geolibro

Eesh. So many, many months ago we began chopping at the guts of the open source GeoNetwork project (GN), with the intent of building a much cleaner, more fluid, more approachable front end to the GN platform. Why? Well, because the back end handles a lot of stuff well already, including all of the forms for metadata input; the external submit function (most importantly, probably, from ArcCatalog); and of course the lucene indexing of that content. More than that, probably, is the built-in harvestability and harvestable...ness (the ability to both harvest via CSW or directly from other GN nodes and be harvested by same). In other words, GN does a lot of the stuff already that any metadata catalog would need to do. Its problem, in my estimation, was a rather ugly and cumbersome GUI, something we set out to fix with a combination of more minimalistic styles, OpenLayers, TileCache, and a lot of brush clearing in the tangle of .xsl files that actually comprise the default GN GUI.

I wrote about this a little (not as much as I intended, of course), then had to set it aside as various other projects repeatedly pulled rank (that's the sad truth of being a librarian, by the way: your own work is usually subsumed by funded projects on which you're just a cog or supporting player). It had a lot of potential to not only solve a campus need for better spatial data distribution, but also become a node in The Libraries' burgeoning master plan for data curation (not to mention further that all of this is supposed to blossom into a campus resource that various proposals to various funding agencies may cite as at least partial fulfilment of data curation requirements). Armed with just an undergraduate student worker (~10 hours/wk) and whatever time I could scrape together at night, I was able to get a working prototype that looked like this:

And it worked! It's a largely untouched back end (except for some customization of the *index-fields.xsl files) plus a heavily customized front end that swapped out InterMap (wtf is InterMap?) with OpenLayers and ran all renderable layers through TileCache for better repeat performance. We also had a script that ran as a cron job that would pre-configure TileCache each night so all layers were ready for the day to come. (We didn't quite get around to seeding the TileCache, however).

But the writing was on the wall almost from the start. The native GN GUI is a pretty rigid mess of Jeeves-run java services that output xml that filter through xsl for styling and presentation. Guess what? All of that garbage doesn't exactly lend itself to swift and efficient web dev. Meaning it took a lot of effort just to get where we got and any future functionalities and fanciness was going to come at a price -- more and more of our blood and time.

So late last semester I finally pulled the plug on the customized GUI version (yes, before we ever even released an alpha of what we had worked so hard on) and split for more manageable waters. And I'm here now to announce the new name in this series, draw out the new stack of technologies, and renew a promise to document the process better than before.

New name: GeoNetwork, Solr, OpenLayers, Me, and Rubber Mallet.

New stack: GN -> Lucene -> Solr -> OpenLayers/jQuery/PHP.

The new plan -- just about caught up to our previous work already -- is to simply use GN as-is for admin only. It will harvest, be harvested, edit and index metadata as it was meant to do. In front of that we have Apache's Solr running, feeding on GN's native Lucene index. This allows us to be much more flexible at every stage down the line from there, and the first place this has paid off is what I'll write about next time -- pulling records out of GN's database (mysql), using Solr, as JSON responses in a homemade OpenLayers/jQuery/PHP web app (here's a preview: it's about 10 times easier than fucking with all of those xsl stylesheets).

I wish this wouldn't happen, but it's pretty common -- one of the least interesting or even just melodic songs on an album is the one that happens to be about a place and therefore a candidate for this geoMp3 of the week feature. It happened just last week with Bob Dylan's "If You Ever go to Houston" and I think I can recall it happening a number of other times as well. This week it happens with Ike & Tina Turner's "Nutbush City Limits," which is a pretty standard rocker from an album that has a lot more to offer (like girl-group soul, kick-ass Tina Turner soul, and even an [okay, admittedly forgettable] rendition of Stagger Lee).

On "Nutbush City Limits," the Turners drive a nondescript guitar riff all the way to the unfortunately-named Nutbush, TN, a place where...

You go to the fields on weekdays

And have a picnic on Labor Day

You go to town on Saturday

And go to church every Sunday

"They call it Nutbush," and not only does it sound like a horribly boring and unbearably rural locale -- any place that even knows what "salt pork and molasses" is will probably be on the list of places to avoid, right? -- it's also Tina Turner's hometown. And that makes this song much more interesting. Stanza after stanza describes a simple rural highway town, but the last one...

A little old town in Tennessee

A quiet little community

A one-horse town

You have to watch what you're putting down

In old Nutbush, oh Nutbush

...suggests there was shit of which to beware in ole' Nutbush. I don't really know enough about Tina Turner to know for sure what needed to be watched when put down (I only know one thing -- the lady who warbled out "What's Love Got to Do With It" had a lot more in her than that stupid ballad might suggest), but I think I can guess.

(By the way, you should pick up a copy of this record if you can. "Come Together" and "Stagger Lee" might be by rote, but there's otherwise great stuff here.)

This week it's still not a Statler Brothers track. Instead, it's a bunch of upstate NY kids who sorta recreate the kinds of harsh rusticism that The Statlers glossed over musically (but not always lyrically). It's The Felice Brothers and "Penn Station" from their recent Yonder is the Clock release. So obviously this one will pin to Penn Station, but not just because it mentions it. It's truly (albeit allegorically) about Penn Station. Protagonist (P) has, in fact, died in Penn Station and as he lays there on the cold tile of one of the restroom floors [~shudder~], with five dollars and a dead cell phone, he ponders how peaceful it is when a man's past can no longer torture him. And no doubt if you're knocked out flat on the floor of a train station john you've got some torture in your past.

Anyway, while it's peaceful now, P faces a crossroads, of sorts (is, in fact, in a crossroads, both literally and figuratively). On track #7 there's a train to heaven. Nice, right? Flatlined on the tile in a train station tank, tongue probably rolled out onto the dank, moldy grout, the guy hasn't been so bad that he hasn't lost his shot at that northbound train. The problem is that there's another train a-comin' (n apostrophe because it's more country or more soulful):

But a faster trains coming near

That the devil engineers, oh lord

That the devil engineers

And that's...a problem.

The good news is...no more Statler Brothers for a while. The bad news is that I'm officially disappointed by Bob Dylan's Togther Through Life. I had heard David Hidalgo played accordion pretty much throughout. He does. I had heard it had a kind of Mexican cantina feel. It does, at times. I had heard it was made to sound like a Chess Records recording. It does (they could have done better with the percussion, but yeah, it does). So how all those elements added up to just a really good record and not a killer landmark album I just don't know. There are of course standouts -- "Beyond Here Lies Nothing," "Forgetful Heart," "Shake Shake Mama" -- but none of those are Dylan good. They're just good.

