Ethanol

I know very little about Ethanol and this E85 that's being pushed hard by GM in their FlexFuel vehicles. It sounds great. Make 85% of the stuff we put in our cars out of corn, everybody wins, right?

But then I read this article on Slate.com that makes me question whether it's a good idea at all. If anyone has any additional information that contradicts or supports this article by Robert Bryce, please let me know.

Enchanted?

You're bound to see the darndest things in Manhattan. Walking to work, I saw a crowd gathered watching a fella on top of a bus with sword. I did a little research that makes me think this may have been "Enchanted" starring Amy Adams & James Marsden.

POINTS FOR ORIGINALITY

LINK

David Cope

Years ago, a friend of mine gave me a tape of a performance by a young man named David Cope from local radio, I think in Philadelphia. There were several great songs on the tape, one of which is "Throw Me Out". I saw David perform once in New York and haven't been able to find any additional information about his music online until recently.

I learned "Throw Me Out" won the month of March in the 2005 VH1-sponsored "Song of the Year" contest. You can download it here. It's in WMA format, but all you have to do is save it to your desktop, then drag it into iTunes. iTunes will convert it for you so you can sync it with your iPod if you happen to have one.

If you like the track as much as I do, be sure to visit www.davidcopemusic.com for more about his music.

Neil's new project

From NeilYoung.com:

"I just finished a new record...a power trio with a trumpet and a 100 voices...recorded earlier this month...i think it is a metal version of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan...Metal folks protest?...it's called LIVING WITH WAR"

If you haven't already, you'll probably hearing about Neil Young's new record, Living With War in the next few weeks. It was recorded very quickly. Seems as though Neil had an idea about how to address the state of the nation and he sprinted to get it recorded and released to the public. They'll be releasing it first as a free stream at neilyoung.com while they're manufacturing the CDs. Reminds me of a story I heard about the rapid production and release of "Ohio" days after the Kent State tragedy.

There's now a blog, I'm assuming it's maintained by Neil's folks, at http://livingwithwar.blogspot.com/ that should keep us up to date on what's going on with the project.

You can read more about it there.

Townley instrumental to dyeing easter eggs in the U.S.

Apparently my people were instrumental in bringing easter egg dye to much of the United States. I've never been so proud. The following passage is excerpted from PeterFredson's Journal)

"Easter egg decorating is an Old World tradition that was brought to U.S. shores by Pennsylvania Dutch settlers in the early 1700's.

By the late nineteenth century, a New Jersey druggist, William Townley, had begun selling small packets of Easter egg dye to mothers in his neighborhood. In 1880, Townley founded Townley's Easter Egg Dye to produce and sell the packets for 5 cents each. Townley, whose early customers had been Pennsylvania Dutch, soon changed the company's name to PAAS Dye Company. The word PAAS was derived from the Pennsylvania Dutch word "Passen," meaning Easter."

Read more about the history of the Paas company at their official site.

Google Calendar released

Google finally released their online calendar this week. I played around with it for a few minutes and while I LOVE Gmail, I have decided (for now) to stick with 30 Boxes, which just keeps getting better. You can now set reminders that will be emailed to you & I love the Evoke TV mashup that keeps me up to date on my upcoming shows. I just checked the 30 Boxes blog and was surprised to see this promise:
"Whatever Google brings to the table, we will do it better."
So far, so good.

Aretha's Will Rise Again

It's been about two weeks now, and I just found out about this, through chance. I was talking to some co-workers about biscuits (don't ask me why) and of course, I brought up the website for Aretha Frankenstein's restaurant in Chattanooga. I went to the website and was broken-hearted to see the place burned. This article at The Chattanoogan provides some details. There's security camera video of the actual fire here.

"and yes...it's going to be rebuilt.
back just the way it was..."

Matthew smiles for Dad

Berlitz commercial

This commercial cracked me up.

A Blessing and a Curse

The new Drive-By Truckers record comes out April 18th. If you want to hear it before buying, just follow THIS LINK to a flash media player that will allow you to stream tracks. These aren't samples. You can hear the complete tracks. Easy to use, sounds great. This is a band with confidence in their music. Enjoy.

Thank Me Later

I may be a little late on this, but the fake "The More You Know" PSAs from the cast of "The Office" are available online at NBC.com. Click here. You'll be glad you did. Oh, and thanks to Tanster over at The Office Tally. I just checked out the site for the first time today and it looks great.

TV schedule on 30 Boxes

I know I keep posting about 30 Boxes, but I wanted to let you know about this great feature. There's a site called EvokeTV. I went through and rated the shows I watch and Evoke TV automatically created an RSS feed that I plugged into 30 Boxes settings page. NOW, my calendar is updated for the week with all my shows, giving me the broadcast times and details about the show. I know at a glance whether LOST is a repeat or a new episode. Here's the link at 30 Boxes with details.

Matthew's FIRST WORD!!!

We're very excited and frankly baffled that Matthew has spoken his first word. We searched the indexes of all our development books and he's defied every last one of them! Ten months is around the time he's expected to talk and it's usually da-da or ma-ma or something simple. We made an appointment with Dr. Freidrich Von Lichtenhoffer in Geneva. He agreed to pay our airfare when he heard the incredible news. We're supposed to fly over on Sunday. Of course, this isn't a complete surprise, he was holding his head up the first day and was crawling 13 hours later. But that's old news. I'm sure you're dying to know what the word is. It's "fool".

The Office

If you're not watching The Office, here's a little of what you missed. Episode: "Michael's Birthday"



Dwight plays the recorder.
Michael: Stop! What is that?!
Dwight: It's "The Longest Time" by William Joel.

* * *

I bet Luke Perry's friends don't treat him like this.
Michael points to his poster of James Dean