Some 'Splainin to Do

I think it is appropriate at this point to explain the title of my blog. It really came to me when I was being sucked back into this blogging thing by the RVB of DU. I got into Blogspot, and I wanted to set up a new account because I wanted to get away from all the baggage from my old Blog persona, the Renegaducator. I may have only posted 5 or 6 times at most as the Renegaducator, but they were intense, powerful posts, taking on the establishment on such issues as standardized testing, classroom discipline, and student body odor. It seemed prudent to make a clean break if I wanted to create a new persona.

So I thought it might be cool to be Weather Boy, the name Mike bestowed on me many years ago, when I pointed out the spot where a new rainbow was about to form. (Parlor tricks such as these have always been fun for me; when I was a camp counselor my campers were always astounded when I could tell the time within ten minutes by the position of the sun. ) Alas, the name "Weather Boy" was taken, so I couldn't work that into my title. I forget what other names I tried, but most of them were either uninspired or taken. It was then that I realized that no matter how cool or unique I think I am, there's always someone who has thought of things before I have. Throw that together with a love of Ben Folds and his skewed and gratuitously profane view of the world, and his song of the same title inspired my blog's name.

So now that the explanation is out of the way, I'll point your attention to the box to the right. I just recently discovered Last.fm, which allows music to be streamed into a blog. After some false starts, I was able to figure out how to embed the code and all that stuff, resulting in a playlist of some of my favorite music. If you click on specific tracks, they seem to only give 30 second samples, which might be a good thing. If you want to hear the entire songs, you'll need to let the application shuffle itself. I'll probably blog specifically about some of the artists, or at least some of those songs, at a later date.

Right now I want to draw your attention to Peter Mulvey (you can also go to his homepage petermulvey.com, but the MySpace page has his music streaming free.) I heard him on "In Tune By Ten" on MPBN a couple of summers ago, and was immediately impressed with his songwriting. Then he came to Maine with Chris Smither last summer or fall, and I was thinking about going. I never did go to that show, but I did look into his music further, where I found out he is an AMAZING guitarist. He came to the North Star Cafe in Portland last January, and I did make that show. The show was fantastic, and I got to talk with him for a few minutes after the show. He is a super nice guy. He will be playing the Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield this October 24th. I encourage you to check out "The Dreams" on my playlist, go check out his other music, watch and listen to him on YouTube, and if you like him, make your reservations at SMAC for October. You can thank me then.