So unfortunately one of my least favorites is geographic. "If You Ever Go to Houston" is a quite traditional cowboy brag that warns of all the dangerous places out West (places, of course, the protagonist frequents). Like so:

If you're ever down there on Bagby and Lamar

You better watch out for the man with the shining star

Better know where you're going or stay where you are

If you're ever down there on Bagby and Lamar

Eh. One could argue it gets more interesting when we find this cowboy (Dylan himself, if you believe the bullshit he spews in recent interviews) is really just trying to squelch a "restless fever burning in [his] brain."

If you ever go to Dallas

Say hello to Mary Ann

Say Im still pulling on the trigger

Hanging on the best I can




If you see her sister Lucy

Say Im sorry Im not there

Tell her other sister Betsy

To pray the sinner's prayer

Ah, so that's it, is it? Anyway, I've been to Houston once and it wasn't great. No Mary Anns, no Lucys, no dudes with shining stars, either. Interstates, concrete, and homeless people, one of whom (not terribly far from Bagby and Lamar, come to think of it) asked my wife and I for some spare change due to help pay for "formula for my wife and baby." To which we deftly replied, "tell her to breastfeed and you can stay home." So I suppose we could have been laid low with a knife twisting in our guts like in Bob Dylan's dusty old cowpoke version of Houston after all. Still, there's something disingenuous about Dylan's new cowboy persona, isn't there (or maybe it's just the mustache that bothers me)? Obviously songs can be places of fantasy and Dylan has historically populated his works with characters of many kinds -- and granted I wasn't in Houston very long -- but I have to wonder how much Houston was ever really like this, how much this track really represents a real place. Anyway, it just seems to me that a person like Dylan could probably write a great song about Houston as it is now and it would be more compelling than a tepid cowbody brag.

This has gotten ridiculous. I have at least five more Statler albums to comb through before I can say I've more or less exhausted their catalog for this geomp3 feature. So with no regret whatsoever I'm announcing that with the posting of this week's track I am discontinuing this Statler Brothers series. It's just too much. I can't...take it. I'm sure Harold, Phil, Don, and Lew will reappear one day in these hallowed, hollowed pages, but for now I'm too fucking sick of lush string arrangements over mild, plodding acoustic guitars to continue with this. I mean, how could anybody post Statler Brothers week after week after week for four months? It's impossible!

My fourth month of Statlers-only geomp3s continues this week with "A Special Song for Wanda." And it's...sorta not that different from pretty much every Statler Brothers recording ever produced except that it's a little bit dirtier and actually doesn't get into the religious stuff. But to keep track, a checklist:

I hear you -- we'll skip right to the double entendres: 3rd verse, fourth line. It seems Wanda was "a Navy wife with too much spare time on her hands," because her husband was deployed somewhere. I'm sure you can guess what goes down. In fact, the lyrics are pretty sparse so here they are in full:

Wanda was alone at night while he was somewhere servin'

A Navy wife with too much spare time on her hands

His letters were a comfort and I think she really loved him

But paper words don't fill the space when someone needs a man.




And I'd just like to sing a special song for Wanda

Cause Wanda was a special friend of mine

And somewhere makin' up his bed in Newport News Virginia

I hope Wanda hears my song and plays it one more time.




Wanda gave me everything a body ever needed

But a body's needs will sometimes lead a soul to sin

She was only lonesome a wife on leave of duty

She went down in history and probably will again.




And I'd just like to sing a special song for Wanda

Cause Wanda was a special friend of mine

And somewhere makin' up his bed in Newport News Virginia

I hope Wanda hears my song and plays it one more time.




I hope Wanda hears my song and plays it one more time...

It's brutal, right? "Somewhere makin' up his bed in Newport News, Virginia..."? That's brutal, and exactly what I have come to expect from these fine Christan fellows. But the real highlight is 3rd verse, 4th line. And am I a jerk-off and/or a prude for practically gasping when I heard this? "She went down in history and probably will again"? I mean, come on!

(Dropped down in residential Newport News)

Another salvo in this war of attrition between me and The Statler Brothers. (Actually, the war must be between me and whomever reads these entries, because that's who sustains the abuse in this situation. The Statlers themselves (excepting Lew) are fine and unawares -- living out their Christian lives with feathered gray hair and gold necklaces.

Anyway, on we go. This week's track is "I Wish I Could Be," and it's a song I don't need to rant about like most of the others. Why? Because it doesn't muck with that old Statler small town/big city dichotomy (here or here) or the hypocrisy of Christianity (every other Statlers post). This one is actually a very sweet lullaby, devoid of gimmickry. It goes like this:

I wish I could be in Knoxville tonight

so I wouldn't worry if you were all right

And you wouldn't wonder where I spent the night

If I could only be in Knoxville tonight

How do you like that? Instantly it puts a distance between the protagonist (P) and his lady, both at the scale of geography and obviously emotionally as well. That's some country music for you. And, okay, the song isn't completely devoid of gimmickry, as it continues with each member of the group taking a turn, naming a different city and some differently-expressed sentiment:

I wish I could be in St Paul today

and watch you get dressed and ready for your day

And tell you some things I know you've been told

If I could get to St Paul before it gets cold




I wish I could sleep tonight in Little Rock

But then we never did go too much by the clock

But I don't remember hearing you ever complain

I'd sleep tonight in Little Rock if I could fly a plane




I'd give everything I have if things had just begun

And you were lying there in North Carolina sun

Every thing we had was still yet to be

Carolina you sure got the best of me

And that was a mistake, because if you don't do that round-robin thing it's even sadder -- imagine if there aren't 4 different dudes singing about 4 different ladies in 4 different cities today, but rather one dude singing about one lady in 4 different cities at 4 different periods of their life together. Better, right? He's wishing he could make it back to those times and places when their lives were happier and more ripe with promise. Today, promise spent, she's in Knoxville and he's not. Ouch. Before that they were in St. Paul, together, and he wishes he could get back there "before it gets cold." Oof. The Little Rock verse is harder to bend into this reading (e.g. "if I could fly a plane"), so let's skip it. This leaves that time, in North Carolina, when "everything we had was still yet to be." And what better way to make you want to blow your brains out? (i.e. isn't that good, solid country music?)

