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GoGo Penguin "Necessary Fictions" The interplay between the drummers of GoGo Penguin and Mammal Hands is fascinating: Rob Turner, Jesse Barrett and Jon Scott. I consider all three drummers to be great, with fantastic sounds and grooves that give both trios a lot of character. I love the tracks where they play syncopated rhythms... microtextures or simply seem to be off-beat before returning to the correct tempo.

So many reason... Gershwin: Rhapsody In Blue, Second Rhapsody for Piano with Orchestra, Preludes, Unpublished Piano Works by Michael Tilson Thomas (1985) https://open.qobuz.com/album/alx83fnr8pexa Example: RIP MTT - a big influence on my early classical music exploration. I didn't have any classical listeners in my circle growing up. I found it on my own with the help of Columbia House record deals, and lots of CBS Masterworks recordings. This being one of my early purchases, so much more jazz inspired than I had heard before. I became a fan. Michael was on my short list of recordings to look for. I was lucky enough to move to the bay area for work and was able to see him in action at least a handful of times in the 90's. In the queue for today....

April 23, 1976, the Ramones released their debut album. Hey, ho, 50 years ago(!) As I snarked in 2016, "Sheee-it, some tiny insignificant punk rock album by a band you've never heard of dropped 40 years ago today. It sold poorly, probably because it didn't have any good songs on it." I know I don't have to explain the significance of the Ramones to the crowd of codgers that is head case. I will be lecturing some mostly uninterested zoomers on the subject.

This is going to be a long walk for fairly little payoff. Everyone knows the 1994 hit film Pulp Fiction, which made Samuel L Jackson a household name and revitalized the career of John Travolta. There's a scene where Quentin Tarantino has a cameo (as he likes to do) playing Jimmie Dimmick. Jimmy has three noteworthy traits: he's the person who the two main character seek out when they need to hide a corpse, his wife (never seen) is black, and he casually drops the N-word (something else Quentin likes to do.) That scene birth the phrase "Dead N-Word Storage" which has lived on on the internet since 1994. Certainly it's popular with people who were going to find a reason to say the N-word anyway, but even outside such circles, the phrase is a cultural touchstone. With that in mind, this meme came across my radar earlier: Even as far back as 1994, I thought Jimmy's kitchen looked very dated. That rage hood reeks of the 1970s. A few google searches later I learned that "Jimmie Dimmick's house in Pulp Fiction is located at 4145 Kraft Avenue, Studio City, California." The property is listed in Zillow and Redfin. It's far older than I'd have guessed, built in 1936. Also it's $2 million, but that's hardly batting an eye about these days. The place has been completely redone since 1994. Very deceptive photo that makes the kitchen look far larger than it actually is. Significantly more realistic shot. Note in both that the range hood (now an iconic screen-used prop) is there in all its glory. The hallway has a print of the Banksy work of the same name (which is so famous it has its own Wiki page.)

Earth Day Chicken Curry

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Beck will depress you and make it feel so damn good.

Finished the right channel today. Feedback as suggested by Justin. Bias servo as suggested by Kevin. Red smoke – Super Symmetrical mode. Green smoke – Zero Feedback mode.

Highs and lows.....sorry if TL;DR The highs: I love my neighborhood, and the people within. I maintain a website for the "Bunco Babes" here, a group of women who would get together monthly to socialize, play bunco...and drink. Since Karen passed, much of the organizing has dropped off. But the OG's of the babes invited me to a get-together; little did I know if was partially to thank me for the web site and congratulate my retirement. Pics below. A low with a little bit of high: we have a local "Buy Nothing" FB group, for free things. I have refurbed and donated computers perhaps a dozen times now. Gave two laptops away this weekend, one to a gent who has been out of work for almost 4 years because he was in an accident where a Mack truck blew a red light and slammed into him. He is now in somewhat constant discomfort or pain, and can't do much physically; insurance fights every step of the way. He even gets PTSD driving long trips.... Yet still, he does a lot of nice small things for others, and we shared our stories about that. Oh, yes: we had one FB friend in common, a wonderful woman with whom I used to work. She passed away from cancer and pneumonia complications recently; it turns out this is her distant cousin, and he didn't even know of her passing. The lower low: another laptop I gave to a woman who has an autistic son (two other kids too, one of whom has pretty high functioning autism). I volunteered to bring the laptop and a full docking station with monitor setup I had over. This amazing woman and her husband spend almost 24x7 watching her youngest, as he has non-verbal autism and also has a potentially deadly condition where his digestive tract will get blocked. Constant monitoring and care, advocating for him at hospital and doctor visits, etc. Hugs and tears resulted. They don't even have a place right now to set up the full monitor, so I told her I will come and help when they do find the space. You can see the strain, yet the strength all at once. Humans are such amazing creatures. But the two situations above point out how much the system works against so many, though!

We cannot get these 2SK109 and 2SK389 anymore, they are obsolete for a long time, all of them are fake from AliExpress.

RIP conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. He had the same kind of brain tumor as my brother who was named Thomas. I should listen to one of his Mahler symphonies because he was MTT's favorite composer. Cancer fucking sucks. ☹️😡 https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/ap-michael-tilson-thomas-renowned-conductor-and-composer-dies-at-81/

Traffic co-founder Dave Mason https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/music/2026/04/21/dave-mason-dead-traffic-cofounder/89727009007/

Just learned that Michael Kohlbecker died. In the 90s he made pounding hard trance on the then-mighty Harthouse label. I especially like the work did under the Eternal Basement name. I had a whole stack of Harthouse compilations in the mid 90s the EB tracks stuck out even amongst his legendary peers. Later, he'd go on to do ambient downtempo weirdness with a rotating crew of compatriots as the Saafi Brothers. While I outgrew the hard trance sound fairly quickly, the better Saafi tracks have stuck with me for decades. My favorite track by them is still this one: In classic SB fashion, it takes forever to get going and goes on far longer than it has any need to. With that said, I used to put it on whole I was cooking dinner in the 00s. I've mixed parts of it in to my radio show many times over the years. It's got the best shuffling bassline.

Iris Long, who helped steer early AIDS advocates into effective treatment activism that led to the development of lifesaving HIV meds, died April 4. She was 92. Long was a retired pharmaceutical chemist living in Queens, New York, when AIDS emerged as a global threat in the 1980s. Compelled to take action at a time when people couldn’t do research online and when most young AIDS activists knew little about pharmaceutical companies and drug development, Long shared her knowledge with activists in ACT UP New York, working directly with them on effective ways to pressure researchers to test and market lifesaving drugs. The title of a CBS news segment in 2013 illustrates her legacy: “Iris Long: How One Woman Saved Eight Million People.” https://www.poz.com/article/rip-iris-long-lifesaving-hiv-treatment-activist-ally

Oh, man.....RIP Mr. Kroft....also hits home here.... One of my most notable memories was being extremely drunk from a Friday night party, it went deep into Saturday and I remember watching HR Puffnstuf the next morning while still occasionally spitting up....good times.....🙄 Another one hitting home too: RIP Máire Brennan (phonetically pronounced and often written as Moya). Have enjoyed Clannad's music for many years.... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crm112y4jyzo