This is not necesarily a non-music thread, but my idea is to provide some of the more entertaining aspects of flaming guests, without needing intrusions to do that, and to go about it in a more civilised way. Music topics might be a Defense of Accordians, or The Benefits of Playing out of Tune, or isn't Rap great, or I don't know, If music be the food of love, shut up, etc. Non-music might be Why I love schmaltzy Hollywood Crap--anything that seems to be a minority position, the un-paragigms of general discourse.

   One that gets me is an unspoken attitude that somehow death is a fate worse than death. Smart and healthy choices make me sick, daily news updates on how to live longer... I'd rather die before doctors find a way to make me live forever. If people spent more time on how to live in a satisfying way, and not how to grab at dirty crumbs of existence, then... then that would be time better spent. It would seem to me that embracing death as part of life would be a smarter, healthier choice.

I also favor child-labor. Trying to entertain kids seems to make monsters of them. If you can give them a job they can do, they get along much better.

Musically I'm getting interested in a hip-hop sampling approach to some folk tunes--it's not new, people have always done it, but trying to get a passing familiarity with hip-hop and rap has given me a new perspective on the tradition of manual sampling and borrowings. And I'm recycling some music that I grew up with, that I'd be too embarrassed to play without quotation marks, by writing stuff that sounds a little like it, or obliquely calls it to mind, the way soundtrack scores tend to sound a little familiar at first hearing. Some of it falls into the zone of an approximate way of playing a tune--playing a version of a tune with accidentals, but on harmonica, without the accidentals, and over different chording.

   Please add any odd thing here that you can advocate in fun or earnest or some mix of the two.