And while this all makes it harder for me (never having been to North Carolina and therefore unable to choose a perfect spot to set this one down), it's still my favored reading. And because I don't think these two kids were the types to be living it up oceanside, I found a lake way, way inland in North Carolina that seems perfect. It even features an address of which The Statlers would approve, and that's where this track goes -- the intersection of "Burnt Schoolhouse Rd" and "Old Highway 64 E." out by Chatuge Lake.

Guess what: this week's track is both A) recorded by The Statler Brothers and B) about some nasty and rather un-Christian goings-on in small town U.S.A. But I guess I could have stopped at A), couldn't I? I referenced it last week when the track was "A Letter from Shirley Miller," but really it should have come first (it didn't because I hadn't bothered to find out if there really was a Lincoln Park Inn*). Why? It's such a classic country song that I think it tips the country-to-other-music-scale all the way over and spills into opera. It's so full of failure and desire and ethos and sadness and disappointment it makes you want to become a loser dirtbag skeev just so you can turn it around and write a song this simple and compelling.

Listen to the way they (well, T.T. Hall) sets up these two spaces:

My name's in the paper where I took the boy scouts to hike

My hands are all dirty from working on my little boy's bike

The preacher came by and I talked for a minute with him

My wife's in the kitchen and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn

And I know why she's there I've been there before

But I made her a promise that I wouldn't cheat anymore

I tried to ignore it but I know she's in there, my friend

My mind's on a number and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn




Next Sunday it's my turn to speak to the young people's class

And they expect answers to all of the questions they ask

What would they say if I spoke on a modern day sin

And all of the Margies at all of the Lincoln Park Inns

The bike is all fixed and my little boy's in bed asleep

His little old puppy is curled in a ball at my feet

My wife's baking cookies to serve to the Bridge Club again

And I'm almost out of cigarettes and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn

I'm almost out of cigarettes and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn

That's the entire song. And, yeah, okay, the boy scouts and kid bike stuff is strong even for classic country, but "my wife's in the kitchen and Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn" is more of a geography lesson than you'll ever get in school or decades of GIS work. And my guess is that Tom T. Hall was no GIScientist. And with the possible exception of Jimmy Fortune, about whom I know nothing and intend to stay as such, I also know none of the Statlers were really contributing code to GRASS back in the day.

* There is a Lincoln Park Inn, it turns out. Bobby Bare, who had a hit with this Tom T. Hall song in 1969, evidently spilled the beans that Tom T. Hall wrote this song about the Capital Park Inn in Nashville. If he hadn't, I still would have used this track and placed it at the location of a hotel in my home town that was abso-fucking-lutely the kind of deep-carpeted, Shasta-vending skankhole Hall had in mind when he penned this little molecule of genius.

Two things are wrong with this idea of doing all of the Statler Brothers geomp3s at once.

Okay, four things (at least). But I've fallen behind and need to catch up, so let's just tighten our rhinestoned rainbow belts and roll up our corded leisure suit sleeves and get through this.

This week's track is "Eight More Miles to Louisville," and it's about how now matter how much they (I'll just presume The Statlers themselves are the protagonists here) travel the country, they knew they would always return to their beloved Louisville (replace that with Virgina to make it factually biographical). "It's an okay song," says geoLibro, punting on a decent analysis. It does seem to blush with excitement, for what that's worth. And they at least give us a couple of easy themes and images (girl waiting for us at home, the picture of your home town appearing into your view as the road crests). Plus it's a rarer geomp3 because it cites a relative location this time (eight miles away from a named place). As for which way they're approaching Louisville? I'll presume they're coming in on Indiana State Hwy 64 from the west somewhere since it's farther and therefore more dramatic. That will put them a little east of Georgetown, IN

This week's track will invigorate my commitment to doing this Statler Brothers series. Because it's one of the most frank, adult, almost dastardly songs they ever recorded. I came late to this one (it wasn't on any of the LPs my parents had), and while it definitely has relatives in the Statlers canon, it's a standout.

It's "A Letter from Shirly Miller," and it is not the only recorded work by this group about a titular character with the name of Shirley (the ball is in your court, Red Hot Chili Peppers). It is also most definitely fucking not the only one of their songs that mixes "Jesus and good singin'" with dirty, down-home, small-town adultury into a filthy, writhing mass of bell-bottomed, star-spangled jumpsuited deviltry. But this one twists the knife, so to speak.

It seems poor Shirley Miller got herself married to a preacher and now she's living in a "Presbytarian home" in The Cleve. To which you're saying, "awesome!" I know. But despite what we all know to be true about how great Cleveland is from watching 30 Rock, there are signs that Ms. Miller is feeling squirrely. For one thing, she's writing letters to former lovers. And while her stationery evidently did not spontaneously combust in an explosion of Jesus tears and purple silk,* it's still a letter that communicates plenty. She writes**:

1. she was too scared to phone

2. she still remembers "things she said she wouldn't"

3. she asked about the protagonist's travels and if Cleveland was on his route (hey-oh!)

4. she's "chilly" in her cold Ohio weather

5. she's happy and hopes P is, too

6. she didn't expect P to answer, just wanted to get a few things off her chest

*Gulp*

I guess that's what your proverbial booty call looks like in Presbyterian religiousville, 1974. But guess what -- P isn't having it. He's leaving Margie at the Lincoln Park Inn again!*** In fact, in a remarkable twist from typical hypocritical sculduggery, P not only throws back the fish that jumped into his boat, he says a little prayer for...hm, the metaphor breaks down. Anyway, here's how he replies:

1. [on Shirley's chilliness in Ohio winters] P thinks she's "warmer than the hell her husband talks about"

2. [on her being happy] "but I could read between the lines knowing Shirly like I do"

3. P can tell her hand was shaking as she wrote the letter

4. P "tore up the letter" then "said a prayer for the preacher"

5. he intends to let the preacher and the good lord "take care of the rest" (good luck, fellaz)

6. finally, P's glad Shirley "never wrote what she sat down to write"

Good guy, right? To be fair, there are lots of good guys in the Statler song book (okay, 96% of them are carpenters named Jesus, but that's still a large population). But here again those goofy looking, key change-lovin' muthaz are at their best when they're acknowledging how sad and desparate adults can get. And it happens whether they drink the Jesus juice or not, evidently.

* not knowing, my guess is Presbyterians don't indulge in the purple silk so much

** Actually, "she" doesn't write. Or rather what she wrote is conveyed second hand. I just wanted to say "she writes" as an introduction to a fictional letter because Tom Waits once introduced "A Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis" that way and it seemed a clever little tip-off to the conceit of the song.

