June 14

I've talked about emo as a misused appelation before, but I just realized that I have yet to demonstrate what emo is. Today, I can rectify that, thanks to Bob Nanna. After the dissolution of his first band Braid (which fans and critics would either call emo or post-hardcore), he formed Hey Mercedes, which comfortably wore the emo badge on the arm where its sleeve was supposed to be. It's all there: the soft-loud-soft rocksong structure, the sentence fragment songtitles, the replacement of cockrock bravado with confessional yearning...

It's not hard to see what some people don't like about emo: confessional intelligence in the wrong hands sounds like a bunch of whiny smartasses. Which is probably why emo resonates so well with teenagers, then tends to get outgrown fast.
Bob Nanna moved on, too. He now plays in the band Certain People I Know, and has his solo project The City on Film. Plus, he's got a day job, at Threadless.com. Among other duties, he's written songs about several of the ubiquitous T-Shirt. Over 150 of them. Each song is linked under its inspiring t-shirt, but there's links to all the songs on his profile page.
Meanwhile, here's footage from the first public performance of Certain People I Know...

April 30

Today's birthday is a cautionary tale. Glenn Humplik was the co-host on many of Tom Green's shows, from his Canadian public access show in the 90's to his ground-breaking MTV series. The signature comedy of Tom Green combined the absurdity of Ernie Kovacs with the lowest common denominator of the America's Funniest HomeVideos standard that is a baseball bat to the groin. And when Tom didn't have his parents or unsuspecting civilians to bamboozle, Glenn served as Tom's patsy.

By the time Tom Green relaunched his eponymous show on the web, Glenn was nowhere to be found. What happened between them is, publically, a mystery. Glenn doesn't speak about it, and Tom Green says that, legally, he isn't allowed to talk about it. Glenn returned to a career in IT and has a personal blog he posts about work, raising his kid, and random videos he finds on the Internet.
He's relatively gracious to fans, but not extremely forthcoming about why that chapter closed. Was Glenn tired of being treated like a sidekick instead of a co-host? Did Tom go one joke too far? Does Glenn not want to make any more humiliating videos his daughter will eventually find on the Internet? Is the money just better in the tech industry?
There's always the memories. Here's a rap that Tom composed about his old friend:

April 5

Fascinating character, this Dean Kamen. First off, he's the son of comic book artist Jack Kamen, whose cover art helped the EC Horror Comics line (Tales of the Crypt) anchor itself in the imagination of a generation. This has nothing to do with what makes Dean Kamen a great deal, but it's a cool trivia bit for a comic book geek like me.
Dean's energies are focused on inventing; he's amassed over 400 patents, for such inventions as the wearable infusion pump, the stair-climbing wheelchair, and the Segway. He's also started organizations to encourage science and math education in today's schools, to foster the next generation of inventors.
If anybody has a chance of winning a Nobel prize in two categories, I'd put my money on Kamen. Without his brilliance, we wouldn't have moments like this:

April 4

Here's another music sensation that rose through the ranks of the Internet: Andy McKee. McKee doesn't just play the guitar, he plays it seven ways to Sunday. That's how he's managed to get several million-hit vids for her performances, and become a successful independent musician. Amazing stuff:

He's got a new album this year, and it's supposed to have a cover of "Everybody Wants to Rule the World". And really, who doesn't?

April 3

Keeping things on the international tip, I'm fascinated by the rise of Gregoire Boissenot, a French music star who came up in the new tradition. In 2007, he signed with the record label My Major Company, an internet record label that gets the fans to raise the money for the artists they love. In other words, his first album had 347 'producers'. They managed to produce three top 20 hits off his first album so far, starting with the title track, "Toi et Moi"

March 17

Appropriate for the holiday, today's birthday toast goes to Mark Gunn, half of the quasi-legendary Brobdingnagian Bards. They're legends to you if you're familiar with the genre of music known as "filk singing", or "filking". Basically, fantasy convention sing-a-longs. The Bards haven't just played renaissance fairs, though; their Celtic-tinged flights of fancy have garnered over 5 million mp3 downloads, and earned them the house band slot at the Oscar party for Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Even though the Bards are history, Mark Gunn remains with an autoharp slung across his chest and a keyboard at the ready, producing five podcasts a week and recording his solo compositions.
Meanwhile, here's another look at the Bards, performing a song from my favorite episode of "Firefly"

