Remembering the Tsunami Victims

(Adrees Latif/Reuters)

Five thousand floating paper lanterns fill the sky over the Andaman Sea, in Khao Lak, Thailand, in remembrance of tsunami victims killed one year ago today. 47 villages along the country's Andaman Sea coastline were wiped out.


(Eddie Keogh/Reuters)

The lanterns symbolize letting go of the dead.


(Parth Sanyal/Reuters)

A candlelight silent march in Nagapattinam, about 202 miles from the southern Indian city of Chennai.


(Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters)

Candles in the sand on Patong beach in Phuket, Thailand.


REUTERS/Adrees Latif

A ceremony in Khao Lak, Thailand.


REUTERS/Nicky Loh

Remembering the more than 231,000 people who died in last year's tsunami.

Pandora

This is pretty cool. It's a music player that allows you to create music stations by typing in the name of a favorite artist or song. The music data base is scanned for similar music, based on rhythmic patterns, orchestration, instrumentation, etc. Pandora will act as your personal DJ and play the style of music you like. In order to refine what your station plays, you can select the tunes you like and eliminate the ones that don't fit your taste.

So far I've tried it with blues and Latin jazz, and it works well with those. Salsa was a bust, though. They just don't have much of it in their selection. Sometimes you'll hear an artist you don't know, so it's a way of expanding your list of favorites.

Pandora is an outgrowth of the Music Genome Project.

On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 5 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

You can't beat the price. Pandora is free.

Headline of the Month

Without question!

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

Shoooot. It worked for Mary Poppins.

Colorful Key West

Credit: all photos by Andy Newman

As many years as I've lived in Florida, I've never been to Key West, which is less than five hours to the south. There, you can watch sunrises and sunsets over the water, something I've never done.

Key West, a.k.a. the Conch Republic, is known for its colorful gay community and laid-back lifestyle. You just never know what's going to happen, but it's usually a lot of fun.

The picture above is of one of the contestants, prancing in his amazing court jester costume during the Paradise Costume Competition at the Pier House Pretenders in Key West on Thursday. The event was a part of Fantasy Fest, Key West's annual masking and costuming festival that was delayed six weeks this year due to Hurricane Wilma. The festival continues through tonight and will be highlighted by the Fantasy Fest Parade down Duval Street.



These two participants are celebrating the hurricane theme, as is this guy in his "Storm Surge" costume.



Showing off their "Raggedy Ann and Andy" costume at the Fantasy Fest Pet Masquerade are Bumper McCabe of Boca Raton and his poodle Tinker Toy. They won second place in the pet/owner look-alike division.



Peter Parente of Sugarloaf Key, and his two-toed sloth, Molasses, show off their "Gargoyle in a Haunted Tree" costume. They placed second in the contest's best theme adaptation category. See what I mean? Who has a sloth for a pet??? Only in Key West!



The winners of the pet/owner look-alike category were James Brooks of Ramrod Key and his bulldog, Brutus. A very clever spoof of FEMA's role during hurricane recovery.

The Nigerian Solution

(AP/George Osodi)

Children wash near the rubble of their demolished house in the Chika area of Abuja, Nigeria, on Dec. 8, following government evictions and the demolition of all the housing stock in the area. Soldiers and police have evicted thousands from a residential area of the capital as part of a plan to avoid the city disintegrating into the chaotic situation of Lagos and other Nigerian cities, residents and officials said.

Yeah, that'll solve the problem of what to do with all those impoverished people. Now they're not only hungry, they're homeless! Maybe they'll just die of starvation and disease, and you'll be rid of them. A wonderful a model for other countries, Nigeria. Way to go!

Ouch!

Scarlett Johanssen takes breast support to the extreme.

What's Wrong With This Guy?

Last September, during a post-Katrina NBC-produced special to benefit the Red Cross, Kanye West made some unscripted remarks which shocked the nation and infuriated a lot of people. He ended his verbal diarrhea by stating that, "George Bush doesn't care about black people!"

While that may or may not be true, it's a very simplistic way to look at the situation. The truth is that Bush lives in a parallel universe and doesn't have a clue about what he's doing to this country.

