what have we hear

freddie does elvis proud on “crazy little thing called love”

MY APOLOGIES, I AM LATE (STILL)with the promised set of articles on the Gold Standard Series of Elvis records. And a second, more controversial article offers a revealing look at a highly sought-after collectable with a dubious pedigree. I am still working on technical aspects of my blogs and still have obstacles in the path of having them up-to-date and running quickly and smoothly. So, here is…

an introduction to the punk note ideations of john yates

I WAS NOT A FAN OF PUNK ROCK in the 1970s and ’80s. I admired the political aspect of the punk movement in the UK and the anybody-can-be-in-a-band spirit, but I didn’t connect with most of the music. (I still don’t care for most of it but have loosened up a bit with age.) I also didn’t care for the artwork that adorned the sleeves and jackets of punk records, although I did admire the…

lonesome george, the pinta island tortoise, has the “perfect” extinction story

THE LAST OF THE PINTA ISLAND TORTOISES died in 2012. Known as Lonesome George, his story is “the perfect extinction story. It features a charismatic character with a recognizable face, an obvious villain, and the tireless efforts of naturalists. The population of the Pinta Island tortoise species was decimated by whalers hunting and eating them during the 19th century.

Zoologist József Vágvölgyi…

to keep my magic true, you must do one thing

HAL HAD IT MADE! He was young, handsome, and smart with a very good job as an accountant with a successful local company. But he had one weak spot: He liked to gamble. A lot. Unfortunately, he usually lost. A lot. To catch up with his creditors, he embezzled $500,000 from his employer, all of which he lost gambling. The company was due for a major audit and the examiners were coming the next day.

RAW STORY’S TOP STORIES newsletter arrived at 5:51 AM today. The headline that caught my attention was “Michael Cohen is writing a bombshell tell-all book on President Trump to be released before the election.” The story was attributed to Tom Boggioni (April 18, 2020), who acknowledged his source as the Daily Beast in his first paragraph. 1

That first paragraph states that “Michael Cohen is hard…

TO RAISE FUNDS FOR HIS AIDS CHARITY, Elton John sold his record collection through a Sotheby’s auction in 1993. The collection contained more than 70,000 items, including singles, albums, 8-track tapes, cassettes, and compact discs. Proceeds from the sale went to the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which remains an ongoing concern that has raised more than $400,000,000 over the past quarter-century.

SEVERAL WORDS ARE MISUSED with great consistently—and often great dexterity—on the internet. “Moot” is one of them. Given that it can be used as a noun, a verb, and an adjective, it’s not surprising that users get things mixed up and become misusers and even abusers. While its use as an adjective is what I want to address here, I might as well give you the whole shebang.

According to…

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CLIMATE ACTIVIST GRETA THUNBERGis back in the news but not in a manner that she is enjoying. According to the article “Trolls Force Artist to Cancel a Planned Greta Thunberg Mural in North Dakota” by Yessenia Funes for Gizmodo (February 13, 2020), local artist/photographer Shane Balkowitsch took portraits of Thunberg in October 2019 when she was visiting members of the Standing Rock Sioux…

WHILE THE PURPOSE OF THIS BLOG is to address the records that were released decades before most of the people who spend the most time on the internet were even born, I can look at a current topic every now and again. I suppose my fascination with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in not establishing some objective standards for eligibility and the equally obstinate Wikipediain insisting on “sources”…

SPOILER ALERT for record collectors! I am about to divulge information that could forever change the way you look at collectable records. And if you wheel and deal in old records, it might affect the way that you buy and sell those records. At least, it might change the way that you look at ads offering Elvis Gold Standard singles for sale, which seem to be a permanent part of the internet.

RCA…

“DID YOU LOVE ELVIS PRESLEY?” That was the question that popped up on Quora on Friday and that I ignored over the weekend. It seems kinda dumb but this morning it caught my attention again and I thought I’d check out whatever answers had been posted in the past few days. One answer from a young man signed in as Zeek Street stood out from the others:

“I wasn’t born in that time period and I’m not…