February 6

There's quite a few cool birthdays to write about today, but my number one pick has to be Rick Astley. Yes, I know he looks like Conan O'Brien doing a Michael Buble impression, but the same time that I was digging Anthrax and Screaming Blue Messiahs, I was digging his "Whenever You Need Somebody" album. Astley's the king of blue-eyed soul, a style that faded with the 90's...
Until the Internet made him a phenom all over again, and allowed millions of people to disguise their fandom in a cloak of irony. Astley treated the whole 'rickrolling' phenomenon with class, even appearing in a Macy's Thanksgiving parade (and pushing it over the shark) for the whole thing.
It would be so easy to post "Never Gonna Give You Up" right now (and more appropriate to link to something completely different), but I'm speaking as an unapologetic fan. Here's one of my favorite recordings of his - or rather, a tv performance of his cover of "When I Fall in Love." I seem to like it better than the narrator, apparently...

By the way, his wife's a movie producer. In fact, one production, "Cashback", was an Oscar-nominated short that spun off into a pretty cool feature-length. Rick provided the score, too. Right on...

January 14

Happy Birthday to good sport and future Jeopardy question Gary Brolsma. When he was 19, he was just a kid with a computer and webcam, and a taste for Eurodance. Nobody (certainly not him) thought he would make the world dance with this clip:

I'm surprised there are no dissertations yet written about how this clip became a cultural nexus point. I mean, it's the 2nd most viewed clip on the Internet ever, after Star Wars Kid - and Star Wars Kid's a recluse. Gary, meanwhile, has taken things in stride, parlaying his internet celebrity status to start his own band and become an ad pitchman.


He's also got his own website, and he's about to launch his own video network, trying to share his fame with as many people as he can. That's class, right there.
And maybe he's got the same attitude about it that Weezer sang about:

January 3

I'm so happy to say Happy Birthday, Julia Nunes. I don't even remember how I learned about this girl, but once I heard Into the Sunshine, I was hooked. She's a college student/ukelele player that got the knack for making her own webcam music videos, posted them on YouTube, and managed to parlay that into three albums and two world tours (okay, trips to England, but still...) I don't even know if she finished school yet.
Anyway, this video will give you a good sampling of the charms of Julia Nunes:

Three days... so much for New Years Resolutions...

December 18

In the interest of perspective (and page hits,) here's some of the people that are celebrating their birthday today...

Christina Aguilera
Katie Holmes
DMX
Stone Cold Steve Austin
Steven Spielberg
Keith Richards

If you see any of these people today, tell them "Happy Birthday"...

Now, let me shine a light on our featured celebrant for today, animator Andrew Kepple. He's from New Zealand, and for the past few years, he's been creating compelling and hilarious Flash cartoons under the name Too Much Spare Time. His style leans toward the Terry Gilliam/South Park style, but layered thicker than fruitcake, and possessed of its own language of humor.
Y'know, Avatar makes its worldwide premiere today; James Cameron's latest masterpiece is supposed to be the next benchmark of computer animation, same as every new Pixar movie and all the movie Zemekis seems to do these days. But I'm all about the other computer animation revolution, the kind that empowers one person with a singular vision to produce their own animations at the speed of thought (comparatively speaking) and share it unfiltered. Imagine what Tex Avery or Ralph Bakshi could have done if they had started with Flash animation.
Anyway, talking about cartoons is like dancing about architecture. Here's a perfect posting for our blog, "French Erotic Birthday"



Besides the usual suspects, it's easy to find Andrew Kepple's work at NewGrounds.com or AlbinoBlackSheep.com.

December 6

Here's another quick one, which seems like a fitting tribute to Craig Newmark, creator of Craigslist. Craigslist is the biggest classified ads source in the world; it's also how I found an apartment, some furniture for my kid, and my current job. So, Happy Birthday, Craig, and thanks.
Here's a musical tribute from Weird Al:

November 3

Lots of great birthdays today; days like this, I defer to the ukelele players. Jake Shimabukuro is recognized as a ukelele virtuoso; he's lightning-fast on the strings, and he's fearlessly exploring the versatility of the instrument (he currently plays a custom-built electric.) He occasionally tours with Jimmy Buffett and he's jammbed with Yo-Yo Ma, but he's mostly busy with his solo work. He's big in Japan; he tours frequently, he's written music scores for two Japanese films, and what would probably be my favorite CD, his all-Beatles covers album Across the Universe, is a Japan-only import that goes for $40 bucks stateside.

Oh, well... at least I have "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." I first learned about Shimabukuro years ago, when I stumbled upon this instructional clip of him in Central Park.