Johnny Ramone died today. That name might not mean anything to the majority of you. That's OK.

Johnny Ramone was the guitarist for the Ramones, a punk rock band that got started in the '70s. His bandmates Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone have already passed, all way before their time.

So, I'm driving home and flipping through the radio stations, and I get to the local Michael W. Smith/Stephen Curtis Chapman/Amy Grant station, and the most unusual thing is playing: David Crowder!

If I had a radio station, of course, I'd just play David Crowder over and over. And when people bugged me about the repetition, I'd just write to him and tell him he needs to make another album quick because people are complaining about the repetition.

Evidently, the Beastie Boys think what I want is another reason not to listen to them. Really, I thought I already had quite enough of those. Short version: If you buy the new Beastie Boys CD and you live outside of the United States, you need to read that story before you put it in your computer.

I really don't want to write another this-is-where-I-was-when-I-first-heard-Teen-Spirit piece. It's too obvious. Every blogger under the age of 40 must be doing that today.

If you must know, I was in my bedroom in my teenage home in Fenton, Missouri. I was listening to 89.7, which was a commercial-less indie station with an incredibly weak signal, run by a local YMCA or some other similar community organization. I could only get it in certain parts of St. Louis, and to get it at home, my boombox had to be in the right place in my room.

I've been playing with MP3 jukebox solutions. Grind! looks perfect, except for the life of me I can't get it to work, which puts a bit of a damper on things. It acts like it's playing, but the sound never comes out of the sound card. The sound card works fine. The www-data account (Apache's user) has access to the sound card. The MP3 player software runs as www-data. It works fine when I log in and su into the www-data account. But when I hit the web page to control it, the music never plays.

It's not exactly new but I think
Beautiful Lumps of Coal by Plumb is overlooked, and not necessarily given a fair shake when it is noticed, so, by George, I'm going to review it. It's my website and I'll review six-month-old stuff if I want to.

Somehow I missed this. The new David Crowder Band release is Sept. 16. And the band's site is streaming a track a day until the album's release.

OK, I've got some questions for once.

So, the other day Gatermann and I were headed out for pizza--if you're ever in St. Louis and in the mood for pizza, Fortel's is your place--and he had the local alternateen station on the radio (105.7), and to my shock and amazement, they quit playing Bush and Linkin Park and Bush and Korn and Bush long enough to play an old Social Distortion song.

I remember just a couple of weeks ago, I was driving home from work and a song caught my attention on the radio. I was pretty sure I'd never heard it before, and given the nature of my two favorite radio stations, there was every possibility I'd never hear it again either. And the DJ never told me who it was.