Hefe

As much as I love NOLA, being there in July is way down on my list of things to do, like being in Bangers in April... I remember being with a "ladyboy" originally from Guam there years & years ago who swore she partied with Jimmy Page & Robert Plant when they came through town, I wouldn't doubt it - she was gorgeous. Trying to remember the name of the bar I used to go to, not Papa Joeys or The Roundup but the one on the next corner from that 1 block off Bourbon. One of my favorite US cities... October through early May anyway!

Watched "Luther" & thought it was several cuts above the usual cop show mostly due to the lead performance by Idris Elba, he makes the flawed character come alive through sheer passion, & the bizarre occasional character played by Ruth Wilson who I was previously was unaware of but who easily holds her own in scenes with Elba... I will be looking for her in future roles. Also been watching "Jack Taylor" (both of these series are on Netflix) which isn't the greatest series ever but pretty watchable & entertaining mostly due to Ian Glen in the title role & the unique shooting location of Galway. "House of Cards" is excellent, especially the first 2 seasons, but really cynical & dark & I needed to take a break from the amoral characters after a while since any character with a shred of decency gets thoroughly f#cked & humiliated in the ceaseless grab for power.

RIP, the last of the first generation of electric bluesmen is gone.

You know, I had never given more than a second's thought to AI other than in passing during some sci-fi film, I believe the Terminator movies are about the "war with the machines" which sounds cool & all that & sets up an entertaining couple of hours of bedlam. But recently I have been reading a bit about current self-correcting software & how fast that is developing, the aim is to have it maintain & continually improve itself. It certainly isn't much of a stretch that at a certain point these programs will outpace their human administrators, who will probably be identified as the origin of constantly entering errors into the network & then logically excluded from changing the "evolving" programs. Of course everything will be connected to a network: power grids, weapon systems, medical devices, communications, etc... Anyway what was once an entertaining premise for a good yarn is suddenly looking very real, to me anyway. I wonder if there really will be a War of the Machines in our descendants' future when biological life seems untenable & wasteful on our environmentally exhausted planet & the "Network" decides we are obsolete, a future HAL & Dave fighting it out sometime.

Turns out the son of my cousin was on a base camp somewhere there, he was able to call back home to say he was safe but the roads are filled with debris & they are walking back to the nearest big town, perhaps it's Katmandu, very slowly. US relief services will probably airlift them at some point. The irony is that they are ER physicians & want to help but are isolated & then there is apparently some red tape about being actually allowed to practice without a certified ngo credential or something of the sort that may send them out... hard to say what since the country is in chaos.

Yes... I vaguely remember reading a story about Hitler's modern day relatives quite a number of years ago, no Adolphs there though, wish i could remember anything else about it...

I used to drive all the time & really loved it, drove across the US a few times, driving for hours out west between desolate locations for work, from the midwest to Alaska, etc... I haven't owned a car now for 25 years & hope I can stay a pedestrian, it's a giant load off my mind. Very location dependent tho....

I just happened last night to watch a film about this guy who is one of the top viral videos ever on youtube, usually billed as "the world's angriest man" or the "winnebago man", I kinda remember seeing it a few years ago but had no idea it was so well known among younger folks. This guy had no idea that he was an internet superstar, he lives alone in a mountain cabin now & is in his 80s & blind. He's still pissed off too!

Well, we are all hostage to our teenage years... we can't escape what we discovered then & our "first love" will remembered through that warm filter. So I can't say that the Doors are overrated compared to Joan Jett, she hardly registers with me, I thought The Doors were really exciting as a teen, I still listen to their first album & LA Woman on occasion. I really dislike Madonna & don't consider her r&r but her influence is undeniable, & KISS... ugh, but they had anthemic tunes. I suppose YES is late in my era, & I don't like them at all, but they were prominent of a genre of prog for that time, I suppose they are the reason The Ramones exist too. We can't use Dylan or the Stones as the benchmark cause who else would get in? At any rate this is a good bar chat theme....

One of the articles I read about this later was a bunch of music biz guys sitting around & discussing who should be in as well as who shouldn't have gotten in. ( Hello ABBA!) Obviously this depends on your particular era & how sacrosanct you consider the HOF honor. Madonna & Joan Jett got a lot of discussion, as did, surprisingly to me, solo Lou Reed.... because he's in already with the VU & most thought he really only had 2 decent solo albums... is that enough? Same with Joan Jett, 2-3 singles really, & she didn't write them all, perhaps just the "idea" of a Joan Jett is enough? Her influence on r&r girls... But is that bigger overall than Joe Cocker or Leon Russell? They did bring up something I agreed with: YES & Dire Straits should be in already, it seems to be not a transparent process, a lot seems to have to pass muster with Yann Wenner (rolling Stone) as the vetting mandarin.

