Sizzle Reel for the upcoming documentary Scouts Honor: Inside a Marching Brotherhood about the Madison Scouts Drum and Bugle Corps, a corps I had the honor of marching with way back in 1982.
Often referred to as “marching band on steroids”, drum and bugle corps takes the marching arts to the next level, and one of the most unique drum corps in existence is the Madison Scouts.
Eric Chemi writing at BusinessWeek, “Listen Up Apple-Haters: IPhone (sic) Sales Eclipse Microsoft and Amazon Revenue”
The iPhone 5s and 5c sold a record 9 million units during the first weekend after its launch. Consider this: The brand’s sales haul over the last four reported quarters eclipses that of such companies as Home Depot (HD), Microsoft (MSFT), Target (TGT), Goldman Sachs (GS), Amazon (AMZN), PepsiCo (PEP), Comcast (CMCSA), Dell (DELL), Google (GOOG), Pfizer (PFE), and UPS (UPS).
If you’re a fan of stand-up comedy, and those who perform it, you’re no doubt aware that a staggering percentage are truly miserable.
KickStarter project by Kevin Pollak. Looks great — so great, that I’ve backed it. Check it out.
ESPN Media Zone:
Silver will serve as the editor-in-chief of the site and will build a team of journalists, editors, analysts and contributors in the coming months. Much like Grantland, which ESPN launched in 2011, the site will retain an independent brand sensibility and editorial point-of-view, while interfacing with other websites in the ESPN and Disney families. The site will return to its original URL, www.FiveThirtyEight.com.
Silver has established himself as today’s leading statistician through his innovative analyses of political polling. He first gained national attention during the 2008 presidential election, when he correctly predicted the results of the presidential election in 49 of 50 states, along with all 35 U.S. Senate races. In 2012, FiveThirtyEight predicted the election outcome in all 50 states. FiveThirtyEight has made Nate the public face of statistical analysis and political forecasting.
Love FiveThirtyEight — just love it. And, as I told many of my Republican friends this past election season, “you ignore Nate Silver at your own peril.”
Interracial marriage still was illegal in 16 states in 1967 before the high court outlawed race-based state marriage bans.
It is rather amazing — and shocking — to read accounts from the 50s and 60s regarding interracial marriage. What’s most shocking is the realization that the arguments used, and used effectively – for decades, by the opponents of interracial marriage half a century ago are, by-and-large, fundamentally the same arguments used today by those who would continue to deny our fellow citizens equality under law. Arguments that are, still today, replete with FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt), person belief systems, faulty logic, fuzzy thinking, and in some cases, nothing more elegant or noble that the simple desire to tell others how they must live.
Honestly, I don’t know why so many people are getting so upset about this. Let me rephrase that: I honestly don’t know why so many people are just now getting so upset about this!
Unless you’ve been practicing willful ignorance — for political or other reasons — then you’ve known full well about (or at the very least had damn good reason to suspect) most of this, as I have, for almost a full fucking decade.
The National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions
[…]
The NSA’s efforts have become institutionalized—yet not so well known to the public—under laws passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
[…]
The Obama administration, which inherited and embraced the program from the George W. Bush administration, moved Thursday to forcefully defend it. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called it “a critical tool in protecting the nation from terror threats.”
Like an awful lot of Americans, one of the first cogent thoughts I was able to put together in the wake of that terrible faith-based initiative that we’ve come to refer to as “9/11” — after spending the better part of the 11th and 12th just holding my wife and son — was “well, I guess we’re about to lose an awful lot of our personal freedoms.” Turns out those were awfully prescient thoughts.
Land of the free…
Recently in a fit of nostalgia — or maybe it was because I happened to catch David Lee Roth on Jay Mohr‘s podcast — I bought last year’s Van Halen A Different Kind of Truth. Plus, what the hell — I’ve already got the rest of the Van Halen catalog (and the David Lee Roth solo catalog, for that matter)…
Wow! This is one hell of an album — “A Different Kind of Truth” is undeniably the best Van Halen album in over two decades*, and arguably the best since 1981’s “Fair Warning.”**
Oh, and speaking of podcasts, check out David Lee Roth’s podcast The Roth Show; it’s really great!
