Category Archives: Music

“Fresh Horses” by Garth Brooks

Garth Brooks has been retired for some time now in a suburb of Tulsa. There has been lots of Garth sitings in and around town and all the people I’ve talked to that have run into him describe him as totally unassuming and friendly. So I’m happy that he has retired. I suspect though that he has just a twinge of anxiety, not much, but just a little itch that he can’t scratch. He can rest easy now.”
I heard that just a few minutes ago he bust into his house with the big news:
“Hey Tricia darling, guess what, Yogi finally reviewed my Fresh Horses album from 1995 and he likes it! He gave it four stars of four!” “Yeah, he liked ALL the songs.” “I was so worried little Darlin.” “Now I can quit for good. My whole life has merely been preparation for this positive Yogi review. My life is fulfilled.”
“I know he’s a nerd twerp, and he bought the cd used, but he is cheap darling, he won’t buy my new ones so he bought an old one.” “Ah forget it Tricia, you just don’t get it. He couldn’t borrow the cd from a friend because he doesn’t have any friends.”
You cannot live in Oklahoma without loving Garth Brooks. He is a heck of an artist and a very generous person.

The Black Eyed Peas – “The End”

I don’t get a lot of hip-hop. I try every now and then on Sirius XM but I’m not really a hip-hop kind of guy. I’m more of an alternative rock – thrash metal – jazz kind of guy. But I finally gave in and purchased The Black Eyed Peas new CD “The End.” I may be the oldest, fattest, baldest guy to ever buy the CD and sign up for their fan club.

To me its not really hip-hop its more of techno pop type thing with heavily synthesized vocals and instruments. Hey if Peter Frampton and Cher can do it so can other people.

I love the beat. You can dance to it. You can, I can’t dance to anything, just ask Sweetie. I like it because most of my ipod listening is while I’m running and this is easy music to run with.

And the lyrics. Gotta love the lyrics. Even I can understand them, and they are so happy.

From “Party all the Time.”

If We Could Party All Night
And Sleep All Day
And Throw All Of My Problems Away-Ay-Ay
Eaaaasy
My Life Would Be Eaaasy
Life Would Be Eaaasy
Party All The Time [x7]
If If We Could Party Party Party (Heyy)
Make That Body Down
Ladies Don’t Stop It
Shake It Round & Round
Feel That Bass Bumpin
And Rock To The Beat
This Beat Is Steady Bumpin
They Jumpin Off Their Feet
Check It Out
Ladies Got Their Hands in The Air
Shake It Like You Just Don’t Care
Party It Down Like Yeah (Yeah)
Somebody Say Yeah (Yeah)

I just love these songs. They are just straightforward silly, no irony, just stuff to listen to.

The big single on this is “Boom Boom Pow”

Their web site is http://www.blackeyedpeas.com/

I rate this CD 4 stars out of 4.

Tip, buy the clean version at Walmart if you have kids. I bought mine at Target, I will not play it with a kid in the car.

Sunday Afternoon Running with The Eagles – Turkey Mountain

I went out for a run Sunday afternon. I was looking for something a little different so I went to the west side of the Arkansas River and started from the Turkey Mountain parking lot. I took my Garmin running GPS watch, my Ipod, Palm Treo PDA Cell Phone, and a Garmin Nuvi 500 crossover GPS to hunt geoaches with, as well as my digital camera. You could say I was fully instrumented. Hey, you wouldn’t take a Ferrari out on the track without a few instruments would you?

Also, its pretty risky to leave the house with just one GPSr is what I say.

I found two geocaches during the run. One was just 8 feet off the trail. The second was a couple hundred feet of the trail and involved a climb up a dry waterfall.

20090906_11

It was kind of ugly going up all those d*** rocks and double ugly coming down but at least I found it. I didn’t fall and get cuts, scratches and stuff such as that.

20090906_10

The rest of the run was a dream. I was running three light poles and walking one since it was so warm and there are no water fountains on this side of the river. My running friends tell me that that is “not real running.” I tell them to “jump in the lake.” Its movement and I kept it up for 5 miles. Its a nice trail, not much traffic so I just lose all sense of time and am totally in the present. I stopped and took a few pictures but it all just kind of morphs together in my head.

Turkey Mountain Run_Page000

I wasn’t playing Metallica since I wasn’t pushing myself so hard. I was playing the Eagles. Their more laid back stuff like “No More Walks in the Wood.” (Terrible news for a geocacher.)

What do you do to “Zone Out.” Tell me.

Green Day – “21st Century Breakdown” and Digressions


There are a few advantages to getting older. One is that you don’t have to be on the cutting edge of everything to be cool. In fact you don’t even have to be cool anymore. Uhh, truth is, you don’t have any choice, nothing you can do can make you cool. Cool! unless you happen to be married to somebody like that. Poor Sweetie.

Anyways, I was bee bopping through Target earlier this week checking out this and that and came to an end cap in the music section. There was a display that said “New Music.” It had Green Day CDs, “21st Century Breakdown.” So I said “cool”, bought it, and have been listening to it the last several days.

It surprised me. I think of Green Day as kind of punkish. Old punkers in their 40’s or so. They look the part. This CD, although it rocks is quite musical, in fact it is kind of “pop” in some tunes. It has 18 tracks and there is quite a variety here. I have listened to the whole thing a half dozen times and I’m not tired of it yet. The cd can rock but then it gets all melodic. I think that it is quite good.