*** That one is for the harder-core Statlervians among you.

Eesh. I'm not sure how much more of this all-Statlers nonsense I can do. The problem isn't listening to Statler Brothers records. I actually do, unironically, enjoy it (despite how critical I am of them). The problem is that their geospatial catalog, it were, is shallow. Musically they never do anything that really evokes a sense of place. And lyrically they tend to just set songs in geography, which means they mention a lot of places but don't really craft anything that are about place (ostensibly the point of these geomp3 posts).

So that's my excuse for some of these tracks that have very frail geographic elements in them. And that sentence is my segue to this week's track, "The Baptism of Jesse Taylor," by The Statler Brothers.

Let's use shorthand, eh? Franklin County had itself a prick on the roster, named Jesse Taylor. Taylor boozed, fought, gambled, and of course ignored his wife and kids. They dunked his ass in Cedar Creek and -- voila! -- everything's okay. This song fits very well into The Statlers' catalog, of course, in that it's about true, unadulturated dirtbaggery amidst a community of otherwise-exhalted souls. This is so common I won't even bother to go into it with these posts. And although the boys' band does a cute little thing with a gospel bridge (uh, that's white gospel), it's otherwise not that interesting.

In fact it's so nondescript that it's hard to tell where Franklin County is. The guys often sing about Virginia, but this one is probably supposed to be generically rural. However! I wanted to put this one on the map, so I did a search for all "Cedar" features, type "stream," in county named "Franklin" at geonames.usgs.gov. There are "Cedar Creek" features in "Franklin" counties in Arkansas and North Carolina. But there's also a "Little Cedar Creek" in Franklin County, Indi-fucking-ana, and you can be sure that -- given what I've seen since moving to this state, which is lots and lots of Jesse Taylors milling around and just as many blue-eyed Christian spooks who would love, love to get that dirty fucker to pick up the way of the cross -- I'll be excusing the 'little' qualifier and dropping this track down there.

And for that reason, it's"The Baptism of Jesse Taylor," also from 1974's Thank You World. Put down in the location for "Little Cedar Creek" recorded at GNIS.

And the geoRSS and kml for all mp3s of the week.

This week's track will be a quick one. Not only because I'm clearly behind and too busy to catch up if I keep writing epic tomes about obvious themes in hokey country music long past its prime. But also because this week's track is simple, doesn't really require much exposition. It's "The Blackwood Brothers by The Statler Brothers," still by The Statlers Brothers, and it's a very simple (but not poorly-built) paean to the traveling, evolving, ever-changing vocal group (no, not Menudo) up to which members of The Statler brothers, evidently, looked. The Blackwoods are still around in some configuration (look for them on the internet in the soft focus Christian entertainers use to suggest angelicism), have been around a very long time in various other configurations, so don't expect anything about them to be said here. Plus...why would I give a shit about them? The Statlers fill my quota for spiritual-but-secretly-sorta-dirty-country-vocal-harmony-acts-from-the-mid-20th-century and I don't need a bunch of no-name, state-fair gigging blue hairs to muss up the works.

The only thing of interest here is, again, the way The Statlers use small town or country livin' (no 'g') as a marker of goodness and value. Yes, these are your recently re-christened "family values," which apparently didn't need qualification back in the day that everybody shared them. I guess? Anyway, in "The Blackwood Brothers," The Statlers recall the days their entire "small, Virginia country town" would gather at the National Guard Armory or "the old schoolhouse" [blech! gurkle-gurkle, blech!] to hear the Blackwoods sell "Jesus and good singin'." So the only thing that really needs to be said (again?) is this: if you grew up in a small town, can you recall what it looked like when the entire town turned up for something? Like carnivale, but all of the costumes and masks were really just the ruddy, drunken faces of your friends' parents and local retailers. And forget about the reason for the congregation. Suffice it to say that The Blackwoods probably wasted their time on the "good singin'" part. Small towns will flock to almost anything (well, okay, no gay rights parades, please), so R.W. and the other Blackwoods could have pulled up lame and just sold "Jesus" and they would have done juuuust fine.

Anyway it's"The Blackwood Brothers by The Statler Brothers," from 1974's Thank You, World. Dropped right down in that small Virginia country town's current National Guard Armory, which I'll just presume is still the same one.

And the geoRSS and kml for all mp3s of the week.

This week's track is a quick detour from Statlersville (also known, evidently, as "urban areas are the devil's playgroundville"). Last week's cut from Los Hermanos Statler was "Streets of Baltimore," and a little trivia for the zero point zero of you follow these posts has it that this was not the first track to find its way to the Baltimore area. Because this week's track is also about Baltimore. It's Nina Simone's "Baltimore" (written by Randy Newman, sans the animated cowboy who cracks wise).

It may or may not surprise you to find that Ms. Simone sees Baltimore in much the same way that poor dope in The Statlers' song does -- a bleak, cold, grey wasteland. Give or take. But in truth The Statlers' protagonist (P) was indifferent until he lost out romantically to the city and moped his way back to the farm in Tennessee. The Newman/Simone track takes a different approach, one could say.

The song eases in cold and moody and Simone wastes little time before she socks Baltimore right in the nose:

мебели софия

Beat-up little seagull

On a marble stair

Tryin' to find the ocean

Lookin' everywhere




Hard times in the city

In a hard town by the sea

Ain't nowhere to run to

There ain't nothin' here for free

Eesh. It's like a postcard. And it essentially just gets less and less poetic from there, so I won't bother to...oh, okay, here's a little more:

And they hide their faces

And they hide their eyes

'Cause the city's dyin'

And they don't know why




Oh, Baltimore

Man, it's hard just to live

Oh, Baltimore

Man, it's hard just to live, just to live

Meanwhile the music itself ebbs and sways with a string arrangement that never, ever gets hopeful and in fact is rather theatrically morose, meaning it sounds like the stuff you'll hear at the end of a tragedy. Which is fitting, because if this song is anything, it's a tragedy. I don't know what Baltimore ever did to Randy Newman (is that what turned him into an quasi-adult-contemporary novelty song writer?), but Baltimore got theirs in this sneering anti-paean. Do note that it's interesting that in Simone's, P's sister Sand and little brother Ray, like The Statlers' P, seems to thin everything will be much better on some farmstead upstate. Maybe. Maybe not.

