Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was a real person and she just died

It is so tragic when it takes a death for society to realize that someone was telling the plain truth about something for so long, and it was not believed for a whole lifetime.

But that is exactly what happened with Lucy Vodden.

She was a preschool classmate of Julian Lennon.

One day, as his father John Lennon repeatedly said, Julian brought home a picture he had drawn at school of his classmate, Lucy Vodden.

When his father asked, as all parents do of their child's first drawings, what it was of - Julian proudly exclaimed that it was Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

No one, from the BBC to her future classmates believed she was the subject of the song. Neither she nor the author of the song was believed when they said that was the case.

Lucy Vodden has died of Lupus, it was announced yesterday by the clinic where she was being treated.

She was 4 when she was Julian's classmate and through his painting, inspired the song. She was 46 this month when she died. A long time to go without people believing you. Her whole life, basically.

Country sounds pretty good to me too

There is a song that goes "Country sounds pretty good to me".

I have noticed that these days I tend to veer towards country music stations when I am in my car.

In the past, I listened to a lot of classic, progressive, and some pop rock.

As rock stars crushing their lives with drug and alcohol abuse has become a tired refrain, I have kind of drifted away from listening to them as much.

I would have to be really dense to think they do not live in a high-stress industry. Musicians have long been recognized as having the shortest life-expectancy of any other major profession.

However, that is not enough reason to like it.

Pop should not be synonymous with explode & meltdown. Hopefully, things will change soon.

added some web bling to sidebar of my blog

Last.FM is a music-oriented social web portal that you can use to keep track of your favorite music. It has the benefit of letting you find other people with similar musical tastes.

Also, it helps educate you about artists, bands, and their songs. The site is highly educational. It will not teach you music theory, how to write music, or how to critically analyze music. It will teach you a lot of history and everything else though.

To kind of do my bit to promote awareness of Last.FM and brighten the pages of my blog I have added several web components to my sidebar. They show what artists and songs I seem to like and a few songs that I have enjoyed recently.

The components use Flash. If you have problems viewing my page you might look into whether that is causing your difficulty or not.

If you like music then I encourage you to check out the Last.FM site yourself.

demise of Spears, Lohan, and lots of other pop stars recently

I find the number of young top pop performers crashing and burning from drugs this year really discouraging.

Intellectually, you can separate the sound or show from the person performing it. On the other hand, people tend to idolize their favorite performers - the ones whose performances they really like and enjoy more than once.

Well, that is getting pretty hard to do now.

I bought a Britney Spears best-of album a year or two ago from iTunes. It was selling at half price and had a bunch of songs I had heard on the radio and liked. She was very popular at the time and it seemed like a good purchase.

Now, however - I really do not want to hear Britney singing that she's toxic. With all the reports about her that have come out in the news this year, there are probably few Americans who do not know she is toxic.

Now, I realize that part of the money I spent on that album probably went to fuel her drug habit, her boozing, her wasteful expenditures while she is not working. All these things are self-destructive.

She is a Mom now, and she is not taking care of her kid. While she was in the midst of losing custody of her child to her ex-husband, she decided to go out partying at a club with Avril Lavigne.

If you read about Avril, you know that the is not exactly the poster-child for sobriety. Though I have never read an article about her using drugs, there have been plenty that talk about her boozing it up from an early age. I have yet to read one saying that he has chucked the habit of getting really drunk.

So, for those reasons, I am a Britney Spears fan no more. No plans to buy any of her albums in the foreseeable future.

Nicole Richie just announced that she is searing off drinking and drugs - 2 things she has had a lot of in the past, judging from her arrests.

She only made this decision after becoming pregnant. The announcement came when she was six-months pregnant. That is a bit late in the process to start worrying about pre-natal care. She said she does not even want anyone smoking around her while she is pregnant.

I hope her baby turns all right. I hope she really has kicked her habits - and kicked them for good.

If not, then she is following just a year or two behind in Britney Spears footsteps. That would be tragic, given how her life is going of late.

She just signed up for an 18 month sobriety program. It is only 52 hours of sessions, though. That is 40 minutes per week, right?

Personally, if I were her - I think I would go for something a little more intensive.

