Category: Blog Posts

A few months back, I did a list of some of the games that have kept me sane while we while away the hours in our bubbles. A lot of them were the big hitters like God of War and Dead by Daylight, but recently I’ve started to deep dive into my Steam backlog to look at a lot of the games that I didn’t give enough of a chance or, more often, missed completely.

Some were bought through a Bundle pack, others were Early Access (a practice I now avoid, but that’s a rant for another day..)

So here’s a short list of some of the little Indies that I’ve checked out, a few I played to completion, and my thoughts as to whether they’re worth your time.

PORTAL RELOADED – Let me start with a cheat. This only recently came out, but I would be doing you a disservice to not mention it. Portal is two of my favorite games of all time, so a well done fan mod that adds a 3rd Portal made me wary. I’ve been hurt before. Fact is, it’s fantastic. The third portal opens a window to the future and the puzzles make you think in an entirely new way about lay out solutions.  Highly recommended.

QUBE – On that note, let’s go with the ‘inspired by Portal’ game, QUBE. You wake up in a big white room and have big white gloves that give you powers over the space. The puzzles never twist your brain too hard and the ending is lacking – but you could do a lot worse than losing a few hours to this one.

GRIS – I have a fairly deep opinion of the good and bad ways to use vehicles like games as art. In short, they’re mostly not my thing… but on occasion, there is a game that is so gorgeously rendered that it is impossible to not fall into it. Gris is that. Every moment feels hand drawn and, where you will have very few real challenges in it, it hasn’t been since Transistor that I took so many screenshots just to revisit the world.

NANOTALE – I have a weird love of typing games. It probably is because I honestly have some fast words per minute and do enjoy stretching those muscles sometimes. I assume this is how sports people feel about holding balls.. maybe..  anyway.. Nanotale is the spiritual sequel to Epistory, another typing game by the same publisher, where you use words to adjust magic, discover nature, defeat baddies, and it is all done with a beautifully built world.

These are just a few of the games I’ve attacked the last few weeks, and I’m sure sometime in the future I’ll revisit this list, as there were some real bombs amongst these gems.

That said, I’m always looking for suggestions on little indie titles I may have missed, so don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know what you’re playing!

Hey Somethings!

So, this is an interesting topic, but one I enjoy talking about.

Years ago, when AOL Instant Messenger was a thing, a friend of mine and I were watching the Winter Olympics on TV and chatting about it through IMs.  We were watching curling, and had no idea what was going on, how it was scored, or anything.  So we did some sleuthing….  and, while we were sleuthing, my friend stumbled across some interesting information…

Friend  : “Hey, did you know there’s a curling place like… 20 minutes from both of us?”

Me : “No shit?”

Friend : “Yeah, it’s $50 for three two-hour lessons, and if you join their club.. like.. their Curling Elk’s Lodge… they take that $50 off the yearly membership”

Me : “$50?  I’ve spent more than that on far dumber stuff…. ”

And a plan was born.

We arrived at the building in Central NJ (Yes, Central New Jersey exists.  No, I will not argue this point.  No, you are wrong if you suggest otherwise) and are immediately greeted by an interesting cast of characters.  Short, tall, skinny, not…skinny, business cut look and ‘lived in the woods and lived off roadkill’ look… one thing was for sure, there’s no such thing as a ‘standard look’ for a curler.

They were amazingly friendly, and when we told them we had found them online and wanted to take the lessons, they said absolutely, but, we have one question “Why curling?”

Friend : “Well, we were watching it on the Olympics and were curious about the rules, scoring, play style and such and saw that you had lessons… so we figured.. .why not?”

Me : “There’s two ways I’m getting to the Olympics.  Curling, or buying a ticket”

Luckily for us, both of those answers were acceptable.

They ran us through the rules for scoring and the rules for playing.

They impressed upon us 2 VERY important rules to start.

Rule 1 – Never step onto the ice with your “slider” foot first (as opposed to your “gripper” foot which has the traction)

Rule 2 – Always take your keys and phone out of your pockets before playing.. because you will forget Rule 1.