Three years ago today began what would come to be described by the Army Corps of Engineers as a “1000-year flood.” In Nashville, the two-day rain totals were nearly 20 inches.
In the days following those events of 2010, I was quite taken — as were many Middle Tennesseans — with the words so eloquently written by Patten Fuqua at the Section 303 website (quite well know to Predators fans and within the hockey community).
I thought I’d take this opportunity to remember and hopefully you will as well…
Always at any given time have a song that you’re listening to over and over again. It can be brand new – it can be the latest Keisha single – it can be an old Stones song that you just rediscovered – hey, “Tumbling Dice” – I’ve been listening to it for the last two weeks, I listened to it thirty-eight times in the last two weeks. Maybe it’s that, maybe it’s country, maybe it’s blues, but always at any given time have one song – and you’ll get tired of it after two weeks, two months, whatever the case may be – but just drill it, repetition, over and over. Put it on repeat when you get into the shower so you hear it eighteen times, you follow? Play it in the car, over and over and over; when you’re working play it in the background over and over and over again. Twenty, thirty, forty summers from now, when you play that song again, you will feel – physically – just like you do right this very instant that I’m describing to you, and if you have one of those songs – now I’ve got [hundreds] of ‘em, you follow? – you can take ‘em like medicine, man, you follow? It’s like changing the lighting – it’s like, you just go there; and you won’t just depend on your memory […] it’s time travel.
— David Lee Roth, interviewed by Jay Mohr on the Mohr Stories podcast, April 15, 2013
Independence Day, Rain and Neighbors…
Today’s forecast: 4-6 inches of rain over the next 24 hours!
Say what you will, but over the last couple years I’ve come to love it when it rains on the 4th of July, and so does my homeowners insurance carrier (ba-doom-ching). That’s because the people who live on our cul-de-sac (and the neighboring streets, for that matter) in this particular upper middle class suburban neighborhood, while decent folk (with one, eh, make that two notable exceptions), are not what you’d otherwise call deep thinkers*. In this particular context, I mean that many seem to believe that “patriotism” is measured by the amount of money one spends at the local fireworks stand.
Ok, wait a minute. That was snarky, which is fine with me, but I don’t mean to be picking on fireworks – that’s not my purpose. Hell, I love fireworks – I’ve shot off way more than my fair share, especially when (1) I was younger, and (2) my kids were younger.
I guess my big complaint is this: even before having kids, I’ve always tried to balance our celebration with the sometimes competing interest of being a good neighbor, meaning that we’ve alway tried to end the fireworks at a reasonable hour. Admittedly, “reasonable hour” was 11-ish before I had kids, and 10-ish after, but still, even as a childless single person living in a neighborhood with families, we never – NEVER – shot fireworks till the wee hours of the morning.
(Brace yourself, here comes my curmudeoney “get off my yard” moment)
And then there’s the issue of the clean-up, or rather lack thereof. If only our neighbors, or some of them, put as much effort into cleaning up their mess from: my yard, my driveway, the street in front of my house (no, I don’t really expect anyone to climb up on top of my two and half story roof to retrieve spent ordinance) as they do into the firing of said ordinance, well, let’s just say that would be refreshing (and that’s an understatement).
As the saying goes, common courtesy just isn’t so common anymore, but when our kids were young enough to want to shoot fireworks at home, we always – ALWAYS – spoke to the four or eight closest neighbors on both sides of our house beforehand to let them know that we’d be shooting fireworks on the night of the 4th. And, after the fireworks, we’d break out the garbage can, brooms and flashlights right then – THAT NIGHT – to sweep up the street and driveways (including those of our neighbors), and of course, we’d make a pass through the yard and our neighbors’ yards the next morning looking for any remnants that needed to be picked up and thrown away. Isn’t that just basic neighborly “common courtesy”?
Apparently not anymore… GET OFF MY YARD!!!
Happy Independence Day everyone!
yeah, in a minute…
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