A mere twelve hours after Halloween's end my cable provider's Sound of the Seasons station was playing holiday music. Aren't we supposed to wait until after Thanksgiving? At least? I'm not the only blogger lamenting the premature appearance of holiday tunes.

I guess an easy answer would be some do, but many still don't. Granted, I have only anecdotal evidence, but it doesn't surprise me while digging through some of my last.fm contacts music libraries, I found that male artists far outweigh female ones. (I actually did some tallying up -- because I am a nerd like that. It was around 5% at the low end, and 25% at the high.)

I'll admit it: I'm a huge geek. But I'm also a huge music fan and always seem to find ways to marry my love for music with my love for all things technical and nerdy. So it probably comes as no small shock that I find this fascinating. Apparently, someone has developed software that can predict whether a song will be a hit or not. NPR's Laura Sydell on Music Intelligence Solutions' Hit Song Science:

 

When hearing of Kurt Cobain's untimely, but not surprising, suicide 1n 1994, my initial reaction wasn't grief or shock, but fear that this would be one of those"defining moments" of my generation. Like the Baby Boomers before us had Elvis and John Lennon, two iconic figures whose lives were cut short, I had that first taste "Wow, life's short." But a suicide, while sad and tragic, is only a blip on the radar screen of life, and we expect out idols to live at least long enough to experience that awesome comeback tour. The ones that don't took Neil Young's advice a little too seriously.