Is there any other high level Sports Commissioner who has failed more then Mr Bettman? Why does he even want the job? It is so apparent that he doesn't follow the sport or has any knowledge of it. Must be that there are no other high-paying jobs left for him to move on to. At this point we can only blame David Stern. His lack of intelligence, sports acumen or even love of the sport shows up ten feet before he ever enters the room. Between the Coyotes and the wonderful salary cap alone, he makes Isiah Thomas's reign as the Commissioner of the CBA seem a success....

Please read the Toronto Sun column on the Coyotes.


Bettman's bid to save Coyotes is misguided
By GARY LOEWEN
In envisioning long-term NHL success in the Sun Belt, Gary Bettman may be wearing rose-coloured glasses.
Or maybe he just has a nasty case of pink eye.
But clearly the NHL commissioner's efforts to keep the Phoenix Coyotes in the desert are misguided.
Bettman long ago should have faced up to the lack of interest in non-traditional hockey markets such as Arizona and taken steps toward NHL contraction.
When it became clear that Coyotes owner Jerry Moyes wasn't interested in continuing to lose millions of dollars trying to make ice in the desert, the franchise ought to have been folded, the players put into a dispersal
draft.
By acting promptly, Bettman could have avoided the embarrassing squabble with Jim Balsillie.
Instead of Duel in the Desert, we would have had Defunct in the Desert -- a move most hockey fans surely would have supported.
But Bettman opted to go into denial mode.
As recently as three months ago, the commish said there were four ownership groups interested in keeping the Coyotes in Arizona.
Today, there is not one investor in sight willing to step up to that challenge.
Bettman wants the NHL to buy the team for the short-term, and during the next year he would undertake the search for a permanent owner.
Sounds like the O.J. Simpson saga all over again.
The NHL needs to accept that hockey hasn't taken root in the deep south. Along with the Coyotes, the NHL could deep-six the bulk of the Southeast Division and few fans would weep.
The league would be stronger, and more appealing to true fans.
Meantime, the board of governors should grab the Sun Belt and use it to tan the commish's hide.
Shifting gears
About those four groups who supposedly were interesting in buying the Coyotes and keeping them in Phoenix: They have opted to buy Pontiac dealerships instead.
Franchise anyone?
What's curious about the Coyotes bankruptcy sale is that there isn't a bidder other than Balsillie interested in buying the franchise and relocating it.
Owning an NHL team in southern Ontario was supposed to be priceless, wasn't it?
Those groups that had professed interest in owning a Toronto-area team have pulled quite a disappearing act.
T.O. on T.O.
Buffalo Bills receiver Terrell Owens was asked yesterday about his team playing at the Rogers Centre on Dec. 3.
"Looking forward to that, too," Owens said.
"Get ready Toronto, here we come."
All right, we wouldn't mind seeing some football in this town.
GARY.LOEWEN@SUNMEDIA.CA
Bettman's bid to save Coyotes is misguided
By GARY LOEWEN
Last Updated: 10th September 2009, 5:06am

Gotta Love Hockey

I can't stand his voice - but Scotty Ferrall is a hockey nut that actually has knowledge and love for the game
So I have to give the guy props....
Read on PUCKHEADS!!


