About fifteen years ago, between the time he moved from Bisbee, Arizona to Tucson, and when he finally escaped to the outskirts of Pearce, my brother Damon discovered the awesome Access Tucson, one of the finest public access television providers in the country. Theirs was a great partnership. Suddenly he was peppering me with requests for old cartoons, pictures from the internet, copies of his various recordings, any raw material he could use for a grand project, the outlines of which I could just barely make out. Next thing I knew, he was pressuring me more than usual to drive down to Tucson and help him out with a television program he claimed to be putting into production.
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
Though it happened over two months ago, word of the death of Les Humphries in England is just starting to trickle out onto the internet. Apparently, he died on the day after Christmas, of heart failure brought on by a severe case of pneumonia. He was 67 years old. Unreported in his native country, Humphries’ death didn’t come to light until eight weeks later when his son contacted Les’ estranged ex-wife, German singer Dunja Rajter. Since Humphries was a bona fide pop star in Germany, that country’s press and blogosphere has reported it dutifully. European tributes are not hard to find, but as far as I know, Bostworld is the only outlet originating from America that has given the matter any space at all.
I don’t feel like rehashing the details of Humphries’ brief but prolific career. You can read about him the same way I did, on the German news sites. Google Translate reveals the sad story: “Les Humphries had in recent years lived very withdrawn…. He was sick, he had incredibly many problems, which he probably only by a certain amount of living could compensate.”
I’ve been running a WordPress plugin called ShortStat for most of the life of this site. It’s a great little time-waster at work, offering the standard innacurate hit counts, plus referral links that I can visit when I get bored. Occasionally, a new one will appear, but usually it’s the same dozen or so sites whose readers apparently can’t resist visiting good old Bostworld (god bless ‘em).
This last week, ShortStat and I reached a milestone of sorts. No, we didn’t log our millionth hit — that’s still a long way off. But we did banish a certain now-defunct share site from the list of the top most frequent referrers. A lot of you music lovers will remember this site, run a former music biz guy with an axe to grind (more so than the rest of us, anyway), posting every album he could get his hands on. He linked to our very first share post, “The Genius In Harmony” by the Anita Kerr Singers, and brought in so many referrals that we were swamped for the better part of two weeks. We were new back then, and the massive hit counts made the future seem very sunny indeed.
Continue reading ‘Your Favorite Little Podcast: Episode Ten’
I had the recent pleasure of spending a cross-country plane ride with “The New Kings of Nonfiction,” a collection edited by “This American Life” host, Ira Glass. As usual, despite the book’s focus on “the new,” it was the old I was most drawn to — specifically, an article on World War II by Lee Sandlin. Though this article was new to me, “Losing The War” is already being hailed as a classic. You can read the whole thing on Lee’s web site.