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Things I should have known about Heart

I was ripping a couple of Heart CDs last night (filling in a hole in my collection that I’ve needed to fill for years), and I learned two interesting things about them that I really should have already known.

First, Heart and Steely Dan share at least one thing in common. They both started as relatively unknown bands, until in each case two fronting musicians joined the group. In both cases, the name of the band became associated with the two new members, even after the original members left and a completely different backing band (or in the case of Steely Dan, a rotating cast of professional session musicians) came in.

Second, speaking of original backing bands, this is the one that really surprised me. I was looking through Heart’s allmusic.com entry, and the names of some of the original band members looked familiar. I looked them up, and it turns out that three of them (Steve Fossen, Roger Fisher, and Michael Derosier) got together with a couple of guys from Sheriff (Freddy Curci and Steve DeMarchi) and formed a little group called Alias, which is one of my “pet” AOR bands (one that I still enjoy). Small world. 🙂

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Memory is a strange thing

In the category of the power of memory…

I just picked up a copy of a guilty pleasure from Second Spin (link invalid… according to my brief scan on archive.org, this company started shutting down in late February of 2008) on the cheap: Electric Youth by Debbie Gibson. I was getting ready to rip it just a few minutes ago, and something really weird happened. My eyes rested on the title of the opening track (”Who Loves Ya Baby?”), and in the space of about 2 seconds, my mind went from the title to a mental sound clip of the chorus to the smell of the ink used to print the liner notes for my old cassette copy (which was stolen along with the rest of my collection over 13 years ago).

I’ve heard before that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory, but I’ve never had it go “backwards” like that before. For whatever reason, that tape’s liner notes had a strong and distinct scent that none of my other tapes had, so I smelled it every time I opened up the case (which was REALLY often about 8th or 9th grade or so). I guess the association in my brain was stronger than I thought. 🙂

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Lead singer of Boston dead

If anyone in our group of friends is going to post about it, it would be me:

Boston lead singer found dead in his home (archived copy on archive.org)

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Video Picks – parody, tribute, or both?

Can a video be both parody and tribute all at the same time?

Scissor Sisters: Land of a Thousand Words

I’m not enough of a James Bond film fan to pick up all the references, I’m sure, but I got enough to really get a kick out of this video.

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WordPress 2.1.1 has dangerous hole

Important security announcement for WordPress users who have updated to version 2.1.1: the download file for 2.1.1 was apparently cracked to include a security exploit. If your WordPress site is running 2.1.1 and you obtained that version from any source other than the official subversion repository (using the svn command and a URL at svn.automattic.com), you apparently need to upgrade to 2.1.2 NOW. Follow the link for details.