Dio

I just heard that Ronnie James Dio, former front man of Black Sabbath after Ozzy left, and hard rock start under his own name with hits like 'Rainbow in the Dark' and 'Holy Diver' passed away. He was 67 and I started thinking of all the really big rock stars around that age that are still alive but won't be for much longer, especially since a lot of them got started in and survived the drug drenched 60's and 70's. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, Roger Waters and David Gilmour, Ray Manzerek, Grace Slick, Ozzy himself, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart, David Bowie and Lou Reed, Elton John, and last but definitely not least Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney...all born in the 40's or earlier. Heck, even my fave author of all time, Stephen King, was born in '47. All these jukebox heroes will be gone soon and all we'll have left is the music, but at least we'll have that.

The World is Falling Apart

Well, it's been awhile since I've been on here, was trying to cruise through April without getting too caught up in things since April usually turns out to be a crazy ass month, plus I had a lot of things to take care of in my real life. April came and went without too much incident apart from the usual crap, but no major school shooting or domestic terrorism at least. Last night I watched 'The Day After Tomorrow' and '2012' (fun!) and thought about all the natural disasters and crazy ass political/social turmoil going on around the world right now. We've had SEVERAL major earthquakes around the world, serious flooding, blizzards last winter (it's still snowing in some US states!), tornadoes, the HUGE environmental disaster still unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico that is the BP spill, the Iceland volcano which subsequently shut down Europe's airspace for a while and it hasn't fully recovered, our country going nuts over the new immigration laws passed in Arizona, the collapse of Greece's economy and riots and now deadly rioting in Thailand. In the movie '2012' as they lead up to that year starting in 2009, there's crap like this going on and it's a really strange coincidence. Do I think anything will actually happen on 12/21/12? No I do not. But, shit, something may happen before then and it will have nothing to do with the Mayans!

Earth Fights Back

We've only been through four months of this year and have seen more natural disasters than are seen in most years total! It started off with the unbelievable earthquake in Haiti (followed by others in Chile and China) and the earth seems downright unstable with a smaller quake at the Mexico-US border near Mexicali and the record ash spewing from the volcano in Iceland that practically shut down European airspace a while back. As El Nino diminishes, it's going out with a bang with tornadoes slamming into Mississippi a couple of weeks ago and this week serious flooding in Nashville and the SE. It's funny when quakes hit Haiti you can count on the Limbaugh's and Pat Robertson's of the world to say it's because of the sinful people there and the judgement of God. I haven't heard from them this week after tornadoes, floods and now the gigantic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico off Lousisiana. I guess it only works when it isn't the capital of Godland. I forgot to mention the piles of snow that fell this past winter. For us here in Texas, with El Nino diminishing, our green time that finally came back after years of drought will start to go away quicker and the heat will be back sooner than we want. I do wonder about good old Mother Nature though. Is she telling us something? 2012 is only a year and a half away and the movie depicted situations like this...it's like '2012' meets 'The Day After Tomorrow'....OH NO!!! You can't even run to hills in this scenario.