I took a road trip to Minnesota this past weekend and its a 7 hour drive for me to get to my destination. In order to make the time go by faster, I listen to music like most people, but I listen a little differently. I listen to movie scores and other off the wall music like Weird Al Yankovic. Well, to make this trip go by faster, I listened to movie music from movies that had car chase scenes, such as:

1. The truck chase from “Raiders of the Lost Ark”
2. The main theme from “Back to the Future”
3. “Speed”

I may be a geek, but it helped pass the time to Minnesota.

I’m kind of lost today. I couldn’t find anything in the news worth mentioning, and I got to thinking that music defines a lot of who each of us is. So I decided to open the floor to a discussion concerning music. As the title suggests, what is your favorite band? Me personally, my absolute, all-time favorite band is Tower of Power, a soul band with a phat horn section. These guys have been around since 1968 and have turned out some iconic horn music. I’m a saxophone player, so it explains why I dig these guys so much. They have had a lot of turnover in 40 years, but the founder, Emilio Castillo, is with the band and still going strong. There some other original members playing with the band, two of the most important in terms of defining the sound of the group is their drummer, David Garibaldi, and bassist Rocco Prestia. If you’ve never seen or heard these guys play, you owe it to yourself to check them out.

If given the chance to redesign our currency, not change the numbers, just change the faces, who faces would we use. Presidents have been the face we see most often, with a few important leaders such as Ben Franklin. Some people have redesigned money with pop culture faces and the ones that make me laugh the most are these.

Yep, that’s the Burger King on the $1 bill, Michael instead of Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, and Homer Simpson gracing the $50 bill.  I think the Michael Jackson bit is pretty funny, and with the way Burger King and McDonalds adertise their dollar menu it only seems natural. Homer just makes me laugh, simply put.

So, after the music business decides to stop litigating against helpless minors for downloading music on their computers for free it comes to light that Lars Ulrich of Metallica fame has illegally downloaded his own music on his home computer stating that he has a right to do so. Now, I think to myself. If I wrote a book and it was published and put in stores for sale would I have the right to walk into the store, take a copy off the shelf and walk out of the store? What Lars doesn’t seem to get is that he just took money out of the other band mates pockets, the producers pockets, the record companies pockets and not to mention he just killed any credibility that he had. Lars, you get a giant sized FAIL for this one!