I enjoy posting on WordPress, but haven’t felt like home here.  As a result, I am moving back over to the old blog.  I am more comfortable there.  Thanks to anybody who has changed my link on their site.  If you will be so kind as to do it again, that would rule.  If not, no worries. 

www.crowdedfrontyard.blogspot.com

 

Please begin reading this post by going here and reading this post first.

Thanks to Annie for pimping out my love for music, because that’s all I really have:  a love for music.  Annie is right…I am going to blog about this CD.  Right now.  Yep.  That’s right.  It doesn’t come out for another few months, but I have had a copy of it in my hands for the past month and a half or so.  Don’t ask how.  I will not give up my source.

I have blogged in the past about Third Day, specifically how I have been a fan since the very beginning of their career.  I am blessed to have a great friendship with Mac and he may or may not have been the person who gave me the CD.  Do with that what you will.  On to the CD  review.

I really try to put aside my personal feelings when listening to Third Day’s records.  When you know someone you tend to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to performance.  In my most unbiased opinion, this is the best record Third Day has made to date.  You get all the things you expect from a Third Day record, but there is something there this time that I haven’t heard before.  The guys seem to have a fire in their bellies and that fire manifests itself with some of the strongest songs they have written.  Mac seems to have been pushed vocally by producer Howard Benson and I love what I am hearing:  gutsy, impassioned performances.  This will be the part Annie mentioned about how rad the technical side of this record is.  The guys enlisted some major heavyweight talent to record, produce and mix “Revelation.”  The end result is a record that is mixed perfectly. The guitar parts jump out, the bass is fat and the drums are present.  Mac’s vocals sound better than ever.  The song that really jumps out at me is “Take Me to the Other Side.”  At least that’s what I think it is called.  I didn’t get a track listing on the copy I received.  This song is 3:17 of rock at it’s finest.  There is no fat at all and there is an amazing guitar solo played by the unbelievable Robert Randolph. Also, there is a song featuring Chris Daughtry on backing vocals and two with Lacey Mosley of Flyleaf.  Amazing.

I hope I have earned your listening trust in the past with artists like Daniel Bashta and Jason Morant.  Trust me.  If you were a Third Day fan but have fallen away for whatever reason, come on back.  This record is worth your money and time.  If you don’t like it, Annie will give you your money back!

I am ON the Atlanta Hawks bandwagon and I am proud to admit it.  I have watched more Hawks basketball in the past three days than I have in the past, oh, decade. I grew up playing tons of hoops and enjoyed watching the greats in college and the pros throughout my youth.  I was blessed to have seen Magic, Larry, Dr. J, Dominique, Michael and my favorite NBA player of all time, Charlie Barkley.  I got to see the Duke teams of the early 90’s that were amazing enough to beat a UNLV team that boasted the best starting 5 I had ever seen.  As I grew older and the Hawks more sucky, I drifted away from the NBA.  Every so often I would attempt to watch a game but was a little distracted by all the tatts and attitude.  I had become an old timer right before my very eyes!

Saturday I played a little golf while the fam was out of town and one of my foursome was attending the Hawks/Celtics game at Phillips that night.  I made a snide comment about the lameness that is the Atlanta Hawks and he said he had tickets and was looking forward to going.  Later that night, I sat on the couch with nothing on TV except the Hawks/Celtics game.  In HD.  I thought, why not?  I’ll watch for a minute and watch the Hawks get spanked like Colt Brennan vs. Marcus Howard in the Sugar Bowl (I know I used this exact synonym in the previous post, but dangit, it WORKS).  Before I knew it, I was DEEPLY involved in this game.  The Celtics tore through the regular season like a team that only had to show up to win the championship.  The Hawks went through the regular season with al kinds of problems.  But they made the playoffs for the first time in 8 years.  Guys, you have to seriously suck to not make the playoffs in the NBA.  EVERYBODY gets in.  But somehow the Squawks couldn’t make it.  For 8 years.  Let me put it this way…there has never been a playoff game in Phillips Arena.  Wow.

As the game wore on, I was flooded with memories of what I love about basketball:  the amazing athletes.  The beautiful arc of a jump shot falling through the net.  The emotion.  The momentum swings.  The fact that when I thought everything was lost, the Hawks took the mighty Celtics best shot and came back and beat them.  It was amazing.  I was yelling and hollering and talking trash to the Celtic players.  I typically talk trash to my kids while playing the Wii, so I was practiced up.  The words flowed like honey.  It was sweet.

The Hawks took that game and then the next one last night to tie up the series 2-2.  They head back to Boston tomorrow night for game 5 in a best of 7 series.  The next game will be in Atlanta Friday night.

This city is dying for a winner.  College football is king here, but if the Hawks or Falcons were to become strong franchises again, they would have Atlanta eating out of the palm of their hands.  It would be sweet.

The game will be on TNT tomorrow night at 8:30.  Check them out!

A few months back on my former blog, I wrote about ethanol being a bad alternative source for fuel. I didn’t think the backlash would start so soon, but have you been to the grocery store lately?  I mean, seriously.  Food prices are up 17% and part of the blame is ethanol based fuels. I know it’s not all because of ethanol based fuels, but a good chunk of it is.  The dollar is also getting slapped around like Colt Brennan vs. Marcus Howard in the Sugar Bowl.  If you were a farmer getting, say, $50 a truck for soybeans and you can grow corn and make $200, wouldn’t you get Jethro out on the tractor to plow up the soybeans while you go buy some corn seeds?  Me, too.  I am not a farmer, so I guarantee no accuracy on neither the price of soybeans nor the measure of purchase.  I seriously doubt people are buying and selling soybeans by the truckload.  Maybe they are.