For scoring, the large ‘targets’ on each end of the ice (called “The Sheet”) is called “The House”, the center of which is “The Button”.  Each team throws (slides) a total of 8 rocks.  The team with the rock(s) closest to The Button gets 1 point for each rock that is closer to The Button than the opponent’s closest rock…. cool, so like, shuffleboard mixed with bocci.  Got it.  The thrower pushes off from The Hack and slides forward, releasing the rock before the Hog Line (think, Blue Line in hockey).  The sweepers can control the speed of the rock, as it reduces the friction in front of it.  What we didn’t know, was the bottom of the rocks aren’t smooth… they’re concave.  Only a very thin lip actually contacts the ice.  The ice isn’t smooth either.  Before each match, they lightly spray deionized water on the ice to give it a dimpled texture.  This texture, along with the bottom rim of the rock, and the slow rotation given to the rock upon release, is what ‘curls’ the rock… the speed of that curl and the distance it travels down the sheet, is aided by the sweepers, and those sweepers are guided by the thrower.

Now, each team has 4 members… 3 players and The Skip (team captain or “skipper”).  It’s The Skip that will stand at the far end of the ice and let the thrower know where he wants to shoot for.  Skip determines placement, one thrower throws, the other two sweep.  When it’s the Skip’s turn to throw, the 3rd thrower will take the Skip’s place at the far end of the sheet for aiming help, but the Skip still tells him where to stand.

Each match is 8 to 10 “Ends” (think innings in baseball) and each End is over when each team has thrown all 8 rocks.  The team that throws first is the team in the lead.  The last rock (from the team behind) is called “The Hammer”…and advantageous rock to have as you can completely change the scoring for that End, but.. you only get that advantage by being behind so… it comes at a cost.

A tournament is called a Bonspiel, and, as is customary in curling, there is an overt amount of good sportsmanship.  Good shots can be quietly hi-fived, bad shots are never mocked, and… at least in the rink we were at.. at the end of every match, the winners by the losers a round, and the losers reciprocate by buying the winners a round.

It was AMAZINGLY fun to play, and MUCH more of a workout than we had imagined.  Our first lesson was all about balance.  Second lesson the following week was form, and third lesson the week after was a mini-match of 4 ends.  We had a blast.  We forgot Rule 1 a handful of times and paid for it.  We were sore for days, but man… it was fun.

We didn’t become members as the ‘local Bonspiel’ was in Canada, and we just couldn’t commit to taking the time to go there when needed to play, but, would I do the lessons again?  In a heartbeat.

Before the post, let me please direct you to our [The Wheel] Vs: Robots episode, where you can help choose the fate of one team of robots as they try and crush the other. There is a poll, there is another segment in a future episode coming about it – it’s a good time and you should get in on it.

Now, to other things.

One of my go to ‘Hey, what am I putting on’ shows when I have no effort built within me to find something new to binge on or I’m not seeing anything screams out for me, is Mythbusters. I love Mythbusters. I did when it was on television and now, with it gone, I still keep track of what Adam Savage is doing on Youtube. They have molded me in ways I can’t even fathom, at the very least, in recognizing that engineering nerds (a subset I definitely put the Mythbusters in) are my kinds of people. So, while I was watching some random thing blow up – I decided to list a couple of my favorite Mythbusters episodes so you can see – if you missed this show somehow, you can jump to the good stuff to see if its your cup of explosion.

In no particular order:

ALCATRAZ ESCAPE
I’m putting this one here because it tends to be everyone else’s favorite. I mean, it’s a great episode and it is one of the best they put together. Season 2, Episode 8 – challenging the question of how the Anglin brothers got away from (sean connery voice)Thehhh Rrock!(/sean) using raincoats shaped into a boat. Did they survive? The Anglin Brothers I mean… not the Mythbusters… the Mythbusters obviously survived.

GOLFBALL CAR
Does a golfball fly because it has those weird pockmarks? It’s so weird, it turns out to be really enjoyable and ranks as one of my favorite stories that has an ending I didn’t expect. Taking the golfball, they attempt that same method on a car and the results are not only interesting, but hysterical looking.

THE DUCT TAPE EPISODES
A bit of a cheat here, but there are like 5 duct tape episodes, and each of them is better than the last. It seemed like every season after the first duct tape show, they thought ‘wait, can we go bigger’ — and they do. From surviving on an island to crossing a damn canyon, the old nerd adage that duct tape holds the world together is shockingly accurate.

LEAD BALLOON
Another episode that usually hits the ‘best of’ lists’ – Lead balloon is a great one for a lot of reasons.  The biggest being that the deeper they get into the science of what’s going on, the harder they try.  You can see the palpable excitement in the team as they solve this puzzle in front of your eyes. Is it possible to fly an actual lead balloon?  How big does it need to be? How the hell do you make a lead balloon anyway? Some episodes are great because of the big bang, some because of the weird results – this one, and my final one, are classics because the methodology is so on display and shows how experimentation gets you to unexpectedly fantastic results.

