On the Internet, Solutions Present Themselves

Brian J. Noggle

Today, I read a disturbing article on the Internet that indicates that, after the fall of civilization, it will only be the Noggle Library that lifts mankind from its new dark ages. The article: A library without books? Some universities purging dusty volumes:

A library without books? Not quite, but as students abandon the stacks in favor of online reference material, university libraries are unloading millions of unread volumes in a nationwide purge that has some print-loving scholars deeply unsettled.

Libraries are putting books in storage, contracting with resellers or simply recycling them. An increasing number of books exist in the cloud, and libraries are banding together to ensure print copies are retained by someone, somewhere. Still, that doesn’t always sit well with academics who practically live in the library and argue that large, readily available print collections are vital to research.

….

At Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the library shelves overflow with books that get little attention. A dusty monograph on “Economic Development in Victorian Scotland.” International Television Almanacs from 1978, 1985 and 1986. A book whose title, “Personal Finance,” sounds relevant until you see the publication date: 1961.

With nearly half of IUP’s collection going uncirculated for 20 years or more, university administrators decided a major housecleaning was in order. Using software from Lugg’s group, they came up with an initial list of 170,000 books to be considered for removal.

Fortunately, an email I received later offered a link to a solution: 15 Brilliant Ways to Repurpose a Pile of Old Books:

If you’ve got shelves or boxes of old books hanging around your home, don’t toss them! Repurpose them into something grand with these 15 fantastic ways to repurpose them.

The burden of the future is partially lifted from my shoulders. Between the Noggle Library at the end of my retirement (projected to be somewhere over 20,000 books, some 15,000 of which I will not have read) and the random crafters making pleasing arrangements of books with pleasantly colored spines, certainly we’ll do what the monasteries did a thousand years ago.

Now, to start a nonprofit that accepts donations from these universities to turn actual academic work (and “academic” work of the latter half of the 20th century) into the 21st century equivalent of macrame instead of cat litter.

Full disclosure: I once tested the first version of the Yesterday’s News cat litter Web site. Also, the remainder of the books left over from the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale, twice a year, are ground into cat litter for Yesterday’s News. So I’m not joking about actual books being ground into stuff for cats to pee on.

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Book Report: Naked Blade, Naked Gun by “Axel Kilgore” (1983)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverI was surprised to see I owned another in this series, which I now recognize (last year, I read Slave of the Warmonger, the seventh book in the series). I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since I bought them together along with a pile of Executioner novels in Clever in 2013. This volume is the 13th; the series itself only ran 18 volumes in the early 1980s (according to Fantastic Fiction).

This book is a bit more amateur than Slave of the Warmonger. The dialog is clunky, and there are extraneous bits of activity and interactions that don’t add to the story.

In this book, The Mercenary is reuniting with his gal when he recognizes a killer from Vietnam and pursues him through the airport, but the fellow escapes when the Mercenary is waylaid by airport security. His girlfriend, a reporter, is doing a piece on cults, so The Mercenary tags along and finds a cult that is killing experts on the cult. However, the cult is really a front for a KGB operation that’s kidnapping scientists, and the head man of the Russians is posing as a Christian preaching the evils of cults. Along the way, there are action set pieces and places where this hard-core killing machine acts very, very dumb to further the plot.

So this is probably my last foray into this series. I’m sad to learn (also via Fantastic Fiction) that this is the same author behind The Survivalist series, which I’d hoped to snag a few of somewhere. But you don’t tend to see them at book sales. Which is just as well, since I’m nowhere near finished with that stack of Executioner books that I picked up along with this book back in 2013.

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Book Report: The Joy of Not Working by Ernie J. Zelinkski (1997)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverThis book joins The Ruins and the complete works of Horace Algernon Blackwood as a volume that goes from my to-read shelves to my “read” shelves (which, you can see now, is all a lie) without me finishing it. I mean, sometimes I pick up a book and read a bit of it only to decide I don’t want to read this right now, and I put it back on my to-read shelves. Few are the books where I decide I will never want to finish reading this. This book is in rare company.

This book was written after the author ran a series of seminars and workshops on what aging members of the World War II generation should do as they retired and suddenly did not have a job to define them. So, somewhere in it, perhaps there are lessons in identity and establishing multiple facets of one’s own identity to account for a time when a job will not tell you and other people who you are.

