Mike's Minutiae

A few years ago, just after [my kids] started listening to music almost exclusively from their computers, I began to hear traditional, bluegrass and jam-band coming from their rooms. They played me Phish, Jack Johnson, Widespread Panic, Moe, Stringcheese Incident and my favorite, Yonder Mountain Stringband. I also heard music they'd forgotten I'd played for them many years before-- The Band's "Music from Big Pink" and "The Last Waltz."

All of this brought back memories of my Radio days. As a kid I'd spent hours listening to 60's AM country crossover hits, like the Statler Brothers' "Flowers On the Wall", Johnny Cash's "Boy Named Sue", Roger Miller's "England Swings" and "King of the Road".

I'd later find myself as a DJ at CKFH in Toronto while it briefly tried being a county music station. There I played them all. Willie and Waylon, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn...

Now, all these years later, I'd rediscovered country and bluegrass through my kids.

I work all day
To pay the rent.
Before the money's earned,
It's all been allocated.
I got nothing on my plate,
But I wish that I were fat.
Nine more gallons,
And I'll have me a hat.

Lookalikes!

Lookalikes!

For 41 hours, [Drake University sophomore Skyler] Bartels wandered the aisles of a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Windsor Heights that's open 24 hours a day. He checked out shoppers, read magazines, watched movies on the DVD display and played video games.

He bought meals at the in-store Subway sandwich shop, but was able to catch only brief naps in a restroom stall or on lawn chairs in the garden department.

Other shoppers and employees didn't pay much attention until the end of his stay, he said, when it appeared some store greeters began to take notice -- pointing at him and whispering.

Then, The Des Moines Register...called to ask him about the experience. Once the story ran, TV networks began calling.

He also talked with a book agent, has been contacted by New Line Cinema about a movie concept and did a radio interview with National Public Radio.

America is raising a nation of sleep-deprived kids, with only 20 percent getting the recommended nine hours of shuteye on school nights and more than one in four reporting dozing off in class.

Many are arriving late to school because of oversleeping and others are driving drowsy, according to a poll released Tuesday by the National Sleep Foundation.

Left-handed snails are better than righties at defending against predators, according to a new study that suggests lefties have the same competitive advantage in nature that they enjoy on the baseball diamond or in the boxing ring.

The study, published in this month's Royal Society Biology Letters, suggests that snails whose shells coil toward the left were more likely to survive crab attacks than those whose shells coil toward the right.

"It's just a frequency issue," said Yale geologist Gregory P. Dietl, one of the study's authors. "As long as you're rare, you're going to have an advantage."

• Jackie Greene, American Myth - he still wears his Dylanesque qualities on his sleeve, but he does it quite well, so all is forgiven. less folkie and more rock on this album, but chockablock with excellent songs. very solid.
  
  
• Gomez, How We Operate - a very coherent release from the Brit indiepsychbluesrockers (neologistically speaking), busting at the seams with melodic rock songs.
  
  
• Scott Miller & the Commonwealth, Citation - Knoxville's fine historian/rocker possibly topped his last record.
  
  
• Built to Spill, You in Reverse - indie guitar rock done right. just as good as (if not better than) their '90s heyday output.
  
  
• Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit - retro pop fine as well-milled as the highest grade confectioner's sugar. and from Glaswegians. could you expect anything less?
  

Simpson, 25, a Texas native who started out singing in her church choir, became a star on the Christian music circuit as a teenager and crossed over to the pop mainstream with her major-label debut album "Sweet Kisses" in 1999.

She became an overnight MTV sensation in 2003 as co-star of a reality show chronicling her first year of wedlock with fellow pop vocalist Nick Lachey, but she filed for divorce in December after three stormy years of marriage. Simpson is currently featured wearing cowboy boots and hot pants in a TV pizza ad.

Operation Smile, a non-profit venture offering free plastic surgery for disadvantaged children overseas with facial deformities.

The counterfeit money looked good, but there was one flaw. There's no such thing as a $1 billion bill.

[...]

Further investigation led agents to a West Hollywood apartment where they found the stash of yellowing and wrinkled $1 billion bills with an issue date of 1934 and bearing a picture of President Grover Cleveland.

"You would think the $1 billion denomination would be a giveaway that these notes are fake, but some people are still taken in," said James Todak, a secret services agent involved in the probe.

Does making a horse wear a diaper constitute an infringement upon its owner's religious freedom?

Perhaps wary of a fight over civil rights as they pertain to the regulation of horse excrement, local officials in Ebensburg, Cambria County [PA], dropped consideration of an ordinance requiring operators of horse-drawn carriages to affix "containment devices" to the business ends of horses as they clip-clop through the newly beautified downtown streets.

Ebensburg, population 3,100, has a small community of Amish that drive their buggies into town from small farms. Active participants in the farmers market and other businesses, they usually keep to residential side streets, said Ebensburg Mayor Charles Moyer. Occasionally, their horses dump a load of manure directly in front of someone's house.

"If somebody doesn't want to apply one of these devices to their horse, I don't know how you go about forcing them to."

"As a rule, traffic pretty much takes care of it and eliminates the problem, with the cars running over it and smashing it around."

It's not easy bein' green
It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things
And people tend to pass you over 'cause you're
Not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water
Or stars in the sky

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why
But why wonder, why wonder?
I am green and it'll do fine
It's beautiful!
And I think it's what I want to be

Scott Stapp doesn't think too highly of "someone."

The Associated Press released quotes Wednesday from an AP Radio interview in which the former Creed singer accuses "someone" of being behind the recent release of a sex tape.

"Obviously, someone wants to hurt me, and doesn't want me to be successful in my solo career," Stapp told AP Radio.

"Someone" could not be located for comment.

This is a pool for predicting the date at which the number of articles (as defined by the official article count presented on the Special:statistics) in the English Wikipedia reaches 110,000,000,000 (one hundred and ten billion). The person who comes closest to the actual date is the winner (of fame lasting one hundred ten billion years). The current number of articles in the English Wikipedia is 1,000,599. It may be a while.