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Back from Denver. Had a nice enough time, even if my carlessness the last three days limited my funtitude options. Then again, I didn’t have my lung collapse, so that’s something.
On Sunday, with my car rental coming to a close, I went roaming in the Rockies, mostly staying on I-70 west of town for a couple hours. One thing I learned while driving: Denver has the best classic rock station I’ve heard, 99.5 “The Mountain.” (I’ll forgive the name.) Their schtick seems to be playing album tracks and obscure songs from the classic rock catalog, not the same few songs that you hear over and over again elsewhere on the geezer-rock dial.
Some examples: Instead of playing “Like a Rolling Stone” for the four-millionth time, they play all eight-plus minutes of Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” — a song I’ve never heard on the radio before, even during all the movie hubbub around the Rubin “Hurricane” Carter case. (Perhaps because Bob uses no fewer than three not-supposed-to-be-on-the-radio swear words, not to mention the ol’ n-word.)
Instead of “Aqualung” again, they play “Bouree” when they get a Jethro Tull urge. Instead of “Stairway to Heaven,” it’s “The Rain Song.” “Bell Bottom Blues” instead of “Layla.” “Madman Across the Water” instead of “Tiny Dancer.” “There Is No Way Out of Here” (from David Gilmour’s 1978 solo record) instead of “Comfortably Numb.” “The Punk and the Godfather” instead of “Who Are You.” (Actually, this station looooves the Who. In two days of sporadic driving, I heard “The Real Me,” “Can’t Explain,” “Love, Reign O’er Me,” and “Athena.”)
Now, not all of those are improvements over the big hits. (For instance, “Athena” should stay locked in whatever vault every other station in the hemisphere keeps it. If you have to pull something off that album, which I still have on tape somewhere, at least have the taste to pick “Eminence Front.”) But a little variety goes a very long way, and it’s nice to see some personality in what’s traditionally been the most stagnant major radio format.
In totally unrelated news, this site will be tomorrow’s stop on the Virtual Book Tour. Last week, I interviewed Mary Roach, author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. A transcript will run tomorrow.

Reading about Jerry Springer’s planned bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio made me wander to the Springer show site. The show listings have all the Springeresque glory you’d expect (“I slept with my [choose one: brother/father/best friend’s husband/dog]!”). But the July 8 show shook me to my core:
“Bi-curious Carl got more than he bargained for. He slept with a one-breasted man who now won

Here’s my story from today’s front page, on why girls are better writers than boys, no matter what LiveJournal has led you to believe.
My only complaint: that the phrase “let’s call it Britneyland” was edited out of one of the story’s later paragraphs. See if you can guess which one.
I’m off to Denver tonight and won’t be back until Wednesday evening. Feel free to rock the party without me.

I’ll be on TXCN tonight talking about test scores. (Like I ever talk about anything else. Even in my private life.) But feel free to not tune in, since it was my worst performance in quite a while.
If you haven’t yet seen the terrifying sausage bludgeoning video, you should. I’m surprised the NIAF hasn’t yet issued an angry statement over the fact it was an Italian sausage that got whacked.

An addendum to my last post: A six-pack of beer to whomever can actually fix the problem. Now we know what it is (from the comments on that post) — but I still have no idea how to fix it. For one thing, the background image was loaded in just a plain BODY tag, not in CSS (it’s actually loaded in both at the moment, after a change). If I change all my positioning tags from absolute to relative, it screws the whole layout. Ideas?
Again, apologies for the geekiness.

Attention CSS experts: If you can figure out why this site’s background disappears when you scroll down in Safari 1.0, I’ll buy you a beer! Hell, two beers! We’re not talking Pabst either — the import or domestic of your choice!
(This is the same problem James wrote about a couple weeks ago. It wasn’t an issue with any of the Safari betas — just in 1.0.)
To make up for this post’s high geek quotient, I offer you these links:
– What happens when you combine a bad man with a camera and two extremely gullible teenaged girls. (For the record, this isn’t the most family-friendly link.)
– The emasculation of Doug Christie continues. (Doug’s the Sacramento King whose wife doesn’t allow him to even speak to other women.)

Ronnie Polaneczky, in her column in the Philadelphia Daily News: Distributing condoms in high schools doesn’t encourage kids to have sex.
Her dad disagrees, so he writes a fairly scathing letter to the editor, saying his daughter’s column “contains obvious contradictions.” How’s that for family support? Most creepy: the way he refers to his daughter as just “Polaneczky” throughout the piece.

Feb. 2003: Why Kobe can’t get a shoe deal. He lacks street cred with the urban demo that buys high-priced sneakers.
July 2003: Kobe’s arrest for sexual assault could help him sell shoes. (The article suggests it probably won’t, but still — what a wonderful world.)

If you listen to only one indie rock duo with an 11-year-old lead singer and 9-year-old drummer this summer — make it Smoosh. Seriously, they sound like a pre-teen Quasi. More here and here.