But it’s hidden among a bunch of meandering and repetitive prose. I made it 56 pages, which is further than the two bookmarks I found in the book (a snippet of the job want ads from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and a return address label). The book itself is only 203 pages, including big sidebar cartoons and quotes about employment and leisure. I carried it to a number of my reading locations, and I had to force myself to open it. Sometimes, I found staring at a cinderblock wall more rewarding than reading the book. I came to a list of things that might indicate your life was not in balance and you might have the wrong job, and I applied them to the time I spent reading this book. So I’m done with it forever.

Perhaps the message was on-point in 1997, but we’ve got a couple self-actualizing generations that have sought meaning outside work (or meaningful work instead of careers) since then. So many of the lessons aren’t applicable to more modern readers. Or they’re covered in the contemporary mindfulness movement, often more concisely.

I see it’s been updated for the 21st century; I hope the later edition has been significantly been rewritten. But I’m not risking it.

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The Song Can’t Remember When

Brian J. Noggle

The song “What’s Up?” by 4 Non-Blondes starts:

Twenty-five years and my life is still
Trying to get up that great big hill of hope
for a destination

I don’t want to make you feel old, old man, but that song itself is twenty-five years old.

The album was from 1992, but the single was released in 1993, so lie to yourself if you have to.

Me, I got the song. On a cassette single. Twenty-four years ago.

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Musing on Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Brian J. Noggle

I’ve started to read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and instead of writing one book report at the end, since this could take years, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on each play as I finish it. Of course, it will still only count as one book on my annual reading count in 2020 because I’m silly that way.

The story of the composition of the play is that Queen Elizabeth wanted to see another play with John Falstaff, the character from the Henry IV plays. So Shakespeare did some fan service with this play, and banged out a play where the scoundrel pitches woo to two wealthy married women, who see through his game and play with him a bit. Two of Falstaff’s retainers refuse to participate, so he fires them. They reveal to the plot to the women’s husbands, and one of them meets Falstaff under an alias to see if he really is pursuing the women. Falstaff reveals his plans, and the jealous husband tries to catch him in the act, but the merry wives hide Falstaff in humorous ways so they can continue to have their fun leading him on. A subplot deals with the daughter of one of the wives wanting a different match for her husband than either the mother or the father prefers, and her parents’ preferred rivals rival each other.

The subplot of this particular play sticks out as a rather grafted on bit that fulfills the requirement of a promised wedding at the end. Also, everyone forgives Falstaff at the very end, which is also stock for the time.

The mainline scenes are amusing enough, but it’s the least of the plays I’ve read so far. I hope Queen Elizabeth liked it.

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The Forgettable Poco

Brian J. Noggle

You know, the band Poco.

Okay, you don’t. But I do.

While listening to a Richard Marx song (“Satisfied”) in the car, I mentioned to my beautiful wife that I saw him twice on the tour for his album Repeat Offender: Once at Summerfest in Milwaukee, and once at the old Arena in St. Louis (I won tickets in a radio contest on Y98, and the journey to pick them up is a story in itself).

She was impressed that I’d been to the Old Barn before it was destroyed and the St. Louis Blues moved downtown. I mentioned Poco opened for him, and that I heard them do “Take It To The Limit”, so I thought that was their big song (it would be about a year until I learned that was originally an Eagles song–Was I young once and ignorant of both St. Louis topography and the hits of the Eagles?)

So I told her they did that one song, and the song eluded me. Poco does not get any airplay on the radio these days (but they’re apparently still a going concern). I knew Poco was around in the 1970s, so I wracked my brain trying to think of an Eagles-sounding California country rock song that was big and was Poco’s.

But I couldn’t think of it, so I researched.

And that one song I was probably thinking of was the Poco song that was a hit around that time (1989): “Call It Love”

You know, I would have probably known that song in 1989, but the years have stripped it from my memory. I mean, I can kind of remember it when I watch the video, but aside from that. But Poco was an old band from the 1970s staging a comeback in the 1980s, man. (Kind of like the Doobie Brothers with “The Doctor“.)

