So Casey Kasem is retiring. Another one of those guys that you grow up thinking will always be there, but all good things come to an end. Casey was an icon of my growing-up years when I followed the music charts more closely.

It bothered me more than I expected when I discovered about ten years ago that his program had changed from a Top 40 to a Top 20 show. One of the problems for a station carrying a show like Casey's Top 40 is that it looks awkward if the station doesn't play some of those songs the rest of the week. Is forty too many current hits for a station to be worrying about? I never would have thought so. One of the stations I sometimes listened to growing up, WLS out of Chicago, was worse than most about overplaying the current top 10 repeatedly, and even they put out their own weekly top 40 chart in those days. But it got worse after the wave of consolidation that started in the 1990s, and local radio gave way to corporate radio. I'm guessing that the corporate program directors couldn't handle keeping 40 current hits in the rotation while maintaining the level of repetition they wanted. Given the aforementioned awkwardness of carrying a countdown show without covering all the songs on it, there had to have been some push-back for those programs to shorten the list to 20.

Now that Casey has "retired", I would like nothing better than to see him turn around and do the show his way, as a podcast. But I suspect royalty/intellectual property issues would throw a monkey wrench into that plan.

I used to think I had a pretty big record collection. I bought about 250 45 RPM singles, most of them during a 2 year period in high school. My collection of LPs eventually grew to somewhere between 400 and 500, plus a handful of cassettes. All told I probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000 songs. I knew a few people with bigger music collections, but not many.

Compare that to what you see today. How many of you have more than 5000 tracks in your music libraries? How many of your friends do? From what I can tell, 5000 tracks isn't that big anymore.

So let's cut the shuck and jive and get on with the lyric quiz.

( How many of these songs can you identify by title and artist? )

This quiz is brought to you by The Lion's Share, where you might hear any of the songs used in this quiz. The show airs twice a week on KWKAT PlanetFurry Radio (which is a temporary address; the "permanent" one has been offline since a server move in May). For more information on air times and how to tune in, visit The Lion's Share webpage.

( Answers behind cut )

I'd like a place with lots of secret rooms, hidden passage, and other interesting places and nooks and crannies to explore. It should be extensive enough for me to explore some of it every week and still have plenty of unexplored parts left to discover after a year.

Although my interest in music nowadays is mostly as a listener and a DJ, I was at one time a player. It wasn't rock and roll or anything like that, however. I had several years of piano lessons, spent three years in band as a percussionist specializing in mallets (I was never in marching band, however, and later wished I had been), was in a choir in college, and briefly tried a couple of other instruments.

Playing gives you an appreciation for the nuts and bolts of music, stuff like key signatures, time signatures, dynamics, tempo, and so forth, as well as overall song structure, such as canons, verse/chorus. Of course there's also the voices and the different instruments and the sounds they produce and how they blend together. It can be very interesting to analyze a song and its component parts, and how they fit together to form the whole.

But enough about that. On with the lyric quiz.

( How many of these songs can you identify by title and artist? )

This quiz is brought to you by The Lion's Share, where you might hear any of the songs used in this quiz. The show airs twice a week on KWKAT PlanetFurry Radio (at this writing, that link is temporarily offline, so try this one instead). For more information on air times and how to tune in, visit The Lion's Share webpage.

( Answers behind cut )

The band Genesis has been through a number of changes in their musical style and their personnel over the years, and many fans have expressed a preference for the music of one or another periods of the band's history. Tony Banks, one of the founding members, once said that to his observation, such fans usually favor whatever they were exposed to as teenagers.

So here's a question for y'all to ponder: How much do you believe your musical tastes were formed during your teenage years? Or perhaps I should turn the question around and ask this instead: How old were you at the time of your initial exposure to whatever types or genres of music you now consider your favorites?

I could go into some detail about my own answers to these questions, but I'll save it for the follow up posts. For now, let's get on with the lyric quiz. The combined results of the first four lyric quizzes this year are 105 correct, 4 partial answers, and 11 not.

( How many of these songs can you identify by title and artist? )

This quiz is brought to you by The Lion's Share, where you might hear any of the songs used in this quiz. The show airs twice a week on KWKAT PlanetFurry Radio. For more information on air times and how to tune in, visit The Lion's Share webpage.

