Sometimes I feel like a motherless child

This could easily be one of those silly meaningless coincidences, but I've noticed in the past that a common bond connecting several famous popular music personalities is losing their mother at a young age.

Madonna lost her mother when she was 5

Bono lost his mother when he was 14

Paul McCartney lost his mother when he was 14

John Lennon lost his mother when he was 17

Elvis Presley lost his mother when he was 23

Vintage videos

Surely anyone of my generation will enjoy browsing this user's videos on YouTube.

Mashups, get your mashups

In the mood to hear some genre-jumping mashups built out of pieces of disparate popular songs? Well, here you can find quite a few by Smash-Up Derby, and a bunch more by Party Ben.

One of Smash-Up Derby's that I've been digging on is She Sells White Weddings, and, for the sake of singling out one by Party Ben that I like, check out Somebody Rock Me.

Go Kermit!

Watch the 20th century's most famous frog sing:

Once In A Lifetime as performed by Talking Heads

Creep as performed by Radiohead

Hurt as performed by Johnny Cash

Pandora Internet Radio

It's possible that I'm behind the curve on this one, but I've just recently found out about Pandora Internet Radio. Basically, this site allows you to customize your own user-created "internet radio station" -- if you suggest artists or songs that you like, then the site will play songs from its database that are supposed to be similar to what you suggested. The idea, of course, is that you can discover new (to you) performers with similarities to those you already like.

Having only discovered Pandora this weekend, I haven't spent much time learning all its features, but it looks like over time you can "tweak" your user-created stations by giving either a thumbs up or thumbs down to the different tracks that come up.

I started one customized station based on the band Ween, and two of the tracks that the website chose to play for me were by a guy from Vermont who I'd never heard of before, James Kochalka. The two of his songs that Pandora played for me were "Bad Astronaut" and "Magic Finger". I found them very entertaining. His compositions struck me as funny, tightly crafted, and indicative of an offbeat sense of humour mixing the adult and the childlike.

On Youtube, you can watch videos for the James Kochalka songs Monkey vs. Robot and Wash Your Ass.