Meaning of the Word PALS

Mon, May 25,2015

Ive had friends and have had PALS
Let me quote Billy the kids on pals

Charley, you'll come with me?
 You ain't gonna say much, dirty Steve? - Cause he ain't got much to say, Charley.
 Or Steve understands the meaning of the word "pals", don't you Steve?
 Cause if you got three or four good pals well then you got yourself a tribe.
There ain't nothing stronger than that. We're your family now, Chavez. You see billy knew Chavez needed them and they needed him PALS stick together no matter what it gets hard sometimes.but you got to ride it out.at one-time I me 4 good pals but time split us up.we did everything together.now im 39 with a wife and kids and my pals are gone we all are doing or on thing now.it was good to see them.it was sad a death brought us together for one last moment in time.my heart a little harder now.You guys are my PALS forever.Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again, but life goes onSo in the end, was it worth it? Jesus Christ. How irreparably changed my life has become. It's always the last day of summer and I've been left out in the cold with no door to get back in. I'll grant you I've had more than my share of poignant moments. Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it. Throughout my lifetime, I've left pieces of my heart here and there. And now, there's almost not enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. There are no more white horses or pretty ladies at my door.

Just Remember it's how many times you get knocked down but how many times you get back up bad times don't last forever BUT BAD GUYS DO!!!!!
Chico...

KILLING SPOTIFY’S FREE VERSION WILL BOOST PIRACY

KILLING SPOTIFY’S FREE VERSION WILL BOOST PIRACY

BY Todd Starr ON MAY 10, 2015

Spotify is generally hailed as a piracy killer, with music file-sharing traffic dropping in virtually every country where the service launches. However, much of this effect may be lost if recent calls to end Spotify's free tier are honored.

cassetteWhen Spotify launched its first beta in the fall of 2008, we branded it “an alternative to music piracy.”

With the option to stream millions of tracks supported by an occasional ad, or free of ads for a small subscription fee, Spotify appeared to be a serious competitor to music piracy.

In the years that followed Spotify conquered the hearts and minds of many music fans. Currently available in more than 60 countries, the service has amassed dozens of millions of users.

It’s a true success story, and one that led to a decline in music piracy rates in a few countries, exactly as planned.

However, in recent months there have been calls to end Spotify’s free ad-supported service. Some prominent musicians and labels believe that killing the free tier will increase revenues.

This week it was revealed that Apple is also pressuring record labels to end the licensing agreements that allow Spotify’s ad-supported deal, presumably to make its own Beats service more competitive.

While Spotify hasn’t signaled that anything will change, killing the free version will be a dangerous move. In fact, it’ll be a step backward that is likely to increase piracy in the long run.

Sure, when free users are forced to pay it will motivate some to sign up for a paid subscription. This will then lead to more revenue in the short term, something labels and artists will appreciate. However, in the long run the effects may not be so positive.

One of the main appeals Spotify has for the public, specifically ‘pirates,’ is that there’s a free version available. Pirates like to try before they buy and Spotify free removes the giant hurdle to make the switch to a legal streaming service.

Those who then like the service and want the ad-free experience will eventually convert to a paid subscription. After all, paying is not a problem for most ‘pirates’ who tend to spend more money on entertainment than the average consumer.

Ultimately, the goal of the free version is to start changing the habits of pirates, and it’s been pretty successful at doing so.

Besides killing the free version of Spotify there’s also a possibility that it may become more limited. Just before the weekend news broke that Apple’s Beats may also offer some content for free, and perhaps they would like Spotify and others to do the same.

Again, this isn’t a particularly good idea. The magic of Spotify is that users can access a virtually unlimited library of music. A library that’s greater than what people can find on most pirate sites, and more convenient too.

Limiting the library for free users will make it look less attractive compared to the pirate alternatives. As a result, people will be less likely to get hooked and less likely to make the switch to becoming a paid user.

This brings us to the exclusivity issue. In recent years the music industry has excelled in making its music available to as many people as possible, often without restrictions. But now that some big artists are removing (or threatening to remove) their music from Spotify, or offer some content exclusively to other services, the overall appeal is waning.

Music fans don’t want to pay for 3, 5 or 10 services to get all the music they love. They want it all in one place. While this may not bring in as much as everyone would like, it’s a crucial part of stamping out music piracy.

A few months ago a movie industry report found that consumers in the UK need to use dozens of movie services if they want access to the most popular films. If the same happens to music, piracy will surely soar.