Meanwhile, 30 years in the future, what gets played on the radio? Bands from the 1970s and the 1980s, but only a subset from across the years, so songs like this and many others hide out in the dark corners of our mind. And brightly on YouTube, when we think of them. And, I suppose, at the lesser stages of Summerfest and other fairs throughout the land, but my children do not yet have the patience to listen to the music when there are games, rides, or cotton candy to be begged for.

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Musing on Shakespeare: Two Gentlemen of Verona

Brian J. Noggle

I’ve started to read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and instead of writing one book report at the end, since this could take years, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on each play as I finish it. Of course, it will still only count as one book on my annual reading count in 2020 because I’m silly that way.

This play is the second in the compendium I have, and reading it, I can see how heavily Shakespeare and Ben Jonson influenced my play The Courtship of Barbara Holt. I see similar structure and situations in the development of the plot in each, but not so much Middle English in mine.

At any rate, the title gentlemen are Proteus and Valentine. Valentine is going off to Milan, but Proteus wants to stay in Verona and moon over his girl Julia. His father, though, decides to send him to Milan anyway. In Milan, Valentine is in love with Silvia, the daughter of the Duke. The Duke kind of wants Silvia to marry Thurio, but Silvia is set on Valentine. When Proteus gets to Milan, he is smitten with Silvia himself and proceeds to stab Valentine in the back by ratting out an elopement attempt. So Proteus tries to pitch woo to Silvia, who’s having none of it. Julia comes to Milan disguised as a boy, and when she is heartbroken that Proteus has forgotten her, tries to help Proteus woo Silvia because she wants him to be happy. Valentine, banished from Milan, falls in and becomes leader of a band of outlaws.

It’s a great bunch of setup, but we get to Act V, and it suddenly resolves too quickly. Silvia runs away from Milan to find Valentine, and is captured by outlaws. The Duke and his men follow Silvia out into the woods, and they get captured by outlaws. In the very last scene, Valentine, the king of the outlaws, brings everyone together and discovers Proteus’s treachery; Proteus asks for (and receives) forgiveness from Valentine and Julia; the Duke forgives Valentine and allows him to marry his daughter; and allows the banished outlaws to return to Milan.

As such, it ends very abruptly. It has a lot going on, good and interesting developments fraught with dramatic and comedic potential, and then Proteus asks forgiveness, and all is forgiven. The end.

This might have been Shakespeare’s first play, and as such, it’s a pretty good outing but for the quick end.

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You Find Electric Six In The Darndest Places

Brian J. Noggle

So I’m watching Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the original film from 2010, and they play some Electric Six:

That’s “Danger! High Voltage” from the album Fire. Here’s the official video for the song, which is a bit racy. You should probably not watch it at work OR IF YOU ARE ACTUALLY IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, SON.

I have to be mindful that my children have started to read this blog and strive to keep it family-friendlier than normal.

What’s next? Gwar or Steel Panther in a Disney film?

I have “Rip It” from the album on my iPod. I used to joke that it was the only Electric Six song without swearing in it, but we can all see now that I exaggerate for humorous effect.

Hat tip, sort of, to Kelley of the former Suburban Blight blog, who introduced me to the band via a Facebook post of this very song.

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Musing on Shakespeare: The Tempest

Brian J. Noggle

I’ve started to read the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and instead of writing one book report at the end, since this could take years, I’ve decided to post my thoughts on each play as I finish it. Of course, it will still only count as one book on my annual reading count in 2020 because I’m silly that way.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare starts off with this play, one of his more familiar comedies. The book actually runs all of his comedies before all of his tragedies, which might make reading slower in the middle of the book than in the beginning or the end, but time will tell.

In it, a deposed ruler of an Italian city-state and his daughter live on a deserted island with only the son of a native witch and some spirits, including Ariel, which is a male spirit in this book (which is hard to remember because of the The Little Mermaid thing). After years, Prospero, the deposed ruler, uses his magic to seperate a fleet and bring his brother (his deposer), the duke of another city-state, and the duke’s son to the island where he hopes to get his revenge. But it’s not a bloody revenge; he just wants justice and his position back.

So the new arrivals are separated and they spend time pondering their fates while Prospero plans a little show for them using the fairies and spirits to tell his story. At the end, the duke’s son and Prospero’s daughter fall in love, and their marriage is that that appears in the final act.