Wed Aug 19, 2009 9:55 am EDT

Five Reasons Sports Radio Icon Scott Ferrall Loves Hockey
By Greg Wyshynski

Our series "5 Reasons I Love Hockey" features puckheads from all walks of life revealing five things that either made them a fan or that keep them watching hockey. It will run every weekday through August. Enjoy.
Scott Ferrall is an acquired taste. I acquired it during his stint on WFAN, where his raspy tone, cliquish lingo, handing out virtual beer to listeners and ability to cram seven words into the space where only one syllable should naturally exist were nothing I'd ever heard before. Not to say it was better or worse than what was regularly broadcast on New York's flagship sports talk station; it was different, which was all that mattered.
Plus, the guy loved hockey, which was revolutionary for New York sports radio or New York sports media in general.
The Scott Ferrall Show airs Monday through Friday from 8 p.m.-12:00 a.m. ET exclusively on Howard 101, one of Howard Stern's two exclusive SIRIUS XM channels.
Here are Scott Ferrall's "5 Reasons I love Hockey."
It's subtle, but you may be able to detect which NHL franchise he prefers.
1. Mike Lange
Pittsburgh Penguins' legendary play-by-play man. There is no one like him. He was my idol in the broadcast booth. I wanted to be him when I was in high school. After doing nationally syndicated radio shows from 1993-99, I snagged the play-by-play job with the Atlanta Thrashers in their expansion season. So, yes, I was the first play by play voice of the franchise and they can't take that away from me.
2. My First Time.
My first experience with hockey was 1980, after the USA men won the gold at Lake Placid. My father took me to see Mark Johnson play. The Pittsburgh Penguins battled the Minnesota North Stars at the Igloo in the Steel City. One game and I was hooked for life. I have proceeded to be a massive hockey fan ever since.
This year will be 30 years of following the NHL. I love the sport like no other. Nothing comes close for me personally. The speed of the game and hitting gets my blood flowing. The fights are just as good. I love the power play and penalty kill. The playoffs are the best happening in sports. This year's Stanley Cup Finals between the Pens and Red Wings was one for the ages. I always watch the NHL over every other sport. I will never stop being a fan and friend of the league. I actually work for the league. I do two shows: THE HOCKEY SHOW on NHL.COM and THE CISCO ALL ACCESS PRE-GAME SHOW during the playoffs.
3. Mario Lemieux.
There was none better in my opinion. The magnificent one! When he got drafted in ‘86 the Pens fortunes turned around dramatically and he would go on to one of the most brilliant career's the league has ever known. He battled cancer. He won two Stanley Cups as a player (back-to-back). He saved the franchise from certain death. He fought off bankruptcy and fixed the financial mess the team was, only to rebuild and win another CUP (this year over the dynasty Wings) as an owner. I'm lucky to say Mario is a friend. Coolest player I've ever met. Humble yet dominant! Unstoppable. I saw him score a goal five different ways in one game.

4. 1990-91; 1991-1992; 2008-2009.
PENGUINS WIN STANLEY CUP CHAMPIONSHIP -- enough said!
5. The Players.
My radio show relationships that I've made over the years with hundreds of players, both current and retired. I've had more NHL players on my radio show at SIRIUS XM Radio (HOWARD 101) than anyone doing radio anywhere in North America. I talk more hockey than anyone. I have several guys that are regulars like Mike Modano(notes) of the Stars, Mike Green(notes)-Caps, Shane Doan(notes)-Coyotes, Sean O'Donnell(notes)-Kings, Joe Thornton(notes)-Sharks, Paul Martin(notes) and Patrick Elias-Devils, etc. The list goes on forever.
How cool is it that every night I get to talk to the best players in the world with NO RULES! Brilliant!
Former ten team and 20-year veteran Cup Champion Jim Dowd(notes) (Brick, NJ) also does my show weekly throughout the season. I've had on everyone from Gary Bettman to Wayne Gretzky.
SEE YOU AT THE RINK AND DON'T FORGET WHO THE NHL CHAMPS ARE RIGHT NOW -- PENGUINS RULE!

NY Times Article - End of The Magazine Era.....

August 3, 2009
THE MEDIA EQUATION
10 Years Ago, an Omen No One Saw

By DAVID CARR
Ten years ago Sunday, on an island off an island off the coast of America, something impossibly glamorous took place. Partygoers took boats from Manhattan to the home of the Statue of Liberty to plop pashalike on pillows and blankets and munch on lamb chops while Macy Gray sang, their faces illuminated with multicolored Chinese lanterns and fireworks curated and narrated by George Plimpton.

“That was a silver-flanged fleur-de-lis,” said the voice, highly recognizable but disembodied by darkness.

This was the Talk magazine launch party on Aug. 2, 1999 — simply called The Party at the time — and it seemed as if a new era of media fabulousness had been christened. The Hearst Corporation and Miramax, owned by Disney, decided to finance a new general interest magazine led by Tina Brown, fresh off her triumphs at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, that would lead the national conversation.

It was all kicked off with the kind of lavish party that would seem unthinkable in the current context.

Sponsored liquor flowed, women teetered about on heels in deep grass, and the A-list guest list — Mr. Kissinger, please meet Miss um Ms. uh meet Madonna — was a testament to the power of the synergized word. Content was king and Ms. Brown was its queen.

“Now you’re not exactly the tired masses, the huddled masses, but then again, I’m an immigrant who toiled here on the Concorde,” she said to the crowd after being introduced by Queen Latifah. “But I just want to say, here’s to Lady Liberty tonight.”

Too bad nobody saw the sharks circling in the harbor. Rather than the culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with cash from the go-go ’90s and engorged by spending from the dot-com era, mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something extraordinary. But that brink ended up being a cliff.

