soundboard de cheevo

There was no need to wait in endless Atlanta traffic to seek entertainment this past week as entertainment came to us. The amazing Audrey Rose, star of her mom Angela's blog , came over to Clare's house with her parents while my sister and I were in town for a visit. Not only can she walk and talk, but this 15-month-old has also mastered the art of the grown folks spoon and showed us her skills with strawberries, chocolate shavings and vanilla ice cream. Like Angela said about Audrey eyeing a bacon, egg and cheese biscuit at the ripe old age of 3 months , Audrey knows a good thing when she sees it. More flickr foto fun is right here.

The Sound of Birmingham show was actually better than I anticipated. The turnout was incredible, the largest crowd Bottletree has had yet, and the performances were fantastic. Ralph "Soul" Jackson was my favorite of the night. He had the crowd wrapped around his little finger and at one point there wasn't a single member of the audience not shaking it, whatever it was. The previously mentioned Sara Leah Miller , who is our hometown girl who helped make the show and album happen, not only got up on stage and shook it five times like the song said, but also sang part of Roscoe's Robinson's "If I had a Hammer." The good energy was contagious and it was one of those moments, like an amusement park ride, where you just can't help but smile. Thanks to Sara, John Ciba and the folks from Bottletree for putting on the best local show most of us have seen in a long time.

Driving to a big box office supply store holds about as much excitment as waiting in line at the DMV so I decided against buying a paper shreader. There's no place to put it in my cramped office/guest room anyway. Why buy a paper shreader when a mini Smokey Joe, a bottle of lighter fluid and a match can do the same thing with much more drama. See ya financial statements, until the next pyrotechnic display that is.

Roy, left, with Stoltze design head honcho, Cliff Stoltze at a recent type conference. Photo by Eben Sorkin (reposted with permission) - - Roy Burns is one of my best friends who lives in Boston. I have known him since my freshman year in college. When Roy used to design CD covers for in his Graphic Design courses, I doubt he ever thought that someday he would design the greatest hits album cover for America's most obnoxious hair metal band. We had a phone conversation about it last Christmas day that went something like this: Roy: "You won't believe whose greatest hits album cover I'm designing." Me: "Barry Manilow" Roy: "No, worse." Me: "Motley Crue" Roy: "WORSE!" Me: "Poison?" Roy: "YES!" Roy and I share a lot of musical tastes in common. Two of our exceptions have been '80s hair metal and new Nashville country so I think it's kind of funny that this high profile job features one of thos...

The final design.

THE BIRMINGHAM SOUND: THE SOUL OF NEAL HEMPHILL VOL. 1 - CD RELEASE - SATURDAY, AUGUST 19 BOTTLETREE CAFE 3719 3rd Ave. S Birmingham, Ala. 35222 with performances by: The Legendary Roscoe Robinson Ralph "Soul" Jackson Roger Hallmark and special appearances by many of the original Sound of Birmingham/ Hemphill Studios members DJs Brian Poust (Atlanta) MLE (Chicago) and John Ciba (Chicago) (Photo and poster design by Ryan Russell .)

(This article was written by Chicago-based writer and music aficionado John Ciba, who was the main organizer of this project. This article is lengthy, but worth the read as it uncovers a very interesting and little known chapter in music history.) Birmingham Sound: The Soul of Neal Hemphill celebrates the body of work recorded at the original Sound of Birmingham and Hemphill Studios in the working-class suburb of Midfield, AL. Although the material from these studios crossed all genres this compilation focuses on the soul music produced from the mid '60s till the late '70s. Neal Hemphill was a plumber by trade with a deep passion for music. He opened a studio in the basement of his plumbing shop to record local and touring acts and named it the Sound of Birmingham. The one difference between Neal's studio and the others was that he welcomed all kinds of music by anybody willing to come in and play him a song. Some of that young talent was songwriters and performers like F...

Sid Vance with bronzed hero, Ted Kluszewski, a Reds first baseman hall-of-famer from 1947-57. Great baseball, great food and crappy customer service are what I will take away from my trip to Cincinnati. I am not sure what was so strange about Cincinnati and its Kentucky suburbs. We had some real twilight zone moments dealing with service industry people and their rude, idiotic ways, but it became funny after a while. They weren't going to rain on our vacation parade. Sid, Clare and I scored some excellent souveniers, got down with Deutschland at the Goetta Festival and at a German brewhouse afterwards and most importantly saw two great games in the Red's new ballpark. The trip home was pure madness as a wreck involving three semis shut I-75 down completely for four hours in southern Kentucky. The detour we took getting around the wreck took about that long making our total travel time back to Atlanta twelve hours. With good music and great conversation, we pressed on toward At...

The Roebling bridge is one of the oldest in the country. It was built in 1869 as a model for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Staying cool does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with looking cool as this photo illustrates.

One well-packed Camry, three passengers and 10 tickets to the Reds/Braves series and here we have landed, not quite in Ohio, but across the river in Covington, Kentucky. After a sun-drenched, beer-soaked Saturday, I don't have a lot of creative writing juices flowing, but I will say that Cincinnati has the nicest baseball park I have ever been to, the new and lamely-named, Great American Ballpark. My best friend Clare, her dad Sid and I got to see Ken Griffey Jr. live and in person today as the Reds beat the Braves for the second time in the series. It's as hot up here as it in Birmingham, but that doesn't stop locals from scarfing up heavy German fare, like peppers and sausages, at the ball park. Across the river is the Goetta Festival (pronounced "Getta" -- rhymes with Jetta), a celebration honoring the strange combination of sausage and raw oats. It sounds absolutely disgusting, but is actually wonderful -- more so on a cold winter morning when Clare's gra...

