Drew Landry's BP Blues now on iTunes; 75% goes to saveourgulf.org

Drew Landry's oil spill song, BP Blues, is now on iTunes.

Remember Drew Landry, the guy who sang in front of the White House committee investigating the Gulf oil spill? I blogged about him here on Action Bob and also here on gather.com.

Today on Facebook, Drew posted that he's signed with Warner Brothers, his oil spill song, BP Blues, is on iTunes, and when you buy it on iTunes 75% of the proceeds go to saveourgulf.org.

For a buck twenty-nine ($1.29) you can have a piece of Americana on your iPod or MP3 player of choice and help the people whose lives have been changed forever by the bungling of a multibillion dollar international corporation. They can put a cap on the oil well, but they can't put a cap on the suffering these people continue to endure.

It's a damn good song, categorized as country, and here I'm getting up on my soap box but it's got all the earmarks of a real country song and not some piece of garbage sung by some stud with marbles in his mouth wearing a cowboy hat. Drew is a bone fide singer/songwriter, and he put his God-given talents to work trying to save the place and the people he loves. You got to admire him and all the other people in the Gulf right now who are fighting for their lives, and if you can spend a little spare change and get a good song out of the deal, you'd be doing something pretty good.

The Housing Market Meets the Big Bad Wolf Economy; Housing Market Dips 25.5%

This week we learned that the housing market is built of sticks and straw and not bricks, as the Big Bad Wolf huffed and puffed in the form of the U.S. economy and blew the U.S. housing market down 25.5 percent below the level it was a year ago.

As reported in the New York Times and by the Associated Press via Comcast, the final blow to the housing market was the...read the rest of the story here.

Journalism for the 21st Century; Revitalizing Journalism Education

Walter Cronkite is a thing of the past. He was called "the most trusted man in America", but today's journalists have lost credibility and the respect of viewers. The rise of celebrity reporters, the Web, 24-hour cable and its unrelenting appetite for content, and bloggers are just some of the factors and forces that changed American journalism.

Read the rest of the story here.

Roger Clements was indicted today...

...and I'll ask the same question I asked two years ago when that committee in Congress called him to testify. What does anyone care what Roger Clemens shot in this big butt?

Back in 2008 the country was going to hell in a hand basket. And two years later it's even in worse shape. Doesn't Congress have bigger worries than Roger's butt?--even though I gotta say, that's a pretty big butt.

Read more about what I have to say here.

Manchester, Ct. shooting

There was a shooting today in Manchester, Connecticut that I've been following all day. I've been updating my blog over on Gather. Not getting a lot of hits. Big news today is the solar tsunami--yep, that's what they're calling it--that may set off some Northern Lights tonight. People are writing about that, and it's clear they've never seen them or might not even know what it's about.

And there's this family the Washington Post are featuring that lived on a boat for seven years. Amazing. Amazing is the word a lot of the big hit writers bandy about because they are plagiarizing, er, I mean, writing so many stories they don't have time to pull together a cogent opinion of anything.

Anyway, the shooting. There's a black man who was caught stealing. He was brought in for a meeting. Either quit, or we'll fire you, he was told. We have a video. He was calm. Then he pulls a handgun out of a lunchbox and starts firing. Eight dead, then he kills himself.

There's a backstory that he had complained about racial harassment. No one did anything.

Anyway, I kind of latch on to certain stories and this was one. I can't write about just anything, which is my downfall on a blog that is only interested in numbers. Not quality, but the quantity of hits. So Google News will pick them up then.

Anyway, here's the report I updated throughout today when I should have been reading and working on a paper for my counterculture class.

And here's an opinion I wrote. Leave a comment if you feel like it.

Arcade Fire's The Suburbs

I've been getting kind of bored with the music I've been listening to of late. There are always new artists you can find, but it's the sound of the music that I'm getting bored with. Alt/indie, country, Americana, call it what you want, I still think it's great, I'm just looking for a little bit something more.

And I think I found it. I haven't been all that happy with old gather.com lately, with its emphasis on numbers and kowtowing to google news so it can be a a "secondary news source", which is just a fancy way of saying "bad writers plagiarizing for hits", but if you'd like, head over there and see what I'm talking about. Arcade Fire's The Suburbs is really something to listen to.