Blogosphere: May 2008 Archives

The folks at Email Our Military are giving away a copy of Final Salute by Jim Sheeler:



Sheeler won a Pulitzer for this book, and a number of my colleagues at DailyKos have raved about it.

Go here to enter the contest at emailourmilitary.blogspot.com.

I'm done with Twitter, at least for the time being. I'm not going to delete the account in the hopes that they can scale up to a proper level of service, but the current poor quality of the site not acceptable.

I'll be experimenting with Pownce and other social networking sites for a while.

If you need me, dm me. If not, find me on Pownce (YatPundit), or look on www.yatpundit.com for the zillion other ways to contact me.

Cheers!

Houston-based wine blogger and fellow twitterer, John Martin (@off_focus), is in town this week. I can't think of a better reason for a New Orleans tweetup, perhaps Wednesday?

Let's talk about where and when, either comments here or on Twitter.

Anyone, Bueller, anyone?

Perley A. Thomas streetcar 962, running on the Riverfront segment of the Canal line.

A bit of an update as to what's going on with CanalStreetCar (dot com) and the New Orleans Street Railway Association.

First of all, welcome to everyone who has made their way here because they saw Angus Lind's piece in Da Paper! Thanks for stopping by, please join the CanalStreetCar (dot com) mailing list, which is returning to production this week.

It's been a wild beginning of 2008 for me personally. I've been traveling again, teaching computer classes for Hitachi Data Systems. (Take a look here for a description of the sort of stuff I teach.) Being out of town during the week for the classes has slowed down progress on developing the nonprofit, and the project is further behind than I'd like it to be. Still, I'm committed to getting it moving and we'll press forward.

If you've arrived at CanalStreetCar (dot com) by going to nosra.org, you'll see that the regular NOSRA server is currently down. It suffered a hard disk failure and needs to be rebuilt. I plan on doing that in a week and a half when I'm home long enough to do that properly. Some links to photos in the NOSRA wiki won't work properly until that's repaired.

In the meantime, both sites will point to CanalStreetCar (dot com). I'll have more thoughts on where both CanalStreetCar and NOSRA are going on this site in the next few days.

Three posts in YatTravel about my trip to Canada last week.

From the N to the O to the L to the A, Renard Poche's CD, "4U 4ME" is simply incredible. I was humming "Same Old Thing" by the Meters the other day when LisaPal told everyone on Twitter to check out the website and give the tunes a listen.

Old-school funk is where I well and truly reveal that I'm a musical mutant. i went to Brother Martin in the early-mid 1970s. One of my debate team partners introduced me to War, in between us listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. The Meters actually played a BMHS homecoming dance, a big gig for them (over 1,000 people). Hanging around the basketball team (I was a sports statistician) turned me on to the Brothers Johnson, Parliament, and the Ohio Players. Then I'd go home and listen to Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Total schizo. 30+ years later, however, I'm more likely to queue up a bunch of those old-school funk tunes. My son's a big part of why that happens. My 13-year old bone player's band does a lot of old school music. In fact, he told me today the BMHS band will be playing "Apache" by Sugar Hill Gang next football season. This on top of the Gap Band, Funkadelic, EWF, and DAZZ band stuff they already play.

But I digress as I listen to "Tumba." It's one thing to re-live the music of one's youth; it's another altogether to discover that someone has run with that music, updating it, kept it fresh, recharged the funk. The mixture of old school, a little of rap, classic jazz rhythms, and oh so much love and soul blend together as only a New Orleanian can make them.

The "intro" surprised me, because usually a commercial CD puts its best musical foot forward on the first track. I grabbed "4U 4ME" as a digital release, and the approach there is different. The intro is the teaser to get you to buy the other tunes. It worked on me, you can just hear the promise of good tracks in the background.

And Renard delivers, first with "Funk 4U," bringing me back to riding the basketball team bus, voice box and all. "I Thought" and its smooth sax combined with a bit of rap goes good with a Hubig's pie. The groove is definitely in full session by "Flavr," and ready to march down the street in "We R"

If "4U 4ME" was a dining experience, it would be a platonic meal.

Support NOLA musicians. Buy these tunes.

Kimber (aka FabGirl on twitter) was laughing about my students I teach in these computer classes. Usually they're all male, but occasionally i get female students. Occasionally those females are total hotties.

One time, back when I was teaching Tru64 UNIX classes, I walked into the office of a company I used to do a lot of work for in suburban Boston. The office manager greeted me in the office and said I was in classroom #1 (of three) that week. I go drop my stuff down in that classroom, and there's this stunning, 5'2" or so blonde in short shorts. No way, thinks I, is this gal here for UNIX class. I figured the office manager got it backwards, and one of the web statistics classes was in #1 and I was further down the hall.

No, office manager says, that's indeed your class. I said, so, should I tell the blonde to move to the other room? No, I'm told, blonde is a UNIX system administrator.

That morning most definitely restored my belief in a benevolent Supreme Being. :-)

I was a dad who was very active in raising my children. I took the night shift feedings, did diaper runs to Toys R Us and/or WallyWorld, and then changed said diapers when necessary.  I washed bottles, did those crappy disposable-bag bottles, you name it.

I'll admit that wife did more shifts in the NICU with our daughter, but the particular trauma of a very early preemie is the exception to the rule.  I held down the fort with older brother who was three at that point.

I know you self-styled mommy bloggers encounter your share of males who don't do much to help the cause of child-rearing, but your poor attempts at sarcastic beat-downs on males don't impress me.  In spite of whatever personal experiences you may have to the contrary, there are a lot of two-parent families where "kid" duties are shared.  Maybe not equally, but often fairly. 

Sell the sarcasm someplace else.

Love,
YatPundit