Yesterday was Burns’ Night. The Tap Room had a special celebration complete with reading Robert Burns’ poetry and the presenting of the haggis. A crew of bagpipe players marched between the first and second floors skillfully entertaining us with Scottish tunes.

That reminds me of a story. One summer I worked at a Boy Scout camp. The staff members resided in one camp site. We had the luxury of electricity. Several staffers brought their stereos. They had a bad habit of playing them late into the night. One morning we all woke to a loud, high pitched wail. All of us ran out of our tents. I remember asking, “who’s skinning a cat?” A scout leader at a neighboring campsite was playing his bagpipes poorly. He was upset about the late night music and taught us a lesson about unwanted noise. Turned out that he was a talented player, but gave us a sample of what bad bagpipes sound like. The stereos got turned down at night.

I had the haggis. They served it with mashed potatoes and turnips. It was pretty good but definitely not something you will find at a chain restaraunt.

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Burns’ Night

I received the following email today from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra

As we head into the peak of the Holiday season, the staff and orchestra members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra wanted to take a moment to say Thank You for your support!  If you’ve been to Powell Symphony Hall this month, you know that we’ve decked our Halls and we thought we’d share the image with you so you can deck your monitor!  Follow the link for a free downloadable wallpaper just for our e-minder patrons. A little something to help make your computer work area a little more festive.

All our best wishes for a safe and joyous holiday season!

Download the Symphony’s free holiday wallpaper

I made a trip to the music store this week. I picked up a Blues Bottle Slide. Playing guitar with a glass slide is an interesting experience. It gives the guitar a new sound. On which finger are you supposed to wear the slide? I’ve noticed that some modern blues musicians wear the slide on their left-hand pinkie finger. While some rock musicians such as Joe Perry and the dude from Clutch wear it on their ring finger. There is also the matter of tuning. A little research on the Internet reveals that many musicians drop the 1st, 5th and 6th strings by a whole step in a tuning scheme called “G tuning”. This tuning was popular among many delta blues artists.

I also bought a Boss TU-80 Tuner & Metronome. It is great for tuning my acoustic guitar. The metronome does not get very loud. But it does have a cool LCD display. So I can time my playing with the image I see on the screen.

Clutch plays two full sets tonight at Pops in Sauget, IL. The band can best be described as chicken-bone jam band southern rock. It is hard to pigeon-hole the band’s sound. It has changed often over their last twelve years. With their latest release, Robot Hive: Exodus, they’ve returned to the guitar rock sound I grew to love on their self-titled effort.

Doors open at 7:00. Show starts at 7:00 PM with special guest Kelly Carmichael. Tickets are $19 at the door.

Directions from the Pops website:

Hope to see ya there.

This weekend I was a computer doctor for a friend’s computer. The hardware was, to say the least, non-standard. We upgraded his Linux OS to Fedora Core 3. This broke his X-windows. The firewall he had set up kept spewing messages to the console. This made typing impossible to read. He didn’t have secure shell installed. After three hours of upgrading his OS and futile attempts to fix X we called it a night. I hate to say it but he’d probably be better off with a re-format and an install of Fedora Core 4, the latest version available.

Saturday night I went to BB’s Jazz Blues and Soups with a friend. We had dinner. I had excellent red beans and rice. She had two large whiting. The food was excellent. It was nice to sit and listen to some blues afterward. If you are looking for a place to dine in St Louis, I recommend BBs.

The yellow and black attack is back! The 80s Christian metal band Stryper announced last month that the band is back and plans to release a new studio album entitled Reborn. It will be the band’s first studio album since 1990′s Against the Law.

It has not always been easy for the righteous metal rockers. In an article in the August 2005 Guitar World singer Michael Sweet recalls:

I remember back in ’85, we played a death metal festival in Holland. Before we went on we could hear the audience chanting ‘F- Stryper!’ over and over. One guy even superimposed a photo of my brother’s [Stryper dummer Robert Sweet] head onto a girl’s body and nailed it to an upside-down cross. He held it up and the crowd ripped it to shreds.”

Say isn’t European intolerance for religious expression one of the reasons why the United States of America came to be? Hundreds of years later we see the same narrow-minded behavior overseas.

The Reborn album embraces subjects like forgiveness, God’s patience and true enlightenment. “The power of God is alive, but we often miss it,” Sweet asserts. “We see opportunities to share the gospel, but we are so caught up in other things of life that we get sidetracked.” Guitarist Oz Fox says, “It is a strong statement about our faith, and also about us as a band. This is a fresh start of us – we have been reborn. And we’re telling people that if they choose to believe in Christ and follow Him, that can be reborn as well.”

Original Stryper members Michael Sweet (lead vocals, guitar), Oz Fox (lead guitar), Robert Sweet (drums) are pleased to announce the addition of Tracy Ferrie (bass) to the band. Stryper will embark on a North American tour this fall.

In fact they will be the in St Louis area at Pops on Thursday, October 6th. The tickets are $20. Tickets went on sale starting yesterday at all Ticketmaster locations.