Cliffs Riffs - Stuph n Nonsense

Thanks to Ted Bergin for use of some of his pictures - his are the good looking ones! The Preservers - Corrina, Ryne, Patrick, Jeremy. Full On Truth On The Interweb Disclaimer : For a variety of reasons, I love this band. They are talented beyond their years, they are from Lowell - my favorite town in Michigan,  and they are really nice human beings. BREAKING NEWS 10.6.17: You can purchase your own copy of Made With Soy and their first CD aptly titled "The Preservers" on Ryne Clarke's new website: Click Here To Go To RyneShyne .  I have enjoyed The Preservers live five times in the past year-ish. A very musical friend suggested that I lend them my ears (thanks for the heads up Lindsay Bredin - she told me about Emma Loo & Sam as well). The first set was played when they were all high school students - three of them about to become seniors and one a sophomore. Holy Waaa! they knocked me down with the complexity of their music and the delivery there...

Skyking - Caleb VanDyke, Jude Lolley, Jonas Quirin, and Nate Dill. A funny thing happened on the way to The Preservers launch party for their second CD last night: I had the pleasure of getting two ears full of these guys: Skyking . Here is my review of "Made With Soy" from The Preservers. The fun happened at the new location for LowellArts  on Main Street in sunny, downtown Lowell. (If you have not seen the new gallery/performance space there - prepare to be Mucho Impressed. It is flat out gorgeous and the flexibility designed into it makes it a veritable Swiss Army Knife of Art Galleries!) Skyking started warming up a couple minutes after Julie and I arrived. Bit me right in the ear just fooling around checking levels. Wait - What? Who are these guys? The warm up was just that - a teaser of the killer music these guys from Grand Haven can make. They put a permagrin on my face from about 4 bars into their seven song set. They played tow covers - Purple H...

"Fake News" is getting all kinds of play these days - from all sides of the political spectrum. Everyone's knickers are muy knotted at the suggestion that "the other side" is manipulating media in order to make points that may or may not be true. The word "News" contains the word "new" and is supposedly "information not previously known" or "newly received ....information" according to dictionary.com. Fake News ain't new information nor is it something not previously known. As soon as mankind figured out how to broadcast information to large groups of people, said information was "tweaked" by the spin doctors du jour to make a point. When printing was the sole medium for information dissemination, many times out right lies were printed - especially in the area of politics when it is beneficial to tweak how folks think. As technology has raced ahead so have the methods used to fake the news. I was not...

Just read a profile/interview on Tim Gill , a software multi-millionaire who has devoted the majority of his fortune to the fight for LGBT rights for over 20 years though the Gill Foundation . Gay marriage was a goal, but now that this has become law, he continues to work toward making equality a reality in all 50 states. As the article points out, what good does allowing a lesbian couple to marry do if either or both of them could lose their jobs simply by putting a picture of their partner on display where they work? (There are still laws in place designed to push back on gay marriage in many states.) The push for single payer health care - even if it was to be AN OPTION or an option that could be a part of a total health insurance package - needs a Tim Gill or maybe a better plan would be to have several Tim Gills. The beauty of what Gill did for the LGBT community was not simply that he threw a lot of money in the effort for equality. He put his logical, computer coding mind to w...