Rock Sugar It took me approximately 90 seconds of “Shook me like a prayer” and maybe four more of “Crazy Girl” to have me clicking “Buy.”

I am happily wrapping up my last work-related trip for the year, and it feels, unsurprisingly, refreshing. For the rest of 2009, I get to sleep in my own bed, and if I don’t, it’ll be my choice. That’s a really good feeling. To briefly revisit another good feeling, I found this old article archived […]

After FINALLY closing a long-standing action item Saturday morning (Hoo-Effing-Ray!), The whole lot of us ventured across town to hang out at the VA Comicon for a few hours and rub elbows (sometimes literally, given the crowds) with fans, creators, and geeks of all stripes. This weekend’s show was a much larger than the usual […]

Since Netflix put the newly-remastered version of The Wizard of Oz up for free streaming for 24 hours over the weekend, we added it to the Roku and watched it on Saturday morning. It was the first time I’d seen it in probably 20 years, having previously seen it only on broadcast TV when somebody […]

As first promised eighteen months ago, the band that provided the soundtrack to my college years, The Badlees, have come out of semi-retirement and obscurity to release a new record. Next month, we’ll find out why, exactly, Love is Rain. Preceding the release is a new tune, “Radio at Night”, streaming through that tedious myspace […]

The title is one of my little rules for life, and one I try to follow if I can help it. There are always exceptions when timing doesn’t work out (U2, Springsteen, Yngwie), and I usually end up regretting them, even if there was nothing I could do about the situation. Even if the performer’s […]

When I was a kid, one of the scout camps I regularly went to had it’s own personal urban legend. Along one of the trails on the property there was a big, roughly grave-shaped dirt mound, which was purported to be the final resting place of an insane Appalachian medicine woman, a witch, if you […]

Les Lye has died. This makes me sad. He was the guy who played most of the adults on You Can’t Do That On Television, a Canadian kids’ show that got picked up by fledgling kids’ cable network Nickelodeon, and introduced both green slime and Alanis Morissette to the world. It also had this guy, […]

The queue at the security door looked like some sort of dead man walking/green mile/death march this morning. None of my systems or passwords work today. Some guy looking for someone who doesn’t work in my building has called me four times in the five minutes, and is unable to understand that dialing the same […]

I kind of love the concept that led to this article: Give a modern 13 year-old a Sony Walkman (first released 30 years ago) in exchange for his ipod for a week, and have him document his impressions. Not surprisingly, he wasn’t necessarily impressed. And rightfully so – I remember the actual Sony hardware, with […]