( Answers behind cut )

Making up these lyric quizzes can sometimes be an interesting exercise. I'll hear or think of a song that seems like it would be good, but when I look up the lyrics online I discover they don't have as much substance as I thought. Others use the title so liberally throughout the song that there's only one or two passages, or possibly none at all, that go long enough without using the title to make a usable quiz lyric.

Sometimes, however, it proves quite enlightening. Seeing and reading the lyrics in print I will notice things I never noticed about the songs before.

The year-to-date totals on the lyric quizzes through March: 78 answered correctly, 8 were not, and 4 partial answers.

( How many of these songs can you identify by title and artist? )

This quiz is brought to you by The Lion's Share, where you might hear any of the songs used in this quiz. The show airs twice a week on KWKAT PlanetFurry Radio. For more information on air times and how to tune in, visit The Lion's Share webpage.

( Answers behind cut )

It's been almost a year and a half since I started broadcasting on KWKAT, and the size of my music collection has more than doubled. Before I started DJing, I collected music based mostly on what I enjoyed listening to most, and before I ever went on the air it seemed like I had more than enough material to work with to put on a decent show.

There's nothing quite like inviting your listeners to make requests to help you discover what you don't have, where the gaps are in your music library.

Since then my perspective on what to add to my library has changed. While what I enjoy is still an important criteria, my focus has broadened quite a bit to include what I think I should have available to put on a decent show, what I believe my listeners would like to hear, what would make a more comprehensive music library for the genres I claim to represent.

Update: Quiz over; answers below.

( How many of these songs can you name (title and artist)? )

This quiz is brought to you by The Lion's Share, where you might hear any of the songs used in this quiz. The show airs twice a week on KWKAT PlanetFurry Radio. For more information on air times and how to tune in, visit The Lion's Share webpage.

( Answers behind cut )

It's February, and time for another edition of The Lion's Share Lyric Quiz. You guys did pretty good last month - out of 31 lyrics, 24 got correct answers, 3 partial, and only 4 with no answer. February is the shortest month of the year, so this will be the shortest quiz of the year.

Some of you may be wondering how accurately the selection of music in the lyric quiz represents the music I play on the show. My answer is that when making up the quiz, I stick with lyrics that there's a reasonably good chance someone will know, whereas on the show I operate under no such restriction and play a lot more deep tracks, lesser known artists, and so forth. I do, however, try to give a fairly accurate cross section of the time periods the music is from.

Edit: Too late to change it now, but in future quizzes I'm going to wait at least 1.5-2 days before I mark which ones have been answered.

Enough of my rambling. Let's get to the quiz...

Edit: Quiz over. Answers down below.

( How many of these songs can you name? )

( Answers behind cut )

This quiz is brought to you by The Lion's Share, where you might hear any of the songs used in this quiz. The show airs twice a week on KWKAT PlanetFurry Radio. For more information on air times and how to tune in, visit The Lion's Share webpage.

It's a new year, another year to achieve more goals and to make life better for yourself and others. Or just to have fun and enjoy more music. Speaking of fun and music, song lyric quizzes are always fun, so what better way to start off the year than with a song lyric for every day of the year!

Then again, 365 lyrics at once might be overdoing it, so how about we take this one month at a time. Here is one lyric per day for the month of January. Googling is cheating, but if you're really curious about one you're welcome to tune in to my show and request it. Although I am usually on Thursday nights, this week I have a conflict and will be doing a show Friday instead.

Edit: I'll update the list periodically to show which ones have been answered but will hold off giving the answers until the quiz ends, to make it easier for latecomers to see how many they can get on their own.

Edit again: Quiz over. The answers have been posted below.

( How many of these songs can you name? )

( Answers behind cut )

This quiz is brought to you by The Lion's Share, where you might hear any of the songs used in this quiz. The show airs twice a week on KWKAT PlanetFurry Radio. For more information on air times and how to tune in, visit The Lion's Share webpage.

Chapter 9 of On Location is finished and has been posted to my website, in the SabrinaVerse stories section. It should be available from The Raccoon's Bookshelf sometime this weekend.

Today I had my first day off in about a month, unless you count my sister's wedding two weekends ago (which was too busy for me to be lazy).

I finally bottled my latest batch of beer, which I brewed several weeks ago and which sat in the fermenter waiting to be bottled much longer than it should have. I'll know in a couple of weeks how it turned out, or if it was any worse off for having sat as long as it did.

