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  • Power outage…

    Power outage…

    I no longer have patience when there’s a power outage…

    Sorry I didn’t write my usual Friday Pop Rock Nation post last week. I was in the midst of a 38 hour power outage here in North Carolina. It started Thursday night at about 5:30pm. I was on the phone with my husband, Bill, who was in Indianapolis on business. He asked me how the weather was and I said it was very hot, but otherwise not bad. Within a couple of minutes after we hung up, the power went out. There were high winds and we had some rain, but otherwise it wasn’t a particularly impressive storm. Something major must have happened, though, because we didn’t have power again until about 8:30am Saturday morning. Little did I know, I would be spending the next 38 hours realizing how hard it is to entertain myself without access to my gadgets.

    The particular power outage was especially sucky for me because I was at home alone. I mean, I’ve spent plenty of nights alone and I wasn’t scared or anything; I think it just reminded me of how much I hate power outages. As a kid, I thought they were fun, but then I joined the Peace Corps and lived in Armenia for two years. In the mid 1990s, power outages were an every day occurrence for Armenians and Armenia Peace Corps Volunteers alike. I got used to reading by kerosene lamplight every night, but I can’t say I really enjoyed it. If there was one thing positive that came out of the lights being out this time, it’s that I had a Bose Sound Dock keeping me company.

    My Bose SoundDock
    My Bose SoundDock

    Bill presented me with this awesome gadget for Christmas 2012. He bought it for me because I like to sit out on the deck and drink beer while I listen to music. It’s cordless and has a rechargeable battery, which makes it handy for outdoor use. I had never used it during a power outage before, but boy did it come in handy this time.

    On Thursday night, I brought it into my office and popped in my iPod, which kept me entertained for a couple of hours while I hung out on Facebook on my phone. Some of the songs on my iPod are pretty funny. Despite the copious amount of white wine I drank last Thursday night while sitting alone in the dark, I distinctly recall getting excited when James Brown’s “I Got You (I Feel Good)” came on.

    Hearing that song takes me back to the days when I was a disc jockey at WLCX, the radio station on my college campus. I used to play this song a lot… but it was also a time when I discovered a lot of great music from obscure bands.

    I went to bed and woke up Friday morning. The weather was beautiful. The temperature had dropped. The power came on… and then three minutes later, it went out again. I spent most of the day trying to entertain myself without electricity, suddenly realizing how much I now depend on electronics to keep me happy. I actually cracked open a real book and read it in one sitting, not something I downloaded to my Kindle.

    At around 4:00pm, I started getting distinctly crabby. My phone was dead and my iPad was dying. The electricity was still out and I watched helplessly as the refrigerator got warmer and warmer and food started to spoil. I couldn’t even get the garage door open so I could go somewhere else for awhile. But then, I had yet another brain storm. I remembered the Bose Sound Dock, whose power was not exhausted during my little Thursday night jam session. I unplugged it and put my completely dead phone on it. A few minutes later, I was delighted to see that my phone had come back to life and my husband had posted on Facebook and called me to see if I was alright. He correctly surmised my phone was dead. I managed to squeeze a little more time out of my phone before the sound dock’s battery was also exhausted.

    By 9:00pm, Bill was home and we’d been powerless for well over 24 hours. Bill had come armed with pizza, but didn’t have his bag because it got left behind in transit from Charlotte, North Carolina. He was almost as cranky as I was, since he has a pretty low tolerance for being in the heat and the house had warmed up a bit. He started opening windows, which didn’t seem to help much. Then he pulled out a spare phone battery for me, telling me that it was an early birthday present (my birthday is Thursday). In a moment of sheer brilliance, he’d picked it up at a phone store at the Indianapolis airport. I can’t describe how delighted I was with this purchase, especially since I knew it would come in handy the next time we take a big trip somewhere. We went to bed early, still grumbling.

    Saturday morning, Bill was boiling water on his gas grill so we could at least have some coffee. Suddenly, I looked up and noticed one of my lamps was working. The power was finally back!