All in all it’s safe to conclude that exclusivity breeds pirates. So if artists and labels are in it for the long run they should keep everything together, and make it easy for pirates to go legal.

Follow @RlzToddStarr on Twitter
Google funboy69able

Waylon Jennings at 18 set for release

http://t.co/kE1gq8QLCd

Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard

Check out @SonyNashvilleUK's Tweet: https://twitter.com/SonyNashvilleUK/status/588373221642260481?s=09

Tim McGraw Sundown Heaven Town CD Review

I write these proceeding words fully knowing that many will roll up to this Tim McGraw dissertation looking for a bowl of blood as recompense for the emotional direst recent Tim McGraw singles such as “Truck Yeah” and “Lookin’ For That Girl” have waged on the mental state of many innocent country music fans. But the simple truth is Tim McGraw’s new album Sundown Heaven Town deserves to be spared the most sinister strokes from the poison pen—not because it is “good” by some stretch of that flattering term, but because it symbolizes a turning of the page for Tim McGraw, and potentially, is a symptom of the turning of the page for the entire country music genre.

Welcome to the post “Bro-Country” age ladies and gentlemen—an era that we probably shouldn’t entertain as being filled with audio offerings that will in any way compare in quality with the greater historical panorama of country music, but one where we’ll see a clearly defined and much welcomed improvement overall in the music being offered for consumers’ listening edification.

Tim McGraw’s Sundown Heaven Town is an example of this. By golly Tim McGraw is actually learning. After he broke from the bonds of institutional subjugation at the autocratic hands of Curb Records which did everything they could to choke every last bit of life force out of Tim’s once high flying career—as accidentally or purposefully as it may have been—he ran to the open and cradling arms of Scott Borchetta and Big Machine to press restart. And almost as if to make up for the half decade he ceded to Curb, Tim started releasing the most ridiculous, panic-driven panderings to young people radio pop as possible in an attempt to regain his relevancy. However the results were so ghastly, even the deficient country music masses saw through it.

Tim’s first post-Curb single was “Truck Yeah,” and immediately McGraw announced there was no floor to the depths he would fall through to regain his pertinence. And for the most part, the single fizzled, especially considering the muscle Big Machine put behind it to reignite Tim’s career. The biggest single to come from Tim’s first Big Machine album came nearly a year later with “Highway Don’t Care.” As a much more nutritious offering, and one that sat much more comfortably in the confines of the adult contemporary style of pop country that has buttered Tim’s bread for years, it became a #1 hit, and the biggest hit on the Two Lanes of Freedom album.

The same story has played out so far for McGraw’s new albumSundown Heaven Town. The first single “Lookin’ For That Girl” was so far outside of Tim’s comfort zone and anything that could be considered “country” it was laughable, and on cue it stalled in the charts. That stuff may fly for Florida Georgia Line, but not for McGraw’s established brand. Then McGraw released his latest single “Meanwhile Back at Mama’s.” Once again a song with more substance did much better, making it to #2 in the charts.

The lesson here, at least for Tim McGraw, is that even in this bereft country music landscape we find ourselves in, it’s still better for him to be himself—that guy that makes moms all around the country swoon with his tight shirts and sentimental ballads. Tim can’t run with the young pups, and he shouldn’t try. And whether that was the purposeful approach toSundown Heaven Town or the accidental result, you get Tim being Tim on this album, which means rooting out some of the best adult contemporary compositions the country industry has to offer and doing them justice.

What surprised me was the lack of drum machine intros, loud overdriven guitars, and ploys for radio play on this album. I was also surprised at the amount of steel guitar. No doubt Sundown Heaven Town still affords some creatively anemic moments, and others moments that are downright awful, but they are nowhere near in the measure you would expect from a Tim McGraw album, or really any mainstream album in 2014. The song “Dust” is probably the album’s laundry list “bro” offering if there was one, and still it’s hard to hate too vehemently. “Keep on Truckin'” trying to capture the vibe of the band Train in the country context, and probably should have been left on the cutting house floor. And songs like “Words Are Medicine” and “Sick Of Me” find McGraw striking out boldly to evoke soaring moments, but the lyrical impact seems to be just a little too flat to achieve those heights.

But even the worst song on the album by a long shot “Lookin’ For That Girl” gets relegated to the next-to-last spot on the track list, where it used to be tradition for track arrangers to bury what they believed was the project’s weakest offering. What McGraw seems to understand withSundown Heaven Town is that albums are for the hardcore fans these days anyway, so you might as well make them count. You might as well make them where they say something and entice people to listen instead of simply being a landing place for hyped-up singles.