“It seems like that happened in the 18th century,” said Ms. Brown by phone last Friday.

Magazines are on pace to book little more than half of the advertising pages that the industry did 10 years ago, and dozens of longtime titles have disappeared. The last big magazine introduction — Portfolio at Condé Nast Publications — flamed out this spring after two years at a cost of more than $80 million. Now even Condé Nast Publications, the world headquarters of printed luxury, has brought in the bean counters from McKinsey with an eye toward further cuts. There may never be another large magazine launch ever, and certainly not one that was accompanied by the fanfare of Talk.

I’m still ashamed to admit that I wasn’t one of the lucky 1,000 people invited to the party — old prerogatives die hard — so I was trapped on shore, covering it secondhand with a nose pressed up against the glass. But it is worth thinking about how this future, or lack of one, arrived so unforeseen.

Ten years ago, journalists, long the salarymen of the publishing economy, began gorging on big contracts and options from digital start-ups like shrimp at a free buffet. With coveted writers commanding $5 for every typed word into magazines that were stuffed to the brim with advertising, there was a fizziness, some would say recklessness, in the air. The industry was drunk on its own prerogatives, working a party that seemed as if it would never end.

Peter Kaplan, the former editor of The New York Observer, attended the party and oversaw coverage of the event.

“Tina, for all the excellence of her antenna, was scratching the air, and like many of us, was unable to pull in the new signal,” he said. “She failed to see that it was probably already over and that there was something slightly hollow about that event.”

Most of us who covered media did not fully understand the implications of the new technology that could publish and distribute information at zero marginal cost. The Web was viewed as a niche, as a way to supplement and enhance the printed product, certainly not a threat that would make many of those publications obsolete.

“Most of the talk at the Talk party was about the party itself,” said Kurt Andersen, a novelist, radio host and founder of Spy magazine. “It was weird and interesting because you were sort of wandering around in the dark out there and bumping into people. There was a meta quality to the thing, a self-consciousness, that in retrospect was probably telling.”

At least Ms. Brown did not compose a rap ode to the new magazine. That fell to Mr. Big, Ron Galotti, the former Condé Nast publisher who managed to get a flock of advertisers to buy the hype and commit to the first four issues of a magazine they had never seen. After Talk closed, Mr. Big quit Manhattan media and moved to a farm in Vermont. Maybe he knew something we didn’t. (He did not return a call.)

“It was the end of something extraordinary, but none of us knew it at the time,” Ms. Brown says now. “What followed was a very turbulent odyssey, not just for me, but for all of us. There has been a volcanic realignment that none of us foresaw.”

After Talk closed early in 2002, Ms. Brown hosted a television show on CNBC and wrote a book about Princess Diana. Demonstrating a nimbleness that has characterized her entire career, she is now running The Daily Beast, a scrappy but promising digital media site owned by Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp.

She pays her writers, increasingly an exception these days, but there are no huge contracts or boat rides to sylvan lawns full of impossibly famous people. The Daily Beast has 1.5 million unique visitors a month, according to Quantcast, and has kicked up some notice, but its opening party of a hundred or so took place at the very much land-locked Pop Burger on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan. There was no Sarah Jessica Parker, no Robert De Niro and no Hugh Grant in attendance. There were a lot of bloggers instead.

Modern media success is enabled by brutal cost control and using hard, fast numbers to convince advertisers they will get a return for their spending. Once stalwart magazines like BusinessWeek are up for grabs and entire formerly lucrative categories have been wiped out. The magazine canard of associative glamour, of selling aspiration by the bucket-load with page after page of pricy merchandise, is all but dead but for a few exceptions.

Ms. Brown once wrote the book “Life as a Party” and on that night, it was.

“I was aware it was a historic night,” Ms. Brown said. “We were on a boat and I was with Natasha Richardson. We were talking and laughing, looking at the lights of the twin towers. And then a big wave came over the side of the boat and soaked us both. Now Natasha is gone, the towers are gone. It’s very, very sad, but I am very excited by this new world we are heading into.”

