A Hundred Sinners with the Feeling

Heard this song by the Feeling on BBC Radio 2 tonight. Another British band that deserves to get more traction in America.

And how about this? Michael Ball on Radio 2 talks with Doris Day. She comes in at 1 hour, 20 minutes into the programme (sorry, can’t embed it). Doris is 87 and she sounds great. Her son was the late Terry Melcher, who had a noteworthy career of his own in the music business. Doris had a squeaky clean “good girl” image in her movies, but she got married to her first husband when she was only seventeen, because she was pregnant with Terry.

Monte Schulz moves into ‘The Big Town’

After the craziness of the Iowa straw poll, where the ostensible winner lost and the GOP front runner didn’t participate, KRUU-FM in Fairfield, IA does something more reasonable and interviews novelist Monte Schulz.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Aug/monteschulz.mp3|titles=Monte Schulz interviewed on KRUU]

According to Amazon, Monte’s next book, The Big Town, will be out in February. Nice cover!

I’m comfortable having a couple of non-fiction books going at the same time, but novels I prefer to read all the way through to avoid spoiling the mood, and I’m starting Monte’s current novel, The Last Rose of Summer. Monte has a knack for defining distinctive characters, and in the first book of his 1920’s Americana series, This Side of Jordan, Chester is as chilling a cold-blooded killer as any villain you’d never want to meet. The funniest moment in the story for me is Monte’s nod to his father that I wrote about at this link.

Eating you out of House and home

Long before Hugh Laurie’s Gregory House, there was House, a bizarre 1977 Japanese movie about a haunted house that eats unmarried girls. House adheres to the Japanese Pop culture obsession with schoolgirls, and it’s essentially a ghost story, but with an amazingly varied, unrelenting series of creatively twisted, comic-horror images.

Because the movie is so utterly strange, it’s no surprise that on Amazon the customer reviews are all over the place. Watch the trailer and you’ll know whether or not you want to see the whole thing.

Garage garbage

Spent most of the day with Eric, cleaning out the garage. It should have been a Spring job, but it’s done. We took everything out, including from the always interesting loft (looks like a mouse and/or a squirrel was up there), gave the place a thorough sweeping and shop-vac, threw out a lot of stuff, and got everything back in, nice and neat.

In the loft I found the kiddie-sized resin chair Eric used when he was little. He sat in it for a moment as a joke and said we could throw it out, but I said keep it, in case a family with small children wants it. A few minutes later, a new family in the neighborhood with two small children walked by, and I offered the chair to them. They were happy to take it, and the father put in it the wagon he was pulling. It was one of those moments, that Eric doesn’t always appreciate, when I was able to say, “See? I told you.”

Back inside, I’m playing with the Squeezebox Touch I got for half price on a special deal from Logitech. The software still needs a few fixes, but that’s always the way with Logitech, and I have no buyer remorse with this purchase.