It’s a Major Award. I won it!

This entry was posted in Family Food/Cooking on by

So the WhiteTrashBBQ blog was running a contest called the MUG® Root Beer Father’s Day Brew-B-Q kit give away. All you had to do was write a story about Dad and his grill and why you or your dad deserve the kit. So I sent in a two part story of the times my dad destroyed the meat and vegetables he was grilling. So I won 🙂 I got the fathers day Brew-B-Q kit, the kit included a Mug® themed cooler, apron and all the ingredients to make the MUG® Root Beer Southern Specialty Brew-B-Q Sauce as well as the recipe it self. So here is the story I sent in. Sorry dad had to throw you under the bus for this one. 🙂

The making of my Dad’s Montauk burger

One summer my parents and I went with 6 other couples to spend a week in Montauk. Well on the night that watching the kids fell to my parents my dad had decided to make burgers for all of us. So he went out and bought an hibachi grill and the makings for the burgers. He also stopped and got a bottle of jug wine some Carlo Rossi paisano to be exact . After getting back to the house he got the fire started and a glass of wine in his hand. Then he started getting the burgers made and had another glass or 2 of wine. When the fire was ready he headed out with the burgers and put them on the grill and proceeded to have a few more glasses of wine. So when he finally came with the burgers and served them up one side was as hard as a Charcoal Briquet and the other side was raw…thus we now make sure when dad is going to make burgers for us he isn’t going to make Montauk burgers.

Last year he was working the grill at his nephews wedding and wandered away to talk to family….while he was away the vegetables he was grilling ignited in to a nice blaze of glory. Luckily I was near by and put out the fire….I ended up doing the rest of the grill cooking that night.

Now don’t get me wrong when my dad is focused on the grilling at hand he does a great job it’s when he has had a few to many glasses of wine or there is a distraction such as his brother or other family members that he doesn’t see all the time that things go wrong.

Drum solos at concerts….

This entry was posted in Concerts Personal on by

Has the drum solo at concerts become the bathroom break of a show? I was watching a Rush concert on TV yesterday and started thinking about this question. Now don’ t get me wrong I like a good drum solo but some drummers just don’t thrill me like a certain few do. Some of my friends I talk to and go see shows with all have a different opinion on this matter. Some Deadheads love it when drums start but others just roll there eyes and head to the concession stands or take a short nap in there seats. I like a good drum solo but it has to be certain drummers. Most of the time at a Dead show it depends how many of the shows I have seen already, if it’s at the start of the tour I will watch the drums solo, but later into the tour it becomes a break from the show and hit the bar for a water.

So while I thought of this heavy question I have come up with my list of drummers I like to see do a drum solo.

  1. Matt Abts – Gov’t Mule
  2. Mickey Hart & Bill Kreutzmann – The Grateful Dead
  3. John Molo – Phil Lesh & Friends, The Other Ones, Bruce Hornsby
  4. Liberty DeVitto – Former Drummer for Billy Joel
  5. Neil Peart – Rush
  6. Butch Trucks – The Allman Brothers
  7. John Bonham – Led Zeppelin (deceased)
  8. Chester Cortez Thompson – Frank Zappa, Genesis, Phil Collins
  9. Phill Collins – Genises & Solo

So that’s my list. Out of the 9 I have seen 8 of them play and they are all worth the watch and listen. Each has there own way of playing.

Free The Dead

This entry was posted in Concerts Reviews on by
Last night my cousin Henry and I piled into the truck and headed into New York City to see The Dead at the Roseland Ballroom. It was a free show that you had to enter an e-mail to get tickets. There were three intimate shows or “sets” last night including ours. The first set was at the Angel Orensanz Theatre with just Bobby, Phil and Warren doing and Acoustic set, the second show was at the Gramercy Theatre with the Full Electric Band and they ended at the Roseland Ballroom.

The show was supposed to start at 11pm and the doors opened at 8pm. We were in line and read for the doors to open. I have never been in the Roseland without over 500 people, but last night when we walked in at 8pm it was empty and was total great. We were the first to use the mens room which was empty as well which is nice not having to fight for the can. We found the Rose Bar in the back that we didn’t know existed. After exploring a little we made camp along the VIP stage wall and got comfortable. We just hung back and watched as the room filled and started hearing about the other two shows that The Dead just finished, and that they were great.

The show started promptly at 11:20pm. and ran to about 1:20pm.

Full Electric Band
Roseland Theatre

  • Althea
  • Cassady
  • Uncle John’s Band>
  • Eyes of the World>St Stephen>
    Dark Star>Sugar Magnolias
  • E: Not Fade Away

The band was tight and in great form, Warren was still working off the lyric book but it was the first round of shows and the tour doesn’t offically start till April, 12 in North Carolina. Bob did mess up a few words in Cassidy but over all it was a good show.

