Author: DOuG pRATt

Richard Thompson closes his ‘Cul de Sac’

Cartoonist Richard Thompson has announced that he is ending his celebrated comic strip, Cul de Sac. A few years ago, Thompson announced that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. The young-onset variety, like Michael J. Fox has. A couple of months ago, Thompson’s friend and ally Chris Sparks raised money for the Fox Foundation with Team Cul de Sac: Cartoonists Draw the Line at Parkinson’s. I’m so glad that Thompson was able to delay his announcement until after the release of the book. In the heyday of newsprint Cul de Sac would have appeared in 1000 papers. It’s been one of the reasons why I’ve kept home delivery of The Boston Globe, and I will miss it.

Titanic Folk-Rock

Bob Dylan’s next record is going to have a long song about the sinking of the Titanic, 100 years ago. Dylan says,

“People are going to say: Well, it’s not very truthful. But a songwriter doesn’t care about what’s truthful. What he cares about is what should’ve happened, what could’ve happened. That’s its own kind of truth.”

That being the case, Dylan’s own take on the Titanic is fair game, and comic Tim Heidecker has recorded a speculative prediction of Bob’s as-yet-unheard song.

The thing is, Dylan is more than 40 years late, because the first and best extended fictional telling of the tale of the Titanic belongs to Jamie Brockett, who used an old Leadbelly song as a springboard. Brockett called the ship the USS for United States Ship, and not RMS for Royal Mail Ship, but hey man, it was 1969.

Boston RadioBDC

Once again, the landscape of Boston radio is changing and, like the return of Barnes Newberry, it’s found on the Internet. The Boston Globe is going back to what some major city newspapers did way back in the 1920’s, by starting its own station. It’s called RadioBDC, which I’m taking to mean “Radio Boston Dot Com.” The station is online only, and it’s essentially picking up where alternative Rock station WFNX left off, when it was sold to Clear Channel earlier this year.

I’m not the target audience for RadioBDC, but I’m hoping it succeeds. It doesn’t have a TuneIn listing yet, and I don’t have a direct URL for it, so for now I can’t play it on my Logitech Media Server network and the only way I can hear RadioBDC is with the station’s Flash player on a computer, which means I won’t be listening to it a lot. But I’ve already heard something I like a lot — Champagne Supernova, by Oasis. I was never one looking to get high, which apparently was a priority for these guys, but drug references in song lyrics have never phased me. For somebody who had bell bottom pants and a paisley shirt in the seventh grade, this is good stuff.

http://youtu.be/g3C7DECI0jU