    It occurs to me after this experience that I’ve become really spoiled in my middle age. But with any luck, when we move to Texas at the end of next month, we’ll have better luck with electricity during storms. Either that, or we’ll finally invest in a generator.

  • It’s time for America’s Got Talent!

    It’s time for America’s Got Talent!

    It’s June! That means it’s time for America’s Got Talent!

    I have to confess that NBC’s general talent show, America’s Got Talent, is kind of a guilty pleasure for me. Generally speaking, I don’t like to watch talent shows. I don’t watch American Idol, X Factor, or The Voice. I did get into So You Think You Can Dance a few years ago, but lost interest in it. Frankly, even America’s Got Talent can get boring after awhile. It’s definitely no Star Search. However, early every summer, I am lured to America’s Got Talent like a moth to a flame because I love to watch the auditions. I missed the first episode last week because our TV was on the fritz. So I watched the premiere last night on NBC.com and I have to say, I was driven to laughs and tears all within the space of about 90 minutes.

    What I love about America’s Got Talent is that it provides an outlet for all those people who do really cool or interesting things and don’t otherwise have an outlet for their talents. I mean, there are several shows out there for singers and a couple for dancers, but on America’s Got Talent, you could literally see anything. And sometimes the failed auditions are more entertaining than the successful ones.


    Miu GaGa from Japan was unsuccessful, but a riot nonetheless!

    The first act in last week’s premiere was a guy who plays with rattlesnakes. He blew up a red balloon and goaded a very pissed off eastern diamondback rattlesnake into popping it while he held it between his lips. Like most everyone else watching this act, I was on the edge of my seat, almost as tense as the angry snake about to strike. Fortunately, the performer was successful in executing his trick and won a spot to Las Vegas. Later in the show, there was a guy named Special Head who suddenly won over a hostile audience when he apparently levitated right before their very eyes. Now, I know there’s got to be a trick to this, since I saw a couple of guys doing something similar when I was in Rome last month, but it was still a great act. And I would not have seen it on a show that is only about singing or dancing.


    David Weathers “the snake guy” and his rattlesnake wow the crowd…


    Special Head and his “uplifting” act…

    I also like this year’s two new judges, Heidi Klum and Mel B. (aka Scary Spice of the Spice Girls). I thought I would really miss the marvelous Sharon Osbourne, who had been judging the show since 2007 (the first year I watched). But I have to hand it to Heidi and Mel B. They were great! I especially enjoyed hearing Heidi Klum yodel (she’s surprisingly good at it). I also enjoy Howard Stern and Howie Mandel, who bring a lot of comic relief to the show and seem to have chemistry. Nick Cannon took over hosting duties from Jerry Springer a few years ago and he is a dynamite emcee. As much as I like Jerry, I think Nick Cannon has him beat in the charm department. He’s great at bolstering the crowd, whether it’s after an act that got X’ed or an act that won them over.


    Here’s Nick helping out Sponjetta Parrish in 2011… Watch what happens when Nick gets involved and Sponjetta gets X’ed. I bet Sponjetta will never forget that as long as she lives!


    Nick Cannon helps Tone the Chiefrocca whip the crowd into a frenzy… Everyone was loving it!

    So far, there have also been a couple of impressive singers. I have to admit, 47 year old Kentuckian Marty Brown’s singing actually brought me to tears…


    Not only is he a great singer, but he also has a sweet story. He managed to silence a rowdy crowd, too.


    10 year old Anna Christine has the voice of a 30 year old woman who’s been around the block a few times. She plays piano, too.

    I don’t know if I’ll keep watching until the winner is named, but I do really enjoy the audition phase of America’s Got Talent. The next audition show on America’s Got Talent airs tonight on NBC at 9:00 eastern time. Now that the TV is fixed, I will be watching!

  • Guilty pleasures

    Guilty pleasures

    Some songs are just plain guilty pleasures…

    I may lose what little street cred I ever had by admitting that I kind of like Paris Hilton’s minor hit song from 2006, “Stars Are Blind”. Like a lot of people, I scoffed when I heard Paris Hilton, formerly famous for being a beautiful heiress who made a sex tape, had made an album. I didn’t bother to listen to it when it was popular because I figured it would suck. Then one day, I ran across a parody video on YouTube…

    The parody was made by omovies and featured on YouTube during the summer of 2007, around the time Paris Hilton was serving time in a Los Angeles jail for reckless driving on a suspended license. I thought the parody was funny and I found that I kind of enjoyed the song’s reggae beat. It made me curious about the original, so I went looking for “Stars Are Blind” on YouTube.

    While I do think I like the parody better, mainly because the person singing it has a much better voice and the video is more fun to watch, I will confess that “Stars Are Blind” is not a bad effort at all. I’ve certainly heard much worse. I now count “Stars Are Blind” as one of my many guilty pleasures.

    It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Paris Hilton can sort of sing. Her mother, Kathy, was an actress back in the 70s and even tried out for the part of “Fake Jan” on The Brady Bunch Hour. Since this post is about guilty pleasures, I will confess that all things Brady, especially The Brady Bunch Hour, are guilty pleasures for me. Kathy Hilton lost the part of “fake” Jan Brady to Geri Reischl, who evidently has a better singing voice. Come to think of it, she also has a better singing voice than “Real Jan”, Eve Plumb. I’m sure that Kathy Hilton feels like she dodged a bullet by not being part of the pure weirdness that was The Brady Bunch Hour.


    You can hear “Fake Jan” sing on this clip from the truly bizarre The Brady Bunch Hour.

    You know who else was involved in the Brady Bunch Hour? Susan Buckner, famous for her role as “Patty Simcox” in the 1978 film, Grease, was one of the bizarre synchronized swimmers/divers featured on The Brady Bunch Hour. The Osmonds had ice skaters; The Bradys had Esther Williams like bathing beauties. And hey, former champion swimmer and movie star Esther Williams died yesterday, so this post is even a little bit topical!

    Pop music is full of guilty pleasure songs. Consider the early 1990s, when there were two very similar songs out…


    There was Tag Team’s “Whoomp There It Is”…


    And there was 95 South’s “Whoot There It Is”…

    They are sort of marginally different, I guess. I probably couldn’t tell the difference between the two unless I really concentrated. I will admit the chorus is very catchy, though. When these songs were popular, I was working as the cook at a church summer camp and one of the teenaged guys who worked as a dish washer used to sing these songs all the time. And now, they are guilty pleasures, though I don’t feel guilty about turning them off when they inevitably start to grate on my nerves.

    Then a few years later, the Baha Men came out with “Who Let The Dogs Out”, a song that I initially found kind of infectious but later got really sick of hearing. Maybe it’s because it sounds so much like either “Whoot There It Is” or “Whoomp There It Is”.

    I also got sick of “The Macarena”, though it was a guilty pleasure when I first heard it. It has a beat you can dance to; heck, the song is about a dance! How could you not love that? Every time I hear it, it reminds me of Istanbul, Turkey. I happened to be there on vacation in 1996 when this song apparently hit big. So instead of Spanish dancers, I think of Turks.


    I never did learn how to do The Macarena properly.

    You know what the ultimate guilty pleasure is? “MmmBop” by Hanson. I have to admit, I kind of like this song, even though it’s pure pop and consists of about four chords. This morning, someone on my Facebook said his wife actually rang off a phone call because “MmmBop” had come on the radio and she wanted to listen to it.


    I never did learn how to roller blade, either.

    Here’s an ironic twist. “The Macarena” is a song by Spanish singers that reminds me of Turkey. “MmmBop” is a song by adolescent Americans that reminds me of Spain. It happened to be very popular when I was visiting Barcelona in 1997, so now every time I hear it, I think of that city.

    I do like “good” music that has a message or is performed by someone with legitimate talent. But I have to admit a weakness for the bizarre, the inane, and the ridiculous. Most of the songs profiled in this post fit that description very well and qualify easily as guilty pleasures. And since it’s Friday, here’s another guilty pleasure song to kick off your weekend.