Oh, how I love VH1 Classic. Outside of an iPod shuffle, I don't know where else I could hear the following sequence of songs:

Morrissey : Sing Your Life
My Bloody Valentine : Soon
Spencer Davis Group : I'm a Man
REO Speedwagon : Roll With the Changes
Fleetwood Mac : Sara

Now, it's not that I actually want to hear REO Speedwagon (ever again), but the fact that a sequence like that can even happen makes me smile. And yes, they changed from one 'show' to another in the middle of that, but still: juxtaposition is magic.

The MBV video was a revelation as I didn't know they had done any - MTV would've only showed this on their stupid alternative ghetto show that I could never stay up for (midnight Sunday/Monday? stupid). It wasn't much of a video, just hazy overlayed shots of the band members playing, with the disembodied head of Kevin Shields singing in the bottom layers - hey, just like the song! But, the sound had been compressed for TV and came out even denser and punchier than the original. It's a shame I only had my little 4" TV speaker to hear it through. In honor, I will listen to Loveless on my iPod now, even though it's a very sleepy Friday AM.

This was taken somewhere around the town of Micro, NC (pop 474). If you're ever driving around the backroads of NC, you'll see that it's very common for a family to have an old abandoned house in the front of their property and a new house in the back. Even if the land is used for crops, the old houses stay.

Go read all about the etymology of the words Dickhead, Butthead, and Asshole.

If you like fish, raw or cooked, don't read this Straight Dope column.

Sigh.

We got a break from hurricane remnants today. For the first time in at least a week, the sun came out and the clouds disappeared. There were no tornado warnings or severe weather alerts, just pure blue sky and sun, and in the time since we last saw the sun here in North Carolina, Fall came.

So, instead of 85 and humid, it's 72 and dry. In fact, it's room temperature outside. So, I can turn off the A/C, open all the windows and enjoy the outside inside. (Is there a place that's always 75 and sunny? Do they need programmers?)

But the best part was that I got to put the top down on my beloved convertible for the first time in what feels like forever - and so did everyone else. I saw scads of Sebrings, multiple Miatas, many MR-2s, muchos Mustangs, a slew of Solaras, bunches of Beemers, a couple of Corvettes, a lone Lexus, and best of all, I saw a black 1957 Porsche Speedster 1500 convertible at the grocery store. It was so small and short I couldn't believe it was even street legal. The widshield couldn't have been more than 12 inches tall. Sweet.

I believe these are Coreopsis. They're planted along roadsides by the NC-DOT, and line both sides of the road on the 20 miles of my favorite Sunday drive: the mighty-pleasant ribbon of old-US 1 from Apex to Moncure. This batch was about twenty yards from a swollen and stinking deer carcass. I suffer so you can see flowers.

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