As for the crowd it was great. It was true blue Deadheads with an age range that ranged from grade school kids to the over 70’s set, that were there to see the band. Before the show it was a whole bunch of catching up with old friends and making new ones with those around you, but once the band hit the stage it was all about the music for the crowd and catching the vibe and letting your self flow with it. On the VIP stage there was one woman who was dancing even to the band tuning up before the first song…she was floating on the vibes coming form the “music” and she didn’t stop dancing till the music stopped…she was in constant motion. There were a few to drunk and too baked people…I seem to always get one right in front of me, who thinks he can dance and then proceeds to bang into me and last night was no different. This guy at least apologized but also wanted to tell me his life story while the band was playing. Finally his buddy got him to move up front and that was the end of him. Other then him there was a good vibe throughout the ballroom.

Sure the show was short and the wait was long but the tickets were free and the band was in great form and the crowd over all was the perfect crowd to see the show with. These three shows were put together for the fans to experience The Dead in and intimate atmosphere and that’s what was achieved. I love seeing bands in venues like the Roseland Ballroom, Irving Plaza or The TLA in Philly. So if you can get tickets for any of the shows on this tour I would recommend getting them and going and enjoy the music and vibe, of course it won’t be as intimate as these shows, but they will be worth going to. I am now off to figure out how to get at least two or three tickets for the two shows at the Spectrum in Philly.

So in closing as I have said in the past “The Grateful Dead might not be the best at what they do, but they are the only ones that do what they do.”

Here are the Set Lists for the other two “sets”

Bob, Phil & Warren Acoustic
Angel Orensanz Theatre

  • Dire Wolf
  • Bird Song
  • Cumberland Blues
  • Pride of Cucamonga
  • Lazy River Rd
  • KC Jones
  • E: Ripple

Full Electric Band
Gramercy Theatre

  • Jam>Playin’ in the Band>Good Lovin’>
  • The Wheel>Franklin’s Tower
  • E: Touch of Grey

It’s looking like the Spring/Summer is going to be a Grateful season

This entry was posted in Concerts on by
So on Saturday night I finally took notice of an e-mail in my In-box from Dead.net, the Grateful Dead’s website. It was a notice that The Dead were going to do 3 shows in NYC today starting at 5pm, 8pm and 11pm and that they were free shows. The only way to get the tickets was to enter the drawing for tickets. So of course I had missed the dead line to get my name in the running I was way bummed, because right now I don’t have the money to see the shows in Philly. Right about that time the following e-mail came in from GDTS TOO the Dead’s mail order ticket company.

There are a small amount of free tickets available from our GDTS TOO allotment for one of The Dead’s performances at The Angel Orensanz Foundation Center for the Arts, Gramercy Theatre and Roseland Ballroom on Monday, March 30, 2009. The intention of these small venue shows is to provide an opportunity for fans to see The Dead in an intimate setting for free.

So as fast as my fingers could type I got my name and my cousins Henry’s name in an e-mail and sent it in. So last night at around 8:30pm I got the word….we are seeing The Dead at the Roseland Ball Room in NYC at 11pm tonight.

It’s going to be a long day but I can’t wait to see the band. It’s been to long since I have seen a concert and over 6 years since I have seen The Dead. So Henry and I will be driving into the city around 6pm to get there by 8pm when the doors open, get our tickets and then hang out at the ballroom and wait till 11pm for the show. The one bummer about the Roseland is that it’s a standing only venue, but hey it’s a free show and should be a blast and it will be fun to hopefully meet up with some old friends and deadheads.

So check back in a few days for a review and set-list.

An acquaintance moves to the east coast

This entry was posted in Friends Personal on by

I have an acquaintance, Jesse that I have met once in person and spent a few days hanging out with, but who I have worked with for over 2 years on the LOPSA education committee virtualy. I call him an acquaintance because I haven’t really hung out with him…but i guess if you drink with a guy for 4 hours that makes you friends…. He is a good guy and a damn fine sysadmin and friendly and a coffee fiend like no one else I know. Since I have known him he and his wife Heather Lee have bought a fabulous looking farm called Bullfinch Farm in Dane County Wisconsin . The day they singed the papers they went back to the farm to celebrate and walked into the house to be hit in the face by the smell of the world largest litter box. They still don’t know how they missed this smell in the final walk through as well as all the times they came to look at the farm. They had to remove all the floors and most of the walls and replace them. There was more to do but it’s not my story to tell. Jesse has also moved to a new job and is now working for a company in New York State.

