Category: Uncategorized

The form on my CD Mix of the Month Club signup page evidently got screwed in my host switch. I’ll fix it when I get a chance, but until then, email me if you want to sign up for the July trade.
Also, there’s a new entrant in the burgeoning mix-trading field: interchange. It certainly has a few edges on CDMOM; for one, you sign up by genre, so if you’re a big a capella fan or deep into J-pop, it’ll work better for you than the indie-rock-with-occasional-asides CDMOM. Plus, it looks like it’d be much, much easier to run, since the guy in charge won’t actually be burning, matching, and mailing CDs. (That hassle will someday be the death of CDMOM.) A lot cheaper, too.
On the other hand, you’re forced to trust other Internet people a lot more the interchange way. Some months, a full 30-40 percent of the people who sign up for CDMOM flake out and don’t mail any CDs — but there’s really no harm done, since I don’t mail CDs to anyone until I get theirs in the mail. In the interchange model (which is essentially a more detailed version of the Burn, Baby, Burn! model), some people will certainly mail out CDs and get nothing in return. (When I did the BBB swap, I sent CDs to five people and got discs back from only two of them.)

Every trivia competition has one of these guys. I hope it’s not me.

I keep meaning to update the calendar in the right-hand column, but I just don’t have much exciting coming up in the next month or so. (At least nothing definite yet.) So I’ll keep living on past glories.

This is the kind of apology you have to write when your newspaper runs a story on a fire at a mental hospital and you put the headline “Roasted Nuts” above it.

There’s a great piece (not online) in this month’s Spin (Red Hot Chili Peppers cover) on an astounding phenomenon: Morrissey’s fanbase has evidently shifted almost completely from weepy, sensitive white folks to young Latinos. I’ve got a few Smiths/Morrissey albums, but this was complete news to me, and I’m strangely fascinated by it — the thought of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” booming in the barrio is just too wonderful for words. I bet Spanish translations of Oscar Wilde are jumping off the shelf, too.
While the Spin piece isn’t online, its reporter (I think this guy) is referenced in this LA Weekly piece on a Morrissey convention in Los Angeles. Quote: “We order drinks and grab a table in the smoking lounge, where we sit and eavesdrop on a Spin reporter, nominally conducting interviews about ‘the Latino angle,’ but mainly just macking on the ladies.”
Spin, which went through a truly crappy period, actually has some terrific features nowadays, some of the best music journalism out there. If only you didn’t have to wade through 80 pages of Incubus and Korn to get to it.

A sad so long to Kelly, one of my favorite DFWbloggers, who as I type is moving to Virginia. We’ll have a drink to you at the next happy hour.

Just because I have to embarrass my friend Lisa, I feel obligated to report her dad will apparently be on Good Morning America and the Connie Chung show tomorrow. Click the link to see why.
By the way, has anyone seen that Connie Chung show? Watched it once last weekend in Rayne — that may be the worst hour of television in history. Painful to watch. I’ve always been a Chung hater, but geez, it almost seems cruel to put her out there every night. Ed Bark, as usual, has it right.

In tonight’s Braggart Watch: I’m somewhat proud to report that my partner Dena and I kicked a little ass tonight, winning the inaugural Dallas Association of Young Lawyers Trivia Bowl. Pitted against the finest young legal minds of the Metroplex, Dena and I somehow came out on top. (In answer to your obvious thought — “Wait, I didn’t know Josh was a lawyer!” — yeah, I’m not. I was brought in as a ringer.) We finished the season with five straight wins, then went 3-0 to win tonight’s playoffs.
It was fun bringing all the old quiz bowl reflexes out of storage. The most fun, as it did in high school, came in beating the team that took things waaaay too seriously — the one that actually held pre-match practices, the one that clearly had their firm’s reputation and their entire self-worth on the line. I am accepting all Trivial Pursuit challenges.
In unrelated news, I was told tonight that I looked like a cross between Bono and Patrick Swayze. Hmm. I’m not feeling particularly flattered. Those who know me are free to comment on the comparison.

All right-thinking people should be listening to the sun-baked cinematic sounds of Tucson’s Calexico. Such great stuff; I’d heard a little by them, but it took a few inclusions on CDMOM discs to get me hooked. Here’s a review of their latest EP.
Several webcast concerts available here. I recommend the audio from Morning Becomes Eclectic and the video from this Paris show.

If you’re going to pull a B&E, at least get your money’s worth: Green Bay Packers fullback Najeh Davenport was arrested Monday, accused of breaking into a university dormitory and defecating in a woman’s closet.
According to police, Davenport crept into a dorm room at Barry University around 6 a.m. on April 1. A woman sleeping in the room, Mary McCarthy, told police she was startled by a strange sound and saw Davenport squatting in her closet. Davenport then allegedly defecated in a laundry basket, McCarthy told detectives.