I kept hearing the name over and over in different places at different times.
ODETTA
 
ODETTA
 
ODETTA
 
The last time I heard the name ODETTA was during the news of Obama's victory for the White House. Someone said ODETTA will perform at the inauguration.
 
I thought to myself, "well now I'll get to check her out."
 
Sadly, this was not meant to be as one of the strongest and most cherished voices of America has been silenced.
 
Sadly, I learned that ODETTA passed recently.
 
Here she is performing Water boy. ODETTA sings with such power. Yes... that is just her and her guitar.
 
ODETTA
 
ODETTA
 
ODETTA
 
Your voice will continue to sing now.... RIP
 

All I have to say is that I'm part Portugese so that's my reason for liking this video.
 
What's yours?
 

Check out this video on YouTube:
 

 

 

A friend posed a question to me and I thought I'd share the step by step.

The question was: I'd like to create a twitter so that everyone in my group can send messages to everyone else by addressing it to the group.  Is this possible with twitter?

Well yes and no.  Twitter is group messaging system but it's designed to be a social tool meaning your 'group' will expand and shrink much like a circle of friends.  There's also no way to address messages to just certain people...unless you use http://grouptweet.com/

It's very simple!

1. Create a twitter account for your group - for our example, we'll create a group called BESTHOWFANS
2. Register this twitter account with http://grouptweet.com by typing in the twitter name and password for the group account.
3. Have all of the people you want to have messaging rights follow BESTSHOWFANS and likewise have the BESTSHOWFANS twitter account follow all of them back.
4. Whenever anyone in the group wants to send a message to members of the group, s/he simply sends a direct message to the BESTSHOWFANS twitter
   by typing "d bestshowfans blah blah blah' 
   It will then be distributed to everyone in the group via the grouptweet account.

It's very simple and it works! 

You can also set the BESTSHOWFANS to be a locked account so that messages don't appear in the public twitter timeline. 
If you do this, then the only additional step will be to accept each members request to follow BESTSHOWFANS twitter. 

I hope this is clear enough. Let me know if you try this and if it works for you!

 

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then here is a graphic representing the performance of the American stock market.
2008 is all the way to the left. Yup, it's as bad as that.

[via DailyKos making a more legible version of a graph made by Value Square Asset Management, Yale University)
 
 
How did things get so bad? Borrowing. Very simple. People borrowed to buy houses they couldn't afford, paying banks to lend on more houses that their consumers couldn't afford. People borrowed against their 401Ks, credit cards, and even stranger ways of funding down payments.
 
Talk about a domino effect. After borrowing to buy houses they couldn't afford, they borrowed some more to improve the houses that they couldn't afford in the first place. They also borrowed to pay off credit cards and cars which is a bad deal.
 
Unsecured debt [cars and credit cards] was being paid for with secured debt [homes]. This is a bad deal for consumers, and a good deal for banks, except that when the banks took over the homes in foreclosures, there was no one left to buy them so the homes sit boarded up and do further damage by dragging down the home prices of homes that people _could_ afford.
 
Talk about a self-inflicted disaster. It's going to take us a long long time to get out of this mess. For those of us with 20 years to go before retirement, there is hope that things will get better when it's time to start drawing on our retirement accounts.
 
For those of us with less than 10 years to go before retirement, the face of retirement is changing. The expectation is now that you will work into your retirement, not for beer or shoes money, but to afford the medications and other expenses that go up with old age.
 
This is one pickle we're in. The question is just how many people and companies will be dragged down into this as the wave of destruction has spread to include people and companies that were relatively conservative in their use of credit.
 
Here is a lecture on leveraging [borrowing upon borrowing] that puts it plainly. Leveraging is how the banks borrowed themselves into oblivion.
 

 
How have you been impacted by this? What are you doing to recover?

Seeing this car chase scene made me think of all the times I hustled to get my butt to work on time. File this under ' hellacious commutes'
 

 
 
My current commute is 1.5 miles so I dont get much opportunity to get the truck up to speed like these speed demons do.
 
 
Hat tip to the wonderful wfmu radio blog at http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/12/greatest-film-c.html

 

As I was getting ready for work this morning and listening to even more tales of CEOs of American dinosaur car companies begging for bailout cash, the following thought occured to me.

Why are American taxpayers paying for the bailout of car companies when oil companies are having record profits? 

Let's think about this.  When you buy a cell phone, you pay a very low price because you're locked into a contract for service with the cell provider.  If you had to pay the full price for the cell phone you probably would balk and not do it. 
Did you know your cellphone probably costs about 300 to 700 dollars without the subsidy from your cell provider?

Why don't cars work this way?  This seems to be the only way to keep car manufacturers afloat as the consumer is realizing that paying for the car plus the fuel is a very unattractive proposition.

 

 

 

It's that time of year. Time to bring out the crock pot and start making heart soups and stews.  I got this recipe a few years ago from the excellent Zonya TV show which airs on a local public TV station.  Zonya's website is at http://zonya.com 

Her approach to healthy eating is very common sense.  It has more to do with making great foods that are easily prepared for busy folks on the go.  I always learn something when I watch her show and when I tried the gypsy stew recipe, I used some cubed tofu instead of the chicken in her recipe.  It was a hit for everyone including the kids and it was hard to believe how something so tasy could be made so quickly and easily.  Here's the recipe...enjoy!

 

 

(download)

What a sad thing...

Newscasters that have been on-air for decades are being let go as part of cost-cutting measures that are affecting us all in one way or another.

These are the people that stayed on air during crises after crises and talked us down from a state of fear back to reality.

These voices of reason and comforting faces reported from their anchor desks day after day to give us consistency and a feeling of normalcy as the world around us seem to twist further and further into chaos.

 

 

The world is changing quickly and not necessarily for the better.

 

Hat tip:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/business/media/01anchor.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

 

Some folks were asking here and there whether I'd posted any video of my mandolin playing. Well after spending all of Sunday moving things around our family room, I decided to crank up the old photobooth and capture some rough noodling on the mandolin.
 
The first part of this is the first tune I learned to play called Red Haired Boy. My version is very simple but it comes easily to me as it's the tune that I know inside and out. The second part is just some messing around with a simple blues progression I have picked up from a Mandolin Blues book I have been meaning to work through.
 
Hope it doesn't hurt your ears too much!