The play gets its knocks because the current interpreters of fiction can fixate on the slave and link him to American slavery and to blacks, but that’s not really supported in the text. And Shakespeare comedies are more amusing to us now than laugh-out-loud funny, but while a trained reader can recognize the jokes within, they don’t necessarily prompt the laugh response. Unless, perhaps, one is a professor of literature and is steeped in it.

For the most part, it hangs together pretty well. The play has some subplots–the romance of the son and daughter, the duke lamenting his lost son, a couple of shipmates who plan with the slave to depose Prospero as ruler of the island–but given the conceit that the people are separated, it works. The subplots fit in.

At any rate, that’s what I thought of it. It’s an amusing read, coupled with the umami of it being fine literature that I can be proud of reading (as opposed to the men’s adventure paperbacks, which I only take pride in how many of them I have read which alludes to my high literary pain threshold). I hope you weren’t expecting a more reasoned, thoughtful comment on the play, but I left college a long time ago and don’t have a grade riding on my rehashed novel academic insights.

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The Threat of Grape-Nuts Clarifies the Mind

Brian J. Noggle

So we do try to get our children to keep a clean and tidy room, and we’re probably a little ahead of the curve on it as they do “clean” the room fairly often (whenever they want video games). But “clean” the room often means to pile things willy nilly into their closet. This weekend, the youngest decided he would clean the closet, so he piled all of the things that had been accumulating in the closet onto the floor of the room.

Which overwhelmed them, the poor dears, and they refused to clean and organize the shin-deep collection of mixed-and-matched kid-a-brac. Worse, when told to clean their room, they defied the directive for a couple of days, which caused my beautiful wife to go all Draco on them, levying a punishment of 1 week of grounding from electronics per day until the room was clean.

Well, I knew that an abstract number of weeks stretching into the future wouldn’t motivate them. They cannot conceptualize being grounded from electronics until summer. Heck, even I cannot conceptualize eating healthy for a month on the Whole30® diet, and I’m 25 days through it. Also, I cannot remember what a doughnut tastes like, but I seem to recall it was really, really good.

Sorry, I was daydreaming there for a minute about carbohydrates.

After a couple of days, my wife bought boxes for the boys and told them to just take the stuff on the floor and to put it in the boxes, and we would store it away. Put all of it in the boxes. But the boys did not do such a thing in a timely fashion. As their archeological digs hit different strata of clutter, they discovered things that had been in their closet for months. Fun and interesting things that they must play with right now. So the room was not clean for days.

Instead of continuing with the one day, one more week of grounding policy, I levied additional sanction to impose every day the room was not cleaned. For each day the room remained a mess,

  • Bedtime is 8pm until the room is clean.
  • No sweets or desserts until the room is clean.
  • All “Can I…?” questions are “No.” until the room is clean.
  • No snacks after dinner until the room is clean.

None of these worked, as the children racked up sanction upon sanction until….

No sweet cereals for breakfast until the room is clean.

That itself was not the actual impetus to a clean room. It was that I actually bought the nastiest, most vile cereal I could remember from my childhood, which as you can imagine was bereft of any sweet-tasting cereal. Sometimes, Chex was the best we could hope for. The cereal I liked least in my youth:

So I bought it, and I put it on the counter, and I explained to the boys that it was neither grape nor nuts and that they could not put fruit in it like you see on the box. I also bought some Fiber One, which I explained was like the pellets you feed to goats at the petting zoo, but in milk.

Today, the room is clean.

“So I guess we’re eating some Grape-Nuts,” my beautiful wife said.

No, we are not, even in six days when this seemingly eternal torment of no-carbohydrates ends. The box of Grapenuts remains in our arsenal of threats to ensure compliance from our children. “Do it, or you get the Grape-Nuts.”

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The Fad of Pop Stars Going Country

Brian J. Noggle

You know what I mean. Steven Tyler of Aerosmith cut a country album. Jewel cut a country album. The trend was so prevalent that Alan Jackson wrote a song (Gone Country).

But it’s not a recent thing. Dean Martin did it before it was cool, and when Dean Martin did it, it became cool.

A sample:

To be honest, not among my favorite Dean Martin discs.

My favorite, of course, is You Can’t Love ‘Em All:

Strangely, “favorite” does align with “the first record I got by” as it often does.

