Yesterday, I was coming back home after a long school board meeting in the suburbs. Since it's one of those suburbs where the Pace bus schedule peters out to almost nothing after 7:00 PM, I ended up taking the Metra train to downtown Chicago and went to catch the Brown Line 'L' train up to Rogers Park ( Read more... )

Yesterday, Aunt Anya sent me a video via Facebook Messenger, urging me to figure out some way to show it to Grandma Nina on Victory Day. And, after I watched it, I could see what she meant.

"Dark is the Night" is one of those classic Soviet songs where, even if you have no idea what movie it was originally written for, you at least know it exists ( Read more... )

Filed under "this has been in drafts for a while, but I'm only now getting around to posting it.

Brianna Price, knwon professionally as B.Traits is a Canadian DJ and record producer who currently lives in London. I found out about her from the eponymous radio show she used to do on BBC Radio 1. The show aired on Fridays late at night London time, ( Read more... )

To contrast the sad post about my family... Here's something a bit happier, from my mother's side of the family.

While looking through Instagram, I discovered that my second cousin, Timofey, wrote an instrumental piece and uploaded it to Soundcloud. It's sort of a chill, ambient piece, and I kind of like that the handle he chose reflects that and ( Read more... )

When this video showed up in my Youtube suggestions, I had the same reaction as a lot of other people. A remix of Ariana Grande with a bad that pretty much defined teen angst in the early 2000s sounded like a stupid idea. It had to suck.

But, to my surprise and the surprise of so many others, it actually turned out pretty damn cool.

Click to view

For one thing ( Read more... )

I bought the first Cheburashka plushie in 2014. It was one of those rare Decembers when I had some spare money in the bank. sirius20_81 and her family had a pretty tough year, and I wanted to get something nice for her youngest daughter, Sera. I couldn't get anything too fancy, but I figured I could get something unique, something she wasn't likely to get ( Read more... )

I wound crashing pretty early last evening. I had several long, really involved dreams, but, as it's often the case, I don't really remember most of them. The one thing that did stick in my head was the song that featured in a last dream. I only remember a few lines....And the part where the melody was basically archetypical "inspirational" ( Read more... )

This morning, Chicago area was hit by light snow - but snow nonetheless. As I've written before, Chicago spring is unpredictable, and wild temperature swings are to be expected. But snow in April was still taking it a bit too far ( Read more... )

So back in 2016, I subscribed to ResiDance podcast, which is basically the recorded version of the Europa Plus radio program about - you guessed it - dance music. It's a great way to listen to some cool music and discover songs I never heard before. Problem is, I recently noticed that, for the past few weeks, the podcast feed hasn't been updating ( Read more... )

Every Friday night, Canadian DJ and musician B.Traits plays some of the more experimental, off-the-wall techno/electronic music out there on BBC's flagship Radio 1 station. While in London, her show runs between 1:00 AM - 4:00 AM - which is 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM US Central Time. If I'm home at the time, I usually launch Winamp and put on Radio 1 as I ( Read more... )