Earl Scruggs at WLYX - 1974 (C)Joe Spake -all rights reserved
I first heard Earl Scruggs playing on TV for Martha White Flour with long time partner Lester Flatt – The Flatt and Scruggs show came on on Saturday evenings in the 1950s and 1960s, I believe. Even though I was too young to really appreciate the music fully, I was glued to the old TV set. All these years later, that Martha White jingle is still top of mind.
Even though Earl’s progressive Bluegrass style created a milestone in American music, He went on to do some more progressive music with his sons in the Earl Scruggs Review in the mid 1970s. I met him, interviewed him, and he spent a lot of time with us at WLYX-FM, Southwestern College’s (now Rhodes) Radio Station (picture above). Continue reading →
For a while last year it looked like we might lose Delicious, the King of online bookmarking and my favorite curation tool, as owner Yahoo did some strategic re-arranging. Delicious was bought by the founders of Youtube and is now rocking on as good as ever.
So what is Delicious?
Think about how you arrange files on your computer: perhaps that MS Word document is filed in a sub-sub directory of my documents like C:\….\MyDocuments\business\correspondence\john_smith_ltr.doc. Delicious allows you to organize Internet content in the same way. If you find a blog post you want to save, you simply paste the link into delicious, assign one or more keywords and the article is saved to a specific URL – for example: http://delicious.com/joespake/socialmedia/ will take you to the articles I think are interesting enough to save. There are lots of possibilities for sharing with this simple format, and as a bonus, Delicious lets you generate an RSS feed for the sub-directory. Wanna subscribe to my social media saves? just go to http://www.delicious.com/v2/rss/joespake/socialmedia. Watch this screencast to see how easy Delicious is to use.
Maybe the bike lanes weren’t such a bad idea after all
Madison Ave, Midtown Memphis, with dedicated bike lanes
It was interesting to read in the Commercial Appeal last month that some of the businesses that opposed the bike lanes on Madison Avenue are now putting their energy into making Madison Avenue a better place – a street that is pedestrian, and bike friendly, safer and more beautiful – home to shops, restaurants, commerce and the arts, in a comfortable mainstream urban environment.
Mark Weber, one of the former opponents of dedicated bike lanes has started a website in support of bicycling on Madison. Weber, owner of the Mail Center at 1910 Madison, says that a number of Madison merchants are adopting a more positive attitude towards bike lanes and the Mayor’s plans to beautify the street; and that a major kickoff of the initiative will probably occur next spring with a “grand opening” of the bike lanes.
Two trips down Madison
I am been around Midtown most of my life, and I have always thought there was something special about Madison – from Stewart Brothers Hardware to Overton Square, Huey’s, Zinnie’s, the Lamplighter, Ardent, and all the businesses, eateries, and bars that have come and gone – there’s just something magical about Madison.
Before the milling, paving and re-striping, I did a windshield video of the stretch of Madison where the bike lanes were proposed:
And here is a video of the same route after Madison was repaved and lanes striped:
Of course, it was kind of a chilly day, early afternoon – maybe too chilly for most bikers. The wide lens I was using made it appear I was really speeding, but I was actually within the speed limit for the whole distance
I have high hopes for Madison being Midtown’s and Memphis’s showcase street for for urban aesthetics, sensible transportation, commerce, and residential living.
