Is there a recipe for meat loaf?

Ditto service workers (even if you’re a regular)

I grew up in a house built in 1886 - not quite pre-indoor-plumbing but close.
One time a plumber came over, opened up an outside panel, and his face just fell.
“Oh…. Shit” were his words as he stood there, slack-jawed.

The “Every border implies the violence of its maintenance” film festival.

It’s a relief to know it’s dishwasher-safe. I’m tired of washing my Stan Perpler by hand.

My spouse keeps pitching me “CSI: Sioux Falls” as a joke, but I just know that the networks will actually make it someday.

As Gillian says:
She has a face like a Jumbotron (complimentary).

Not that she plays things broadly, quite the opposite!
But even as she downplays her emotions, every subtle movement her face makes is immediately legible.

Bassists: the mysterious operators pulling the strings from the shadows.

You don’t figure that the theater copyright cops are going to bother you, but yeah, I’d be worried about rewriting the end of a play.

(I did hear of a production of West Side Story that killed off their Maria. I later worked w/ that actress & I understood the impulse)

Yeah I know a venue that got busted by the ASCAP/BMI police and now they won’t host live music anymore, which is the worst of all worlds.

That’s madness. It’s true for adapting musicals, too:
Must perform the book/music you bought the license to, no tweaks!

Any money I make from music is in live performance, so it’s easy for me to say: do both!
Sometimes we play bars/festivals w/ a cover, and we insist on good pay for those gigs.
Sometimes we play in parks & whatnot, and it’s free and we get paid barely anything, and it’s worth it.

They shouldn’t outlive the artist — or, in the case of artists who die young, the rights should expire on what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday or whatever.

I have mixed feelings about copyright laws. Ideally they protect artists’ ability to earn money from their work, though too often they’re used by corporations/lawyers to stifle art — like Disney’s copyright hoarding, or the Bittersweet Symphony lawsuit.

@andrewhickey.500songs.com’s podcast is like the cerulean speech from The Devil Wears Prada, (without the mean-spiritedness).

Every moment of musical originality is downstream from a thousand tributaries, and he patiently explains every one.
It’s marvelous — vital listening for songwriters.

They teach people to write songs this way!
Lake Street Dive’s “You Go Down Smooth” started as a college class exercise in rewriting “Got to Get You Into My Life.”
The two songs aren’t the same, but are built from the same parts, like those Lego sets w/ alternate instructions.

Most of these are chord progressions - totally legal to steal! Others are bits of melody or rhythm that I’ll rework to the point they’re unrecognizable.

But I’d never be able to deny it! I’d be on the stand, giddily showing off how clever I was to adapt a country banjo solo into a funk bass line.

I’m only a semi-professional musician and an amateur songwriter, so I’ve never had to test where the homage/infringement line is, but: I’m a shameless musical magpie.
(I think most of us are)

I write funk & jazz, but have swiped from John Williams, Elliott Smith, & Miranda Lambert.

Sim City (original recipe) won recognition for modeling traffic like this, however many decades ago.

While Sim City taught us some bad lessons (where’s the multi-use zoning?), it was spot on about traffic.