After reading the info about Bullfinch Farm and what they are trying to do I realized that they remind me of certain people in my family. First of Fran and Angelica, by the way Jessy and Heather Lee dream of giving something back to the earth and to make a place for artists and thinkers and just regular people to have a peaceful place to come and work and relax and create. The list of “critters” as Jesse calls them reminds me of my aunt with all her chickens. I am sure that they will love the Southern Tier of New York and Pennsylvania. Welcome Jesse and Heather Lee to the Southern Tier.

A hello message and it’s turned into retrospective kind of time

This entry was posted in Friends Personal on by
A few weeks ago a real great friend from my past e-mailed me. She said she saw her roommate looking at a web site and did a double take at the picture at the top of the page and realized it was me. She said she immediately jumped online and e-mailed me. When I get e-mails from old friends it makes me feel good to know that people actually do remember me.

This friend though was what I considered my best friend at the time and I use to wonder what happened to her when I would go home to see my folks and wondered what she was doing these days. She worked for a competing radio station when I worked for KZ106 and WCLI but when we weren’t working we were inseparable around Corning and Elmira. She and I talked music, about life and just hung out and had fun as platonic friends do. When I changed stations and shifts and then eventually moved out of the Bath/Corning area we had drifted apart and I never got to say goodbye…and I always felt bad about that and it was good to hear from her and know that she is doing well.

This is also the time of year I always get into a retrospective mood and always think about the past and all the people I never see anymore…all my friends from Fallsington that I heard from once or twice right after I was banished to Bath, Rick and Kathleen Chevet, Mike Capriotti. I do see my ex neighbor Kevin Reed once in a blue moon..he told me a kid who use to hang out with Mike, Kathaleen and me died a few years back, which shocked me Jay was a few years younger then me. Then there are the friends from The Hun School that probably don’t even remember me, but who I remember fondly as well as the friends from Newtown Friends School. I do hear from my buddy Bill Magod from NFS every few months or so..but don’t see him much since our schedules never seem to mesh.

I asked a question to a friend of mine at work the other day “if you could back to High School with what you know now and do it all over again would you?” She said she would..she of course asked me the same thing and of course I had some wise-ass answer because I didn’t want to admit I would go back farther then high school. I would go back to that second year of The Hun school and maybe really apply myself….see I was never one for school and back in 7th grade I just didn’t care and my following school years show it.

Even before I asked her the question I had been thinking about the past a lot and wondering how much my life and even me as a person would be different if I had done things differently? Would I have had to move to Bath if I had been doing better in school, would I have gone into radio at all, would I have gotten into computers and system admining? If this were a movie I would now be hit on the head, be knocked out and dream that I was back in 7th grade and see how life would be different.

Now don’t get me wrong I love and am happy with what I have become as a person and what I have done with most of my life, but we all have those few little things we did that we wish we could have done differently or not done at all. I turn 42 this July and I look back and realized that somethings I could have done differently. So as my life moves on it will always be in the back of my mind what if I had really studied for that science test or taken the time to really apply myself in high school instead of just trying to get by (my parents are nodding there heads right now saying “we told you so”) and going to college and getting the ever coveted degree, how would life be different for me and my family.

I am now the father of a 16 year old daughter

This entry was posted in Family and tagged birthday daughter on by

Well this month I have hit a new milestone in my life. My daughter turns 16 this month. So does this mean boys will suddenly start appearing at the front door, she is going to start driving soon, she is going to get a job and then she will be going to college in a few years. I am sure my dad looks at me now and chuckles to himself as he remembers his son turning 16. I wasn’t that bad as a teenager but I did have my bad points. It makes me feel a little bit older, but it also

So now my daughter is turning 16 and I can see the change in her already, she is becoming more independent and is living her own life without her parents always being there. She is off to the mall more and hanging out with her friends. She passed her drivers ed class with an A+ and aced her written test and is looking at Carolyn’s car with a whole different look….I know in her mind the word “MINE” flashes up when she looks at it. So now we have to get here signed up to take the 6 hour mandatory behind the wheel class then it will be a year of “Can I drive? Can I drive?” all the time. This will be more of a problem for my wife since she has the car with the automatic transmission and my truck is manual. 🙂 See I was thinking when I made that purchase.

I know it sounds like I am complaining but I think it’s great that she is now 16 and is growing up and is starting to make a bigger mark on the world. So Happy Birthday Avery and may you have many more. Hey she can start working now…hmm rent is starting to sound good. 🙂

RIP WCEB

This entry was posted in Radio and tagged WCEB FCC Corning on by

This morning I got an e-mail from Dave Game the founder of the Corning Community College radio station WCEB that it had lost it’s license. I have written about WCEB before and the ideas I had for making it a viable option for the Corning Community. Sure it was low powered but it had potential well at least I thought so. I thought it so much that I sent an e-mail to the President of CCC with my ideas of what could be done to make WCEB a great local community radio station and a learning tool for the students. So in this hard time for the local radio station especially in the Corning/Elmira market where most of the radio stations are all on hard times I raise my glass to you WCEB the radio station that started the carriers of many of the radio personalties in what was one of the best markets to start a radio carrier. Here is a copy of the e-mail I sent the President of Corning Community College.