RAY JOHNSON - AN INSPIRATION TO ALL OF US

ESPN ARTICLE (Also featured in Sport Ilustrated)
One-time Mav faces cancer with 'attaboy' spirit shown on court
Associated Press

DALLAS -- Sitting courtside with Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in New Jersey, Ray Johnston watches his buddies play and tries getting lost in the action.
He can't do it. Instead, Johnston imagines the ball back in his hands, spotting Josh Howard, throwing a lob for a dunk and getting a nod of appreciation.
Oh, how he loved those "attaboy" moments.
Johnston never lets the memories linger for long. It's been a couple years and way too many doses of arsenic and chemotherapy since everything happened, all of it so fast:
The scout at the Hoop-it-Up tournament. The tryout. Going from a 25-year-old loan officer with season tickets to having Steve Nash's locker, a No. 2 jersey and being teammates with Howard and Devin Harris on the Mavericks' summer league team.
Then a bump in a pickup game led to surgery -- and a coma. All because of the leukemia no one knew he had.
Two brushes with death later, he awoke with a tube coming out of his neck and seven toes blackened by poor circulation, soon to be amputated. Eighteen months after his cancer was gone, Dallas was playing Miami in the NBA finals and Johnston was facing cancer again. The Mavs lost; Johnston won.
Now it's late on Dec. 5, 2006. The Mavericks have beaten the Nets and are settling in for the flight home. Johnston heads toward his seat, practically giving out high-fives and slaps on the back.
"Good win, man, good win," he says in his Southern drawl.
He passes poker foe Jason Terry, text-messaging pal Dirk Nowitzki and all the coaches. Then he plops his 6-foot-2, 165-pound body into a comfy black leather chair.
That's when he feels it again. That pain in his tailbone that should've been gone by now.
------=
Johnston grew up in Montgomery, Ala., getting into basketball by shooting free throws in his driveway when he was 4. By fifth grade, he was picked first in games with 40-year-olds at the YMCA. In eighth grade, he made the high school varsity.
Before his senior year, Johnston went to the same all-star camp as Stephon Marbury. Knowing he was no NBA prodigy, Johnston went home with the award for being the hardest worker.
"I was a pass-first point guard with an inconsistent shot," he said. "I was a guy that always went after loose balls. I might not get it, but I'd be on the floor and leave a sweat stain."
The work ethic, along with a devotion to faith and family, came from his parents, who divorced when he was 2 but shared in his upbringing.
His mom, Martha, sometimes had several jobs at once, including a long stint leading Auburn athletes in aerobics. Ray often tagged along, especially Sundays after football games; that's how he got to know Bo Jackson.
Ray Sr., a Vietnam vet, sold insurance and raised cattle. He taught his boy how Johnston men handle tough times and how to treat people right. Strangers were a handshake from being friends. Humility and happiness came naturally. That's why he was always smiling, even on the court.
"We had friends who didn't even have children in the game who would come to watch him," Ray Sr. said.
Small colleges were interested, but Johnston wanted to play in the Southeastern Conference. So he walked on at Alabama for two seasons. He graduated in 2001, then moved to Dallas.
Within a few years, he'd built a life to be envied.
He was dating Miss Texas, working in the mortgage business and was the model on a life-sized cardboard cutout in every FedEx Kinko's store in the country. He also had gigs playing guitar and singing tunes by Dave Matthews and Pat Green.
And there was basketball -- leagues at night, weekend tournaments anywhere within a five-hour drive and pickup games from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. nearly every day.
Michael Irvin and Deion Sanders were impressed enough to hand him an agent's business card.
"It's probably a boring thing to hear," Johnston said, "but practice paid off."
------=
The 2004 Hoop-it-Up tournament was held right outside the Mavericks' arena. Cuban gave it an "American Idol" flair by sending scouts to look for 20 candidates to battle for spots on Dallas' summer league squad.
Once he made that cut, Johnston taught the others plays he knew the Mavericks used. They listened because he was setting them up for shots. Mavs president Donnie Nelson noticed that no matter what combination of players Johnston was with, his teams always won.
When the few who made it moved into the locker room, Johnston settled in under Nash's nameplate. Then Nash showed up to clean out his locker. He'd just agreed to sign with Phoenix.
"Sorry, I'm in your way," Johnston said.
"You're fine," Nash said, smiling and shaking his hand.
Playing behind two draft picks, Johnston's per-minute averages were decent, but he didn't get many minutes.
Still, everyone hated to see him go when the summer league ended. Nelson even offered to find him a roster spot in Lithuania or Croatia.
Johnston had six weeks to decide. Meanwhile, he kept playing pickup ball.
During a lunchtime game in late August, he got hit on the right shin. It was barely more than a tap, but it kept hurting, then swelling. The next morning, he went to Mavericks orthopedist T.O. Souryal for a surgical procedure that took only 20 minutes.
"You're good," Souryal said in the recovery room. "Keep in touch."
Hours later, a nurse frantically called Souryal. The area below Johnston's right knee was filling like a balloon, only with blood. He was rushed to Presbyterian Hospital, where specialists spent days trying to figure out what was wrong with a 25-year-old athlete whose medical history was one line long: a hernia when he was 8.
With no diagnosis, Johnston's mind raced. Friends came to the ICU to keep him occupied, like the night of Sept. 1, when a game of spades turned into Texas Hold 'Em.
The next thing Johnston knew, it was November. The Boston Red Sox had won the World Series, and President Bush had just been re-elected.
------=
Johnston awoke to a bright room with get-well cards dangling from the ceiling.
Colored posterboards held hundreds of encouraging e-mails. A guestbook was filled with names and prayers. It was as if all the attaboys he'd ever given had come back to him.
His mom was behind the decorations -- and the mood.
When a doctor said there was a 1-in-whatever chance he'd make it, she shot back, "You just may be looking at the one."