THE SEE-SAW SAGA
By far, my favorite episode of the Mythbusters, and given it is one of the later season episodes, I wish they had gone back to this style of episode more. Both teams (Jamie & Adam / Tory & Kari & Grant) get together and do two parts of one huge myth, culminating in what can only be described as a Rube-Goldberg-esque puzzle of scale and impossibility. Did you enjoy the Mythbusters? What’s your go to comfort food for your brain? Sound off in all of the usual places and let us know!

Every week, the Somethings will be giving you a little something extra, so please check back every week for reviews, lists, cool finds, and more!

Heya Somethings!

If you haven’t followed along the last few months, we’ve talked a lot about the MCU’s TV outing WandaVision – and for good reason.. whether you dug it or not, it was a fresh take on a story that really felt beyond the scope of what DizMarv would try and pull off.  The concept of the show isn’t precisely a straight from comics series, but it does take some points from the comic and the on-again off-again low bubble story of the Scarlet Witch’s tragedies. The on-again / off-again aspect is very much because comic writers sometimes pick up a character where they want them to be and another character sees where they should be differently, so you end up with disparate versions of the same character… but since it’s comics, it’s usually begrudgingly accepted.

That said – Wanda is, quite literally, my least favorite Avenger… and it is mostly because her power set is so vaguely ‘chaos magic/hex powers/mutant ability/reality warping/etc’ that she has become the go-to on how to get into a bad situation or out of one.  So why don’t we take a look at the reason the Scarlet Witch has the power to disassemble how much great stuff the MCU has done…

First – let’s take a look at Wanda in the early years of Avengers…

Using her mutant ‘Hex Power’ she basically had telekinesis that only worked half the time. If the villain was too strong, too not-human enough, too aware, too magic, or too advanced.. there was a lot of this sort of ‘OH IF ONLY…’  But from this issue above (Avengers #99, 1972) to this panel from (West Coast Avengers, #56, 1989) she has fallen in love with Vision, he’s been taken apart by the government and replaced with an emotional white husk of his former self (sound familiar) and has been corrupted by an evil something er another…

And just like that – Wanda’s powerset has grown exponentially and is never reined in again. It just continues to morph and grow and get bigger and dumber and more unwieldly.  All the while she ends up being the go-to damsel in countless stories.  Wanda’s been brainwiped. Wanda’s in a coma. Wanda’s been kidnapped. Brainwiped again. She gets over the Vision. She’s not over the Vision. She has moved on to become a better person. She can’t handle the Avengers. Just non-stop using her as a foil and a victim and a catalyst when honestly, all she really needs is some good head meds and a shrink.

Then….. in the 2000’s – literal hundreds of comics later.. she becomes enraged about her kids and takes down the Avengers.  She’s locked up and the Marvel heroes are legitimately contemplating killing her.  Yes, there’s a lot of handwringing and ‘we can’t do that’ talk, but the fact is – the idea pops up and is considered… so when Xavier and her comic dad, Magneto, show up at her cell.  She does this:

She creates an entire reality where mutants never existed and her dad is the king and everyone is happy. (House of M) — When we break out of that alternate world, no more mutants are being born… like she literally altered the DNA of the world. All the while she continues to disappear for a while, come back and be forgiven, or atone, or have her powers changed yet again — the cycle continues on. When there is an unstoppable unbeatable villain?  Who do writers call on… whatever version of Wanda is useful for them.  No reason to explain it – just call it ‘Untapped Remarkable Powers’ and it’ll do just fine.  When Wanda can’t do it.. just have someone photocopy Wanda’s powers so DOUBLE WANDA can do it. (Avengers v. X-Men #12, below)

I’m thrilled that Wandavision was so good. I just hope that the movie writers don’t fall into the same pit that the comic writers have for years – that by not defining the Scarlet Witch, you leave her available as a crutch to lean on whenever you didn’t have a better ending in mind.

Hey Somethings!

This week, I want to dive into a part of one of my all-time favorite film franchises… James Bond.

Bond films have set a high bar for fight scenes, chase scenes, cinematic excellence, and, what I’ll touch on this week… stunts.  So join me as I run through my top 3 favorite stunts in James Bond Movies!