The other issues that have been a little unsettling are the gas and water issues.  Let me state from the get-go that I do not think we are going to run out of water.  That being said, the fam is doing it’s darn well best to conserve water…wet the toothbrush quickly, turn off water…no sprinkling of the lawn…no filling up the bathtub for Q (we get one full pitcher of water at a time and take care of business)…you get the drift.  Gas is getting so expensive that we are starting to alter the way we drive.  People across the country and the world are doing their part to conserve gasoline (for economic AND environmental issues) and water (for fear of a limited supply).  And they are being rewarded how?  By having their prices raised to help cover the decline in use.  In California, residents are curtailing their driving to save gas and, since it is California, probably to help the environment.  And their reward?  The government is hiking their gas taxes to make up for the decline in use.  Aye, yi yi.

While I am at it, I have to say, I am really getting sick and tired of kids, adults, girls, etc. beating the hell out of each other and videotaping it for the world to see.  The line between reality and movie/fantasy is GONE.  I remember Les Beauchamp saying at camp years ago that there was a generation of kids being raised without strong parental guidance that would basically become predators.  He was abso-freaking-lutely right.  Violent video games, horror movies, the Internets and, in my opinion, the lack of fathers who give a damn have helped to create young people with rage in their hearts.  It sickens me to no end to watch the news and the stories we see have to deal with a teenage girl getting beat down by a bunch of redneck skanks.  And as I type this while watching the news, some dude videotaped himself forcing a toddler to take some bong hits.  Videotaped it!  We show the most shameful things to the world!  Not only have people lost their minds, they are taping it for the whole world to see!

We need a revolution.

The Dawgs are getting some major national love in regards to the upcoming football season.  I am a huge fan of all things UGA although I never attended a single class there.  My sister went there, but that really hasn’t had an impact on me.  I think the thing that hooked me was going dove hunting as a kid with my dad (I don’t hunt anymore, not that there is anything wrong with that).  When I was 9 we went hunting at my grandparents farm in Villa Rica and listened to a freshman named Herschel Walker run over Bill Bates en route to leading the Dawgs to the National Championship.  I have been hooked ever since.  My kids know all the players names (even Quinn!) and we await the upcoming season with great anticipation.  Why, we might just find a new HD big screen in the basement for just such an occasion.  I’m just sayin’.  The Dawgs will be on the tube A LOT this upcoming season, so that’s a reason.  And we can play the Wii on it, too.  Nan loves the Wii.

I must confess, however, that interspersed with the anticipation, I have some nervous thoughts as the Classic City Canines garner national attention in the national championship race.  We haven’t even gotten to summer practice yet and there are already preseason polls out.  I don’t want to be number one to start.  I want to be top 5, but not number 1.  I don’t know how many UGA fans I speak for in feeling this way, so I ask all the UGA fans:  What do you think?  How do you feel about the possibility of starting the season at the top?  Nowhere to go from there but down.  Pessimistic?  Yes.  I know.  I guard myself so the fall isn’t so hard if it happens.

A while back, Bill sent me an email link with information about a new movie coming out in the spring.  I blogged about it a while back.  It is a documentary style movie, with Ben Stein (“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”) asking professors and educators about creation vs. evolution.  When I went to the movie’s website, I signed up to receive email from them about the movie, reviews, when it would be coming out, etc.   Here, from the Relevant site is a nutshell of what the movie is about:

 The film opens by exposing severe cases of highly-qualified educators and professors at top universities who have been fired for mentioning that the evolution theory has some flaws. Top professors are denied tenure, editors fired, and journalists shunned for touching the subject even at its most innocuous levels. It continues, slowly peeling back the layers, revealing scientific and academic intolerants (many of them funded by our tax dollars) that have swiftly and aggressively silenced any dissent—either by Intelligent Design proponents or anyone questioning Darwin’s theory, a deliberate crushing of our freedom of inquiry.

It looks like an amazing movie.  I applaud Ben Stein for taking on this subject.  When “Expelled” comes to Marietta, let’s all go see it and go talk about it.

Major, major thanks to Clay Kirkland for sending me a link to Daniel Bashta’s site.  While I don’t know a lot about Daniel, I do know that he is an amazing musician.  If you go to his site, you can download his album FOR FREE.  And that is by his choosing.  Check him out if you get a minute.  You won’t be disappointed!

This would be a smart move on Apple’s part.  Rhapsody is selling strong with their 4.5 million song library.  If Apple would start this program and use it with the wonderful Ipod, it would be beautiful.  The only reason I didn’t get an Ipod was because I don’t want to listen to my old CD’s in MP3 form.  I wanted to try new music.  And Rhapsody scratches that itch.  Is my MP3 player as cool as an Ipod touch?  Not even close.  But it meets my greatest musical need and that is to be able to try out what is new, see if I like it and then either keep it or ditch it. 

If you want to check out the newest buzz bands, this is the way to go.  Rhapsody is the price of a new CD a month and if Apple gets going, I am sure it would be competitive.

Great news for the music fan.

Bin Laden is back!

You may not hear about this from the mainstream media, but it is worth reading.