During the coma, Johnston had to be shocked back to life. Twice. His lungs collapsed, five days apart, with an irregular heartbeat in between. His kidneys failed. Twice. Blood clots in his brain led to seizures.
The culprit: acute promyelocytic leukemia, which the American Cancer Society says accounts for about 3 percent of leukemia cases.
The cancer was declared in remission about two weeks after Johnston came out of the coma.
It wouldn't last.
By the spring of 2006, Johnston was worried when he was playing football and the 40-yard spirals he usually threw went only 4 yards. Dozens of excruciating arsenic treatments later, he was a two-time cancer survivor.
The early December road trip with the Mavericks was somewhat of a celebration, but the joy was short-lived. All because of that aching tailbone.
He was hospitalized again in late December. Using arsenic, chemotherapy and radiation -- the medical equivalent of a triple-coverage defense -- cancer was again pummeled into remission by early February 2007. He received a bone-marrow transplant on Feb. 28, a few weeks after turning 28.
The next step was waiting to see if his body would allow a new immune system to take over.
If he could make it to 100 days, his chances of surviving would soar.
------=
Johnston went through all three rounds of cancer with a strong support system.
Mom moved in. Dad flew in plenty. And there were lots of prayers from family in Alabama and friends in Dallas.
There also was his Dallas family. The Mavericks.
Souryal, the team doctor, visited nearly every day of Johnston's first 132-day hospital stay. They became so close that Johnston and his mom later spent a few nights at Souryal's house. The doctor eventually announced the friendship was too strong for Johnston to be his patient. Then he realized Johnston's case was so far beyond the realm of an orthopedist that it didn't matter.
Nelson visited whenever he could, called when he couldn't. He was a constant source of advice, encouragement and swag, bringing everything from a Mavs cap to John Mellencamp's manager.
"It's hard not to fall in love with people like him," Nelson said. "He has this infectious love of life, a winning attitude and a competitive spirit. It's what makes him a guy that can overcome all odds to make the Mavs and then become a miracle man conquering death."
Cuban actually knew Johnston the longest, having played against him on the pickup-ball circuit.
Now their bond is so strong that when Cuban said he'd considered selling the Mavericks after losing to Miami in the finals, but didn't in part because of people whose lives are impacted by the team and the impact those folks have on him, Johnston thought, "He's talking about me."
"He was one of them, absolutely," Cuban said. "The Mavericks are more than just me or Dirk or our win-loss record. It's a community trust. You recognize that there's more to a team than just the organization itself, and Ray embodies that across the board."
------=
These days, Johnston hardly resembles the guy in the Kinko's cutout.
Having bottomed out at 120 pounds, he's up to 145. Still, he's bald, bony and often in pain, sometimes sitting on a "booty pad" or propping up his right leg, the one that still has three toes.
But something hasn't changed from his modeling days -- the smile. It's always there, the doorway to a charismatic personality that still turns strangers into friends, from greeting volunteers at the hospital to offering a high-five to a crying kid at a restaurant.
That attitude can be traced to his strong faith, and his favorite scripture: "A cheerful heart is good medicine, a downcast spirit dries the bones."
The first setback was so devastating he needed six months of recovery and rehab. Then he started traveling, dated another Miss Texas and got a commercial real-estate degree. He wound up working for the Heroes Foundation, an organization that promoted baseball to at-risk youths and wanted to get into basketball.
The second time cancer invaded, Johnston was so determined not to break stride that he flew to Las Vegas to coach his Heroes team the day he left the hospital. He later rounded up some relatives and got picked to be on "Family Feud," although their visit was postponed when Johnston went back in the hospital.
The third comeback hit high gear when oncologist Robert Collins declared Johnston's recovery among the best he's seen for a recipient of a bone marrow transplant. Then Johnston asked his survival chances if cancer returned.
"Not good," the doctor said.
"Great!" Johnston replied. And he meant it. If this new immune system didn't work, there would be "no more pokes."
"There are only so many Ws you can get in life," he said.
This isn't giving up. It's starting a fast break toward the rest of his life, free from worry.
He picked up his favorite acoustic guitar and started rubbing calluses back into his fingertips. He took a date to a Mavericks playoff game.
Soon after, he went to Nowitzki's MVP coronation. They shared laughs and a hug in the locker room before the ceremony, Johnston retelling his story of moving into Nash's locker a few hours before Nash moved out.
"Ray is definitely one of the toughest guys I've ever met," Nowitzki said. "He's just a great guy."
Johnston knows he can't fulfill many of the dreams he once had, so he's come up with new ones, such as making it to "Family Feud" and doing more with Heroes.
His main goal is becoming a motivational speaker. After all, that's what a point guard is supposed to do -- make everyone around him better.
"I had a nice little run 'til I was 25, then I had three years that were pretty up and down," Johnston said. "For people to see that I've gone through all this and I can still be upbeat, maybe that will push them to do something in their life that they wouldn't have done before."
Johnston still hopes to marry and have two boys, one in the NBA and one on the PGA Tour. Another dream is having the Dave Matthews Band mark the five-year anniversary of his transplant with a concert in his honor. At the Mavericks' arena, of course.
The odds of that happening are a lot better than a college walk-on making an NBA summer league team after being spotted at Hoop-it-Up.
To start, he hit the 100-day milestone a week ago Friday.
Attaboy, Ray. Attaboy.
------------------------------
Now he's got a band - and touring the South!
http://www.rayjohnstonband.com/
http://www.trgf.org/events_rayjohnston.shtml

