Davey Jones – Dead at 66
Monkees singer Davy Jones died Wednesday after suffering a heart attack. He was 66. Martin County, Florida’s Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed the news, first reported by TMZ. Authorities say they are investigating the circumstances surrounding his death.
Jones joined the Monkees in 1965 along with Michael Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, and Peter Tork. Their hits include “I’m a Believer,” “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” “Daydream Believer,” and “Last Train to Clarksville.”
Jones left the band in 1970, according to their website. He went on to land a solo hit, “Rainy Jane,” the next year, and also made several TV appearances, including a late-1971 episode of The Brady Bunch.
Jones reunited with Tork and Dolenz for a tour in the mid-1980s, and in 1987 they released a new record, Pool It.
Read MoreMatt Kenseth Wins an Explosive Daytona 500
DAYTONA BEACH, FLA. – Matt Kenseth survived rain, fire, engine overheating and a fast charging Dale Earnhardt Jr., to win the 54th running of the Daytona 500, his second victory in the Great American Race.
At the finish line it was Matt Kenseth, Dale Earnhardt Jr., and Greg Biffle. Denny Hamlin took 4th and Jeff Burton rounded out the top five. Paul Menard, Kevin Harvick, Carl Edwards, Joey Legano and Mark Martin filled in the top-ten.
Sunday rain pushed the race to Monday and then to late Monday. Drivers nerves were tweaked tighter than a Carolina wino when the race finely went off at 7:00 pm. One lap into the event five-time champ Jimmie Johnson ended up in the outside wall bringing out the first caution. It was a short race for Johnson.
The crash set the tone for the rest of the race as drivers threw caution to the wind and drove hard from flag to flag. The second caution came out on lap 13 when Ryan Newman looped his racecar in the middle of the pack. He was able to restart the car and get going.
Caution number 5 came out on lap 64 for debris on the track and the next on lap 81 when former champion Jeff Gordon exploded an engine going into turn three shattering his hopes for another Daytona win.
Caution 7 flew on lap 89 when Terry Labonte clipped Marcos Ambrose coming off turn 4.
Martin Truex Jr., was the leader at the halfway mark and took home the $200,000 bonus.
Clint Bowyer brought out the next caution on lap 129 when his car stalled in the second turn. On lap 157 David Stremme blew an engine and spun in front of a small pack of cars and was lucky to come through as the only victim.
On lap 157, with the race still under caution, Juan Pablo Montoya had mechanical issues on the backstretch and lost control of his race car. Montoya collided with a jet dryer working on cleaning debris up by the outer wall. The violent crash ruptured the jet-fuel cell which exploded in heavy flame.
The event brought the race to a complete stop as firefighters and safety crews quickly went to work to extinguish the fire and protect the racing surface. All in all the cleanup took nearly two hours to complete.
When the race resumed on lap 166 Matt Kenseth was the leader and for the next 34 laps nobody presented a serious challenge.
There were two more cautions in the closing laps including a multi-car mishap on lap 196 involving Tony Stewart, Dave Blaney, Ricky Stenhouse Jr., Landon Cassill, Kyle Busch, and Ryan Newman.
The race ended on a green-white-checker finish on lap 202 with Kenseth, Earnhardt Jr., and Greg Biffle, the top 3 cars.
Read MorePost Office Blues
This seems like a very American thing to do.
Your business is failing so what do you do. You start looking for way to cut costs. You look for ways to reduce payroll. You let people retire without replacing them. You look for operations that aren’t turning a profit and you cut them out like a cancer, forgetting what it might do to the patient.
It’s a challenge facing our Postal Service and the Postmaster has laid out his plan for survival. For the customer it will mean worse service for a higher cost.
In a plan right out of the General Motors playbook, the Postmaster General announced his five-year plan to rescue the Post Office. With red ink approaching 18 billion within three years nobody denies that something has to be done. But when you are talking about an institution as old as the USPS that is the glue that binds together rural America you can’t solve the problem with an ax. Delicate surgery is the name of the game.
The postmaster’s plan includes the following:
- Reduce payroll through attrition, leaving jobs unfilled when postal workers quit or retire.
- Halt the prefunding of its pension fund, which is obligated to pay these retirees, and tap the funds already contributed to cover current operating costs.
