When one hears the phrase “surveillance state” one’s mind immediately goes to Russia’s notorious KGB or East Germany’s Stasi secret police.

They’re synonymous with ruthless imposition of order and the means to enforce that order.

Granted, the United States has quite the surveillance state of its own right now, what with the NSA listening in to our phone calls and internet traffic. (Hi, guys!) But that’s the small fry.

In true U.S. fashion we’ve managed to privatize our surveillance state with the likes of Google, Facebook and devices like the Amazon Echo.

But what of the... More

Twenty-five years ago right around the time I write this I was sitting in my first college class.

Turns out, it was a key moment of my life.

It’s not often that something like this can be so easily pegged to a particular date. In this case I can recall it because bluesman Stevie Ray Vaughn had died the night before.

A quote from Vaughn was written across the blackboard of my Journalism 121 class. The professor, a blues fan, was especially hit. “Awful,” he said to the class. “And right after he’d cleaned up.”

Indeed.

The untimely death of... More

One of the most poignant lines in all pop music I find in Weezer’s disposable ditty Island in the Sun.

The band caught a lot of criticism when the song came out. People said it sounded like Sugar Ray. That’s a fair criticism, musically. But I find the song more meaningful than anything on the soul-baring Pinkerton album.

Frontman Rivers Cuomo spent years battling crushing depression – the “put tinfoil on your windows and never leave your apartment for years” type. The hardcore type.

Wanting to be on an “island in the sun” isn’t just about a holiday... More