3 – Corkscrew Car

In “The Man With The Golden Gun”, we get a comical sequence where Bond ‘reunites’ with a character from a former movie, J. W. Pepper.  As the duo chases Scaramanga, they come across a broken bridge over a river.  Flooring it, Bond drives his red AMC Hornet X Hatchback at the broken bridge, which corkscrews the car through midair, landing safely on the other side.  It was stuntman Loren “Bumps” Willert’s first time doing the stunt, and he pulled it off in one take. (Check it out here)

2 – Boat Jump

“Live and Let Die” was Roger Moore’s first Bond film, and the first time he encounters Sheriff J. W. Pepper.  In this scene, Bond is being chased by Kananga’s men through the bayous of Louisiana.  Running out of water, Bond races his boat at an embankment alongside a highway where Pepper and his men are waiting for him.  Hitting the embankment, Bond’s boat sails over 100 feet in the air before landing in the water on the other side of the highway. (Check it out here)

1 – Dam Jump

“Goldeneye” marks Bond’s first return to the screen after a 6 year hiatus, and the first time Pierce Brosnan takes up the title role.  In the pre-title scene, we see Bond running along the top of the Verzasca Dam in Switzerland.  In a wide, panoramic shot, after securing a cable, Bond dives off the top of the dam in a makeshift bungee escape.  The leap set a world record for stuntman Wayne Michaels, which was done in one take.  The scenery, the epicness of the cinematography, and the fact the jump was done in silence just emphasizes the immensity of it all, and puts this stunt at the top of my list. (Check it out here)

Let’s discuss some nostalgia porn, as it isn’t all created equal.  First, let me mention Meddling Kids which is a novel I read last year that blew me away. A group of twenty-somethings that bear a remarkable similarity to a group of teenage detective sleuths and their snack-hungry dog have all grown up and are dealing with the PTSD of the things they saw as kids.  From being faced with murder to the supernatural, they have grown-up like the kids from It have – repressing everything.

The nostalgia in Meddling Kids is biting and funny and a new take on tropes as the not-Scooby Gang bump into Lovecraftian Lore, it analyzes not simply what the characters would be like if they actually had to deal with fantastical Hanna-Barbara cartoon mysteries, but talks about the relationships of these people. Why is the book smart nerd friends with the stoner and the ‘nice guy’. It takes its premise through brutality and emotional turmoil and makes these fictional kids feel like they could fit in a real-ish world.  It stunned me, and I highly recommend it.

Now, let’s discuss the other side of nostalgia porn, and the reason I picked this topic to talk about.  I enjoyed Ready Player One, the book. I caught it early on the hype train and it tickles quite a few of my weird sub-sub-genre’s of stories. It hits on ‘movies as game’ like It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Midnight Madness, and Jumanji. It features one of my particular eras of nerddom that doesn’t get a lot of notice, 1980s computer culture – and mixes it with science fiction, comics, Brat Pack pop culture, and a thousand other things that were the bread and butter of my pre-teen youth. There was one thing that stuck in my craw about it though, and that was we are watching a ‘day after the day after tomorrow’ type world and the creators of said world seem obsessed with this era of culture. Now don’t get me wrong, I do understand that this is a love letter to that era, but in a book about video games with the grand master video game makers of all time.. you would think they also liked things a bit more ambitious than NETHACK.  All of that said – I enjoyed RP1. I thought it was cute and fun and itched the popcorny itches it was designed to itch, even though it is not without its flaws…. unlike its sequel….

You see, Ready Player Two is now out and it has given up on everything that even remotely made RP1 enjoyable and doubled down on the thing that made it annoying. Yes, there’s another fetch quest. Yes, the band gets back together. Yes, the stakes are raised… and it is because of those things that everything else falls off a cliff. Without delving too deeply into spoiler territory, RP2 puts lives at stake.  It isn’t about an evil corporation and a young plucky hero… it’s about millions of lives in peril and our, now infinitely rich and yet somehow still remarkably naive, hero – with his encyclopedic knowledge of everything his idols have ever done, spends literal chapters spilling about movies and music. He goes into explicit detail about the life of John Hughes and into deep Tolkien ephemera. He whines about his lack of romance and realizes all of the mistakes he’s made and the missteps he’s taken (none of which that we get to see, mind you) — all while telling us about the trees on Chewbacca’s home planet.  There are millions of lives depending on his journey and he can’t help but idly giggle like a schoolgirl because he sees a computer generated Juliette Lewis — a Juliette Lewis that he literally could have delivered to his virtual bedroom and programmed to ride his Natural Born Killer from Dusk Til Dawn.

