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Phil Everly, who with his brother, Don, made up the most revered vocal duo of the rock-music era, their exquisite harmonies profoundly influencing the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Byrds and countless younger-generation rock, folk and country singers, died Friday in Burbank of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his wife, Patti Everly, told The Times. He was 74.

Oh my, it happened again. Last time, it must have been almost 10 years ago, I had a keystroke capturing malware on the 'puter and some bastard from L.A. ordered a couple of hundred dollars of computer memory from a computer company, which then put me on its mailing list where I remain to this day receiving daily spam while never having bought anything from them. But that was all. The bank replaced the credit card, it didn't cost me a cent, and the culprit probably got away with it. The cops told me they get a couple of hundred...

If you happen to care about grammar and spelling, then in these post-literate times you can expect to be considered a pedant by the semi-literate, and a "grammar nazi" by the illiterate. My blood pressure rises when I see misuses of the apostrophe, pluralization with an apostrophe, "impact" as a verb, "pro-active" in all its uses, "there is a lot" and "there is many", "He would have if he would have", among other errors familiar to the readers among whom I don't expect to see makers of such errors. Still, I realize that the battle has been lost now. Here...

I take a lot of photographs. So many, that my Sony DSLR broke, probably from abuse of my use, the LCD screen in the OVF mode won’t display, though everything else works OK, and two distant repair outfits sent me estimates of $200 and $235 plus shipping, while Sony says send it in, we’ll tell ya. (Ever hear any more of local repair shops for anything?) Repair or replace? Anyway, walking downtown this afternoon I saw a familiar figure a tenor saxophone player, a very good one, who plays at some or other spot downtown all the time, really, I...

Warning: Something's Not Right Here! www.freerepublic.com contains content from www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com, a site known to distribute malware. Your computer might catch a virus if you visit this site. Google has found malicious software may be installed onto your computer if you proceed. If you've visited this site in the past or you trust this site, it's possible that it has just recently been compromised by a hacker. You should not proceed, and perhaps try again tomorrow or go somewhere else. We have already notified www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com that we found malware on the site. For more about the problems found on www.tellthechildrenthetruth.com, visit...

It was the yearly street fair. The big one. Sunny Sunday afternoon, booths selling tchotchkies, Mexican and oriental food (try calling it politically correctly ‘Asian-American’ when the sellers themselves called it ‘Oriental’), insurance companies, banks, chiropractors offering free spinal exams, political candidates and political causes, save the planet, save the greyhounds, church booths - I didn’t see the community church which bear hugged me last year and which I promised myself to visit and never did, but they were there according to the map, absent were the Scientologists this year and the usual masked protesters against them, masked because they...

Will ya? For the past six months or so I have been meeting each week with a young Chinese economics scholar from mainland China, discussing life in the United States, and helping him with his English which is excellent as far as vocabulary and grammar, but rather dismal in the pronunciation department. This is my volunteer work contribution to the betterment of mankind, as I tend to avoid those typical volunteering activities such as "teaching children of prisoners to read", preferring instead, as has been my habit in other areas, to try to subvert the dominant paradigm. (Today, seeing a...

A HEN produced a live chick in a freak birth at a poultry farm in central Sri Lanka, a veterinary surgeon says. The vet in charge of the town of Welimada, PR Yapa, said the egg appeared to have incubated inside the hen for 21 days and the hen died when it gave birth to the chick. "I had only heard about such aberrations, but I was able to see it for myself today," Dr Yapa told AFP. He said the free-range farm owners alerted the local veterinary authorities after the highly unusual phenomenon and he performed a post-mortem examination...

By now you probably know that when you enter a term into a Google box and press the Return key (sometimes incorrectly called the Enter key), Google will show you back results that will be different if President Usurper entered the same term, or even if another member of the forum with whom you agree on everything except of course the Zimmerman-Martin case entered it. It is called personalization of results, and we are supposed to think it is good. Somebody out there, even if it is merely a heartless programming algorithm, recognizes your uniqueness in this cruel, impersonal universe...