Check out the bands web site here. It has cool stuff, except for the widgets bloggers use on our posts. None of their widgets work at all. Which is par for the course for band web sites.

The cd came out in May so its not like brand new, but I love it.

I give it a 3.5 stars out of 4. Which is good!

Anybody out there a Green Day fan? Tell us about it.

After I wrote this, I checked out the reviews. Turns out this cd is a rock opera in three parts. Imagine that, I had no idea. I don’t listen to lyrics, I cannot understand them anyway. (Drives Sweetie to the brink sometimes, this trait of mine!) The opera is all about how life was hard under George Bush. Ugh, I’m no W fan at all, but He’s gone folks. He is walking his dog in Dallas people. He is even carrying a pooper scooper! He is out of the picture. SO FOR THE LOVE OF PETE CAN’T I JUST LISTEN TO SOME MUSIC without some sort of political message. Ahhhhhhh!!! By the way, as a certified tax payer, and a certified Republican non fan of “W”, I’m willing to spend a little extra so that a former President of the United States of America doesn’t have to scoop his dog’s poop. Please!

Anybody else out there tired of the culture wars? What we can going to do about it? Class? Class?

Ripping Music

The Yogi family had big plans for today. I get every other Friday off these days and Sweetie and I were going to downtown for some business with an attorney, then lunch, while a baby sitter watched SuperPizzaBoy. Then we were going to go see G Force in the afternoon.

SPB had some digestive upset, severe digestive upset, so we cancelled the attorney and the baby sitter. I ran a couple errands including getting an estimate to repair a door handle on Sweetie’s care. ($78, I didn’t know they were allowed to charge that little.) I ran some books back to the library (all three of us together had a huge stack overdue). Then of course I found an opportunistic geocache.

So we couldn’t really go anywhere, SPB had to stay close, if you know what I mean. Sweetie ran two grocery runs. One for us, one for her Mother, who has broken her leg and although she is recovering nicely, is homebound for now. Later Sweetie is going to the gym. She has been burning the candle at both ends taking care of her Mother and taking care of SPB and me.

SPB is alternating between watching TV and reading. The kid is a championship reader. Here is an action shot of him reading.

SPB Reading

Meanwhile I started to rip music. The Yogi family is big into music SPB loves everything but hard rock. Sweetie loves all sorts of music and so do I. I have two ipods, a Nano that I run and exercise with and an Ipod Touch that does almost everything including play music. So I gathered up a bunch of cd’s and ripped them.

Ripping CD's

Everything from Metallica to Michael Jackson to his cousin Alan Jackson, Dixie Chicks, AC/DC, Lionel Richie, Mercy Me, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Miles Davis, Martina McBride, U2, Alecia Keys, Pearl Jam, Green Day, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shania Twain, Madonna, and of course, Oklahoma’s own Garth Brooks.

Most music already on my ipods was downloaded. A little bit different group there: Barenaked Ladies, Blink-182, Bride, Carrie Underwood, Cold War Kids, the Eagles, Gov’t Mule, Korn, the Killers, the Pastels, Patsy Cline, the Pixies, Red Fang, Santana, and Taylor Swift.

We have a bunch of classical and jazz music. I like listening to that while in the living sprawled out on the couch with a glass of wine in hand.

I can’t wait to listen to all this forgotten music!

Do you have an ipod or mp3 player? Do you use it? What kind of music do you like? Has the kind of music you listen to changed over the years. I wanna know!

Guitar Hero – Metallica

Great News Everybody! Especially those who got Guitar Hero for Christmas. And double good news for those who find the game FUN but the songs, well, they are good but … There is a Guitar Hero Metallica edition coming sometime in the first half in 2009. 28 Metallica Songs, 20 songs from their friends, a new “Expert+” mode”, and much much more.
Read about it here.

Wow, 2009 is already looking better than last year!
You don’t want to miss out. Go to Metallica.com to sign up for the email list so you can stay up with the news. Or, don’t worry, I’ll keep you posted.

The Radio City Christmas Spectacular


The Yogi family ventured downtown Tuesday afternoon to see the Radio City Christmas Spectacular at the BOK Center.

We saw why they call it a Spectacular, because it is. They had everything, the Nutcracker, Christmas Carols, Santa Claus (a bunch of Santa Clauses, he revealed the secret to why there are so many Santas floating around), a Christmas Pageant (complete with live critters, two camels, a donkey, and several sheep), ice skating (part of the thrust stage was a small ice rink), a bus tour of New York and of course the Rockettes.

The Rockettes were truly spectacular. The troupe is very fluid and precise. Their various routines are very intricate and they pulled them all of flawlessly at least to me. They did lots and lots of kicks. To the right, the left, and straight ahead. I had never seen so many legs flying around.

The special effects were also spectacular. The coordination between the video screens and the peformers on stage was unbelievable. One segment had a life size double decker tour bus on stage. Somehow, with the video screen behind the bus, it made it look like it was going on a nighttime tour of the lights of Manhattan.

The show is completely over the top in almost all respects. I loved it and recommend it highly.

We had an unexpected bonus of the show. We had bought nosebleed seats and we got a free upgrade to lower level, so it was a double upgrade. I don’t think the show would be too enjoyable from the cheap seats. We bought the tickets prior to finding out at the Carrie Underwood concert that the cheap seats are not worth having.

We had a great time. I rate the show as 4+ stars out of 4.