Here’s the scene on the all-season porch. MSNBC is on the venerable Sony 32XBR100, with captions on, and I’m reading those while the sound comes from Pandora on the Roku player, which is a p-in-p box in the corner. The song is John Lennon’s “Nobody Told Me.” Cutting to commercials, the caption for a Nissan spot says, “Mama told me there’d be days like this,” timed perfectly at a moment when Lennon sings, “Nobody told me there’d be days like these.” Not a big deal, but it was fun, and what else am I going to do while waiting for the new computer to be delivered?
Author: DOuG pRATt
What’s wrong with oldies radio
Oldies stations have left the 50’s behind — demographic is too old — and even the 60’s is being nudged out, now that the 80’s have been added to the playlists. But even when the 60’s was the sweet spot for ad dollars, the stations kept far too few songs in rotation. Here’s but one of many examples. Tommy James’ hit “I Think We’re Alone Now” would get played to death, but we’d never hear his great single “Mirage.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXMEhRmKeyM
The good news is, Pandora and Slacker have, and play, everything. Music Choice on cable TV is good too. And that’s why, unless I’m the car, I don’t listen to oldies radio.
Lawrence O’Donnell calls out O’Reilly
Lawrence O’Donnell has Keith Olbermann’s former 8 PM weekday slot on MSNBC, and tonight he’s ripped apart “Irish bully” Bill O’Reilly. O’Donnell’s style can occasionally be combative, but tonight he’s his more typically controlled and metered self, and he’s done a good job of picking apart O’Reilly and what passes for news at Fox.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Joe Sinnott in Dutch, Ian Anderson in Space
Mark Sinnott has announced that his dad, Marvel Comics legend Joe Sinnott, will have some of his fantastic art on display at the Dutch Ale House in Joe’s hometown of Saugerties, NY. The opening for the two-month showing will be next Sunday, February 20 at 3 pm, and I’m hoping to be there with D.F. Rogers, esq. Denro has done an incredible job of locating issues of comic books for Joe that he worked on decades ago, where Joe had only the story title on file because the publisher didn’t have a specific issue in mind for the assignment.
Mark is the world’s biggest Jethro Tull fan, and at this moment one of Ian Anderson’s flutes is in orbit on the International Space Station, with astronaut Catherine Coleman.
Late Night, last night
It was Perm Week on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Scott was worried they might do something to his own back-length hair; but, as you can see, he escaped unscathed. Which is a good thing for us too, his co-workers at the office!
Here’s the video. Don’t know how long it’ll be available, so watch it now.
Coming up Acers
Knowing that you can’t stand the suspense of waiting to find out what my new desktop computer will be, I’ve already ordered one. It’s an Acer Veriton M275 E7600, and having soured on Dell, it will be the third Acer computer in the house.
Ugly box, eh? It’s intended to be a business computer, and that’s why it interests me, because it has Windows 7 Professional (64-bit), which is $80 more retail than Windows 7 Home Premium, but $100 more when ordering it as part of a customized Dell configuration. I’m fairly confident the 500 GB hard drive from the Dell Inspiron is still good, and the new computer also has a 500 gig disk, so I’m hoping to use Windows RAID 1 mirroring. I vaguely recall there are hassles when doing this on a C: drive, but I’ll either figure it out or add the second disk as a D: drive.
My external Western Digital USB drive has hardware RAID 1 mirroring. Unfortunately, it appears that WD has discontinued their Mirror Edition drives, but fortunately Amazon still has some, so I grabbed one.