Category: Uncategorized

…especially those that start with a flat tire.

I’m watching CNN’s coverage of tonight’s incident at Chicago’s Midway International Airport in which Southwest Airlines Flight 1248 skidded off the runway upon landing in a snowstorm and crashed into a busy intersection just beyond the runway.

CNN is using Google Earth to show an aerial shot of the airport so I went to look at it myself on Google Maps (see picture above). I have never been to Chicago and very unfamiliar with the airports there, but looking at Midway Airport I can only ask myself the question that serves as the headline of this post. I can’t believe an airport in a major city that serves 17 million travelers a year was designed with such a minimal buffer area between the runways and the neighborhood roadways.

Nobody on the plane suffered any injuries and were evacuated successfully. However, the plane hit two cars at the intersection of West 55th Street and S. Central Avenue, which is located just beyond the northwest corner of the airport. One car was unoccupied, but the other was carrying a family of five and a six-year-old boy was killed.

This was the scene outside my window in Fairless Hills, PA, around 5:30 this morning…the first snowfall of the winter. I’m sorry the photo is so dark, but I didn’t want to use a flash and draw attention to the fact I’m a geek up at 5:30 a.m. taking pictures of the first snowfall.

Well, anyway…for some reason, whenever I am home for the first snowfall of winter, I feel compelled to sit down at my keyboard and try to write something wintry (i.e., “Mountain Dance” by Dave Grusin). Well, instead, I went back into my archives and brought a song called “Eventually” into the 21st century. This song dates back to around 1989 or ’90. My former bandmate, Christian Beach, wrote different lyrics to the music I wrote and called this song “Second Look” (and I’m sure he’ll be happy to hear this song again).

Except for a couple of instances, this sounds pretty much just like the original version I wrote so many years ago. The lyrics in the first verse and the chorus have been around for ages. The bridge is something I started playing around with recently so that needs a lot of work. I quickly improvised the words in the second verse and those in the bridge are obviously temporary (when you listen, you’ll hear what I’m talking about).

To listen, click on the headline above or, if you have QuickTime, on the embedded player below.

Eventually (demo) (4:12/5.8 MB)

From Yahoo! News, courtesy of NewsFactor.com:

Podcaster falls prey to RSS hijacking

Extortionists now have a new type of victim to pick on: podcasters. U.S. podcaster Eric Marcus has fallen prey to a hijacker who has diverted his really simple syndication (RSS) feed and is allegedly demanding money to release it. Marcus, who runs the Vegan.com site and produces the Erik’s Diner podcasts, is looking for legal redress…

…Marcus found that Yahoo has an RSS listing for his podcast on its podcasts.yahoo.com directory, but that the listing directs potential visitors to podkeyword.com rather than to vegan.com. He also discovered that Apple’s iTunes online music store associates the podkeyword.com Web address with the Erik’s Diner podcast…

…Marcus asked podkeyword.com to make a listing change. But the site allegedly replied that it would only do so if Marcus made a payment or permanently agreed to its terms, according to press reports.

For more on this case, Marcus’ attornety, Colette Vogele, head of the San Francisco-based law firm Vogele & Associates and a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, has posted a report on Marcus’ problems on her blog at http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/vogele/.

As this CNN/AP story shows, it’s always fun when one musical act, in this case the band 311, beats up another, in this case former Creed singer Scott Stapp.

(Note: Yeah, I know…it’s not the most insightful of posts, but I have been busy and wanted to push “Happy Thanksgiving” a little further down the page, considering it is now December.)

I probably won’t be posting for a few days so I hope anyone who reads this blog has a safe and happy Thanksgiving.

Right now, I’m giving thanks for my new iMac G5 at work, which came with what I think is the crack of software applications: Photo Booth. You know it’s bad for you, but you keep on doing it.

Here are some samples of what Photo Booth can do:

You can take a normal photo, but…

…things can get a bit distorted, if you so desire.

It turns out webcams can save lives, too.

This AP story, tells the tale of a Norwegian artist who collapsed in her California living room. One of her sons in the Philippines just happened to check the webcam in that living room and saw her lying on a couch, unresponsive to his phone calls.

He couldn’t get through to the local emergency services so he called his brother, who was having breakfast with his wife in Norway. The wife, originally from Long Island, NY, knew exactly who to contact and the paramedics arrived within 10 minutes.

Mmm…the Newberry Family Feast for Four from Newberry’s Backyard Bar-BQ in Newberry, FL. Good eats!

Well, the University of Florida Hilton — headquarters for my friend’s wedding — does indeed have free, high-speed Internet in the rooms. However, I just haven’t been in mine long enough to do much with it. But since this is my last night here, I figured I should try to get one post onto the ol’ blog.

The picture above was taken at the rehearsal dinner. I thought it was an interesting photo…kind of like something you’d see on Mike Doughty’s blog so I decided to post it.

That’s all…now, I’m going to sleep.

Well, I’m flying down to Florida tomorrow (Thurs.) morning and will be back Sunday night. I am the best man for my friend Cliff, who is getting married in Gainesville on Saturday.

Hence, I’ll be pretty tied up over the next few days and will be away from the ol’ blog until I get back.

Right now, I am packing, making myself something to eat and enjoying “My Blue Heaven,” one of the funniest movies ever made.

Well, the Ben Folds show at Radio City Music Hall rocked Monday night — despite the stupid 11 p.m. curfew imposed on him that resulted in Ben closing with just the crowd-sung harmonies of “Not the Same” instead of the full song. If he had gone one minute over, he would have been charged $10,000.

So while Ben didn’t play standards like “Philosophy” and the full version of “Not the Same,” Katie and I did get to hear nuggets like “Don’t Change Your Plans” and “Where’s Summer B.?”…and the CD version and the reworked, stadium rock version of “Jesusland” (if you can figure out this RapidShare site and manage to download this FLAC file of the song, congrats…it took me awhile to figure it out). The stadium version — think U2 meets Ben Folds — kicked ass and was a whole lot of fun. I hope it gets recorded at some point and becomes a B side.

Anyway, tonight’s show ranks up there with among the best I have ever seen…probably because Ben and the boys were in top form and it was in such a hallowed venue like Radio City Music Hall (its policies notwithstanding). You could tell Ben was having fun playing there and seeing all those people at one of his shows.

And, as I posted earlier, because Katie won a contest on BenFolds.com, we got kick-ass seats (Row EE) that were an upgrade over the ones I had purchased (Row F…of the second mezzanine) and we were able to meet Ben after the show. It was very quick, though, and kind of awkward. We just stood there in his dressing room on an upper floor of the venue until some others moved out and we were able to grab a few seconds of his time. While we were in there, though, Ben appeased the crowd gathered on the street below by tossing bananas out the window to them.

Oh, and props to Colin, the college rep for Sony, who worked everything out for us and got us the free CDs (Ben’s “Songs for Silverman-Deluxe Edition” and The Fray’s CD) and the passes to the mysterious Roxy Suite.

OK…here are some pics from the evening: