So we went to see Billy Bragg in Ottawa last night, eighteen years since the last time when I got the t-shirt and taught Bill suffleboard during a break in a sound check as I held the best table in the place all afternoon. I actually turned down free Sloan tickets a few days earlier as I learned …

Even though YouTube is drawing all the kids away from bloggging and into gawking, I like it. It is simple to use, provides me with access to most every video I can think of from my university days and even some sports events that I enjoy remembering. Its days, however, may be numbered …

Seeing as I have only see one person ever in my life using an iPod, I seriously discount claims to their importance. Yet, while this is not in the range of those two-wheel human transporter system thingies from 2002 - as gratuitously illustrated - I am still concerned as to their effect …

The whole concept of TGIF has been laid aside somewhat since the disco era. Something happened around the time the Smashing Pumpkins were being miserable. I think it was then because when the Smiths were miserable at least you could still dance to it even if you had to try a little too hard …

As time passes and you get older you forget you laughed a lot over bands like Foreigner and so you now think it is kind of cool to walk around the New York State Fair and listen to them. Apparently a lot of people are of the same mind. They were tight and from 500 feet looked pretty good …

I can hear them even now - whiff, whiff, whiff. The sound of my new back to school cords, junior high late 70s. Crisp now, they would weigh me down in that cold October rain waiting for the bus, absorbing like a new sponge technology. This is the first bad day in the calendar since February …

That is the name of the Billy Bragg compilation that came out this year: Must I Paint You A Picture?: The Essential Billy Bragg. I bought it the same time I bought the reissued version of Talking to the Taxman about Poetry that we played over and over on the trip to the salty coast last month …

I think this is the Europe a certain class of faith-based North Americans fear. This is Old Europe. This is the communalist who would lay his or her individuality down on the railway track abandoning all fiscal, ethical and political propriety for the glee of being something together. Consider …

Thankfully, I no longer have to worry about what the young kids are listening to as I have reached an age where I am confident that I have experienced throughout the years of my life the very apex of rockdom. Yet it is still disconcerting to read this:  •  “"It’s not trendy enough to do guitar …