I am putting together a photo album. One consisting of my own photographs taken by the DSLR camera I own. I've already created one album, paying ~ $42 for a book of 26 pages (13 sheets) of my color photographs. Expensive, but worth it. (The service, which I selected after thorough online investigation, was Adoramapix. I am not associated with them, and seeing the results I do recommend them, but if you know of a service that is less costly and as good, please do let us know.) The theme and title of my second photo album is to be...

Ultimately, it is all my fault, my failure, my fall. I failed to persuade, failed to seduce, failed to sell. (I hate the concept of 'selling oneself', so prevalent in our culture, but it is what it is.) And it's my core that is responsible. My unchangeable core. It was my core that was rejected, despised, spat upon, accused, laid off from my job, told "I cannot love you". No Prozac, no therapy can change my core, they can only dull my senses, hypnotize me into accepting despair. I know what I'm talking about, the world has sent me a...

Sally's husband was often abusive. One morning, over breakfast, Hank began yelling at her because she was on the phone instead of keeping him company. Later, after Hank went to work, Sally picked up his shirts from the laundry, ran some other errands for him, and decided to cook his favorite dish for dinner. Do you think Sally did the right thing? Sally, alas, believed that if she could only create an ideal loving home atmosphere, her husband's abusiveness would stop. Unfortunately, she was in fact rewarding her husband's negative behavior. In response to his outbursts, Hank found his chores...

Every couple of years I would scour the Al Gore's most famous invention after climate for interesting music, sites like artistsdirect.com, garageband.com and others that don't exist anymore and where unsigned bands, or signed and little known artists uploaded their music, oftentimes quite good, occasionally brilliant. I'd listen to hundreds, thousands of cuts to find a few diamonds in the rough.  I had a method, which probably missed a few rarities, but which served me well. I'd listen to a few seconds to decide, 5, 15, 30.  Certain guitar chords alerted me to the worth of the rest of a...

The latest Internet sensation is Lytro, the high-tech camera start-up with $50 million in venture capital financing that promises to launch a "picture revolution" by upending everything that we know about taking pictures. In other words, with this camera, you shoot first, focus later. And when you take the time to focus, your photo turns into an amazing work of 3D art with crisp, high-definition details. Lytro calls them living pictures, and claims that this movement from 2D to 3D photos is just as revolutionary as the movement from film to digital. Continued...

Truth be told, a secret handshake was the only thing missing. There were odd one arm hugs, euphemism filled talk that would put the corporate Bullshit Bingo game to shame, rules, and rituals, all of which reminded me of the Catholic masses I attended as a boy, and the altar boys’ my age choreographed moves carrying an enormous Holy Book from one side of the altar to the other, and then, inexplicably, back again. Watching the proceedings I thought of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton of the Honeymooners and their Loyal Order of Raccoons lodge. But there was nothing funny...

Isn't it great? You no longer have to buy your software. Why, it's on the "cloud". Maybe even Cloud 9. Like beer, which you never buy, you rent it. It won't take up valuable space on you 1,024 gigabyte hard disk, no updates to worry about, no fees for updating the damn thing. But wait, something ain't right! Let's say you are using Google Docs (and let's not get into the discussion of Google being Communists, as they all supposedly are according to some here. If they support the RATS it's only because we've allowed the RATS to control the...

Now that we have resolved the einsteinian equation 48÷2(9+3) = ? (my brother and I maintain it equals 288!), give me a hand attempting to solve another mystery. My beloved car was stolen. (Hold on the string section. As a matter of fact, you may dismiss the violinists.) In broad daylight. My ex borrowed it, drove to and parked in one of the crime capital cities of the greatest country in mankind's history, forgot, as exes tend to do, to lock it, left for 20 minutes to pick up a prescription, came back, said automobile vehicle was gone. Seven year...