Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I live in one of the larger radio markets in the country. And yet it seems when I turn on the radio I've got fifty bazillion country stations to choose from. Or an almost equal number of "Adult Contemporary," which means mediocre thirty year old rock that aired when I was in High School, for pity's sake. Puh-lease. Which is why I love broadband and streaming internet music: now I can listen to mediocre fifty year old lounge music. Or other even more obscure and narrowly defined genres. Unlike the early days, when you had to have a computer turned on to listen to this stuff, these days, a number of standalone devices are available. Along with internet streams, these devices will typically allow you to play your own collection of MP3s (or other digital audio files). After much research, I ended up getting (for Christmas) a Roku Soundbridge , which I have hooked up to my sound system (unlike this model, which has no speakers, the Soundbridge radio has speakers and the a...

I confess: I'm a music junky (and my friends and family would say I like a lot of junky music). I prefer to think of myself as eclectic. But I digress. Cool thing I discovered the other day that feeds my appetite for tunes is the daily download courtesy of AllAboutJazz.com . Rather than the usual 30 second clip you get from Borders or Amazon, you get the full track -- anywhere from 2 to 8 minutes -- from participating artists. In addition, they've made it easy to include a daily download widget that can be added to a website or *ahem* blog. Scroll down on this page and you'll see it. Like what you hear? Visit their MP3 shop and buy some more. Prices are reasonable, the downloads are MP3s (no proprietary formats that can only be played on specific players) and you can hear the cuts in their entirety before purchase. Heck of a deal!

After blowing off most of December and a large portion of January I've decided to pick up the slack. The holidays went too fast; I didn't do squat (out of the large group of self-assigned projects I came up with for myself). Mostly I vegged out and watched junky movies on TV, reveling in the fact I was not in my office. Couple of movies I saw are worth mentioning: Charlie Wilson's War and Juno . Charlie Wilson's War was an odd film -- Tom Hanks did a credible job as Charlie Wilson, the "liberal from Lufkin," part of a now almost extinct breed: the Texas Liberal Democrat. Some of my cohorts would take exception to his implication in the military buildup funded by the CIA, but given what replaced him -- the likes of Tom Delay and Jeb Hensarling -- I'd take a dozen more like him. Julia Robert's part was a complete throwaway; as best as I can tell, she was cast just to sell tickets. Philip Seymour Hoffman on the other hand, playing a cynical CIA agent,...