I put my thoughts about it on Friendfeed as I was watching it, so I decided to also share it on my blog.

Respect Yourself by The Staple Singers. I don’t think a group headed by a senior citizen would be very popular nowadays. Nope, not at all.

Band Of Gold by Freda Payne. Her lip synching was really bad compared to the Staple Singers, but that’s OK because even with the huge hair, she is really cute. If they ever do a biopic of her in the next few years and don’t get Thandie Newton, the producers are dumb.

Have You Seen Her by The Chi-Lites. This song means early 70s to me. Sort of how California Dreaming means late 60s. The Afros bigger than the rest of the head is a bit distracting, even though I’m pretty sure I had one like that as a kid.

They were really smart and put a commercial for the Best of Soul Train DVD set on the show. They are talking directly to their audience.

I Gotcha by Joe Tex. I had never seen him before. He has the worst lip synching so far. The director has to rely on wide shots or with the camera behind him. The microphone isn’t anywhere near his mouth at times. This is wonderfully bad.

Fire and Water by Wilson Pickett. He has a full band behind him and I am almost positive they are playing live and he isn’t lip-synching. The dancers are going crazy during this song.

Slipping Into Darkness by War. Again, this is a full band and they are playing live. I wonder if the policy was bands get to play, while singers have to synch. Side note, the harmonica player is the first white person on the show so far.

Proud Mary by Ike & Tina Turner. This is definitely live. Damn, she was hot. And he may have been a drug-addled wife beater, but Ike had stage presence.

Power of Love by Joe Simon. I was never a big fan of this song. Joe is lip-synching and isn’t do much beyond that. He’s just standing there slowly swaying and singing. At least Joe Tex was jumping around and acting like a fool. Easily my least favorite part of the show so far.

From Now On by Lou Rawls. I’m not sure if he is lip synching or not but probably because the director isn’t going in tight on his face. He is ‘dancing’ only a little more than Joe Simon did in his segment, but this is Lou Rawls and he is making it work. This makes me even more disappointed in the Joe Simon segment.

You Make Me Feel Brand New by The Stylistics. I’m not sure why Comcast switched Lou Rawls and The Stylistics in their description, but I’m just glad we didn’t get rooked out of seeing them. I love this song and I’m pretty sure they are singing. The camera is spending a lot of time right on the faces of Airron Love and Russell Thompkins Jr. so if they are lip-synching, they are doing an excellent job.

Overall, it was a good way to spend 44 minutes on a slow Saturday afternoon.  9/10 is a great score. The only thing I would have gotten rid of would have been the Joe Simon section and replaced it with Barry White, but that’s just me.

The first song from their debut album ‘12 Jealous Roses’ is called ‘Pleasure’. The first two times the chorus was sung, it included the phrase “I smash my own bones just to hear them crack…”, which I thought was a great line.  However, on the third go around, that part of the chorus changed to “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die…” This was definitely a bit of a departure and I had never heard that line before.

Years later I found out the “shot a man in Reno” line came from ’Folsom Prison Blues’, and was written by Johnny Cash. When he was writing the song, he was trying to think of the worst possible reason for one person to kill another and just to watch someone else die was pretty much it.

I sought out a copy of ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ and I liked it. In fact, I liked it so much I bought the three CD set, ‘The Essential Johnny Cash (1955-1983)’, which quickly became one of my favorite collections of music. I compare all other country artists to Johnny Cash and if they don’t come close to his sound, then I don’t like them. Needless to say, I haven’t liked much country music that has come out since 1983 and I don’t feel bad about it at all.

While I am a huge fan of the earlier Johnny stuff, I respect what Rick Rubin brought to the table with the ‘American Recordings’. I know that ‘Hurt’ was the big hit of those sessions, but my favorite song of Older Johnny was ‘Ain’t No Grave’, which is Johnny Cash’s final studio recording and the music behind The Johnny Cash Project.

Here is Pleasure by The Dancing Hoods:

Here is Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash:

And here is Ain’t No Grave by Johnny Cash:

Image via Wikipedia

I thought the series finale of Lost was great. Exciting, touching, heartwrenching, and satisfying. For me, this ranks up there with the series finales of ‘Life On Mars (the original, I still haven’t seen the ending to the US series), The Shield, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse. In fact, it definitely makes my top five, I just have to think long and hard about which one it knocks out.

Go watch 'The Wire' instead.

