It’s been an emotional week for me and my fellow Delicious lovers. The hysteria began with a slide leaked from an internal presentation at Yahoo, Delicious’ corporate parent, saying the service was among the ones slated to be “sunsetted.” After Techcrunch published the slide, the web lit up with the rumor that Delicious would be …
Yearly Archives: 2010
Gimme Shelter
I’ve always been more of a Beatles guy than a Stones guy, but respect where respect is due, “Gimme Shelter” is a classic. It’s on my mind because Dangerous Minds posted the isolated tracks, and they’re a lot of fun. It’s fascinating to hear the separated vocals, guitars, bass and drums. The Youtube videos containing …
Blues for the Jews
December is always a complex month for half-Jewish mutts like me. When pressured to self-identify, I usually just go with “Jewish” for the sake of simplicity, but this is in spite of not having being bar mitzvahed, not knowing any Hebrew, having only the vaguest idea what all the holidays and rituals mean, and having …
The pentatonic box
Once you’ve mastered the basic guitar chords, you might want to tackle some scales. The pentatonic is a good scale to start with. It’s easy to play, easy to memorize and sounds good in an astonishing variety of musical situations. Here’s how to play it:
In praise of copying
We conventionally place a high value on originality in music. But it’s been my experience that the desire for originality gets in the way of making music that’s actually good. The closer you are to your influences, the more definite and truthful your work is. The key to quality music is to blend together an …
Hawaii, part five
See the photos First stop yesterday was Kipuka Puaulu, a rainforest bird park on the lower slopes of Mauna Loa. We heard more birds than we saw, aside from the many pheasants crisscrossing the trail. Hawaii is absolutely infested with pheasants. There’s a phrase I don’t find myself typing very often.
Hawaii, part four
See the photos After the better part of a day taking care of urgent internet business, and the not-so-urgent business of finding me something to read on the plane home, we finally made it outside to do something Hawaii-y: a trip to Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, on Snorkel Bob’s list of recommended snorkeling locations. While …
Hawaii, part three
See the photos We took our first trip off the Kona coast and went to check out the more rugged and rural north coast of the Big Island. A lot of the drive took us up the seemingly endless lava plain that makes up the northwest quarter of the island. It looks a lot like …
Hawaii, part two
See the photos Lovely as it is here in Kona, it does have kind of a Disneyland quality. Anna did a great job of getting us out of the tourist rut for our second day here. She was poking around food web sites looking for interesting places to eat. That led her to a discussion …
Hawaii, part one
See the photos First of all, what are we even doing here? Anna’s dad had been sitting on a timeshare for years, and he finally concluded that he was never going to use it. So he offered it to us, and we thought, great, Hawaii. Anna’s been before, but I haven’t been anywhere remotely tropical, …