Saturday Song Share: Roseanne Cash - The World Unseen

A love letter to her dead father, the great Johnny Cash.  Simply beautiful.

Tom Wrigglesworth is Aaron Rodgers

An English comic looks remarkably like the Packers' all-pro quarterback.  The attached video (more cute than funny) looks at his interactions with folks in Green Bay, complete with a stop at the famous Pancake Place:

New Concept - The Mass Mob

The concept of the flash mob - where a group comes together, seemingly by random, to perform some kind of dance, song, or skit - has been all the rage on social media.  If anything, they have been kind of overblown and over done.  All of which makes the next story so interesting.

Out of Detroit comes the story of Catholics coming together to form a "Mass Mob" (or a "Flash Mass," I guess).  The group leverages social media to select a church and a mass time, and then shows up a couple of thousand strong to fill the church and turn any random Sunday into a Christmas or Easter mass.

For those that participate, they get to tour the churches of the local Detroit area; taking in their beautiful artwork and architecture.  For the regular parishioners, they get to feel that feeling that only comes from being a part of a massive and motivated faith community.

Let's be honest - churches are dying, parishes are closing, and mass times curtailed all because people just don't go to church anymore.  Unfortunately, it becomes a vicious cycle as it is the community of the people attending the mass that make the mass - the voice singing in the choir, the person handing out communion, the woman next to you shaking your hand at the sign or peace, the whole of the building praying for you.  Without people, there is no mass, and another church shutters its doors.

The mass mob is attempting to change that.  Can they be successful?  Ugh.  Theirs is a long and uphill battle.  But it is a fight they are undertaking, and I pray that they're able to inspire folks to take that step and come back to mass.

Foo Fighters - The Last Rock and Roll Band?

Attached is the latest single from Foo Fighters:



Some thoughts about what we just heard:

• Check out that bridge!  Sounds like vintage Heart, with a touch of Stevie Wonder's "Superstition" for good measure
• Lyrics are really strong here - love the story
• Check out the Rick Nielsen camo at the 3:00 mark.  I love that so bleeping much.  
• How many guitars does one band need?  Exactly!

Nobody is making music like this anymore, at least not at this quality.   Music like this was part of what I grew up listening to - solid singing and music, built around a simple guitar riff as the cornerstone.

The guitar riff - man, how I miss that.

I can't wait to hear the rest of the album and see who the cameo guests are.  If anything like the first effort here, I don't think I'll be disappointed.

Augusta Air Passengers Comforted by Therapy Dogs

I bumped into this article last week, which talks about a program at the Augusta, SC regional airport in which therapy dogs roam the airport with handlers.  The goal is to calm those that may need calming, and, in the event you haven't traveled lately, we ALL need calming.  And there is nothing better than the sight and engagement with a friendly dog to immediately change one's mood and perspective.

It truly is amazing what dogs do for us.  The whole concept of therapy dogs is truly fantastic, and what they do to make lives of people substantively better is truly awesome.  Working dogs, be they military dogs, police dogs, or hunting dogs, do their jobs better than humans or machines ever could.  Finally, the health benefits of having a dog in terms of stress and blood pressure reduction are renown.

A favorite story that I bumped into many years back (and one in which I can neither find nor attribute) goes back to a Native American legend in which the Great Spirit has created the world, and all of the people and animals in it.  In his design, the Great Spirit found it necessary to separate people and animals, and He ran a river between the two groups to keep them separated forever.  But just as the division was almost complete, dog jumped over the river and stood alongside man.

If you're ever flying through the Augusta airport and encounter one of these dogs, see if you don't feel if that Native American legend was right.    

Technology and the Loss of Humanity

When's the last time you called an obscure friend?  Odds are that you do communicate, but when done it is through a social network or perhaps maybe a text.  With all of the other easier and less intimate methods of communication, why mess with something as clunky as actually talking to someone?

And this is spoken as a Gen Xer.  I'm not a digital native.  Indeed, we have an entire generation of people coming up that prefer these cursory, limited, and shallow communications.  Oh, sure, digital means have afforded many more relationships, and I've not lost the irony of this rant occurring on a blog.  However, it seems quantity has been traded for quality.

What can be done to deepen human relationships in the digital age?  I don't have answers.  But I do have a hell of a lot of Facebook friends.  

Very few of whom I'd like to call.

NFL and Breast Cancer Awareness Month

I need to make a confession.  For a number of years, it has bugged me what the NFL was doing with Breast Cancer Awareness month.  It seems like everywhere one looked, there was some kind of pink thing here, or some kind of breast cancer event there, and the NFL looked like it was just doing a "me too" to take advantage of the meme.

And that is truly what I felt it was - a meme.  

I mean really.  That breast cancer stuff is everywhere.  There are so many other maladies in life - why the concentration on breast cancer?  To me, it all appeared to be overblown marketing, and the NFL appeared guilty of piling on.

And then my wife got breast cancer.

With the diagnosis has come knowledge - of the prevalence of the disease, of how many people have been impacted, and the resulting magnitude of it all.  I could not have been more wrong, and I feel like maybe I'm paying some kind of karma penalty for my narrow and incorrect opinion.

So color me wrong.  Color me a fan of what the NFL is doing.  But more than that, color me pink.

Saturday Song Share : The Waterboys - Fisherman's Blues

In honor of my Irish cousin's birthday today comes one from the best Irish band that isn't U2



Happy birthday, Murphy.  I hope we get to see each other sometime soon.