past articles

28 May 06

Harry and the Potters: Promoters of Dental Hygiene And The Wizards Who Share Their Spinal Tap Moments With Dewey Decimal

By Sean Moeller Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Paul and Joe DeGeorge of Norwood, Mass., band Harry and the Potters make the spines of copies of Jane Eyre , Salem’s Lot and all those boring James Patterson books shake. They force a quiver out of all of those titles lining the young adult section, causing some of them to pop right out of the shelf and crash to the floor, bending over pages hurtfully until someone walks by and puts them back in their place. The DeGeorge’s aren’t hoodlums disrupting the quiet sanctuary where, at any given time during a school year, a teenager could be researching the migrating habits of the Monarch butterfly, the gross domestic product of Paraguay or getting into the National Geographic archives for impure reasons. They were invited. When they arrive, these librarians, with their thin, bony fingers and tiny spectacles must think, “What a fine looking pair of bookworms. They sure do dress the part of our normal patrons, those mindful of the silence that’s necessary for the harmonious meeting of the written word to the hungry mind. We’ve done a good thing by agreeing to let them play their little songs about Harry Potter for the youngsters.” They tote their keyboard, amps, guitar and PA system in through the front doors and the librarians must get a bit more squeamish. Those speakers are so big. The instruments look so menacing and racket-making. They don’t let on that they might be a little scared because there are 200 young kids there whose faces they’ve never seen in their library before. They might have library cards. They might not. They do have V-necked cardigan sweaters, black-rimmed glasses, fake tattoos for their foreheads and would wear T-shirts claiming, “I’d rather be at Hogwarts” should such T-shirts exist.more...

23 May 06

Vacation Essay Contest

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22 May 06

Essay Contest #3 Winners

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21 May 06

Drakkar Sauna: To Fear The Murder Ballad Is To Not Know The Murder Ballad

By Sean Moeller Free Daytrotter Session Songs (Don’t miss this page!) Do you have any idea what we’re drawn to, more than anything, in this crazy scam called living? It’s people that we can’t figure out. Really. It is. We’re enraptured by those daredevil types, the never do wells and the rapscallions who proudly let us believe that we will never know what they’ll do/think of/say/expose/tackle/champion next. The human crapshoot is a source of astonishment and jealousy when seen in another. We want to know how they can just go about their things so haphazardly, so wantonly and yet we secretly pronounce them the lucky ones. It’s the reason John Belushi was our guy. It’s the reason Anna Nicole Smith and Courtney Love are two of our national treasures, like it or not. It’s the reason why we hate Jessica Simpson so much. We’ve gone over the threshold – not just with the breathy abomination, but with Barry Bonds, Dr. Phil, Elvis, Oprah and Marilyn Monroe – to where we know so much about them that they’re useless to us anymore. The pilot light has blown out and we have no intention of slipping a match under there to get it firing again. We stop caring when we are all full up. It’s why the most enticing person in the room is the one who looks like they’re hiding something, the shadowy stranger or the vixen standing confidently in the corner. And in a way we never want to figure them out, only to have the make-believe ruined. Lawrence, Kansas two-some Drakkar Sauna is so enigmatic that I still know nothing about them even after spending an afternoon with them and last week conducting an e-mail interview with them both for inclusion here. It was to be the lowdown and what it amounts to is a couple of pages from an Abbott & Costello act or some twisted dialogue-heavy scene from a Neil Simon production.more...