Left to my own devices

Corey Pope died last week. On the one hand, the death of a fellow human being is a rather unremarkable event. People die all the time. But I happened to know Corey. I knew him during a time of life when we were both young(er), free spirits and when the world was new. At least, that's how I look back at the mid-to-late '90s through rose-colored tints. In truth, it was often a miserable, lonely time for me but, as with most things, distance has put a shine on the experience. Corey and I weren't close. He was a regular at Chester Street Bar in midtown Champaign, He also, sometimes, worked there, as did I from 1998-99. I never knew quite what to make of Corey. It seemed that he almost always had an impish grin. It was both charming and unsettling. He liked to drink, and to serve drinks. He liked a lot of the dance music that was played at the club. He was formerly a medic. There was, as is the case with many people, more to him than met the eye. Rakish, thin, wi...

It's the 26th birthday of British actor Daniel Radcliffe, and he's our Pic of the Week. Enjoy!

Nostalgia is a funny thing. It can devour you, if you're not careful. One can lose oneself in it. Nostalgia can be a useful tool for remembrance, but it can also be deceptive. We can learn to love a past that perhaps doesn't always deserve the affection. This is especially true if it's a past we didn't experience. But even our own past can play tricks on us. Best, then, to take only small dips in the nostalgia pool, eh? The aforementioned thoughts regarding nostalgia are what developed from a simple airing of the 1985 classic movie Back to the Future on TV over the weekend. For the uninitiated, the film features teenager Marty McFly going back in time thirty years, to 1955, and trying to make sure his parents get together so that the family he knows and loves will be there when gets back to 1985. It's a great bit of cinema, and I clearly remember seeing it at the old Thunderbird Theater with my mom back when it came out.

Today we're going to talk about something very important. We're going to talk about Madonna. "Madge," as she's affectionately known around the gay scene, has been making music for over thirty years. I grew up with her songs, many of them pop classics. In recent years, it can be arguably said that her popularity has waned a bit. During the past decade, Madonna has put out seventeen singles. Of those, three have charted in the US Top 40. Ten Failed to chart at all on the Billboard Hot 100. We now have at least one possibility offered as to why Madge's chart power is waning: Ageism. At least, that's what Diplo (just, Diplo), a producer of some of the tracks off her latest album, thinks . I know it's difficult to be objective about something you've worked on -- whether you were the producer or the artist -- but, as a listener/fan, I have to say that Madonna's most recent work has simply not been that good. Still, we'll hear what ...

I've mentioned in passing on social media recently about how I've been fighting a depression. It's true, though hard to admit. It can be seen as a sign of weakness, and that's never something one likes to promote, especially if they're in a leadership position, with many eyes looking to them for stability and decisiveness. Still, I am who I am. As a matter of fact, this morning, I didn't want to get out of bed. The weather wasn't bad (for once), I wasn't feeling ill or otherwise in poor health, I felt refreshed from a good night's sleep. There was, simply put, a dread about having to face another day. There wasn't a specific issue resonating in my brain that was pushing this feeling, yet, it was there.

We're just a little over halfway through 2015, and I've seen 27 of the year's movies (so far). I thought that now would be a good time to rank those movies! Of course, this is just my opinion, one of many. But if you haven't seen some of the films in, say, the top ten, then try and watch them if/when you can. Ok, here we go….

It's been awhile, but we're back with a new Pic of the Week! This time it's model extraordinaire Sebastian Sauve. Enjoy!

Those commercials for Ancestry.com finally got to me. At first there was annoyance. I'm sure the woman who currently features in the majority of their ads is a nice person, but something about her voice and her delivery grated on me. After awhile, it didn't offend as much, and I learned to simply gloss over the commercials whenever they came on. And then.... there came the curiosity. They say the older you get, the more you begin to care about where you came from, so after months of being inundated with Ancestry.com ads on TV, I signed-up for a two-week free trial period. The biggest surprise wasn't anything as grand as discovering blood relation to a monarch or former president, but that the web site wasn't all Big Brother-ish. I'd just assumed that it would take my particulars and plug-in everything. Not so. You have to provide it with the names of family members and then it searches for potential matches (which you have to confirm). On my dad's ...