Reviews Deano in Blogcritics: “It is personality that drives McCullough’s vision of Rome and the Romans within. Her vivid portraits of Marius, Sulla, Julius Caesar, Brutus, Anthony, Cato and the countless others that inhabit her pages, are highly realistic, almost evocative personalities, reflecting the daily lives, ambitions, philosophies, obsessions, egos, …

In an effort to combat the exponential growth of Internet junk email (about 8 percent of all e-mail traffic in late 2001, about 40 percent today) AOL, congress, state courts have all taken strong anti-spam action of late. Now the FTC has filed suit against prolific porn spammer: The lawsuit, …

My brother ran across this – I think it represents my own attitude rather well, and has a lot more weight coming from Pat Metheny: Kenny G is not a musician I really had much of an opinion about at all until recently. There was not much about the way …

First, Cory Doctorow presented comments to the FCC (on behalf of the EFF) asking it to allocate unused TV frequencies to unlicensed use under the same terms as the 2.4GHz spectrum in which WiFi runs: The First Amendment calls on government to eschew regulation of who may speak and how …

Whitney Houston’s December TV interview with Diane Sawyer (“crack is whack”) led many to conclude that her relationship with reality is somewhat, um, tenuous. But following tepid sales of her latest album, she is returning to the tube to try to get something going. Per her website: April 17, 2003 …

Dr. Robert C. Atkins, 72, the low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet guru, died several days after suffering a severe head injury during a fall: Atkins died Thursday at the New York Weill-Cornell Medical Center after falling on an icy sidewalk April 8, said his spokesman, Richard Rothstein. He underwent surgery to remove …

Interesting Slashdot interview with Fast Eddie Felten, Princeton computer science prof, purveyor of the Freedom to Tinker blog, DRM cracker, and pro-tech/information freedom gadfly: Some legal issues, some technical issues, a little personal insight… This is what Professor Felten gives us here. Some excellent questions rose to the top in …

Quick – what blues performer had the most pop and R&B hits between the mid ’50 and the mid ’60s? It isn’t one of the “King brothers” (B.B., Albert, Freddie – no actual relation), or Muddy or any of the Chess Records champions: it was Jimmy Reed. While Muddy Waters …

As we have mentioned before, this is the 50th anniversary of the seminal Chicago blues and jazz label Delmark, and there is many a celebration in the offing. But I think of no better celebration than to talk about a Delmark release that is considered by many to be one …

Now I’m feeling bluesy. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the original release in 1966 of the three volumes of Chicago: The Blues Today! helped save electric Chicago blues. Most of the white, folky audience that had come to be fans of the blues were stuck …