Bruce Blog From The UK....

As if we needed to go over the ocean to check out how Bruce did in the UK.... But every now and then we need to hear some feedback from fans outside of the Jersey area. It seems that no matter how many tours, albums, tv specials the Boss and his Band seem to produce - there is still amazement at his level of genius. Forget all of the other music icons past and present. Bruce is the Boss. Hands down. Read On.


Glastonbury festival on TV: In which we discover just how many songs Bruce Springsteen has recorded
The Boss brought his A-game. And his B-game - enough games to fill almost three hours, in fact. But on TV they managed to boil it down to just over an hour: but it was still monumental.


Bruce Springsteen headlining Saturday night on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury 2009.

It was an amazing show. The E Street Band are virtuosos; the Boss is probably the best live performer in the world, and he did not stint – taking requests from the audience and playing for well over two hours.

He opened with an acoustic ditty about wandering between the stages at Glasto, and listening to Dizzee; the rain came down and it was sweet and charming.

Hearts melted as he bellowed "Now let's start the show!", and the young and really-not-so-young on Pyramid hill got ready for a romp through New Jersey rock. If we're honest, especially the gang of boys next to me, mainly from the Born in the USA album, please.

Instead, he did a set which was almost perverse in its determination to eschew anything a festival crowd might know, in favour of a purists' paradise.

My devotee husband was in heaven: "he never plays this", "this is the title track of his critically acclaimed but largely ignored album", and "this is usually acoustic", were rolled out. Outlaw Pete was dramatic and stark, but too alien for most around me. Radio Nowhere's chorus "is there anybody alive out there?" felt a bit too much like a plea, down my end of the field.

Somebody forgot to tell Bruce it's not the done thing to romp down the dark side of the back catalogue. 40,000 in Hyde Park tonight will doubtless be delighted with The River. At Glasto, we were mostly waiting for Born to Run and Dancing in the Dark. Which thankfully, when they arrived, did not disappoint. As I trudged away from Pyramid hill, the crowd were singing Born in the USA. The boss was not.

Farrah Fawcett Obit

Since Michael Jackson is getting all the press.....
We can't possibly forget our favorite 70's icon. My bet is half of the teenage boys in the US had her poster on the wall. And we all know which one that was. Let's not forget half of the teenage girls wanted that haircut.
Thanks for the memories Farrah.


