The Friday Wrap

Here's a recap of the last seven days here at the ol' paragraph factory.

A guy who grew up in Charlotte wrote a cool book about the vocoder. (Plus DVD extras!)

Now you have to remember if you're in the Orange Zone or the Green Zone. (Several readers made a smart suggestion: The recycling bins should've been orange or green, depending on what zone you're in. But you'd still have to remember which week you take out recycling. Maybe they could've stamped a calendar on the lid.)

LeBron chose away over home.

A quick follow-up on that... NOBODY looked good after The LeBron Show last night.

LeBron showed all the emotion of an insurance adjuster and seemed to have no idea how deeply he was crushing Cleveland fans by renting ESPN for an torture session of kissing them goodbye.

ESPN chucked its credibility and spent an hour kissing LeBron's ring. Well, he doesn't HAVE a ring, but you get the point.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert wrote a letter hammering the guy he loved and coveted up until the very minute LeBron decided to go somewhere else. It must have been a blast to write, but conveniently fails to mention that Gilbert just finished getting rid of the Cavs' coach and general manager -- so much for loyalty -- and also fails to understand that he sounds like a ninth-grader who got dumped a week before the prom. Which, in a way, he is.

The only people who came out of the whole thing with unadulterated happiness are Miami Heat ticket scalpers. Good news, Junior, that college fund's back in play.

A few of the things I linked on Twitter (@tommytomlinson):

RT @Pogue Did the Jetsons predict the iPad, FaceTime, and streaming video news sites in 1962? http://bit.ly/bQJByg

Alvin Greene's stimulus idea: Alvin Greene action figures. I'm beginning to think this is performance art. http://bit.ly/chSbD0

Gator walks into a building at LSU. (Insert SEC joke here.) http://bit.ly/aGN4hd

Not sure I agree with all this from the great @williamfleitch... but damn, is it well-done. http://bit.ly/aWm0Gl

Former co-worker @tTribble helped come up w/the awesome cover for the Cleveland P-D today. http://bit.ly/cgf3Kx

Finally, some music. Smashing Pumpkins are coming to Charlotte next week. It's about a decade past their glory days in the post-Nirvana era, but I saw them when they were here in 1997, and they were really good. Here's a clip of Billy Corgan doing an AC/DC cover on the street in Italy. You'd never know from a Smashing Pumpkins show that Corgan can be charming and goofy... but he is here.



Enjoy the weekend, everybody.

DVD extras for Sunday vocoder column

Hope everybody had a good Fourth. For us it involved a trip to Oklahoma and a drive through the flatlands of Kansas on July 4 night -- fireworks in every direction and Conway Twitty on the radio. That's America, y'all.

Now that I'm back at work I wanted to share some supplemental material that goes with my Sunday column on Dave Tompkins, who grew up in Charlotte and just wrote a very cool book about the vocoder.

Buy a copy on the book's official page or on Amazon.

Here's a story from New York magazine.

And now to the music:

This is "Clear," the song that Dave fell for when it came on WPEG back in 1982.



Here's "Pack Jam" by the Jonzun Crew -- a glorious mix of Devo, Michael Jackson, the Oakland Raiders and "CHiPs."



This is Midnight Star's "Freak-a-Zoid," which you heard if you visited a dance club anytime in the mid-'80s.



And if you want to go all in, check out this 75-minute vocoder megamix from Dave's site.

I think it's fair to say that the vocoder changed Dave Tompkins' life. Is there a song, or a sound, that changed yours?