) moving companies that do it all and
(B) doing it all yourself with a U-Haul truck
standard options, there are now
(C) container services that will drive your stuff from Point A to Point B but expect you to load and unload it (e.g., U-Pack) and complementarily
(D) companies that only un/load but don't do any actual moving.
Being a non-motorist and not having anyone to help me on the New Orleans side, I wanted an (A) company.

My quote quest began with Thumbtack, an all-purpose service broker. After I filled out a brief form for my move, Thumbtack initially promised to deliver multiple quotes from pre-screened pros but subsequently put me in touch with a single, not-NOLA-based mover - Turnaround Moving Service in Geismar, LA - that offered me a wildly uncompetitive quote* of $6500, which was a good thing in the sense that it spurred me to get up off my duff and go get a better quote.

*I indicated on the form that my move was for a studio apartment (the smallest choice) but the form did not contain a comment box for providing more detail; Turnaround probably assumed that my move included several large appliances (a refrigerator, an oven, a dishwasher), which was not the case.

CORRECTION: I rechecked with Thumbtack and its long-distance moving form does in fact include an Anything else the mover should know? comment box, in which I didn't enter anything, so evidently I'm to blame for what happened. The moral of the story: The more details you provide to the mover, the more accurate your moving quote is going to be.

BTW, Yelp did not prove that helpful in my long distance movers new orleans search, which is not so surprising given that Yelp's focus is local businesses vis-à-vis interstate ones; however, Yelp did at least enable me to weed out various we-don't-go-outside-of-Louisiana businesses that were not suitable for my move.

On the right side(s) of the Google search pages were a series of ads for discount 'movers' that, like Thumbtack, don't do any moving themselves but instead serve as intermediaries between movees and actual moving companies. I submitted move information to at least two** of these outfits: Budget Van Lines and OrbitzMoving.com (**I seem to recall also doing so at either GetMove.com or GotMovers.com but I just can't remember). Budget Van Lines responded directly to me with a $1333.50 quote. Meanwhile, I received emails or phone calls from five companies (presumably) contracting for OrbitzMoving.com:

(1-2) Allied Van Lines and North American Van Lines wanted to actually come to my apartment and look over my stuff, and would not give me a quote without doing that.

(3-4) Cross Country Movers and Global Transportation offered me quotes in the neighborhood of $1100.

(5) World Wide Van Lines sent me a not to exceed moving quote of $5,599.95.

At the time that I had to make a decision, I had a Global Transportation 'email trail' - an introductory letter and a binding estimate contract of sorts - whereas Cross Country Movers hadn't sent me any emails at all, so I went with Global Transportation for my move.

Departure

Global Transportation itself did not move my belongings but rather subcontracted the job to Chico and the Men, a Slidell-based moving company.

A three-person Chico team - two dedicated movers and a paperwork guy who helped the movers a bit - showed up slightly late on the day of the move. The two movers put me at ease; as I watched them it was clear to me that they knew what they were doing. In contrast, the paperwork guy seemed to be going by the seat of his pants:
(1) He asked me to input address and/or credit card data - data that I had given to my Global Transportation contact and that he should have had on hand - into a number of forms.
(2) He asked me for a photo ID and seemed confused when I handed him my passport; he called up a superior to ensure that a passport was an acceptable form of ID (it was). He then told me that I would have to send photocopies of (a) my passport photo and (b-c) the front and back of my credit card to Chico's headquarters before Chico would ship my goods.
(3) He finally told me that it would take at least three weeks to deliver my shipment whereas Global Transportation's binding estimate email had said I would get it in 5-14 business days.

I felt a sense of great relief as the moving truck drove away. "At long last I am getting out of New Orleans," I thought.

Connecting timeline

• My belongings were carted away on 10 December.

• I left New Orleans by train on 11 December and arrived in California on 13 December.

• The aforediscussed photo/credit card photocopies were obtained and then faxed back to Slidell on 14 December.

• On 29 December I got a call from a Chico employee: "Your shipment will arrive in 5-7 days; a day before the delivery the movers will call you to give you a heads-up."

Arrival

On 4 January a mover called me with the news that
(a) my belongings would be delivered the next day but
(b) they were sitting in a massive truck that could not be driven to my precise location and
(c) they would have to be transferred to a smaller U-Haul truck for delivery, which would require an additional $300 cash payment.
It crossed my mind that he was lying about the truck business, but at that point I was eager to get the whole thing over with so I said, "OK, let's do it." Had I known this would happen I would have chosen Cross Country Movers for my move.

(In retrospect there were two Global Transportation minor red flags that might also have steered me to Cross Country Movers:
(1) Global Transportation was difficult to get through to on the phone.
(2) Global Transportation's introductory letter email concluded with a www.globaltn.net Web site URL that points to a "This Web page is parked for FREE, courtesy of GoDaddy.com" page.
Maybe these were relevant considerations, maybe not.)

At about 10:15 the following morning the mover - one guy - arrived with the U-Haul truck, in which my belongings were commingled with someone else's belongings; he would have given me the whole lot had I not said, "Hold it, this other stuff isn't mine." After my items were unloaded, I handed the mover the $300 and signed off on an inventory sheet, and that was that.

I'll write more about my 'new life' in California as time permits.