Sundown Heaven Town starts off quite strong with “Overrated,” which is something completely unexpected from Tim, and probably one of the best songs on the album. “City Lights” is also strong, and so are the more traditional “Diamond Rings & Old Barstools” duet with Catherine Dunn, and “Meanwhile Back At Mama’s” with better half Faith Hill. “Last Turn Home” achieves that high emotional response McGraw regularly looks to achieve with his song selections, and even though “Portland, Maine” has some people in that city a little upset(however playfully so), its expedition into the terrible head space proceeding a breakup is effective and resonant.

Tim McGraw’s Sundown Heaven Town does not come recommended, but nonetheless comes with praise for affording a template for how mainstream country albums should be made moving forward, and from showing improvement from the artist. Passive consumers who only pay attention to singles anyway shouldn’t be regarded when making albums. And an artist like Tim McGraw is much better off being who he’s always been, from both a commercial and a critical standpoint. Make good albums and you will be on the right side of where country music is headed, and create separation from the lost era when country believed clichés about beer and trucks would line their pockets forever.

i really like the CD the deluxe is worth the money

Todd Starr

4-10-2015

Follow @RlzToddStarr on Twitter 

http://open.spotify.com/user/12135445742/playlist/5qbikvgBvqnXhUfp7w5Yzx

UFC185'

The highlight of the program  was Ronda Rousey I think that she is one of the greatest women fighters I have ever seen it will go down in the history book as the greatest woman fighter of all time

Technologyhas the potential to distract and overwhelm, or isolate us from each other

However, human beings being what they are, the path from self-disclosure to interpersonal intimacy is neither safe nor straightforward. Relationships are complex. To paraphrase Pepper Schwartz’s quote about sex, human relations are messy, passionate, tentative, exultative, anxiety-producing, liberating, frightening, embarrassing, consoling, and cerebral—in other words, contradictory, different for different people, different for the same person at different times, and operating at three or four levels at the same time. And that just covers our relations with ourselves. Add another person and it gets really complex.

As Altman and others (such as Leslie Baxter(link is external)) have observed, interpersonal relationships have a dialectical dimension, which means that they often develop in the lively jostling of opposing motives and desires. Ourmotivation to self-disclose and increase intimacy, for example, often bucks up against our desire for autonomy and privacy, which may be better served by self-silencing or concealment.

Clearly, an inability to self-disclose is a barrier to the development of intimacy. MJ Voncken(link is external) and colleagues at Maastricht University in the Netherlands found, for example, that the failure to self-disclose may be why people with social anxiety make poor first, and second, impressions.

However, disclosure too carries inherent risks of being misperceived, misused, or misguided. In particular, too much disclosure too soon will often stifle intimacy. As Altman and Taylor have noted, the journey from disclosure to intimacy often takes time, particularly as we get into the deeper layers of our, and others’, selves.

It’s worthwhile to note that the gradual nature of this self-disclosure-to-intimacy process is quite at odds with our cultural penchant for speed and immediacy. By and large, we like fast products. Fast and "instant" foods are popular. Fast cars are valued. Fast Internet connection is desirable.

Intimacy, though, is different.

Thought experiment: Someone attractive is standing next to you at the bar. You say, “What’s up?” They answer, “I want to have sex with you; I also hate my mother, and I have painful hemorrhoids.” What would your reaction be? Chances are you will recoil rather than rejoice at this display of openness, even if your companion is being completely honest; even if you would actually have wanted to know—and accepted—all these things about them sometime later on in the relationship.

Unlike other realms of life, where we want a fast product regardless of process, the product of intimacy is valued only if constructed slowly over time, as a consequence of the process of gradual and mutual self-disclosure.

While it plays a crucial role in shaping intimacy, self-disclosure itself is shaped by multiple forces. First and foremost, whether and what you disclose will depend on whom you’re interacting with. But other variables are also in play. For example, research has shown that positive mood increases disclosure tendencies. Gender is also a factor. Women on the whole disclose more than men, and also receive more disclosures from others (a woman-woman pair will win a disclosure contest most every time if matched against a woman-man or man-man pair). People of similar age and status also disclose more to each other.

Cultural norms inform patterns of self-disclosure, too: Americans on average engage in more self-disclosure than the Japanese, for example. And environment matters:Vanessa Okken and colleagues(link is external) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have recently shown how self-disclosure, particularly of sexual topics, is influenced by architectural space (specifically, room size). People in cramped spaces disclose less.