So it's"Baltimore," from 1978's Baltimore. Dropped right down in -- why not -- Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

And the geoRSS and kml for all mp3s of the week.

In this [especially late] installment of a recent Staler Brothers-only run here we again find the boys waxing ruefully about the big, bad center of population. This time it's Baltimore that incurs the wrath of these clean-livin' country boys, in a song called "The Streets of Baltimore." It's about a couple that moves to Baltimore and splits up. Ostensibly, anyway. Because as usual for The Statlers it's much more about the cultural geography of urban v. rural (Oh, by the way -- please interpret that as a direct equation to sin v. salvation, respectively). Let's walk through it:

The intro eases in as a lot of Statler tracks do. There's gentle, loping, harmonized single lead line, and nothing else. Then the narrative begins and oh, christ, seriously? In the first stanza? Alright, fine -- the first stanza lays it out starkly:

I sold the farm to take my woman

Where she longed to be

We left our kin and all our friends

Back there in Tennessee.

First of all, using the word "kin" establishes a lot. You don't even need the bit about the farm. We can infer.

Nonetheless, there it is and it's helping to tell the story of a poor, poor slob who sold his farm in order to move with his bride to Baltimore, evidently a life-long dream of hers. And before I get into this a little myself, let me stop you right there and say that, yes, when you grow up in small towns, you grow up with seclusion and exclusion (both ways!) and your perspective on life is limited by default. One has to read or find other ways into engaging other cultures and worlds if one cannot travel to do so. But having said that...Baltimore? I've been. It's ah-ite. Not sure about the stuff of dreams.

But the protagonist's (P) lady friend seemed to love it. Oh, did she love it. And while P worked his factory job running "an old machine" (could none of the Statlers name a single type of factory machine that rhymed with any synonym of 'serene'? -- actually, scratch that remark. 'Old machine' makes more sense -- it contrasts well that the wife is out shopping and this dude mans some old, apparently indescribable heap of industrial machinery), his lady was living her dream.

You can see where this is heading, so let's jump there:

I did my best to bring her back

To what she used to be

But soon I learned she loved

Those bright lights more than me.




Now, I'm a going back on that same train

That brought me here before

While my baby walks

The streets of Baltimore.

So, yeah. The dude becomes a drip in order to pay for the lifestyle (his excuse, not mine -- my guess is that he wasn't a barrel of monkeys back in Tennessee, either). Meanwhile the lady isn't so interested in a drip and pretty soon he's back on that train going the other way. Yep, that's it. There isn't that much going on in this song, is the thing. They don't try to Baltimore up the music, for example, and in fact the arrangement and instrumentation is very uniform throughout (suggesting that, in fact, P has learned nothing?)

So it's"Streets of Baltimore," from 1974's Thank You World. Dropped right down in -- why not -- Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

And the geoRSS for all mp3s of the week.

If you spend any time in The Statlers' canon you'll quickly see their predominant sense of geography and place. It's so adorably simple it almost hurts: cities are corruptive dens of iniquity and anything not urban is fertile, fecund, almost sacred ground where upright and proper values are sewn and reaped -- you know, stuff like "do unto others," "honor they mother and father," "hate gays and foreigners." Good, American fabric stuff. To The Statlers', cities are Sodoms to the Gomorrahs that are any rural area yet untouched by the march of progress and modernity. Done. Except scratch "almost hurts" and replace it with "hurts." Because this is the kind of reflexive, old-timey junk that oozes out of our dark, scared hearts in times of hyper xenophobia and jingoism (that just happened to coincide with the last eight years and just happened to cameo at Sarah Palin rallies last year). It's just so obviously bullshit, is my problem. To think that rural America is somehow more American, or more pure, or more moral is egregiously ludicrous (a phrase I keep trying to insert into my personal conversations but seems too strong every time I think of it). Rural living isn't more anything. Well, "anything" positive, I mean. It's probably more on-its-way-out. It's certainly more meth-addled.

But not according to The Statler Brothers. They've harmonized to tale after tale of big city livin' gone wrong, and this week's track is a doozy. It's "Streets of San Francisco," and unlike about ten other songs is not in any way related to "Streets of Laredo." No, this one isn't about insane asylums or cowboys. It's about an upstanding young Tampa High student who goes out west, changes her "Christian name," and all hell breaks loose. To wit:

She thumbed her way for seven days

And way too many nights

And hit the Streets of San Francisco

Runnin' for her life

Okay, so no real explanation as to why she had to leave Tampa. There's something later about her "mama's disgrace," but it's unclear to me if this is the protagonist's mother or if the disgrace belongs to her as the protagonist. Nonetheless, here she is in San Francisco "runnin' for her life," and already there's a problem. Do The Statlers not realize there are thousands and thousands of prostitutes who practice in small communities across this great land? Granted, most of those "communities" are truck stops and filling stations on frontage roads outside of late-shift factories, but still. You can be a whore anywhere there are dirtbag johns who will pay. It's not a function of concrete and infrastructure, is my point. But I digress already.

A week in cosmetology two weeks in airline school

Seven days of shorthand in a secretarial pool

But now desk clerks and bell hops all know her by her face

And the folks of Tampa know her by her mama's disgrace



All through the day she sits alone and dreams of Tampa High

Wonders what the other kids are doin' then she cries.

Then with the California sun she goes down every night

And hits the Streets of San Francisco walkin' for her life

And there you have your options for women in Statler land. Never mind how ribald and dirty that "California sun" line really is, let me just tell you what the other kids are "doin'" fresh out of Tampa High.

It gets worse.

In her mind she plays a make believe game of her own

She pretends she's window shopping, furnishing a home

For a husband who will come along and take her from this life

For now a John will come along and take her for the night

(repeat chorus)

Ours is a sexist, patriarchal world. No question. Just recently I was privy to a particularly gut-twisting tale in real life, in fact, which I am not at liberty to tell. And it's very possible that a San Franciscan prostitute might very well wish for a less chaotic, less damaged life that features -- even centers around -- a loving husband. But in art (well, lyrics), having your protagonist wander the streets yearning for a man to rescue her from her prostitutin' (I'm tryin' to drop all of my Gs to siphon some gravel street cred) means more, means in this case that the woman is clearly helpless, talentless, listless, and passive. Like all women are, right? (Never mind that I'm sure we all know some kick-ass lady bitches and some of us might be lucky enough to have married them.)

