This month, I cut the cord, cancelled my Spectrum cable TV service, and switched to YouTube TV, which meant I needed a way to watch YTTV on, well, my TVs! There’s a dizzying array of devices for the cord-cutter (Roku, Apple TV, smart TV apps, and more), but since I’m already an Amazon Prime subscriber, I choose the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K.
music
A New Orleans Tricentennial Celebration with Harry Connick, Jr.
My wife and I last saw Harry Connick, Jr. when he came through Clearwater on his “Your Songs” tour back in 2010. Back in March he announced a short tour in June to celebrate the New Orleans Tricentennial. Clearwater was lucky to have two dates on the tour so I of course got us tickets to the second show at Ruth Eckerd Hall.
Like last time, we couldn’t remember if this was now the fifth or sixth time we’ve seen Harry in concert. I think this was #5 as I’m pretty sure we’ve seen him three times now here in Florida and twice when we still lived in Cleveland. No matter, every show has been amazing and this one was no exception. For just under two hours (with no intermission) Harry and the band entertained the audience with New Orleans-style jazz (including a jazz funeral with “When the Saints Go Marching In”) and other musical styles he’s played over his career (big band, gospel, funk, etc.). Familiar tunes included “We Are,” “Here Comes the Big Parade,” “Come By Me,” “What a Wonderful World,” “Yes We Can Can,” and a medley of songs from “When Harry Met Sally” including, of course, “It Had to be You” (a personal favorite). Like before he showed off his talents by not only singing and playing the piano, but playing the trumpet, tap dancing (!), and even playing the drums and two pianos during the encore number (“Big Chief”). Just incredible.
The entertainment wasn’t just the music, however. Harry is great with the crowd and the show is a nice mix of musical numbers and him talking (which gives the musicians a break). He spoke to a 9-year old kid in the front row and even brought him up on stage to play piano!
So it was another great show. I did find it funny that, despite the hall’s policy against photos and video recording, a lot of people were using their phones to take pictures and recording. Even funnier, they were all older folks. I joked to my wife “I wish these old people would put away their phones and enjoy the show!” 😀
Amazon Music
Now that I have an Amazon Echo in the house, I wanted to be able to play my music collection by just asking Alexa to do it. Since the Echo relies on the cloud, it can only play local music when it’s paired to a device as a speaker. So I could pair my iPhone or PC to it and play music from iTunes, but that’s so … manual! In order to say “Alexa, play some Oingo Boingo” and have her look at my own tracks instead of what’s available for free on Prime Music, those music files needed to be in Amazon’s cloud so I decided to try Amazon Music.
Prime subscribers can upload up to 250 tracks to their Amazon Music library for free, but I have about 20x that many songs so I paid the $24.99 for a year of the service, which increases the limit to 250,000 songs (a lot more than I have). This is in line with what Apple charges for iTunes Match but Google Music (which I’ve been using as just another cloud backup for my music library) is free up to 50,000 tracks. The Echo doesn’t work with Google Music though, obviously, as Amazon wants to keep you in their ecosystem, so I paid for the subscription, downloaded the app, and started uploading my library.
Amazon Echo
For Father’s Day I got an Amazon Echo, Amazon’s voice-activated smart home speaker. You may know it (her?) as Alexa. If you’ve followed the blog, or even just glanced at it, you know I love tech gadgets and am also no stranger to dabbling in home automation so the Echo has been a fun toy to play with so far.
Alton Brown Live! The Edible Inevitable Tour
My apologies to Alton Brown … apparently I am cursed when it comes to attending his live shows.
Back in 2009 I went to the “Good Eats Turns 10” live show in Atlanta. In that show was a trivia segment that had (pre-selected) people from the audience come up on stage. One of the participants was extremely annoying in her behavior which made for (I thought) an uncomfortable situation (and I think the rest of the audience did too).
Last night I took my daughter to Alton’s “Edible Inevitable” tour show in Tampa. Overall, we had a fantastic time, starting with an in-person meet-and-greet backstage with AB (got a few autographs, including on a photo of the three of us from 2004). The show was a lot of fun, a great blend of music (Alton playing guitar and even saxophone!), comedy, cooking information, food science, and larger-than-life experiments … everything you’d expect from the creator of “Good Eats.”
The only pall on the evening was the audience member Alton invited on-stage for his second experiment. I won’t spoil too much of the surprise but let’s just say it involves a super-sized Easy Bake oven. AB asked for volunteers and picked an older woman waving her scarf (“I’m picking you so you’ll stop that.”). Right from the start, something was wrong … the way she was acting, her snarky replies, etc. It didn’t seem like she was treating Alton with the respect he deserved (it is his show, after all!). I think the rest of the audience was in agreement as things got out of hand quickly with jokes and innuendos spoken by this lady that made me a little uncomfortable (this was supposed to be a family show, after all!). Clearly she had been drinking and I’m sure Alton was regretting his choice, but he did a good job keeping his cool, rolling with the punches, and kept the show moving.
