Yes, it's a photo. I was having fun with adobe, decided to post some of the fun to my site at DeviantArt and share a little of it here. If you'd like to see more, the link below will take you there and yes, this does make me a deviant.

Astor Toward Dusk by ~josephdunphy on deviantART

Back to music, as I ponder the 2st century paradox: the scarcer money gets, the more everything costs. $24 cover at the Wild Hare a few months ago - huh? Ever been? It's a tiny little standing room only Reggae club near Wrigley Field and when I say standing room, I'm not talking about popularity. The place is so barebones that it doesn't have chairs.

A mystery until you look at the club listings in Chicago magazine and compare them to what can be seen in old issues from more prosperous times - listings that used to run for a few dozen pages now run to maybe three or four. Supply contracted well ahead of demand, and prices spiked.

And that's why G-d created ipods and sites like Napster, I guess - and why I dream of moving out of here. Part of why. You look at a situation like this and ask yourself "is there any less talent out there than there has ever been or any less interested in finding it, so why don't the downsized musicians go find places to play to their downsized fans and forget those ripoff clubs". Because the armed goons that we call a police force would end that in a hurry, practicing restraint of trade in the name of crowd control; peaceful crowds are dispersed as a matter of course. Freedom of assembly? What's that?

What I'd like to find is a place where people remember that there's nothing natural about that at all.

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Sometimes names aren't enough, especially when there are at least a few dozen people you know of who share it. I'm this Joseph Dunphy

http://my.mashable.com/josephdunphy

not to be mistaken with the stockbroker, the basketball columnist, the organizer for one of the Communist parties in Chicago (I wonder if he's met the stockbroker) ... etc. etc. So if you meet "me" at a Lawrence Welk concert and thank me for that great if surprising review I did of that Soundgarden album a few years ago, and "I" look at you strangely ... well, just don't be surprised if "I" look at you blankly and can't seem to shoot hoops worth a d**n.

It's all I'm saying. Oh, and these are my blogs, too.

http://joseph-dunphy.blogspot.com/ http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/

I'll be periodically tossing in links to some of these places in the future, something I'd rather not have to do because it makes the blog look a little sloppy, but MOG forced the issue by not providing us with a section where we can post our links. Experience has taught me that pages that are linked to without being linked back out of have a way of becoming traps for the search engine spiders, rising at the cost of driving down the rankings of one's other pages. I don't know why these guys won't provide a simple "homepage" link, but since they won't, I'll just do what I can to work around that.

Here's my homegroup where I talk about what I'm doing on my sites

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Joseph_Dunphy

and I hope you'll enjoy my reviews as they come in. I'll try to keep the backlinking to my profiles as low key as possible, now that we understand why it has to be there.

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