Still, I guess I'll still excuse The Statler Brothers here because they're telling prostitute stories pretty far in advance of the time it became a putrid and dishonest cliché. At least they were ahead of the curve, you know? (I'm talking to you, Garry Marshall). I mean, I excuse a lot of Statler Brothers sins already (and if I keep up with more and more Statler tracks you'll see -- there's no end to their sinnin' ways). What's one more when you have a CD -- a compact disc! -- of Lester "Roadhog" Moran and The Cadillac Cowboys laying around?

This one goes down in the Union Square/Tenderloin area of San Francisco, a likely candidate for where our poor Tampa High dropout may have done her window shopping.

"Streets of San Francisco," from 1973's Carry Me Back.

And the geoRSS for all mp3s of the week.

So last week a friend unleashed a blizzard of hell on those of you who read these geoMp3 posts. Yes, both of you. It was the annual dust-up of my love for The Statler Brothers, and the first track was a pathetic little tale of some ethically questionable bloke who absconded to New York City to fulfill his dreams and left his lady back in Clay, Kentucky. Presumably to just rot there. Well, some night he gets a little whistful and calls her up with a bunch of weepy business and that's the song. But I hinted then of things to come when I drew attention to the odd appearance of Jesus in this tale, and -- guess what -- Jesus is back muthafuckaz. He's back in this week's Statler Brothers track, "New York City," an even more sordid little threnody, of sorts, that tries to portray New York City as a lair of amorality and evil. Okay, that happens a lot, right? But this song actually has the stones to blame the city while making it very, very clear that the protagonist himself (and very possibly his lady friend) is the blazing dirtbag.

You'll quickly see how this week's track is the inverse of last week's. It starts with an unwelcome visit to the protagonist from his former lady friend around Christmas time:

She came to me shortly after Christmas,

Said she hated spoiling New Year's Eve.

But the truth doesn't wait to come in season

And what we had feared was now believed

She said she'd leave come Monday morning,

Catch a plane if I'd split the fair.

She had friends who lived in New York City.

She'd look them up and have the baby there.

Of course the girl feels apologetic (for spoiling the New Year's fun of her short-lived friend). I mean, it's her fault, right? But, okay, so they're a couple of kids and they weren't careful. It happens to the least careful and responsible of us. But what the fuck did New York City do? Nothing so far except house some friends and have good hospitals. That's it so far, but nonetheless here comes the chorus:

And now she's alone in New York City (New York City),

Living like ... Lord, I wonder how.

An angel in hell in New York City (New York City),

But I can't think about that now.

The implication is that somehow New York City's, what, bigness is contributing to this girl's hell? Why else mention it? And repeat it? New York can be pretty seedy, but what gall to suggest that the girl you knocked up and then didn't help or bother to help support is having a rough go of it because she's living with friends in New York City. Rather than, say, Clay, Kentucky or Old Timey Values County, Virginia.

But I'll get off the New York City thing, because I quite frankly don't care to defend it. There are other great cities in this country, and any one of them will have many fewer roving, ferile hipsters taking ironicartistic (it's one word to them, see) pictures of each other puking at night clubs. NYC isn't that great, is my point, and anyway there's way more interesting stuff going on in this song.

Such as the last stanza:

Honey, will you tell him Bible stories

And give him all the love I never could?

And never tell him too much 'bout his daddy

'Cause there's not too much to say that's good.

He'll have to learn it all from his mother:

How to count and say his A-B-Cs.

But when you teach him prayers to say at bedtime,

Leave off "God bless Daddy," won't you please?

This is why The Statlers are so interesting to me. The first reaction here -- especially from someone like me -- is to rail about the hypocrity of even thinking The Bible should be pushed on this poor bastard when it was clearly not helping the adults in its life keep their shit together. Deadbeat dad is clearly a fuck up, mother a clearly subservient ("if I'd split the fair"? "If"?!) and passive slob who will be taken by countless father figures to come. In other words, The Bible ain't nowhere to be found in these lives except in their evidently meaningless night-time prayers and this is a very, very common complaint among those who don't just think religion is an amusingly pointless and fussy hobby but is actually bad for us.

But The Statlers -- for all of their constant Jesus this and Jesus that -- clearly expect the human condition to be only occasionally triumphant and transcendent. The rest of the time, they seem to argue, it's nothing but struggle and regret and the gruelling process of reconciling the moral standard you shoot for and the one you actually attain. They clearly see a continuum from bad (Satan, big city values) to good (anything rural and old?), but their catalog is very full of people all along that spectrum. I should research and see how they treat true atheists (or are those "New Yorkers"?), but otherwise they seem to be fully aware and accepting of the fact that adults are weak, troubled, and sad. No matter how much they pray, no matter how many of those little foam wafers they choke down, and no matter how many gay marriages they disallow, adults are weak, troubled, and sad. And obviously I'm okay with that, because I feel the exact same way.

"New York City," from 1970's Bed of Rose's.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Hoh, oh, oh. Watch the fuck out. I'm going to try really hard to keep this in check, but there's so much to say. Recently, a friend of ours happened to mention The Statler Brothers. It went something like "Hey, I saw an old newspaper the other day and one of the ads was for a Statler Brothers gig at a prison rodeo. I thought of you guys."

Well, that was plenty. Never mind the hilarity of the prison rodeo gig, it instantly triggered my complex and possibly Oedipal fascination with The Statler Brothers that exists in me constantly, just below the surface. Hm, actually my hatred for Charlie Sheen's comedic persona exists just below the surface, so my love of the Statlers is probably just under that. Except -- what about my hatred for Ray Romano? That has got to be right in there, too. And there must be room for my hatred of the forceful mentally-challenged know-it-all blowhard from down the street. I'm not sure where my Statler Brothers thing really resides, I guess.

Nonetheless, this week it springs to the surface, and I doubt I'll be able to contain it. I will try, but I find them fascinating.

I am not posting their greatest track, which is, of course, "Every Time I Trust a Gal." (Just kidding -- but when's the last time somebody rocked a chorus of kazoos like that?) I am posting instead "How Are Things in Clay, Kentucky." And while it's not their best musically, it's still almost perfectly indicative of what Harold, Phil, Don, and Lew were all about (I'll get to you in due order, Jimmy). To wit:

How are things in Clay, Kentucky?

Bet you thought I'd never care

There was a time when I felt lucky

Just to be away from there.