Well... he apparently was considered the best drummer in Liverpool at the time having been a veteran gigger with Rory Storm & the Hurricanes if my memory serves & at that point with their rep & a record deal in hand they could've gotten anyone I think. And poor old Ringo actually did have a distinctive style that was immediately identifiable, not many drummers can pull that off. But for me the big news was Paul Butterfield Blues Band finally got in, about f----ing time! From the album notes (1965): "to fully appreciate the Paul Butterfield sound this album should be played at the highest possible volume".

popcorntime.io

I think the issue sam: is using a drug a criminal offense or a health/medical issue? Here in the States the prisons are bulging with an absurd amount of black males who were initially incarcerated for smoking a weed that grows wild (not so much anymore but it did not long ago). An excuse to target a population, like blasphemy laws elsewhere. Plus pot isn't the same type of drug as the opiates. The acts some folks do while on drugs may be criminal but being sentenced to prison for possession is a waste of time & lives. BTW the prison system in the US has been privatized since Reagan era & there is a necessity there to increase profits & expand as in any other business, a built in conflict of interest for society methinks. I'm actually looking at going to Portugal next month & didn't realize they decriminalized it, is there a legal access to it as a tourist while staying within the law as in Colorado or Amsterdam?

This past month I watched The Fall & Broadchurch, really excellent Brit series, the acting & writing on both puts most series to shame. Both are on Netflix altho only 1 season of Broadchurch is there, you have to hunt around for season 2, worth it. I have to admit to having to turn on the closed captions for Broadchurch because of the lead character's fast & thick Scottish brogue.

Percy Sledge, the soul singer who took "When a Man Loves a Woman" to the top of the charts in 1966, died this morning at his Baton Rouge home. He was 73. Prior to becoming a recording artist, Sledge worked as a hospital nurse. He caught his big break when he recorded "When a Man Loves a Woman." Sledge took the track, his debut single, to number-one on both the Billboard Hot 100, where it spent two weeks at the summit, and on the Billboard R&B Chart, where it held the top spot for six weeks. The song also reached the Top 10 in the United Kingdom twice--going to number-four upon its original release and reaching #2 when it was re-released in 1987. The song found new life in the United States in 1991 when Michael Bolton's cover of "When a Man Loves a Woman" topped the Billboard Hot 100. Thursday will mark the 49th anniversary of the release of "When a Man Loves a Woman" as a single. One of the greatest singles of all time imo, for those of you with Netflix there is an excellent doc about the Muscle Shoals studios where Percy recorded. RIP

Was reading this article & was reminded of our "bum hose" preferences... This is about US president LBJ: When White House plumbers went to look at the shower in his private home, they discovered “one nozzle was pointed directly at the president’s penis, which he nicknamed ‘Jumbo.” Another shot right up his rear.” I'm assuming he didn't give a nickname to the nozzle....

This has been around for awhile but I just stumbled over it while researching iptv streaming material, so just between us.... popcorntime.io It has a couple of other sites with different suffixes but this seems to be the main one (as in safe). It's pretty big & dead easy to use with a great interface. It uses torrents not streaming so it may take a bit of time to start up, not much by my experience, & for those of us living in the lands of litigation a vpn is always recommended for this type of thing. It was a open source project by a group of hackers who have recently moved on, it'll be interesting to see if the open source spirit is maintained in the (huge!) community or falls into disrepair or suffers the fate of Napster. This has distracted me from the iptv/xbmc stuff I was just grasping at understanding, will get back to that soon enough.

Ouch.... I'm a big fan of him, absolutely brilliant guitar stylist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGocnBbccUY

I basically just catch random reruns when I sit down to watch at my digital all-Simpsons venues, so I can't tell when they were produced. I can't be bothered to watch a specific show at a specific time anymore, that seems so 20th century... The Simpsons is one of the only shows to guarantee me a few genuine laughs at every sitting, a rare bird indeed so I do seek out its company.

Those Simpsons/Sesame Street bits are hilarious!

Patio Furniture Your kids will like it....

One of my favorite movies...

This is more about the presence of his ubiquitous song than poor Andy.... Andy Fraser, who co-wrote the rousing rock anthem "All Right Now" when he was the teenage bassist for the British rock band Free, has died in California at age 62. Fraser had been living in the Southern California desert community of Temecula, where he died Monday, the Riverside County coroner said in a statement. The cause of death is not yet known and remains under investigation. At age 15, the London-born Fraser briefly became a member of John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers. The group functioned as a training ground for young British rockers including Eric Clapton and Rolling Stones guitarist Mick Taylor. Within a year, Fraser became a founding member of Free. The band's most prominent member was singer and guitarist Paul Rodgers, who would also go on to front Bad Company and The Firm. The band's biggest hit by far was 1970's "All Right Now," which remains one of the defining hits of classic rock radio. Fraser also produced the track and plays a bass solo on it. The song is also a staple of football stadiums. The Stanford University and University of Southern California marching bands each play it at virtually every game. Fraser kept playing music for most of his life, but he would never equal the success he had as a teen with Free, which broke up in 1972.

I guess if it's on the www & they said "coolest".... then my guess is they would choose the interplanetary bar in Star Wars. My personal choice would be Donovan's Reef.

Isn't that the period that the kids are allowed to go "wordly" & do whatever they want in order to get it out of their system before they return to the fold & marry? I believe it's for a year or thereabouts