The most recent chapter of my story, On Location, was posted to my website earlier this evening. It actually got posted to The Raccoon's Bookshelf late Friday. I also updated the DJ page including the songlist. Come check it out if you'd like to listen to my show sometime.

You may have heard the old adage that you always find something in the last place you look?

I occasionally keep looking for something after I've found it just so that adage won't always be true.

Yeah, I'm weird sometimes.

One day, probably when I was about 14, I was sleeping in on a Saturday when my Dad started playing a new four-LP set he had just received, loud enough to wake me up. It had a bunch of classics by Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and others. My reaction then was, "Yuck! Turn it down!"

Earlier today I created a station on Pandora with Miller, Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and a couple of others. I've listened to it for probably about four hours. I really should be in bed already, but I'm still too caught up in the music. I feel as if I could just sit here and keep listening to it all night.

Strange how your viewpoint on some things changes over time.

Tonight my second child graduated from high school. I am very proud of him. Congratulations to Robert Joseph McCauley, class of '007.

To anyone who's paying attention, Chapter 7 of On Location is now available at both my website and The Raccoon's Bookshelf.

Here are the answers to the song lyrics meme.

( Answers behind an LJ cut in case you want to take one crack at it before seeing the answers. )

Okay, since a few of you have been doing this 30 song lyrics thing and I've been posting my replies to them, I thought I'd put up a list too. Like the rules say, 30 songs at random, but since my song collection has a lot of deep tracks and some lesser known artists in it, there are a few in here I'll be surprised if anyone gets, but there are also several that ought to be pretty easy. Ones that have been answered correctly have been bolded

1. Poor old Johnny Ray sounded sad upon the radio
2. Ooh I got a busted wing and a hornet sting like an out of tune guitar
3. It's been a one man show that I been runnin' on a two way street for love
4. Quarter moon, always makes me think of you. Are you thinkin' of me too?
5. If I close my eyes I can almost hear my mother callin', "Neil go find your brother"
6. When superstars and cannonballs are running through your head
7. If I listened long enough to you I'd find a way to believe that its all true
8. Your nose is runnin' and your eyes are red, Your head is achin', You'd be better in bed
9. On a cold concrete sidewalk on the corner of Fifth and Main sits an old black blind man
10. Yeah I looked at my watch and it said a quarter to five
11. Man, you oughta finish what you've started, You can't leave me here alive
12. Should I fall out of love, my fire in the light to chase a feather in the wind
13. At the top of the stairs there's hundreds of people running around to all the doors
14. Those days we gave our all. Unaffected I bravely faced the fall
15. I used to go out to parties and stand around 'cause I was too nervous to really get down
16. Snow, cement and ivory young towers, someone called us Babylon
17. Well, it's shinin' brightly, it's lookin' pretty right
18. Talk to me, you never talk to me, Ooh, it seems that I can speak
19. Can this feeling that we have together, ooh, suddenly exist between
20. You see in the past I had a dream, a fantasy, I thought that we would last
21. Right here I’d like to melt inside of you, Right here you kiss is totally new
22. Isn't it strange, Feels like I'm lookin' in the mirror
23. It's one o'clock and time for lunch, bum de dum de dum
24. I'd sit alone and watch your light, my only friend through teenage nights
25. Well we're living here in Allentown and they're closing all the factories down
26. Sweet Marjorie she's talking to me, I only say she's right
27. Put your faith in what you most believe in, Two worlds, one family
28. Virgin land of forest green, dark and stormy plains, here all life abounds
29. Here I come again now baby like a dog in heat
30. Plowin' these fields in the hot summer sun, over by the gate lordy here she comes

I've just created a new LJ community, catholicfurs, for furry fans of the Catholic faith (Roman or otherwise), and for anyone else interested. I don't know who on my friends list is Catholic, but if you are, come on over!

An interesting quote from an executive at the Property and Casualty Insurers Association:
"In years of record catastrophes, we are often criticized for not paying every loss. In years where losses are less than projected and the investment market is healthy, we face political backlash for what some will characterize as excessive profits."

In other news, I've posted a new chapter of "On Location". It's on my website at the SabrinaVerse stories page.

At 1:55 this morning, my sister gave birth to a girl. I am a proud uncle once again. Karina Catherine is my sister's first child and my mother's first grandchild in 13 years.