- Remove older employees from the Post Office’s own health plan, and dump them into the taxpayer-funded Medicare system instead.
- Shutter as many as 3,800 rural post offices and mail processing facilities.
- Eliminate Saturday mail delivery.
It’s a tactic seemingly learned from the U.S. Airline industries. Cut services and charge more for it. That hasn’t worked out all the great for the sky jockeys flown right into bankruptcy court.
I believe reducing services is not the way to go. If you reduce services you will have less peole using the them. I’m no math genius but I look at it like this.
The post office brings in around $67 billion right now which equates to about a 27% ($18 billion) operating loss. Seems like taking the cost of a stamp from $0.45 to $0.60 would go a long way to solving the problem. I’d kick in my $0.15 to save the American institution Ben Franklin put in place.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Budget deficits… now that’s an entirely different matter all together.
For more information regarding this government plan, visit – Save the Post Office.
Read MoreDaytona Delayed
So there I was, planning my day.
Coffee… check
Oatmeal… check
Pet the spotty dog… check
Morning meeting… check
Watch the race… rain
Watch the race… rain
watch the rain… more rain
Watch the race… Monday
Read MorePhysical Graffiti
Physical Graffiti is the sixth studio album by the British rock band, Led Zeppelin.
Without a doubt it is my favorite and shows a depth and diversity of this historic rock band not reached by any of the previous releases. Physical Graffiti was Led Zeppelin’s true coming of age and a masterpiece of rock that still stands today.
It released on February 24, 1975, a full two years after the previous album, Houses of the Holy. The long hiatus from recording was to give bassist John Paul Jones some time off from touring. Had circumstances been a bit different at the time, JPJ could’ve ended up choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral.
After the time off he returned to the band ready to record.
Jones reflects on this period:
I didn’t want to harm the group, but I didn’t want my family to fall apart either. We toured a huge amount in those early days. We were all very tired and under pressure and it just came to a head. When I first joined the band, I didn’t think it would go on for that long, two or three years perhaps, and then I’d carry on with my career as a musician and doing movie music.
The band returned to Headley Grange in January of ’74 and laid down eight tracks in short order.
Robert Plant talks about these tracks:
Some of the tracks we assembled in our own fashioned way of running through a track and realising before we knew it that we had stumbled on something completely different.
Because the eight tracks extended beyond the length of a conventional album, it was decided to include several unreleased songs which had been recorded during the sessions for previous Led Zeppelin albums. The instrumental “Bron-Yr-Aur” was recorded in July 1970 at Island Studios, London, for Led Zeppelin III. It was named after Bron-Yr-Aur, a cottage in Gwynedd, Wales where the members of Led Zeppelin spent time during the recording of Led Zeppelin III. “Night Flight” and “Boogie with Stu” were recorded at Headley Grange and “Down by the Seaside” at Island Studios, all for Led Zeppelin IV. “The Rover” and “Black Country Woman” were recorded at the same sessions as “D’yer Mak’er” at Stargroves using the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio in May 1972. “Houses of the Holy” was also recorded in May 1972, but at Olympic Studios. The group’s fifth album,Houses of the Holy, took its title from this song despite the decision not to include the song on that album.
Jimmy Page explains:
We had more material than the required 40-odd minutes for one album. We had enough material for one and a half LPs, so we figured let’s put out a double and use some of the material we had done previously but never released. It seemed like a good time to do that sort of thing, release tracks like “Boogie With Stu” which we normally wouldn’t be able to do… This time we figured it was better to stretch out than to leave off.
Within two weeks of release Physical Graffiti was at the top of the US Billboard chart. It is 16x Platinum in the United States.
By comparison, Led Zeppelin’s next album, Presence was a commercial failure at 3x Platinum and a peak at #1 for two weeks on the U.S. Charts after which it was quickly replaced by The Rolling Stones, Black and Blue.
It’s hard to fathom a “two week, #1 album” as a failure but Physical Graffiti set the bar very high for Zeppelin.
At 37 years old Graffiti stands the test of time and still gets play in this old rock and roller’s music machine.
The album cover is a photographic image of #96 & #98 St. Mark’s place in Manhattan’s East Village.
Read MoreMickey Mills
Struggling writer on the Harley Davidson of life.
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