The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Category: personal

Stuff about me (Bernard HP Gilroy), instead of or in addition to stuff about education.

  • Review: Marc Cohn at the St. George Theater

    Marc Cohn with Toby Lightman
    St. George Theater, Staten Island, NY
    Thursday 2008 August 21

    This is another in my ongoing series of reviews of Marc Cohn shows. See this earlier one and this one as well for comparison.

    The St. George is a beautiful venue, an old vaudeville theater (I assume) which has been either renovated or maintained lovingly in its original state. Ornate and glitzy, it nonetheless provided excellent sound for an intimate concert. The opener was a bluesy singer/songwriter named Toby Lightman, who has been featured (apparently) on the Home Shopping Network as well as singing the opening for NASCAR on Fox. Unfortunately I don’t know any of Ms. Lightman’s work, so I can’t review it in depth. She seemed to have a nice range, though, and her songs aren’t bad at all. She does appear to be a bit nervous on a stage by herself.

    After Ms. Lightman’s forty-minute set and a small break, Marc Cohn came on stage with his current touring band: Shane Fontayne on guitar; Joe Bobadillo (?) on drums; and John Ossman on bass. The set was high-energy and went on for more than an hour and a half, including two encores. The playlist is below the fold.
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  • Review: Counting Crows with Maroon 5

    Counting Crows with Maroon 5
    Also with Sara Bareilles
    Thursday 2008 Aug 7
    PNC Bank Arts Center
    Holmdel, NJ

    My usual way to review a show would be to give the playlist and say what I did or didn’t like about each. That’s not going to work this time for a host of reasons. First off, I don’t really know the body of work for either Sara Bareilles or Maroon 5. I wouldn’t be able to name almost any of their songs, and it wouldn’t be fair to give an in-depth review of material I was hearing for the first time, under concert conditions. I can say that I was impressed with both groups, enough that I’ll probably plunk down some cash and check out their studio work. Ms. Bareilles has tremendous range and an endearing quality to her voice. Maroon 5 also covered a lot of ground stylistically, from hard rock to something that sounded a bit like late Police work.

    I do know most Counting Crows songs, and I will be posting their playlist. But it really isn’t meaningful to analyze each in detail, for reasons that will be made clear below the fold.
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  • I Didn’t Know

    For all the regular readers — both of them — wondering what’s prompted the past week of short bursts of happy posts, a hint. It’s about as subtle as a bowling ball and not nearly so good as it should be, but for what it’s worth, it is earnest. Further details, alas, are embargoed for a short while.

    (An aside: It is surprisingly hard to rhyme “breath” without dragging in the morbid. I didn’t pull it off.)
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  • One incredible week

    It’s been an amazing seven days for me. In the grand scheme of things, perhaps it doesn’t quite take first prize for Most Significant Week Ever. But in my little world it’s running a close second. As of yet I’m not at liberty to document why, but I’m hoping that will change shortly.

  • Echos of Sins Past

    Regular readers of this blog, were there any, would know that in early June, The Mongrel Dogs That Teach was high-jacked by people of malicious intent who inserted “invisible” code into my text to direct people to infected sites and to sites offering badware. This resulted from my neglect of the infrastructure of the site, specifically, from failing to upgrade regularly. Let that be a lesson to you!

    Anyway, the malefactors pulled off their dastardly deed using a glitch in WordPress (since fixed) that allows one user to modify the posts of another. So the creeps created a spurious account, leavened my site with their crap, and (as far as I know) moved on. Following advice I found on the Net, I deleted the fake users (instituting user moderation for the future) and purged their comments, after upgrading the WordPress installation. This, I thought, solved the problem; but I was wrong.

    Today, browsing to my own site, I was blocked by Firefox, which told me that Google has deemed the site unsafe. Further investigation made clear that many of my posts were still harboring the vile iframe and noscript tags that causes the problem. I discovered admin tools that simplified my search-and-destroy mission, removing the offenders from every post and comment.

    Now I’ve submitted a request that Google check the site again and clear it. Let’s hope that works out.

  • Six days and counting…

    … and it’s still all good.

  • Regression to the mean…

    … has not yet set in. Maybe it’s a new mean.

  • The streak…

    … continues, with today topping even yesterday.

  • As for today…

    … even better than yesterday, which I would not have thought possible.

  • Just wanted to say…

    … that today has been a very good day.