Image via Wikipedia

This isn’t exactly a review because I couldn’t make it through the entire first episode of ‘Happy Town’. A lot of people might not get it, but I found the music derivative of ‘Eastwyck’ and ‘Desperate Housewives’ (two shows not really known for the backing music) and extremely distracting. On those brief occasions when I could block out the music, the dialog was filled with heavy exposition. The characters seemed like they were spouting out lines in a script instead of having conversations. After watching a show like ‘Treme‘ where everyone seemed to be actually talking with one another, this was painful at times. I finally had to tap out when the secret high school lovers were in the music room. I think they were talking about how life was too short or something, I know they had to give their entire family trees and the reasons behind their “Romeo and Juliet thing” when I realized life was too short to waste on a show I wasn’t liking at all.

The show wasn’t all bad. The locations and interior sets all looked very good. Some of the actors were good in their roles. MC Gainey, Steven Webber and Robert Wisdom all come to mind as people who were very good in the little that I saw of them. Of course they were all from three of my favorite shows (Lost, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The Wire), so they have built up some good will with me. Amy Acker and Sam Neill are both fine actors and might have developed interesting characters, but I didn’t see it. Unfortunately, none of the other actors or characters stood out as being particularly good or interesting, which is a shame because I wanted to like the show.

Happy Town wants to be a truly scary TV show and it may hit its stride after a couple of episodes, but I won’t know because unless I hear glowing reviews from a number of people I know, I won’t be watching any more of it.

We currently have two dogs living in our house. Lola is a short-haired pointer mix (with what we aren’t sure but possibly pit bull) who is without a doubt a Mama’s girl. If Patti is in the house, Lola is either right next to her or laying down somewhere keeping a watchful loving eye on her.

The other dog is Ruby, a full breed boxer with papers and everything. She was a gift from a grateful client to Patti. She is a good girl, but she’s not a Mama’s girl. If anything, she is Lola’s dog. As close as Lola stays to Patti, Ruby is usually even closer to Lola.

They are both good dogs, but neither of them is MY dog. Isabella was MY dog. Like Ruby, Izzy was a full breed boxer, but unlike Ruby, she was born is a plethora of health issues that caused her death shortly after her one year birthday. I have described her on this site as “a very good puppy with very bad genes” and I stand by that. However, more than just being a very good puppy, she is the one pet who is no longer with us that I miss the most.

Ruby, her successor but never her replacement, will sit next to me and snuggle in close when she wants to go to sleep. When I lay on the couch, Lola will climb up next to me and sleep behind my knees. These are both things that Izzy used to do, but with her it was different. With them, it seems like they have found a comfortable spot but with Izzy, it was like she wanted to be where she was most comfortable. Do you know what I mean?

The two dogs we have now will come up and greet me when I get home but the reaction I get is the same reaction everyone gets when they walk through the door. When Izzy greeted me, you could tell she was giving me a greeting that no one else got. Even on the days when she was at her most painful, when even the wind blowing on her caused discomfort, she would rush to be with me.

So even though I love both dogs, I miss MY dog.

Image via Wikipedia

My thoughts on St. Patrick’s Day are quite simple. If you refer to it as “Amateur Night for Drinking”, then most likely you are an asshole and have a drinking problem.’

Beyond that, I don’t get gifts or the day off, so I don’t care.

Image via Wikipedia

I have putting off writing this blog post for one reason or another (I’m not really sure to be perfectly honest with you) but something today the question has popped into my head once again: Does Gmail’s spam filter still work?

I went from getting one or two spam messages in my Inbox a month to my current state of several a day. If that wasn’t aggravating enough, legitimate email such PayPal notifications concerning automatic subscription withdrawals or daily notifications for the Road Crew web comic are going to the Spam folder, while emails from someone called ‘Pharmaceutical Sales Rep’ are getting through.

I would probably understand the Pharmaceutical Sales Rep message getting through if the subject line didn’t include “gets 77% off for all orders today” and SEVEN previous messages with the phrase “gets 77% off for all orders today” hadn’t just been sent straight to Spam.

Catching every piece of spam is tough, as is avoiding false positives, but both are happening at an ever increasing rate and I have to wonder if Google’s preoccupation with rolling out new things such as Wave, Voice and Buzz aren’t causing them to neglect perfecting their spam filter.

In the meantime, I just have to keep scrolling through offers for ED meds, Russian girls who want to meet me, overseas businessmen who have a totally legal proposition for me, hot Forex tips, offers on Acai Berry and Vertu (whatever in the hell that is) and of course, Master’s Degrees I can get (overnight) just to make sure that I don’t miss an email from PayPal telling me there is a problem with my account and my subscription has been automatically cancelled. Again.

UPDATE: Tomato. I can’t believe I forgot that one.
UPDATE 2: Garlic and lamb should also be on the list.

I’m pretty sure there may be at least one more, but I cannot remember it right now. I will update this post if I can remember what it was.

Does anyone have any recipes that doesn’t include any of these ingredients?

What should I eat afterwards? Any suggestions?