Given this background, it stands to reason that the mediumused for disclosure also has an impact.

Indeed, research has suggested that computer-mediated communication (CMC) may increase self-disclosure and intimacy compared to face-to-face (f2f) communication. This may be partly due to the absence of nonverbal, visual cues in the CMC environment. That absence creates heightened uncertainty, which people seek to reduce by disclosing more. The absence of immediate nonverbal cues also reduces conflicting or distracting information, thus helping to facilitate a sense of interpersonal cohesion.

It is also possible that online disclosures are less threatening than f2f disclosures, in the same way that a solicitation for money received online is less threatening than an encounter with a panhandler on the street. Paradoxically then, the physical distance of CMC may confer a sense of security that makes intimate sharing easier. Over-sharing is less noxious from a person who is not physically leaning into your space.

The tendency to disclose more is one factor that leads to feelings of heightened intimacy in online communications. Another factor may have to do with how online communication is received. Our interpretation of any communication from another depends in part on our attributions. Understanding the meaning of what someone says to you is contingent on your sense of why they are talking to you in the first place. That’s why confessions made at gunpoint, for example, are viewed differently than those freely volunteered.

Thus, self-disclosure, while necessary, is not sufficient for fostering intimacy in interpersonal communication. In fact, if disclosure is interpreted as dispositional (part of the sender’s personality) or situational (attributed to circumstance), intimacy will not increase. For the magic to happen, the receiver must make an interpersonal attribution to the sender’s disclosure—they must see the information disclosed as motivated by the desire to relate to the receiver in particular.

Recent research appears to support the notion that high disclosure in CMC leads to heightened intimacy compared to f2f interactions because CMC receivers are more likely to make interpersonal attributions to disclosure. After all, there are no visual or other cues present to contradict such an assumption or cast doubt on a positive attribution of the motivation for disclosure.

In a recent study by Jiang et al.(link is external), 79 student participants communicated with a confederate either f2f or through a computer. The confederates produced either high or low self-disclosure during the interactions. Participants then completed questionnaires about their attributions—such as, Why did the other person disclose?—and level of intimacy with the other.

Results revealed that high self-disclosure led to more interpersonal attributions in the online communication only. Moreover, interpersonal attribution accounted for the link between high disclosure and heightened intimacy. Online communication seems indeed to facilitate interpersonal attributions of disclosure, thus leading to greater intimacy.

There’s much more to learn about how self-disclosure relates to intimacy in the CMC universe, and how the CMC and f2f realms interact, both in the classroom and in the interpersonal realm at large. Technology, of course, may not always prove a friend to intimacy, or a safe environment for its inhabitants. Stories of how people can be stalked, bullied, and menaced online, sometimes to tragic effect, have raised alarms. Sherry Turkle(link is external) and others have written thoughtfully about the potential risks to intimacy posed by our incessant virtual connectivity. Technology has the potential to distract and overwhelm, or isolate us from each other. Andrew K. Przybylski and Netta Weinstein(link is external) of the University of Essex in the U.K. recently reported findings that linked the mere presence of a cellphone nearby to lower ratings of closeness and relationship quality in pairs of participants involved in a meaningful face-to-face conversation. The sight, now common, of people in public spaces, heads bowed towards their handheld screens, oblivious to one another, tuned out of their immediate surrounding while absorbed in their private virtual spheres is the stuff of dystopian nightmares—and a source of befuddlement for many people over 40.

At the end of the day, though, there is no denying the fact that we now inhabit a brave new "dual ecology," where, for good and bad, CMC and f2f processes entwine in a dialectical dance all their own, shaping our disclosures and intimacies. Whether technology as a whole will end up helping or hurting our ability to communicate intimately remains to be seen—in all likelihood, on YouTube.

Dana White On Why Brock Lesnar Attended UFC 184

Dana White On Why Brock Lesnar Attended UFC 184, Lesnar Asks About Frank Mir

Above is post-UFC 184 video with UFC President Dana White commenting on WWE World Heavyweight Champion Brock Lesnar being at the pay-per-view. The Lesnar talk starts at around 3:20. White told Ariel Helwani that Lesnar was just in Las Vegas to see some people and joked that Lesnar is apparently a UFC fan.
Helwani asked White if Lesnar will be coming back to UFC and White once again gave the standard answer of Lesnar calling him when his WWE contract runs out. White did say that Lesnar asked if Frank Mir really wants to fight him a third time.