If you pay attention to my music entries, you may have noticed a recurrent theme. It seems a lot of the bands I hear these days, many of which I really like, remind me of bands from the past. Like The Mary Onettes: I recently tripped across one such example, Sweden’s The Mary Onettes. They can’t seem to make up
Read moreVerily, we have arrived at the end of all culture. Perhaps predictably, the culprit is technology. Or, to be a bit more specific, the culprit is Microsoft, which has now infused the art of songwriting with the same kind of magic and warmth you’ve come to expect from Excel. Microsoft is pitching software designed for you, no musical training required.
Read moreAt the request of Lara Amber, the most bright young lady you see in our better comment threads from time to time, we have established a new Scholars & Rogues Facebook page. If you’re a Facebooker – and really, who isn’t? – drop by, join, and carry on in whatever way seems appropriate.
Read moreI’ve recently discovered Wordle. Which is what, you ask? Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however
Read moreYou may have heard that Inauguration Day was something of a mess in our nation’s capital. People with tickets who couldn’t get in to see the actual inauguration (which included everything from an all-around offend-o-rama of an “invocation” to a Supreme Court justice swallowing his tongue to an example of why people don’t like poetry to the longest goddamned rendition
Read moreTo truly love some silly little piece of music, or some band, so much that it hurts…. – Sapphire On June 9, 1992, Fontana Records released an album called Ferment from a new band called Catherine Wheel. The disc managed to be as noisy and distortion-riddled as Jesus & Mary Chain without sacrificing an ounce in the way of melodicism.
Read moreWe went to see The Killers at DU last night. A few stray thoughts, in no particular order of importance. 1: There are air raid shelters with better acoustics than Magness Arena. I’m guessing it makes for a suitably noisy hockey barn, but let’s just say that it’s sub-optimal for a concert. Still, the crew managed to make the band
Read moreI was living in NC when Colorado’s governor, Bill Ritter, was elected, and therefore didn’t follow the campaign closely and don’t really know a lot about the guy except that he’s bound to be better than his predecessor, Bill Owens. Short of actually outlawing schools, Owens did all he possibly could to destroy education in the state, and I’m sure
Read moreOur Best CDs of 2008 continues today with a review of the super-premium Platinum Award winners for Excellence in rocking and rolling. As with last week’s Gold Awards, these are in alphabetical order. Band Web sites link to the band name, and if the CD is available via eMusic, that links to the CD title. (Mike Smith of Fiction 8,
Read moreIn an inspirational finale to the 2008-9 college football season, Jesus Christ ran for 109 yards and threw for 231 yards and two touchdowns to lead the University of Florida to a 24-14 victory over Oklahoma in the BCS “national championship” game. It capped a perfect season for the sport’s first infallible human being, who gave all the credit to
Read moreI don’t normally get all giddy over gadgetry, but this, THIS is just ridiculous. Gloriously, fantabulously ridiculous.
Read moreI’m not a real photographer like Dawn, but I had to offer this one up.
Read moreI haven’t waited tables in over 20 years, but I still get the nightmares. It usually goes something like this. I show up for work a few minutes early. The hostess greets me at the door. “I just double-seated you,” she says. Wonderful. So I haul ass, get my apron on, clock in, and by the time I get to
Read moreEarly today hackers launched an attack against the SoapBlox network, wreaking havoc with a significant number of progressive blogs (including Pam’s House Blend, My Left Wing and several state-focused sites). At one point it looked as though the whole network may have been trashed, although at this point it seems that some sites (like our friends at Square State) were
Read moreMost years are pretty good for music if you know where to look, and 2008 was no exception. It’s a shame that you have to search so hard, of course – once upon a time all you needed to keep track of what was good in the world of music was a radio. These days it requires a little effort,
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