I'll soon have music reviews of the new Propaghandi, Lagwagon, Echo & The Bunnymen, and Western Addiction to name but a few, but until then how about some random links to things I like.

First is the poem The Oldest Map With The Name America by Lucia Perillo. I like its style, its tone, the lines connecting humanity through time, and its praise of exploration large or small.

Next on the list is the poet Lew Welch. I've written about my appreciation of his poetry before. This time around I'm including a link to the poem After Anacreonwhich contains the lines from which I assume the band Guided By Voices arrived at their name.

One of the first sites that really got me excited about the internet around 1996 was one devoted to listing all of the samples and pop culture references from the Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique album. A version of that site still exists today so shake your rump on over there and find out what foundation the record was built upon. I've got some memories of days spent cruising around with Toby in his Olds listening to that album while we were scouting out new places to skate.

I won 27 cents playing Powerball yesterday on a $2 investment. I went in with some office mates and it was fun to daydream about becoming wealthy, but this dream of wealth can't match my childhood daydreams about Oak Island. If you don't want to click over to the several Oak Island sites available the story goes: kids find a depression in the ground under a tree. Branches in the tree look like they might have been used with a pulley so they start to dig under the tree for what could be buried pirate treasure. Every ten feet down they would find a layer of material until years later when they made it to 90 feet they found a stone inscribed with a code. They kept digging until The Money Pit flooded and people have been trying to find out its secret ever since. This story, which I probably caught of public television at some point in the 70's, fired up my imagination. I've yet to find a treasure, but I'm still always on the lookout for my own version of The Money Pit.

Maybe The Red Hand Gang should have investigated the island. They could have ganged up with the kid detectives from The Double McGuffin.

Since this has careened off into a mention of a kids show (which needs to be
released on DVD) and a kids movie I thought I'd mention a movie that used to be shown with regularity on the CBS Children's Film Festival: Hand In Hand. It was a British film from 1960 about a Roman Catholic boy's friendship with a Jewish girl. Their parents try to keep them apart, there's a rafting accident on a flooded river, and the boy thinks the girl has drowned. The story is told via flashback and even though I haven't seen it since I was a little boy it has stayed with me. Most people who've ever seen it say the same thing. Some enterprising company needs to bring this great film to DVD.