Nostalgia porn has its place to make a story taste the way it’s supposed to taste, like one of my all time favorite movies, Super 8 or something as charming as La La Land… but when your narrative only serves to plate nostalgia instead of tell a good story dressed in it — all I want to do is go find a new story that doesn’t need to tell me all of the stories that it relies on.

Every week, the Somethings will be giving you a little something extra, so please check back every week for reviews, lists, cool finds, and more!

Hey hey Somethings!  PCR here, and today I’m listing out my “Top 5 Favorite Swords”!  These could be from movies, TV, Comics, Video Games… not limiting myself here.  I am also grouping “Lightsabers” as an honorable mention as a whole.

On to the list in no particular order!

5 – D’Artagnan’s/Top Dollar’s/Inigo Montoya’s Rapier
While not the same prop, they all have an amazingly similar style and look to them.  The large, swept-hilted basket hilt is very distinctive and back in my Ren-Faire days, it was my favorite kind of weapon to wield.

4 – Highlander’s Ivory Katana
While there should have been only one (movie), this sword quickly became iconic.  I know when that movie came out, if you picked up *any* katana, you were immediately acting out one of the many scenes from “Highlander”

In the last two or three months, I’ve started going back to X-Men. You have to understand, there was a time where I drank down everything ‘X’, and when I needed new furniture, I was able to put my mattress on the longboxes I had so many filled with Charles Xavier’s team of racial allegory.

Now, I will admit, I am not currently brought up to speed… I stopped reading what I previously had said was a couple of years ago, but honestly is almost coming up on a decade. Somewhere shortly after Hope Summers saved the world I got super busy and life happened and comics just fell to the wayside. I’ve found during our current Under-The-Dome sheik lifestyle, comics and logic puzzles have helped me caulk up the boring minutes.

So to celebrate that, here are my three favorite X-Men and why!

#3 – JAMIE MADROX
Oh yes, the Multiple Man, the only comic book character that shares my name. Maddrox, for a long time, just felt like ‘another tough do-gooder’ in his younger years, but after Peter David took back X-Factor and we got ‘Multiple Man, Private Dick’ and the much more traditional soap opera of David’s runs, Jamie really came into his own as a complicated and, in many ways, man broken into hundreds of pieces. He’s layered and at times completely wrong in his choices… but that’s what makes good character.

#2 – ROGUE & GAMBIT
The middle spot here is a bit of a revolving door of characters. I always love Maddrox, and #1 is kind of a non-shocker if you know anything about me… but this middle spot really could be taken up by ‘whomever I am really loving right now’. It’s been Blink, it’s been Colossus, it’s been Maggott (oh yes, you read that right). But Rogue and Gambit, at their best, are a fantastically brutal story about the things you can’t have and the toxicity of relationships. Some writers have done them well, other writers have been complete garbage to them and can’t help but treat them like a ‘forbidden fruit’ trope.

When they’re good, they’re great, though – and in my trawling through the X-verse, I have been keeping an eye on where they end up. Sadly, with the way comic books work, their world will never be perfect, and if it feels that it is, it won’t be for long. He’s too broken and she’s too uncomfortable with who she is and there will never be a writer that wants you to feel that they are an ideal that has been achieved when there is so much more gristle on the bone in their dysfunction.

#1 – EMMA FROST
Are you surprised? If you know anything about me, you shouldn’t be. Emma has been one of my favorite characters since Generation X and, honestly, probably before that (but I’ll blame that on teenage me seeing a woman clad in white lingerie and thinking that was the cat’s pajamas. The truth is, Emma, when done correctly, is a tragically beautiful character. From her Hellions being brutalized to her making amends and being the teacher for the next generation of mutants. Followed up by being Cyclops’s therapeutic ‘other woman’.  She is cold and calculating, brutal and unforgiving, and that’s even after you get to know her. The emotions of Emma and the feelings beneath her coldness has been attempted to be explored in an individual series and many many flashbacks that all don’t seem to make much sense when you blend them together, but the heart of her character is true – it is easier to be cold, than hurt… 

At her best, she doesn’t care about what’s best for the ‘Dream of Mutants’ and she doesn’t care what’s the best legal choice. Emma does what’s best for those she has placed beneath her, the kids that are using her as her template. Every story that includes some concept of ‘will Emma be evil?’ doesn’t get Emma at all (I’m looking at you Whedon) and where I loathe her secondary mutation as it feels a tad to ‘on the money’ – when Emma wants something, you’re doing what Emma wants which is the fear everyone has about the Psi-Level-Mutants because if she wanted to, she could rule the world and you wouldn’t even know she was doing it.

