...useful stuff for the rest of us

Michael John And The Bottom Line: As a rule, CyberStuff does not review bands unless they are all-time favs like Little Feat, Harry Chapin or Box Set. Every so often, we get to add one to the list and take the artistic license to do so (hey, it's our site :-). Recently, we attended the Topanga Blues Festival at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum in Los Angeles (Will Geer played Grandpa Walton). This venue is one of the most amazing places to see live music (they also do Shakespeare, al fresco). The fest was already a winner when Michael John and the Bottom Line took the stage. Now it was time to sit up and take notice. This is one smokin', soulful blues band. Lead singer Michael John's vocals have a powerful, sultry resonance that compliment the well-oiled machine that is The Bottom Line. Most of their material is original, ranging from slow to swinging. But our highlight was an incredible rendition of John Hiatt's classic "Feels Like Rain." Buddy Guy may have done it earlier, but he's got nothing on Michael John and The Bottom Line. Coincidentally, this version appears on the band's latest CD, "Good Thing," available at their web site. Also check the schedule and catch them live. Well worth it. 

The Covers Project: The Covers project is, according to the owners "the product of too many late nights with too much free time." They are building a database of cover songs (songs performed by an artist other than the original performer) with the intention of creating cover "chains." A cover chain is a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the band who covered the preceding song. An interesting note about the origins of the phrase "Cover Song" from Mark Edwards at WICC Radio: An example of a COVER record would be the release of "Sh-Boom" by the Crew Cuts in 1955 at almost the same time as the original by The Chords. The term COVER record is taken from the fact that the Crew-Cuts version, being performed by a white group and distributed by a major record label, and thus finding considerable additional radio airplay, would COVER any chance of success that the original release may have had.

Our Two Cents :-): Current estimates by the U.S. Mint place the number of pennies in circulation at around 140 billion. Others have estimated as many as 200 billion currently circulating. Since the first penny was minted in 1787, until present-day, over 300 billion pennies have been minted in the United States. So that leaves about 100 billion pennies that have been retired by the Mint, lost down sewer drains, stored in jars, smashed by trains, or collected by numismatists in the past 200 years. Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it's still hard to grasp just how much a "billion" really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer the question: "What would a billion (or a trillion) pennies look like?"

Buy A Can Of Whoop Ass: We couldn't decide whether this should go here or in "Weird Stuff." But since it seems they are selling cans of Whoop Ass for real...it made more sense for this department. Product attributes notwithstanding, we like the story of how the company started: "In March of 1998, Laura and Jennifer took a weekend trip to New Orleans. While enjoying themselves one night on Bourbon Street, a young man began pestering them with off-color comments. The ladies had no intentions of falling victim to such annoyances and “opened up a can of whoop ass” on the fellow.  They joked about it the rest of the weekend. They returned to Atlanta and continued to reflect on the incident. One year later they decided that an actual can of whoop ass might come in handy for many situations. This is when they came up with the idea of a physical can containing citations of different varieties. At this point, W.A. Unlimited was born.

How Smart Are You?: There's only one way to know...take the test.

Celebrities: Are They Alive Or Dead?: One might consider this site a bit strange or even morbid, but it's really a fascinating exploration of people in the public eye. Peruse Who's Alive and Who's Dead and you'll find categories covering actors, athletes, politicians, musicians and even astronauts. Did you know there are 61 living members of the Baseball Hall of Fame and that the oldest living player is Carl Swanson, born December 17th, 1900? How about the fact that there are still two living members of Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 marine voyage where he traveled on a small, man-made craft across great distances, to support his theories that ancient peoples could have made these same migrations. Neither did we.

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