Not sure if Nicole Richie has ever made a record. She did truly grow up with music performers, though. And her TV career with Paris Hilton made her a pop star in her own right.

Her biologic dad was a member of adoptive father Lionel Richie's band. Her biological mother worked backstage. Lionel Richie launched two major musical careers: first with the pop disco/funk band The Commodores. Then, as an 80s solo artist he wrote/performed a lot of sentimental ballads and moody soft rock music.

Lindsay Lohan might actually turn her life around this month. The Disney movie star went to a rehab clinic in Utah recently. She plans to settle in Utah for the time being - instead of L.A./Hollywood.

Afterwards the clinic she is off to spend time with her dad. He had his own problem with drinking that was in the news quite a bit. However, he seems to have gotten over that habit and reformed himself into a crusader against drinking & drugs. I hope his daughter becomes his second success story.

The entertainment industry really needs to find a way to get booze off the table for minors. I know it sounds crazy but maybe they shouldn't serve alcohol at their celebrations for a year or two.

Even if the kids are not served alcohol at these events, their role models and more senior professional peers are sipping it and it sets a bad example. Or it at least gets kids thinking that is what they should be doing.

Since they have the money to burn it takes them no time at all to fuel a substance-fired meltdown as soon as they turn 18 or 21, if not sooner.

It is easy to blame the teenagers when this happens.

However, I think they are being a little set up for a big fall. In some cases, it is not the intention of those responsible. In other cases, it clearly is.

The end result does reflect badly on the entertainment industry. Look at the number of current and former Disney stars that are in trouble these days.

That just did not seem to happen in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties - did it?

Apple breaks out new ad for former adversary Paul McCartney album

Apple is showing no hard feelings in the wake of its final settlement with lawyers representing the business interests of Sir Paul McCartney and the other ex-Beatles.

This month McCartney rolled out his new album on the Apple iTunes service, making it accessible in minutes to the tens or hundreds of millions of MS-Windows and Macintosh users.

Last night I saw an iTunes ad written around the new McCartney album and the rocker himself. It was pretty good. Very colorful and creative blend of art, technology, and video. Appropriate, it seems - for the newest blockbuster product on the iTunes service.

A couple of decades ago I was awestruck by the initial Apple TV ad - the ominous yet encouraging "1984" TV commercial.

Nowadays, Apple ads are infinitely more playful and warm. The steaks are no longer life-and-death for Apple, its platform, or its user community.

Now, it is just good, clean fun!

The adoption of entertainment products and services into the Apple core product line families has really transformed the company and a few industries. Just about everyone would say - a lot for the better.

It has given marketeers for Apple a whole new audience to play with too.

iTunes 7.1 released by Apple

Hey, iTunes 7.1 is out!

huge news on satellite radio scene: XM and Sirius digital satellite radio companies merge

Everyone knows that if you want satellite radio, you have to decide which of two incompatible families of services and radio equipment you have to chose from.

Well, not not any more - at least, not for long.

CNNMoney reports XM, Sirius announce merger.

USA Today says, XM and Sirius satellite radio companies strike a merger deal.

At the moment, www.radiosatellite.org shows the features, costs, limitations, and partners involved with each of the two formerly separate companies.

As a guy who likes music, listening to the news, and a little commentary from time to time while he is driving to and from work - this is kind of interest-grabbing.

As a guy who uses his computer over a radio in his house for news/entertainment 99.99 percent of the time - with a TiVo and computer-based tuner for all of his television-watching - I am pretty excited.

This should usher in a new golden age of radio.

It will probably really shake up the broadcast radio scene.

For one thing, this will directly pit accused monopolist Clear Channel directly against their more space age brethern.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out against the Kerbango internet radio service in iTunes, AOL Radio, and Live 365 internet radio.

I suspect this will be the first boulder to roll in an avalanche of change in the way we get our audio programming in the United States.

Companies across the US and some other parts of the world are probably scrambling as they figure out how to capitalize - or blunt the impact - of this new age of radio.

By the way, the first man to come up with and publish the idea of broadcasting radio waves to earth from satellites encircling the globe was Arthur C. Clarke. He is a noted and celebrated author of science fiction.

I imagine there are a lot of people celebrating his idea tonight!!!