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The Uncomfortable Talk with the Children

Brian J. Noggle

When my children ask me what I do for a living, I find it hard to explain what a software testing and quality assurance professional is.

They still don’t know, but they do know that what I do keeps me from entering the cool contests that our friends keep winning. Because I’m not allowed to enter because I work there, but the friends can, and they win. True story: Friends of mine have won thousands of dollars in prizes in contests for a company I’ve worked for. So much that the company’s owner wondered if I was somehow scamming him. Since I still work there, he must have believed my protestations of innocence, but there have been no more contests, which has severely limited my friends’ collection of valuable comic books.

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A Little Too Far Ahead Of The Story

Brian J. Noggle

The Springfield News-Leader made sure to post someone at Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield to capture the chagrin of people who would find the GOVERNMENT SHUT DOWN! PEOPLE WILL DIE, OR NOT GET TO USE THE BATHROOMS IN THE VISITOR’S CENTER!

Unfortunately, since the Senate reached cloture and the government shutdown ended, they didn’t get to write the ongoing story of how the shutdown was causing DISASTER and HARDSHIP for all, but with the story already written, they went with it:

Wilson’s Creek visitors frustrated by diminished experience:

Three visitors from Michigan spent a cold afternoon battling whipping wind and a government shutdown in their attempt to see Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield.

The historic Civil War national park southeast of Republic was nearly empty of visitors Monday afternoon, and no park staff was visible during the short-lived government shutdown.

The popular visitors center was closed, but motorists could still drive through the park property, read the educational signs and listen to recorded bits of history about the first Civil War battle west of the Mississippi in 1861.

In other words, it was about as busy as you could expect on a cold Monday afternoon.

But the journalist was sure to make sure the newspaper’s dwindling readers knew who to blame:

All three, however, laid the primary blame on President Donald Trump.

It’s a shame how many people don’t know that the President signs the bills and the legislature passes or does not pass them. I used to give journalists the benefit of the mendacity when they’d write stories mischaracterizing the political process in this country, but now I’m pretty sure they’re just ignorant, too.

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Book Report: Killer Mine by Mickey Spillane (1965)

Brian J. Noggle

Book coverAs you know, I just bought this book a couple weeks ago. As it so often happens in the Nogglestead library, I pick up the most recent book I bought to read, and things like The Buddhist Tradition in China languish on my shelves for decades.

I started reading Mike Hammer books in high school, probably spurred by the Stacy Keach television portrayal (and the fact that I read detective novels a lot in high school), but I haven’t seen many Mickey Spillane books at book sales in the past couple of decades, so my reading of them are pretty sparse since the dawn of the new century (see Black Alley, a Mike Hammer novel, in 2003 and Dead Street, a non-Mike Hammer novel completed by Max Allan Collins, that I read last year).

Like More Good Old Stuff, this book is old school hard-boiled stuff. The book is from the middle 1960s, but it reads like 40s fiction.

“Killer Mine” deals with a cop returning to his old, rough neighborhood where some of the local hoods he grew up with are getting bumped off. The brass put him in undercover, placing him as the pretend wooer of a policewoman who still lives in the neighborhood. As he does some legwork and starts to win over the population who distrust police, he closes in on the killer. Who was obvious to a modern, sophisticated reader of detective fiction. As a matter of fact, I wondered how the detective would take 150 pages to discover what I knew from very early. Then, on page 75, he confronts the killer, and I thought, “Whoa! Now there is some twist to account for the other half of the book!” But, no, this single volume is two novellas.

The second, “Man Alone”, I had read before. I don’t remember much except they call the protagonist “The Killer Cop.” A cop beats a framed payoff from an organized crime figure and then the murder of the organized crime figure and sets out to find who framed him. Again, the answer is obvious to modern readers who’ve been dealing with these sorts of twists for decades after this was written.

But we’re not in a Mickey Spillane book for a novel twist at this point. Instead, we’re in it for the gritty, hardboiled writing style, which you get here for sure, but as I have grown older, I find it less compelling than, say, John D. MacDonald or Raymond Chandler–or even Ross MacDonald. It’s certainly above most men’s paperback fiction in consistency and punchiness, but not the top tier. Which, I’m sure, Spillane would have accepted as long as people bought his books.