So first of all, this one obviously goes down in Clay, Kentucky. Does that mean something? Absolutely. And...not really. Clay, Kentucky means nothing. It's a ~2,000-person burg in western Kentucky, for one thing. Which is bleak any way you slice it. There might be a reason The Statlers called it out, but maybe not. The point is that the protagonist is pining for a former lover who chose to live there. Chose to live there! The protag is in New York City making clandestine telephone calls to a married former flame in Clay! It's ludicrous, right?

Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, The Statler Brothers will often appear to be ludicrous -- preachy, old timey throwbacks to a time that to have seemed old-timey even when it was modern. But there's something you need to understand about what The Statlers have always understood in full: the horrible regret and unavoidable sadness of having lived. So let's stick with this, move past some stuff about the protag thinking NYC would offer everything he wanted, but finding that "how things are in Clay, Kentucky, has been lately on my mind," and get to the stuff that's classic Statlers (yes, I'm willing to write things like "classic Statlers" unironically -- that kind of irony is for tight-pantsed hipster douchebags, and we're all weathered adults here):

I hear kids back there playin';

I hope he don't know it's me

Jesus knows I still love you,

But I just had to call and see.



How things are in Clay, Kentucky.

Bet you thought I'd never care

There was a time when I felt lucky

Just to be away from there.

Aw, man. Can you hear that? That's the sound of some poor slob's heart creaking and groaning through the rest of his life. Those fucking genius Statlers chose New York City for a reason, see. They chose stupid, dumpy, Clay, Kentucky for the same reason -- to make it hurt.

Oh, and let the fact that "Jesus" shows up in a stanza in which he otherwise doesn't belong serve as a harbinger of strange things to come. The Statlers are super religious, see, but that somehow doesn't stop them from cheating on wives, breaking up marriages, and engaging in all manner of country music shenanigans. Evidently the abhorrent crimes required to produce country music trump any real effort to follow the teachings of Jesus after all.

"How Are Things in Clay, Kentucky?" taken from the 1980 10th Anniversary collection.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

I considered doing some kind of Super Bowl-themed track this week, but it's just too hard to care about a herd of rich man-boys who all, somehow, think God has an interest in whether they win a game or not. On the other hand, I guess there's a chance God is interested in whether Ben Roethlisberger or Kurt Warner go home on Sunday nights feeling good about themselves. Because he doesn't seem to give two shits about the rest of us (just kidding, he does not exist). Although if I had to put money on it, If he did exist I would have to say that Warner would have the edge over the other dude, given the amount of time he devotes to depicting his godhead. (Didn't that used to be blasphemous? Did Catholicism make that okay? I wonder if I should bother to look into that.)

Anyway, who cares? This week's track is Roger Miller's "Kansas City Star," and it's going down in Kansas City. Which one? Well, it sort of doesn't matter. Pick one, because the point of the song -- if there is one (Roger Miller records don't always bother with such things) -- is that your choices should serve you best. I mean, the protagonist is eschewing a better job with higher wages in Omaha just to stay in K.C. where he's happy. Hm, possibly it's that humility is important -- that one shouldn't just follow stardom and money anywhere it leads. Except that he seems to get off on being a star, no matter the fact that it's a local market.

You know what? I think this song really doesn't have a meaning and is yet another in a decently-long line of Roger Miller novelties. Which I happen to love, by the way, including "Big Harlan Taylor," "One Dyin' and a-Buryin'," and "Lou's Got the Flu." If you like country music at all (although why would you, given what hat-sniffing double-skulls like Toby Keith have done to the genre?), do yourself a favor and buy King of the Road: The Genius of Roger Miller.

And I've only driven through Kansas City, maybe 6-7 times right along I-35, but I think I understand how a pistol-shooting local TV clown might be able to scrape together a carer. It reminds me of a larger Lafayette, IN, meaning it also reminds me of about 150 other cities of that ilk where kind and wholesome (read:worthless) entertainment can cut it.

So that's my Super Bowl week. If you really want it to be footbally, go from one team with red jerseys, Arizona, to another team, the Kansas City Chiefs, and then you're right there in Kansas City where you need to be. But why would you care?

"Kansas City Star," taken from the King of the Road: The Genius of Roger Miller box set.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Eesh. I was hoping it wouldn't turn out this way. I am what you would call a Bruce Springsteen apologist. He can sure be full of shit sometimes. But in the same way that The Statler Brothers can nail the awfulness of adult regret and acute sting of nostalgia, Springsteen is able to stuff otherwise unfaceted concepts (concepts!) such as hope and truth and rightness and sacrifice into three or four minute packages and they suddenly apply. They make sense. You're able to see them and for even those few minutes you -- just some poor slob driving a car down the road -- can make an instant connection to something that you hope against hope you're implementing day-to-day but you sort of don't have time to sit down and examine. Because you have a job, for one thing. People with jobs and kids and mortgages don't get as many opportunities to sit down and pen anthemic rock poems in favor of or rebellion against redemption and iniquity, respectively. I want to, don't get me wrong. I just have an iron-caked heating element and a leaky ballcock to sort out.

That's what she said. Anyway, the draw of Springsteen is that he's been able to make it okay for dock-working brutes to well up about stories of salvation, redemption, sacrifice and all of that other bullshit he preaches. And goddamit, man, when he gets it right it's really great. Fulfills the promise of rock and roll, it does. To this day, even. Granted, another Born to Run or The River isn't likely, but even on 2007's Magic he was wrapping some awesomely windy shit around details that could be true of the lives of dopes like me:

Pour me a drink Theresa in one of those glasses you dust off

And I'll watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross

Get it? She has to dust off the glasses because her days of entertaining company are over? But there's still grace and nobility and angelicism in somebody that is otherwise showing some signs of wear and fatigue? That's vintage Springsteen, and if you're not a pretentious, Sonic Youth-loving dirtbag you shouldn't mind letting that stuff get to you.

But that's if he's getting it right, and unfortunately this last batch he found crumpled in the bottom of his bag and taped together as Working on a Dream has a particularly glowing example of how narrow that line is between the magnificence of the workaday life and the glorification of what is, in truth, ordinary.

Oh, before I get started: "Working on a Dream?" Scout's honor? You're not pulling my...alright, alright. No, I know it's your album but...No, I know. Okay. Fine. It's fine. It's great. Very clever.

