Aug 5, 2006 5 min read

I hope that it’s finally cooled down a bit by the time you read this, because — even though I’d rather be warm than frozen — all this heat is a bit much. Even though I’ve lived in Uniontown for 28 years now, I still don’t recall it being this hot for this long, although I’m sure it has been.

I’ve been telling some of my guitar students a story about when I lived in England because I only remember it being really hot there once, for about a week.

By hot, I mean the actual air temperature at night after the sun goes down. Anyway, within days, the small town where I lived in Blackburn had pretty much sold out of all its ice cream and soft drinks — I still laugh at the memory of it.

I’m sure it’s pretty grim, with the heat wave that’s currently going on over there, because few people having air-conditioning.

You can read about the situation on the Internet at this site: a href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5193486.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/5193486.stm end

and a href=”http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4697519.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4697519.stm end

.

These are two more excellent examples of insights into other peoples’ lives we can get by using the Internet.

Another interesting thing that I read online recently was found at a href=”http://gbgm-umc.org/UMW/bible/crusades.stm http://gbgm-umc.org/UMW/bible/crusades.stm end

, which details the Crusades. It gives a chilling picture of how long the fighting in the Middle East has been going on and of the many reasons for it.

On a much lighter note, I also recently visited a href=”http://www.rehearsals.com/lessons/ http://www.rehearsals.com/lessons/ end

and watched some really good clips of musicians, not only playing but also talking about their music.

With Yahoo.com’s video search engine and utilizing and a href=”http://www.youtube.com http://www.youtube.com end

, people of all ages can see video clips of all kinds of musical genres that interest them.

Speaking of music, any of you with the latest iPods who are having problems with really short battery life and are charging the iPod using the USB cord into your computer, try using the wall power adaptor that comes with most of them (or buy a suitable adaptor).

Even though your iPod may indicate that it’s charged, the USB method apparently only gives it a very small charge.

Instead, plug it into the wall overnight — and your problems should be solved.

Thanks to one of my students, Amy, for this tip. Another of my students was complaining about his iPod only playing video for about a half- hour before quitting, so, hopefully, that’s a good tip you can pass on.

I recently heard about plans to make an online community along the lines of myspace.com for Baby Boomers and I guess I fall into that category. If you do too, then check out a href=”http://eons.com/ http://eons.com/ end

.

It appears that there are online communities for just about everybody now — even for Mac owners, at a href=”http://www.spymac.com/ http://www.spymac.com/ end

. If you own anything remotely Macintosh, then this is the site for you.

Lots of thanks go out to all the people who emailed us after either seeing our band, Bad Mojo’s, debut at Summer’s on the Mon or who read about how we got the name in last week’s column.

If you missed that one or any other recent column, you can still read it online at my Web site at bloodylimey.com. You can also see a pic of me there, holding Doren’s “bad” Mojo and see when and where we’re playing.

It’s proof that even the elderly can still rock.

I have to share with you a funny thing that happened after work last week when I picked up my wife at home and we cruised up to our Walmart in the “Toaster.”

As we got out of the car, we realized with horror that we were both wearing our band T- shirts emblazoned with “Bad Mojo” on the back.

Since it looked so horribly corny, we wrestled with the idea of driving home to change. It reminded me of people who we’d seen years back when we went to a WWF wrestling event, where everyone seemed to wear the same shirt with the same wrestler on it.

Anyway, by now I’m sure you get my point.

In our case, it was almost worse because the front of our shirts have a small distinctive logo on them.

I desperately tried to cover it up by holding my hand in an affected manner over it.

So, if you saw two people in the same shirts looking furtive and embarrassed at Wal-Mart recently, it could have been us.

Speaking of big-box chain stores, you can check out any of them online, including, of course, the new Target.

It’s fun to browse them online and sometimes you can even find things they don’t carry locally.

That’s it for this week, but keep watching the show and, of course, keep your emails coming as well.

Have a great week and happy surfing.