I don't expect anyone who didn't go to University of Montevallo to care about my new photo blog, but I spent a long time working on it and today, after two months of collecting over 200 photos from friends in attendance, it is done. Also it's some nice documentation of my aforementioned former band, Every Alice on Earth, back together for the first time in six years and who knows how many more years will pass before we play again. Orr Park is the excellent city park in Montevallo. It's like a tiny version of Central Park with winding paths, large grassy pastures a creek that runs through it. The irony in that similarity is that the famous Holmestead brothers designed both Central Park and the University of Montevallo campus. To add to the beauty of the park, an artist named Tim Tingle has carved Nordic-looking faces into some of the dead, but still standing trees. He started this process in the early 1990s, close to the time I started school there, but his carvings loo...

This is a good city. It has an ugly past caught on camera and written about in history books; unfortunately that past has become fixated in the minds of many, even those who didn't even live during the Civil Rights movement. Deadly racial violence has happened in Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York City, but in the minds of the big city elite, those mentalities thrive and are encouraged in Alabama and much of the south. I'm not saying the mentality is totally unjustified as it's definitely been perpetuated in worlds of news and entertainment for decades, but isn't making blind judgments about a place infamous for making blind judgments a bit hypocritical? I didn't plan to be here when I turned 30. There are still times when I get fed up with Birmingham, but the place has grown on me and after my parents moved away from the town where I grew up, Auburn, I adopted this city as home and for the most part, I have been very happy and that is why I stay. Good shows an...

- - Step 1: Call the 1-800 number on the back of your credit card and cancel your account Step 2: Standing over the sink, hold the card at a downward angle and light it. It will might not officially catch on fire, but it will burn. Step 3: Enjoy - - - Back in the early '80s there was this idiotic toy called Shrinky Dinks . You colored these little characters, such as Smurfs, with pencils and then got someone's mom to bake them in the oven for 20 minutes. Unamazingly, they turned into this tiny little hardened pieces of plastic and then you were supposed to play with them. Once the baking action was over so was the interest in Shrinky Dinks for everyone involved. I relived a Shrinky Dink moment this past week and this time it was fun. It took a lot of butane to get it completely warped on one side. My favorite part was calling Chase and speaking to someone in India (of course) who wanted to know, in broken English, why I was cancelling the account and when I said I was trying...

After my 48 hour nanny job to three kids this past week I have a new-found respect for any single parent who makes it out child raising alive. I know two parents to one child has major challenges, but it's nothing like one parent to three. Their mother, a friend and co-worker, wanted to get away to the beach for a few days for a much-needed and appreciated trip. She was the one that told me, "Once you have three you might as well have 10." I think there must be some truth to that. Don't get me wrong, I love these kids and they are great almost all of the time, but when there are three of them they never stop talking and most of their conversations are simultaneous and completely unrelated to what the other brother/sister is talking about. Some interesting and slightly disturbing observations into kid world: -- People my age playing the parents in their movies (David Arquette and Kristin Davis in "Shark Boy and Lava Girl") I know that should be par for the co...

This is not what I ordered from eBay. I have compiled a set of photos of my creatures and others here on Flickr.

I first wrote about the hilarious South Park vs. Tom Cruise and Scientology pseudo controversy back on March 19 of this year. The story grew when the episode, banned in England, was broadcast to the U.K. public in closed screenings . Here is the latest in the most entertaining entertaiment story of this year. I have no doubt that if Tom Cruise was not an idiot, and had kept his weird mouth shut, this most famous episode of South Park to date, would have caused a quiet, but brief internet buzz and then settled back in the ranks of the show's other hilarious celebrity-bashing archives, right up there with Babs Streisand and Paris Hilton. Not so. South Park’s ‘Trapped’ gets Emmy nomination Controversial episode lampoons Scientology, Tom Cruise The Associated Press North Hollywood, July 06, 2006 . - One of the Emmy nominees for best animated program is the episode of “South Park” that’s said to have angered Tom Cruise and Isaac Hayes. The episode called “Trapped in the Closet” implies ...

"Dale who?" "What's the big deal about SEC football?" "I can't believe that political candidate had his pastor in that television commercial. What about the separation between church and state?" "My iced tea is too sweet." "I'm not shopping at that Piggly Wiggly again. They don't have wheat bread or a large enough ethnic foods section." "Where's Wal-Mart?" "Have you seen my PETA t-shirt?" "Hey, let's go to transgendered atheist night at the VFW." "Can I substitute tofu for pork?" "Does Bear Bryant really deserve his own museum?"

A few years ago I remember reading an article in one of the local entertainment papers about the death of the rock club in Birmingham. Sadly, the writer had a point. In a span of just a few years three live music clubs in the Five Points South neighbor closed, two tragically replaced with meat market dance clubs. The most painful of of three was Five Points Music Hall which, it its decade-long life, hosted The Ramones, Frank Black, Rufus Wainwright, Ivy and Superchunk just to name a handful. The Nick, always the staple of live original music, has always and still brings in interesting acts, but somewhere around the time I turned 30, I got tired of buying expensive drinks in plastic cups and having to quarantine the clothes I wore into the place due to the dense wall of stale smoke. Zydeco has decent bands from time to time, but again with the smoke and more recently, the over-the-mountain frat crowd. WorkPlay has been the only exception. Here is a great space where the stage is set up...

A few of the nice details that make The Bottletree Cafe, a warm fuzzy kinda rock venue.