But the title isn't the biggest dog on this album. It's "Queen of the Supermarket," which is an ode to some hapless slob at Bruce's local grocery. (Or is it your local grocery store? Get it?) This one tries very hard to push some poor local high school kid up into the pantheon of Springsteen characters who dream so big they actually work up to takeoff speed ascend to some sin-absolving Elysian field (sorry, Elysian highway). But this poor teen (you know she's a teenager, right Boss?) is in all likelihood just some surly local slob who misbags your clementines or chats with Braden the produce stocker while your leeks silently yearn to be weighed.

Under ordinary circumstances he could probably pretty easily pull this off. I think the trouble is that he starts out in the hole:

There's a wonderful world where all you desire

And everything you've longed for is at your fingertips

Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips

Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you

And the cool promise of ecstasy fills the air

At the end of each working day she's waiting there

It's...the supermarket! As metaphor for the promise that a good woman represents. But A) good woman? Bruce, you have to know it's just some prickly emette from Rumson High scraping together enough dough for smokes and a ticket to see Hawthorne Heights this August. And B) "aisles and aisles of dreams" don't await a person at "the supermarket." Let's not let it go that far.

He goes on about this affected fop and thinks it's "wonderful and rare/the way she moves behind the counter/beneath her white apron her secret remains hers/as she bags the groceries her eyes so bored."

Oof. It's just awful, really. A miss for which I cannot apologize. Go listen to The River to hear about how broken people cope or fail to cope. Or track down his 1996 solo show in Freehold if you want to hear songs about noble-but-regular people performed in a way that makes you actually give a shit about them.

Okay, so anyway this one I'm putting down in the closest grocery store to what is purported to be Springsteen's Rumson, NJ home. At the very least it will be placed at a grocery store in Rumson where The Boss' "Queen" will be doing after-school shifts and smoking on shoppers during her break as they enter or exit.

"Queen of the Supermarket," hijacked from NPR's advanced stream of 2009's Working on a Dream.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

capture from Dylan GEO

You would think I would be ecstatic to discover that bobdylan.com now has geographic access to a wealth of Dylan data. It's called "Dylan GEO" and it provides interactive globe access to "over 40 years of Bob Dylan touring history." It even uses a well-done retro film theme (wait, why, because he's old?). And I guess I'm happy. I suppose. I mean...it's nice, yeah.

But here's my problem. There's nothing geo* about it. It's fake geography. They've essentially geocoded 40 years of Dylan touring data, integrated a nice social media module that allows people to comment about the shows, and made it all available online to the world, right? But they did it as a graphic. It's a Flash app with no discernable geo component at all except that the graphic upon which the pins have been placed looks like earth (until you zoom in and it looks like overextended pixels -- could be a LIFE photo of George Custer or Joey Buttafuoco, for all you know, since it's not tiled geospatial imagery). Never mind that it makes my fan run like Miley Cyrus from a Roman Polanski photo shoot on Mulholland (Just kidding, Miley would stay. [Too much? Agreed.]), my problem is that Dylan GEO is a completely self-enclosed Flash app when it could have been a very, very welcome contributor to the geoweb.

Okay, let me disclose that I don't know for a fact that they haven't built this app around a truly geospatial heart. It's possible that behind this little movie there is a heaving, fully gist-indexed PostGIS the_geom column that feeds this stuff into some format Flash can use on stage. And if that's true, I expect any day that an API will be published so that mashers the world over can pipe these Dylan shows into their app or publish comments and incorporate a piece of Dylan GEO into blog posts and such. I mean, that's the spirit and ultimate promise of the web these days, right? So obviously that will be possible, yes? I secretly hope the Dylan site people will respond and tell us all, but I'm sure they're busy building the rest of what really is one of the better big-time musician sites out there.

My point is that the tools exist to do this correctly but they seem to have not been used. These points could pretty easily be made available via WFS (an open OGC standard, see), or geoRSS or geoJSON or Fire Eagle or...what the fuck, there must be a hundred ways to make this stuff useable by the community and therefore used anywhere. Can I think of something to do with them? Well...not really. Not right now, anyway, as Dylan's Theme Time Bloody Mary recipe is too good for my own good, Plus, professionally I'm busy with other stuff. But that is decidedly not the point. I couldn't think of what to do with a video of two chicks dropping their soft stuff into a cup, either, but somebody else did. Yeah, I stand by that example because my point is clear -- if the Google thing has taught us anything it's that you make tools available that do even just a couple of things pretty well and people will use them to do additionally cool shit. And then if that cool shit is done with a sense of community and -- preferably -- open standards, then still more people will do decently-awesome things with it. And you'd have to be a four-star nincomp. to not realize that Dylan data would be useful. Mash it with Dylanbase; mash it with bobsboots; mash it with dimeadozen; do a comparative mashup with Wallflowers tour dates, for all I care. Aren't there billions of Deadheads out there? Do something with that! Listen: you shouldn't have to even try to predict what people can do with a dataset. You developed it, so just let them try, for fuck's sake. Not to mention that sweater-wearing nerds like me can use this kind of stuff when they teach geoinformatics courses or do guest lectures in media/communications courses about the burgeoning geospatial component to a hitherto flat, 2d www.

why not just do this within the app?

Even if I weren't a tiresome, open source, open standards, hippy dippy librarian type, I would still be hotter than Ted Knight after Ed Asner argues in favor of gay marriage about this (No, you're right: I'll quit. I really don't want to be a Dennis Miller wannabe). Why? It doesn't even work that well. Unfortunately. Specifically, the navigation is a little jumpy. You'll expect this to behave like WorldWind or Google Earth but it won't. It will lurch and twist on you. It will spin "east to west" (I use those terms loosely) when you pull "down" (that's more like it). So why didn't they just use WorldWind or Google Earth?

Maybe the excuse is that they would have more control over how content is rendered? Then why does the "Show Details" throw a popup? Why not keep it inline? If it was a Google Earth app maybe I would understand, as there's less control over how you can present data "on" the globe (less true now with the GEarth API). If it was a WorldWind app, I would understand because -- although it's open and technically the only thing preventing anything is the time you have available to write the code -- it's quite frankly more efficient to use something else (although that's not stopping me, with my stable of 1 java[-ish] developer). But this is Flash, so why not stay within the Flash environment? Maybe I'm naive (you can be critical and naive at the same time, yes?).

I don't know, man. I don't get it. All the effort that went into Dylan GEO is just going to stay in Dylan GEO, I guess. Such a waste.

Oh, by the way: look at how many shows Dylan has played in Germany alone. "Neverending," indeed. Get me a recording of "It's great to be back in Schwbisch Gmnd!" for my birthday, please.