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Good Book Hunting, January 18, 2019: Hooked on Books

Brian J. Noggle

So I had fifteen minutes to kill yesterday afternoon before picking up my children from school, so I stopped in at Hooked on Books. Partly because it has a restroom. But, as you know, I always find something on their sale book racks. Today, they were indoors because of the weather. But I found a couple.

I might have mentioned before that Hooked on Books has the best selection of John D. MacDonald paperbacks in the Midwest. But that was eleven years ago. Now, they have two paper copies of Barrier Island, and I have a lifetime of regret that I did not pick them up when I could.

At any rate, I got a couple sale books.

I got:

  • Hardball: Aryan Legion, the second volume in a paperback series I’d never heard of. I am pretty sure the Aryan Legion are the bad guys here, and this is not further evidence that this is a Nazi-sympathizing blog. Although linking to it with the hyperlink text “Nazi-sympathizing blog” is probably not helping my case with the search algorithms.
     
  • Wheland and Carwin the Biloquist by Charles Brockden Brown. I recognized the Penguin Classics spine but never heard of the book. I wonder if it’s really a classic, or just something that modern English professors want to include on their syllabi. I guess I’ll find out someday.
     
  • A Question of Accuracy, something in a series called Exploring Mathematics. It might be a children’s book, but if it’s a children’s book from sixty or seventy years ago, it will be something to challenge modern adults.
     
  • Proud to be Right, a collection of conservative voices of the next generation. Which might be two generations ago by the speed of Internet intellectual fads.
     
  • The Backward Shadow by Lynne Reid Banks, which is a sequel to the novel The L Shaped Room. Which I had seen recently, so I thought I had it on my shelves. Further reflection indicates that this book was one I bought in my eBay selling days, and that I still have a picture of it from the same that I use as test data from time to time on one of my contracts. So I’ve seen the book cover, but I no longer own the book. But I just bought the sequel.
     
  • From Mind to Market by Roger D. Blackwell. It’s a book about rethinking logistics. I like to buy industry-specific books sometimes, but apparently I like to read them less. The guy behind the counter couldn’t find the discounted price on it, so he asked me to verify that it was a sale book. I pointed out that it had a red dot on the spine, and he said they’d never done that. But the young man has only been there three years. I’ve been coming to Hooked on Books for over 20 years (!) since my beautiful wife and I were but dating. The kid behind the counter was probably even born then.

They were sale books, so I spent about $7.50. It’s almost worth it for the story about the last book alone.

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The Radio Shuffle Leaves Brian J. Without Hard Rock

Brian J. Noggle

Is it time for radio stations to alter their play lists already?

Apparently so, for the “rock” stations in Springfield have changed their formats to chase the local “Jack” station.

So 106 “The River” in Springfield, the local “Jack” station, or whatever they call the variety format that plays a couple dozen hits from the 80s, a couple dozen hits from the 90s, and six or ten songs from after the turn of the century, has shifted its playlist to include Led Zepplin and AC/DC.

So 104 “The Cave,” a classic hits (what we used to call Album Oriented Rock back in the day) determined it needed to compete with that format by playing M0AR POWER BALLADS.

The rock station that played new hard rock and metal, Q102, decided what it needed was alternative music from the 1990s. Friends, most of the rock music from the 1990s sucked. Sorry, but you know it’s true. Grunge corrupted everything it touched, and emogoth really loud is not rock.

US 97, which touts its long-standing rock heritage and pedigree dating all the way back to the Clinton administration, has added some newer songs but has also added more 90s rock and power ballads.

I mean, I heard Green Day’s “Basket Case” twice yesterday, on two different radio stations.

And by that I mean I heard the first two lines (“Do you have the time/to listen to me whine?”) before changing the radio station. Attention, millennial radio program directors: THIS IS NOT ROCK.

I used to be Green Day agnostic. But a couple more spins of this in the near term, and I’ll hate Green Day.

Which leaves poor Brian J. with nowhere to turn to hear new rock. What, YouTube? I’m an adult. I don’t have time to wander around YouTube. Spotify? Meh. Make a radio station on one of your favorite bands, and it will play you songs from four or five other bands. Which will be the same bands pretty much no matter what I pick.

I miss the good old radio days of 2017.

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