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one small letter, one big difference
I love the smell of geraniums in the morning… …and I love the sound of Germaniums at night!
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Debt.4: What’s good for General Motors and what’s good for America
Sometimes the mark of a good book is how it crops back up in your mind a few months or years or even many years after you first read it. I wrote 3 posts about the book Debt by David Graeber back in February & March. There have been several occasions since then when the…
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Other John Davises.1: My life as an 18th century batsman
It can be a bit strange having a ubiquitous name. But it can also be kinda fun. This post is the first in a series of characters I found on the net that have the same name as me. If you believe in previous lifetimes, you may even believe I could have lived some of…
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Top 40 Over 40.6: Unplugged Youth
I can think of few artists more identified with the electric guitar than Thurston Moore. Unlike the guitar god of classic rock, Jimmy Page, who layered his hard rock records with gobs of acoustic fretted instrumens, the guitar god of post punk / undie music always stayed electric. The only exception I can think of…
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To the victor go the spoils…
The record producer Joe Boyd visited a studio in a former eastern block country shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The engineers there proudly showed off what they thought was a state of the art newly acquired reverb unit they had acquired from some western engineers who visited their studio. When Boyd asked…
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Muffled in Miami.2
As a post script to my post on the censure of Ozzie Guilllen for his comments on Cuba, I’m posting today stories from The Real News Network and Democracy Now on the isolation of the US and Canada at the just-concluded Summit of the Americas because of their refusal to allow Cuba to participate. As…
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Top 40 Over 40.5: Sun Ra, live in 1989
One of my great regrets in life is that I never got to see Sun Ra and his Arkestra live before the great man passed. If I had arrived a little earlier, I would have. They played the campus of the University I attended the year before I got there – which was in fact…
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Prarie Wind P.S.
As an addendum to my post of April 8th on Neil Young’s album Prarie Wind in general, and song “It’s A Dream” in particular, I’m posting this video clip of the late Thai monk Achaan Chah, in whose lineage many of the Western Insight Meditation teachers I have studied with over the years trained.. “(One…
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Muffled in Miami
previous My expectations fof the sports world when it comes to politics are pretty low. So I wasn’t surprised when a sports radio station I tuned into spent nearly the whole day bashing Ozzie Guillen over the comments he made about his “love” for Fidel Castro. I am not a Communist or a Castro…
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Top 40 Over 40.4: Prarie Wind
I don’t usually pay much attention to stories about the circumstances in which a particular record came to be. However, the stories about the timing of this record are an exception. Neil Young made this record in Nashville in 2005, shortly before going to the hospital for surgery for a brain aneurysm. Combined with the…