So what about you – who’s your favorite X? Who am I completely wrong about? I’ll tell you right now.. I will happily write more X Reviews if you want, as it’s how I cut my teeth as an internet presence and I do miss it sometimes. See you next time.  

Every week, the Somethings will be giving you a little something extra, so please check back every week for reviews, lists, cool finds, and more!

Hey all you Somethings!

We haven’t talked much Music lately, and we’re always looking to give listeners an insight into what makes us “Us”, so I’ve compiled a list of 10 albums that, as a catalogue, speak volumes as to the person I am. In no particular order….

10 – Eat ‘Em and Smile – David Lee Roth.  The year was 1986, and an impressionable PCR was just entering High School.  Between Yankee Rose (with Steve Vai’s ‘talking guitar’, and the frequency of the video on MTV), Shy Boy, Tobacco Road and I’m Just a Gigolo.. this album quickly became one of the soundtracks of my High School years.

9 – Passion and Warfare – Steve Vai.  A second shout out on this list to Steve Vai.  Up until now, my musical interests had been rather… vanilla?  Commercial?  Mainstream?  Whatever the word, 1990 hit and this album caught my eyes and ears.  Liberty, Erotic Nightmares, The Audience Is Listening and The Animal spoke to ‘college Rob’ in ways other primarily instrumental music hadn’t.

8 – Raising Hell – Run DMC.  I remember recording the Raising Hell concert off WBLS when they aired it live (Fun Fact : Beastie Boys opened for them.  More on that later).  Full transparency, I love EVERY Run DMC album, but this is the one that started that love for me.

7 – Disney’s Robin Hood Album – Various.   I had this on vinyl.  I listened to it endlessly.  I can still quote 90% of the movie word for word in the accents.  Fight me.

6 – License To Ill – Beastie Boys.   The ‘sampling’ issue had been around for a while, but when License came out I was old enough to understand it.  Sampling from Led Zeppelin for Rhymin’ and Stealin’  felt almost like… well… stealin’, but the beats they dropped for other songs such as She’s Crafty, No Sleep Till Brooklyn, and the rap/rock of Fight For Your Right. turned me in to a longtime fan.

5 – BomBARDed – The Library Bards.  The story of how we met Bonnie and Xander has been told before, but meeting them in person was one of the best things this show has ever done, and we were happy to support both of their albums, the newest of which is BomBARDed which can be found at https://librarybards.bandcamp.com/

4 – Running With Scissors – ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic.  Much like Run DMC, I love ALL of Al’s albums, but for my money, this is probably my favorite in no small part to seeing him live and watching him do The Saga Begins and All About the Pentiums live.  The man is an unstoppable force when performing live and it remains one of my top concerts ever.

3 – Appetite For Destruction – Guns n’ Roses.  Not a bad song on the entire album.  My current workout jam.

2 – Un-Led-Ed – Dread Zeppelin.  Take a reggae band that does Led Zeppelin covers and give it an Elvis impersonator as a lead singer and you have this bit of genius.  First introduced to this band when it was background music at a party I was at, my brain kept saying “I know this song… but not… THIS.. song…”.  Once I was able to focus, I was hooked.  Seeing them live (with Mojo Nixon and the Toadliquors) was hilarious.

1 – Sunshine On Leith – The Proclaimers.  This album was unexpected.  Originally purchased for one song and one song only (I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)) the rest of this album I absolutely adored.  From Cap In Hand, My Old Friend The Blues and Sunshine On Leith showing off their soulful side, to Then I Met You and Oh, Jean being more raucous and rambunctious, this album is still a go to for me on long road trips.

Honorable Mentions.
Music From The Elder – KISS.  My favorite album from one of my favorite bands.
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – The Beatles.  My top Beatles album.
Disraeli Gears – Cream.  For my money, the definitive Cream album.  

Every week, the Somethings will be giving you a little something extra, so please check back every week for reviews, lists, cool finds, and more!