NY Times
June 26, 2009
Farrah Fawcett Dies of Cancer at 62

By SUSAN STEWART
Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.

Her death, at St. John’s Health Center, was caused by anal cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.

To an extraordinary degree, Ms. Fawcett’s cancer battle was played out in public, generating enormous interest worldwide. Her face, often showing the ravages of cancer, became a tabloid fixture, and updates on her health became staples of television entertainment news.

In May, that battle was chronicled in a prime-time NBC documentary, “Farrah’s Story,” some of it shot with her own home video recorder. An estimated nine million people viewed it. Ms. Fawcett had initiated the project with a friend, the actress Alana Stewart, after she first learned of her cancer.

Ms. Fawcett’s doctors declared her cancer-free after they removed a tumor in 2007, but her cancer returned later that year. She had been receiving alternative treatment in Germany and was hospitalized in early April for a blood clot resulting from that treatment, according to her doctor, Lawrence Piro. He also said her cancer had spread to her liver.

Ms. Fawcett’s career was a patchwork of positives and negatives, fine dramatic performances on television and stage as well as missed opportunities.

She first became famous when a poster of her in a red bathing suit, leonine mane flying, sold more than twice as many copies as posters of Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable combined. No poster like it has achieved anywhere near its popularity since, and, arriving before the Internet era, in which the most widely disseminated images are now digital, it may have been the last of its kind.

Ms. Fawcett won praise for her serious acting later in her career, typically as a victimized woman. But she remained best known for the hit 1970s television show “Charlie’s Angels,” in which she played Jill Munroe, one of three beautiful women employed as private detectives by an unseen male boss who (in the voice of John Forsythe) issued directives and patronizing praise over a speaker phone. Her pinup fame had led the producers to cast her.

Ms. Fawcett and her fellow angels, played by Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, brought evildoers to justice, often while posing in decoy roles that put them in skimpy outfits or provocative situations.

“Charlie’s Angels,” created and produced by Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg for ABC, was a phenomenon, finishing the 1976-77 season as the No. 5 network show, the highest-rated television debut in history at that time.

Ms. Fawcett was its breakout star. Although she left the show after one season and returned only sporadically thereafter, the show’s influence — among other things, it inspired two much later feature films starring Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore and Lucy Liu — was so indelible that she was forever associated with it.
The series, whose popularity coincided with the burgeoning women’s movement, brought new attention to issues of female sexuality and the influence of television. Commentators debated whether the show’s athletic, scantily clad heroines were exemplars of female strength or merely a harem of pretty puppets doing the bidding of a patriarchal leader.

As the show’s most popular star, Ms. Fawcett became another sort of poster girl, for the “jiggle TV” of the ’70s, and a lightning rod for cultural commentators. Chadwick Roberts, writing in The Journal of Popular Culture in 2003, described her “unbound, loose and abundant hair” as marking “a new emphasis on femininity after the androgyny of the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

In 1978 Playboy magazine called Ms. Fawcett “the first mass visual symbol of post-neurotic fresh-air sexuality.” She herself put it more plainly: “When the show got to be No. 3, I figured it was our acting. When it got to be No. 1, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”

Ms. Fawcett acknowledged that her sex symbol status was a mixed blessing. It made her famous, but it often obscured the acting talent that brought her three Emmy nominations, most notably for “The Burning Bed,” a critically acclaimed movie about spousal abuse.

“I don’t think an actor ever wants to establish an image,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1986. “That certainly hurt me, and yet that is also what made me successful and eventually able to do more challenging roles. That’s life. Everything has positive and negative consequences.”

Ferrah Leni Fawcett was born in Corpus Christi, Tex., on Feb. 2, 1947. Her father, James, worked in the oil pipeline industry; her mother, Pauline, was a homemaker.

After dropping out of the University of Texas, Ms. Fawcett moved to Hollywood to pursue acting. She soon found work in commercials for Wella Balsam shampoo and Noxzema shaving cream, among other products. A Noxzema commercial in which she shaved the face of the football star Joe Namath was shown during the 1973 Super Bowl.

Ms. Fawcett also found acting work in television, landing guest roles on “I Dream of Jeannie,” “The Flying Nun” and other sitcoms. She appeared in four episodes of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” whose star, Lee Majors, she had married in 1973. When Ms. Fawcett was cast on “Charlie’s Angels,” she had a clause written into her contract that allowed her to leave the set every day in time to prepare dinner for Mr. Majors.

