AMAZON link

WIKI link

ARTIST – Dirge Within

ALBUM – Force Fed Lies ( + + + + ~ )

GENRE – Heavy Metal

RELEASE DATE – September 1st, 2009

SONGS

01) Self Medicate ( + + + + ~ )

02) Forever the Martyr ( + + + + + )

03) Force Fed Lies ( + + + + ~ )

04) Confession ( + + + + + )

05) Spit ( + + + + + )

06) New Disease ( + + + + ~ )

07) Last Goodbye ( + + + + + )

08) As I Walk ( + + ~ ~ ~ )

09) Inhuman ( + + ~ ~ ~ )

10) Stain of Humanity ( + + ~ ~ ~ )

11) Complacency ( + + ~ ~ ~ )

MY REVIEW
I first saw this band on Head Bangers Ball on MTV 2 in August of 2009, the video was for their first single “Forever the Martyr”. I was taken aback by the song, it was fantastic. Their sound was like Trivium, very fast riffs and a good singing voice plus a little bit of growling. It was nice to finally here a new heavy metal band that sounded more like Killswitch Engage, Sevendust and Nonpoint. Somebody that actually sung instead of just growling and screaming to super heavy riffs it was a pleasant surprise.

FINAL THOUGHTS
If you are a fan of Heavy Metal you will enjoy this cd, the only downfall I had was out of the 12 songs on the album, the first seven are fantastic, the last five unfortuantely are not as good. Unfortuanetly these songs have more growling and screaming in them and I did not like them. If you don’t feel like buying the whole album, hit up iTunes and download “Forever the Martyr”, “Confession” and “Last Goodbye” because you will not be disappointed.

AMAZON link

BOOK – Crow Killer: The Saga of Liver-Eating Johnson (Paperback)

PUBLISHER/DATE – Indiana University Press; First Midland Book Edition (August 1, 1983)

AUTHORS – Raymond W. Thorp Jr. (Author), Robert Bunker (Author)

DESCRIPTION – The true story (on which the film Jeremiah Johnson was partially based) of John Johnson, who in 1847 found his wife and her unborn child had been killed by Crow braves. Out of this tragedy came one of the most gripping feuds, one man against a whole tribe, in American history.

MY REVIEW
I purchased this book with the intent of seeing how well it stood up to the movie, Jeremiah Johnson starring Robert Redford. Boy was I surprised at the huge differences between the movie and the book. There were many differences, one big thing was, his name actually was not Jeremiah Johnson it was Jeremiah Johnston. The movie really dumbed down his life and made it very politically correct. What I mean by this is he was very well known for eating the livers of all the dead that he killed, be it Crow, Siow or Flathead indians. Not to mention he killed over 200 Crow Indians in his time. I could probably talk all day about the differences but I don’t want to give away the story from the book or harp on the differences, because if you’ve ever read a book you know that 9 out of 10 books are better than the movies.

All in all the book is a very good read and it is not very long at a 192 pages. It includes alot of historical facts which I found to be pretty nice because it helps with the authenticity of the characters. There was an issue I did have with the writing style though. Everytime you see a quote from or a conversation between Jeremiah Johnston and another frontiersman the authors put it in the English they spoke. Because of this writing style. I did have problems trying to read through the book. You would be reading along smoothly then all of a sudden you would encounter a few sentences of what I would call “gibberish”. The way the authors translated what the said was in very broken English and was very hard for my brain to understand. Luckily this is a small part of the book and doesn’t distract to bad from the history of the man an the legend.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I am very glad I bought this book off of Amazon seeing that I did get it for a roughly 5 dollars with shipping. I suggest that you should read it if you are a fan of history, frontiersmen or outdoorsmen or even a fan of the movie.

On April 26th 2010, Ryan Howard, 1st baseman of the Philidelphia Phillies, signed a 5-year, $125 million extension to the contract he inked before the 2009 season.

Really! The man is thirty years old, not to mention a big power hitting 1st baseman that plays average to below average defense. Why do baseball teams continue to waste money on players that are past their prime. Anyone that follows baseball closely knows that an offensive baseball players career years are generally when they are twenty seven and twenty eight years old, after that they have peaked and their offensive numbers start to decline.

What were the Phillies thinking? He still had another year on his current contract and the new contract is for guaranteed money. Over the last few years we have seen more and more power hitters decline since the steroid era pretty much is dead.

I hope Ryan Howard can stay very productive for the next seven years so he can actually earn his money but I highly doubt it. As a fan of baseball the General Managers and Owners for most of these clubs infurriate me because of the way the throw money around or won’t spend it at all, Pittsburgh Pirates!

We just arrived home after finishing the MS Walk with some friends, thank you everyone who donated money for the effort. The morning started out pretty crummy, it was spinkling, gray and a little cold but we all walked the 1.5 miles around Blossom Music.

MS Walkers (from Left: Beth, Aimee, Todd, JoJo, Nivert and baby McKenzie, missing Jim and Aimee)

First of all I want to thank Shawn Cope for helping me re-do my Wordpress site since I found a new theme. I promise to actually put up posts since I am now unemployed I really don’t have any excuse!