After the show, I thought maybe she had been a plant and the whole scenario had been scripted/planned. I called my sister who had seen the show a few weeks earlier in Chicago, though, and she confirmed nothing like the sort had happened. Now, that’s not to say the show couldn’t have multiple plants but I’m pretty sure Alton was just picking random people and really had no idea what he was in for.
So, Mr. Brown, I apologize for last night and hope you still managed to have a good time here in Tampa. Thanks for an incredible evening!
WIJFR: Year Zero
Low-level entertainment lawyer Nick Carter thinks it’s a prank, not an alien encounter, when a redheaded mullah and a curvaceous nun show up at his office. But Frampton and Carly are highly advanced (if bumbling) extraterrestrials. The entire cosmos, they tell him, has been hopelessly hooked on American pop songs ever since “Year Zero” (1977 to us), resulting in the biggest copyright violation since the Big Bang and bankrupting the whole universe. Nick has just been tapped to clean up this mess before things get ugly. Thankfully, this unlikely galaxy-hopping hero does know a thing or two about copyright law. Now, with Carly and Frampton as his guides, Nick has forty-eight hours to save humanity – while hoping to wow the hot girl who lives down the hall from him.
If you took Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” mixed in a little of Patrick Tilley’s “Mission” and healthy doses of the RIAA, copyright law, and popular music, you’d probably end up with something close to what I just finished reading: “Year Zero” by Rob Reid.
Nick Carter is a New York entertainment lawyer who, when mistaken by visiting aliens for a different Nick Carter, gets pulled into an intergalactic paper chase of epic proportions. The entire universe has been freely copying and enjoying all of the Earth’s music production since it was discovered in 1977 (thanks to an episode of “Welcome Back, Kotter!”). The Refined League’s strict rules state that a culture’s laws pertaining to art are involatile and must be followed. Based on recent legal rulings (like the Jammie Thomas case), the cost for each infringing copy of a song is around $2,000 which means that the population of Earth is owed approximately all of the money in the known universe. Awesome though Earth’s music is, there are some members of the Refined League that aren’t too happy about going completely broke. So, if the human race were to say, accidentally destroy themselves, then how could they collect on what’s owed? It’s up to Nick (the lawyer, not the Backstreet Boy) and his new alien friends to figure out a way to save the Earth and the wealth of the universe.
Filled with comedy, music, technology, law, and pop culture references (from Zork to THX 1138), if you enjoy space/alien comedies (like H2GT2G) and dislike the record labels and overly broad copyright law, you’ll love “Year Zero.” And if you’re an IT geek like me, the Epilogue will be particularly funny.
GoalZero Rock Out portable speaker
The GoalZero Rock Out portable rechargeable speaker, which I received as a recent birthday present, is the latest addition to my solar-chargeable gadget collection.
The Rock Out unzips around its edges (like a suitcase) to reveal the on/off switch, mini-USB port for charging, audio input jack, and audio output cable. The other half contains a mesh pocket just the right size to hold your smartphone. Fire up your favorite music app, plug in the cable, turn on the speakers, zip up the package, and you’re ready for music on the go. A set of elastic straps along the back make it relatively easy to attach the Rock Out to the handlebars of your bike or just about anywhere. The sound quality is excellent and the speakers are loud, although there are no external volume controls: you have to use the volume on your phone which is a bit of a pain since it involves having to unzip the pouch to access the device (not an easy feat while riding a bike!).
While the Rock Out isn’t a formal part of our hurricane evacuation kit, the fact that it can be charged via the solar panels I already have means it will definitely come with us should that time ever come. For now, though, the Rock Out (plus iHeartRadio on my iPhone) is serving its primary purpose as an entertainment device on our family bike rides.
You kids and your music these days
Driving home with my daughter the other day I was “forced” to listen to 101.5, her current favorite radio station. I really don’t listen to the radio anymore (not since getting my first MP3 player in 2002 and then switching to the iPod in 2006 and discovering podcasts) but she’s at that tweener stage where listening to popular music on the radio is just something kids do to expand their musical horizons.
I just think it’s unfortunate that the current music she listens to is so bad. 🙂
They’re creepy and they’re kooky …
This afternoon we caught a matinee showing of the just-started US tour of “The Addams Family” musical at the Straz Center.
It was an enjoyable, funny show and our whole family had a good time watching the antics of the Addamses and the Beinekes. I didn’t find the music/songs to be as earworm-worthy as those from “Wicked” or “Rent” but they were still pretty good. As a comedy goes, though, I found myself laughing a lot! If the US tour is coming near you, I recommend you check out a showing.
Dayton: Day 2 (Go Flyers!)
The day started early again as we got up at 7am, grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel, and the headed out into the chilly, windy morning over to the University of Dayton Arena for rehearsal with the alumni band. Practice ended a few hours later after we rehearsed the pre-game and halftime shows with the student band on the football field Welcome Stadium.