As a former student of Corning Community College and former announcer on WCEB it was sad to see that the college hasn’t renewed the license for WCEB. I was the program director of WCEB in 1986 and 1987. I always thought that the station was never used to it’s full potential for the college and the Corning radio community.

WCEB is one of only a handful of Class D licensed radio stations in the United States.
In Corning there are 13 stations licensed to Corning including WCEB. 7 of the licenses are for repeaters for stations outside of the Corning area. Of the 6 remaining stations 3 of them are in financial trouble and are cutting back on local programing and personnel. The remaining 2 just play bubble gum top 40 music and are programed by people outside the Corning area.

The Corning radio market use to be a great place for up and coming radio personnel to get there feet wet in the broadcasting field. But since deregulation of radio and TV the big corporations have bought up most of the stations in the area and cut back on station personnel in favor of satellite fed shows or making the station automated and getting rid of the human factor in broadcasting.

I have always thought that WCEB should be run as a business for the school and not as a student club. It should be used as a teaching tool as well as a way to promote the college and to give back to the Corning community. I have always felt that if I was given a chance to run WCEB again I could make it a viable concern. It is already licensed as non-commercial so making it a public radio station would not be hard. As a format I would make it a hybrid of WXPN in Philadelphia and FreeForm radio such as WFMU as well as brodcasting CCC sports events and other community shows. In my 5 year plan the college would provide funding for the station with grant money as we rebuild the station, we would have fund drives 2 times a year starting in the 2nd or 3rd year and slowly start cutting the college funding from our budget. For personel we would start with a manager/program director/announcer/board operator and a part time certified radio engineer to maintain and take care of the equipment as well as marketing manager. To fill out the air shiifts we would take volunteers from the comunity and college. As well as have internship positions hopfully filled by CCC students.

I have more ideas about this and feel that it is an idea that Corning Community College should think about as a way to educate your students and as a way to give back to the Corning community.

William Bilancio

Update: The deletion of the license by the FCC was also mentioned in this weeks North East Radio Watch by Scott Fybush

Pet Peeve about other web sites and fixed the issue on my own.

This entry was posted in Technology on by

I have come to hate web sites that don’t give me the option to e-mail the article or a link to the article. I follow a lot of websites/blogs through Google Reader and if the article is something I think is worth sending to a friend or family member I like to send right from the site. Most times the site will send a little synopsis of the article which is more then I would do if I just sent the link from my mail client. This way if the recipient likes what he/she reads then they can continue or trash the e-mail.

So as I was fuming about this the other day I realized I didn’t have that option on my own site so I went and fixed that with a plugin for WordPress. So enjoy.

Thinking of 15 albums just wasn’t enough for me.

This entry was posted in Technology on by
It started with an e-mail from Facebook stating that I was tagged by my buddy Brian Jones on a note he wrote on his face book page.

Think of 15 albums, CDs, LPs (if you’re over 40) that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life. Dug into your soul. Music that brought you to life when you heard it. Royally affected you, kicked you in the wasu, literally socked you in the gut, is what I mean. Then when you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good.

Well I came up with the following 15 albums:

1. Beatles – Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
2. Billy Joel – Piano Man
3. The Blues Brothers – Briefcase Full of Blues
4. Kinks – Give the People What They Want
5. The Allman Brothers – Eat a Peach
6. The Nails – Mood Swing
7. Steely Dan – Aja
8. Wings – Wings Across America
9. The Who – Who’s Next
10. Web Wilder – Doo Dad
11. The Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers
12. Sam & Dave – The Best of Sam & Dave
13. Huey Lewis & News – Fore
14. Supertramp – Breakfast in America
15. Boomtown Rats’ – A Tonic for the Troops

But with my back ground of radio and also the fact that there wasn’t much to do in Bath NY in the winter as well as being a member of the Columbia Recod Club..I had just so many more albums that had influenced my life. On my ride home form work I came up with at least 10 more and by the time I sat down and really thougth about it I came up with a total of 55 albums that had such a profound effect on me. This list is in no order except for the first 2 albums, they were the first albums I ever owned and listend to and effected me. This list is not complete in my mind because I am still being effected by new music and albums as well as I keep thinking of other albums I use to listened to…I still haven’t gone to the basement and gone through my many cases of vinyl. So enjoy the list of “The Albums that have influenced my life from the early 70’s and onward.”