She was billed as Farrah Fawcett-Majors until 1979. She and Mr. Majors divorced in 1982.

The poster that ignited Ms. Fawcett’s career was shot at the Bel Air home she shared with Mr. Majors. “She was just this sweet, innocent, beautiful young girl,” said Bruce McBroom, who took the photograph. Searching for a backdrop to Ms. Fawcett in her one-piece red swimsuit (which she chose instead of a bikini because of a childhood scar on her stomach), he grabbed an old Navajo blanket from the front seat of his 1937 pickup.

After leaving “Charlie’s Angels” to pursue a film career (she came back for guest appearances for two more seasons), Ms. Fawcett made three forgettable movies in quick succession, then salvaged her reputation by returning to television. In 1981 she starred in the mini-series “Murder in Texas,” as the wife of a doctor who is subsequently accused of murdering her; in 1984 she made “The Burning Bed.”

Both movies were shown on NBC, and both performances received strong reviews. In “The Burning Bed,” Ms. Fawcett was one of the first prime-time actresses to forgo cosmetics in favor of a convincing characterization.

In 1983 she played another victimized woman who fights back — a vengeance-seeking rape victim — in the Off Broadway production of “Extremities.” She took over for Karen Allen, who had replaced Susan Sarandon. Ms. Fawcett went on to star in the film version of the play in 1986.

Other roles followed in film and television — she won praise again in the searing 1989 television movie “Small Sacrifices” — but throughout, Ms. Fawcett tended to attract more attention for her looks and personal life than for her professional accomplishments. Her long relationship with the actor Ryan O’Neal, with whom she had a son, kept her on the gossip pages long after her television work had become sporadic. In recent months she and Mr. O’Neal had been living together. Interviewed by Barbara Walters this month on the ABC program “20/20,” Mr. O’Neal said that he had asked Ms. Fawcett to marry her and she had said yes.

In 1997 Ms. Fawcett negated much of the respect she had earned as an actress when, during an appearance on “Late Show With David Letterman,” she promoted a bizarre body-painting Playboy video and appeared ditsy to the point of incoherence.

But later that year she appeared in the acclaimed independent film “The Apostle” as Robert Duvall’s long-suffering wife, and her critical star rose again — only to be dimmed by publicity about a court case involving a former companion, the director James Orr. Mr. Orr was convicted of assaulting Ms. Fawcett and sentenced to three years’ probation.

In addition to Mr. O’Neal, Ms. Fawcett is survived by her father, James, and her son, Redmond James Fawcett O’Neal.

Though her career was volatile, Ms. Fawcett’s fame never diminished after “Charlie’s Angels.” She tried to capitalize on her celebrity with the 2005 reality series “Chasing Farrah,” but it was a critical and ratings flop. Writing in Medialife magazine, Ed Robertson described the series and its star as “a living example of a talented actress whose career has been turned into a parody by poor decisions.”

Ms. Fawcett herself described her career succinctly. “I became famous,” she said in her 1986 Times interview, “almost before I had a craft.”

Please, Give It Up Already.....

Is it just me....am I way too jaded? Or does this look like this information was sent out by a record label, the RIAA or the Recording Academy? Stick a fork in revenue streams for the labels. Publishing is where there is money.

Twitter users buy more music: report

DENVER (Billboard) – A new NPD Group study finds that active Twitter users buy 77 percent more digital music downloads on average than non-users. Additionally, 12 percent of those who have bought music in the last three months also report having used Twitter, versus 8 percent of overall Web users.
"Based on their music-purchasing history, active Twitter users are simply worth more to record labels and music retailers than those who are not using Twitter," says NPD entertainment analyst Russ Crupnick.
A third of all Twitter user reported buying a CD in the prior three months, and 34 percent reported buying music digitally, compared to 23 percent and 16 percent for overall Web users. Another one-third of Twitter users listened to music on a social networking site, 41 percent via online radio and 39 percent watched music videos online. Overall, they are twice as likely than average Web users to visit MySpace Music and Pandora.
"Twitter has the potential to help foster the discovery of new music, and improve targeted marketing of music to groups of highly-involved and technologically savvy consumers, but it has to be done right," Crupnick said. "There must be a careful balance struck between entertainment and direct conversation on one hand, and marketing on the other. Used properly Twitter has the power to entertain -- and to motivate music fans to purchase more new albums, downloads, merchandise, and concert tickets."