Melissa won a photo contest this week for a frog picture. Jennifer entered it for her. The prize is an Old Town canoe!

Two shows at the theater last weekend, a WERU fundraiser on Friday night and Girlyman on Saturday night. The WERU volunteer DJs are an instant peer group for talking about music. And I do love to talk about music. In an article about the beginnings of Hip Hop in the station's fall newsletter Salt Air, Magnus Johnstone has a wonderful quote: Boston's only black-owned station, WYLD, was so anti-rap that when one of the ghetto record stores that underwrote my show produced a radio spot using a rap background, it aired only once before Joe Johnson, the owner, called up and forbid that spot to ever be played again. At the time, Stevie Wonder said of rap, "It's like there was a third world war, and music had to start all over again from scratch." I remember thinking, "That's meant as a dis, but actually it's a compliment." Rap was that original, that revolutionary.

Another WERU guy Brother Al put me on to Paste Magazine, and exploring that cool player widget they use, I discovered it to be Goombah an application that Randy Labbe tried to get me to be a tester for when he was developing it a couple of years ago. Randy was the producer for a couple of albums recorded at the theater during our B&B days. I didn't do ITunes then so I declined. Nice to see a Maine product making it in the wilds of the internet. I put it down below so you can try it. David Brooks' article in the NYT on the "segmentation of music" couldn't have gotten it more wrong. One size fits all white boy music played in huge arenas and by mega stations is what we've gratefully escaped; too bad about his old Disenfranchised Blues.