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I listen almost exclusively to talk radio and music to which I’ve danced.  Of course there is the occasional southern rock band, or novelty record. Okay, lots of novelty records…but I digress.

WSKY, 97.3 FM, is a local News/Talk station in Gainesville, FL. Some of the local jocks had been using tunes by The Right Brothers as bumper music. Well one of them managed to get the the whole band (both of them) as guests on an afternoon show. They’re hilarious! In particular, you should listen to their song, “What About the Issues?” (free download)

They composed this song after getting several thousand emails, of which only two were interested in having an actual persuasive discussion — the rest were just as you might expect from the title. Their music seems to be varied in style: I would describe some of it as metal and some as country (go figure). These guys appear to be real musicians — not synthesizer pilots. They lyrics are what you might expect if Rush had had Neal Boortz writing their songs instead of Neil Pert — well, if Boortz had been introduced to them before Libertarianism had taken over his entire brain.

Come to think of it, I’d like to hear a collaboration by those two…

Dana, my wife, won a 6GB iPod Mini from a vendor in the trade show at The American Academy of Audiology (AAA) Conference last year. It’s still in the shrink wrap. Since she’s at AAA again, it seems that a year has slipped by without either of us making any use of it.  This can’t go on!

We’ve got plenty of music — about 9000 tracks ripped to FLAC. It’s all on the house server and it is available to the MythTV front-ends, but I’ve never figured out a good way to make it available to Dana’s computer. yeah, I could export it via SAMBA, but that’s just annoying.  So I’m looking into iTunes.

The house server is Gentoo Linux, so all it took was:

% emerge mt-daapd

Which makes me feel a little silly. Rhythmbox on my laptop now sees that system as an iTunes server, and when Dana gets home we’ll install iTunes on her Windows box and see what that does. Whee!

I’m not normally an American Idol fan.

But I’ve just gotta love Taylor Hicks. Not only does this guy have soul, but he’s got a WordPress blog!.  I certainly hope he does well (even though tonight’s performance was plagued by what I think was a poor song choice). There just aren’t enough true soulful blues atists producing new records. Yeah, I’m not sure if there can ever be enough, but that’s not the point.

If Taylor records an album, I’m gonna buy it.

Oh, and Pickler and McPhee had performances I enjoyed also. Maybe I’ll have to actually watch the show a bit.