Posts by Alby

Guest post by Nathan Arizona Solos by even the most famous jazz musicians rarely get a huge national audience and become part of America's aural landscape. But that happened with…

One of the foulest MAGAts in Congress, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, lost his primary last week. His victorious opponent, dairy farmer Charlie Hatcher, is also a pro-Trump conservative, though…

Even with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's fondness for '50s vocal groups, it's rather surprising the Dells made it in. Formed as a doo-wop group by high school…

It sounds like the pitch for an SNL skit – RFK Jr. does a cooking show! Except, in the bizarro world we inhabit, it's real. Or, as some critics have…

The media loves to celebrate round-number anniversaries, even when nobody cares. The American semiquincentennial is a good example. Was anyone jazzed about celebrating it? Not that I could tell. Still,…

Guest post by Nathan Arizona There might be no better way to spend a lazy summer than on a tropical island where you can sit around filling buckets with sand,…

Guest post by Nathan Arizona His name was Stagolee or Stack Lee. Could have been Stag-A-Lee, Stackolee or Stag Lee. Maybe it was Stackerlee or Stack-O-Lee. But since Lloyd Price’s…

H/t to Joe Connor, who left a comment a couple of weeks ago mentioning the 1969 Atlantic City Pop Festival. It was the first I ever heard of it, and…

No matter how incompetent you think Trump's minions are, they're actually worse than that, and his State Department proved it the other day at a global AIDS conference in Brazil.…

Donald Trump finally got me to listen to Noah Kahan. The singer-songwriter from Vermont has steadily increased his audience since his first release in 2019, to the point that his…

Guest post by Nathan Arizona A teenage John Lennon used to keep his ears glued to the BBC waiting, like thousands of other British teens, for a skiffle tune called…

Here's a surprise: It turns out that ending the drug trade by blowing up individual boats that might be carrying cocaine is about as effective as eliminating malaria by swatting…

H/t Jonathan Tate. Delaware has joined 44 other states with reported cases of measles, a disease that had been eradicated in the U.S. in 2000. The state health department has…