HAPPY NEW YEAR from Kristel Verbeke, Karen Damen, and Josje Huisman!
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Special K3
The British are coming to Boston… again!
HAPPY NEW YEAR! “One if by land, two if by sea, three if by music!” Andrew Sandoval‘s British Invasion Tour is coming to Boston! Thursday, February 26th. Denro and I will be front and almost center at the Wilbur Theatre to see and hear Peter Asher, Chad & Jeremy, Billy J. Kramer, Denny Laine (is in my ears and in my eyes) and members of the Searchers and the Hollies. This is going to be a fab show, for sure!
Retreating from Roku
I was not late getting into streaming video. The day Netflix said I could stream on my PC in early 2007 I installed the browser app. Roku introduced its first player in mid-2008 and, once I saw it was going to hang in, I bought one in early 2009 and put it on my Sony 32″ SD TV with an S-Video cable. After replacing the TV with a 40″ HDTV Samsung in the sun room I bought a Roku 2 XS and moved the Roku player to the projector, where the receiver accepts only coaxial and optical digital audio. And that is one of the reasons why, as of this Christmas Day, I am saying goodbye to Roku.
The XS has been good, but Amazon’s pre-release offer of $20 for the Fire TV Stick was too good to pass up. So that’s on the Samsung now. Downstairs, on the projector, I used the old Roku player until getting a new Sony Blu-ray player a year ago. The Roku is extremely slow and only goes up to 720p, so I streamed Netflix and Amazon on the Blu-ray, but the Sony network is very annoying because there are often lengthy delays in starting online playback, and sometimes the connection fails to come up altogether.
So, acting on a $70 deal from Amazon, there is now an Amazon Fire TV downstairs. I have no interest in updating my Dolby Digital receiver to one with HDMI switching, and the XS doesn’t have optical audio, but the Fire TV does. As an early and enthusiastic supporter of Roku I don’t feel good about leaving them, and if they hadn’t dropped optical audio I would have bought a Roku 3. But circumstances, and pricing, being what they are, I am now deeper than ever in the Amazon ecosphere.
Glamming it up for Christmas
Four years ago (FOUR?) I posted Slade’s 1973 recording of “Merry Xmas Everybody“. Slade kept another Glam Rock Christmas record from reaching the top of the British Pop charts that year, from Roy Wood’s band Wizzard.
A Visit with Saint Nick
A couple of months ago I did a post with some Nick Lowe songs. Terry Gross had Lowe on Fresh Air yesterday.
Hearing Lowe’s new song “Christmas at the Airport”, it reminds me somewhat of the more recent compositions by Neil Innes.
Troll-ops
I love the Tintin-inspired cover for the article about the hunting of Internet trolls in the latest issue of MIT Technology Review. I don’t care for the anonymous trolls that post obnoxious comments to news articles and forums, but I see a big difference between them and the trolls that target individuals for harassment and personal ridicule. At the very least they deserve to be outed.