With the Grammy's coming up, he's shooting off his mouth again.

"If I don't win album of the year, I'm gonna really have a problem with that," the Chicago rapper told MTV this week, responding to predictions that his mouth would cost him a victory.

"I don't care if I jumped up and down right now on the couch like Tom Cruise...I don't care how much I stunt--you can never take away from the amount of work I put into it."

And Kanye wasn't done: "I said I was the face of the Grammys last year. I'm 10 times that [this year]. . . . Two things: Do not let me get on that stage and do not let me get on that stage. Either way, we goin' crazy!"

To top it all off, his Assholiness wears fur. Watch your back, Kanye. You never know when PETA might appear.

Oh, and before I forget. I'm not done with you. Your song, "Golddiggers"? Here's what AngryBlackBitch had to say about it. Jerk.

"Hey, Laaaaaaaaa-dy!"

I don't know what I'd do without Watertiger's humor on Dependable Renegade! Her hilariously captioned photos crack me up every day.

The Worst President In History

James Buchanan, the 15th president, is generally considered to be the worst president in American history. A recent informal poll of historians indicates that 338 believe Bush is failing, while 77 say he's succeeding. Fifty said they thought he was the worst president ever. Worse than Buchanan.I just had to highlight that. It gives me hope.

This is what those historians said -- and it should be noted that some of the criticism about deficit spending and misuse of the military came fromself-identified conservatives -- about the Bush record:

• He has taken the country into an unwinnable war and alienated friend and foe alike in the process.
• He is bankrupting the country with a combination of aggressive military spending and reduced taxation of the rich.
• He has deliberately and dangerously attacked separation of church and state.
• He has repeatedly "misled," to use a kind word, the American people on affairs domestic and foreign.
• He has proved to be incompetent in affairs domestic (New Orleans) and foreign ( Iraq and the battle against al-Qaida).
• He has sacrificed American employment (including the toleration of pension and benefit elimination) to increase overall productivity.
• He is ignorantly hostile to science and technological progress.
• He has tolerated or ignored one of the republic's oldest problems, corporate cheating in supplying the military in wartime.

Bo and Family

Credit: Tamara Reynolds

You'd have to be living in another country to not know who Bo Bice is. For the two of you who read this blog :D , Bo, an Alabama native, was the runner-up on the last season of American Idol. He seems to be a super nice guy. Southern rock is his thing, but he can sing ballads too, and he has perfect pitch. I LOVE it that a talented musician who spent years toiling away in honky tonks finally made it big.

Love the doggie pacifier!

His debut album, The Real Thing, will hit stores on Dec. 13.

75 Bands

There are supposed to be 75 bands suggested by this picture. There are actually more. Click here for a larger view.

All of the following bands are represented. If you want to try it yourself first, don't peek!









Alice in Chains, B52’s, Animals, Beach Boys, Bee Gees, Black Flag, Black Crowes, Blind Melon, Blondie, Blues Brothers, Blur, Byrds, Cake, Cars, Cornershop, Cowboy Junkies, Cranberries, Crowded house, Cypress Hill, Dead Kennedy’s, Deep Purple, Dinosaur Jr., Doors, Eagles, Eels, Eminem, Fish, Garbage, Gorillaz, Great White, Greenday, Guns ’n Roses, Hole, Iron Maiden, Jewel, Kiss, Korn, Led zeppelin, Living Colour, Lemonheads, Madonna, Manic Street Preachers, Matchbox 20, MC Hammer, Men at Work, Monkeys, New Kids on the Block, Nine Inch Nails, Pet Shop Boys, Pink, Pink Fairies, Police, Postal Service, Postman, Prince, Queen, Radiohead, Ratt, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rolling Stones, Roots, Scissor Sisters, Scorpions, Seal, Sex Pistols, Shadows, Silverspoon, Simply Red, Smashing Pumpkins, Spoon, Strokes, Subway Sect, Sugarplum Fairies, Talking Heads, Tatu, The Go-go's, Twisted Sister, U2, Yellowman, Wings, White Stripes, Whitesnake, White Zombie