The Top 11 Albums of Last Year

Here it is, a week too late to be timely and about a month late to be relevant. Here are the top 11 albums of 2011, so you can be nostalgic for something a week old, which still makes you less pathetic than the Baby Boomers.

11) Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman - World Wide Rebel Songs

Tom Morello steps into his alter-ego suit as the Nightwatchman to make this paradoxical album. It's supposed to be protest music, inspired by union songs, but even still, it sounds fun. Picture, if you will, in the eye of your heart of your mind's wildest imagination, the attitude of rage, minus the yelling, minus most of Morello's guitar pyrotechnics, plus acoustic guitars, harmonicas, and some actual melodies. The union song is a bit of Americana that has been all but flushed down the toilet of time, and this album, in a way, resurrects the tradition and reskins it.

10) Bon Iver, Bon Iver

I think I'm the one fan of this album who still pronounces it wrong, saying it the good ol' fashioned Amurrcan way, bon I-vurr [bɑn 'aɪvɚ]. While Justin Vernon's debut LP was more like a memoir where the core argument was "I'm sad," this second album is a novel, exposing something about the human condition more multifaceted than the struggles of the writer himself. And it's a huge sonic expansion over the tinny, out of tune guitar. Rich horn harmonies including work by the legendary Colin Stetson, three percussionists, pedal steel guitar, layered synthesizers, and even some artfully used autotuners. Although it is broken into individual tracks at logical song boundaries, it sounds as though it is one whole, through-composed piece of music, concluding with a movement that might sound a little more Bon Jovi than Bon Iver. But if you don't mind falsetto and the almost universal critical acclaim isn't enough, I would advise you to pick up this album (even though I stole it).

9) Wilco - The Whole Love

Since Jeff Tweedy produced what I think was #6 on last years list, he is now officially the winningest musician, according to the Ozone Shack. But I think without the accolade he would be doing just fine. From the first track, the seven minute "Art of Almost," it's clear that the one-time alt-country band is expanding their sound to new directions, a step they didn't really take on their last two studio albums. But the album's laid back midsection and on the gently swinging "Capital City," they don't intend on leaving their old selves behind. The sound they create is somewhat evocative of The White Album, were it recorded in 2011 by Americans. This is a return to form that may be able to contend with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, making up for lack of earth-shattering publicity and novelty with solid craftsmanship.

8) The Sea And Cake - The Moonlight Butterfly

My personal experiences come into play here. I first listened to this album lying on the floor of my fried's room in Flagstaff, where I had found myself on a spontaneous adventure, while a late summer thunderstorm raged outside. I was sold instantly. This Chicago jazz-rock band uses a texture of clean guitar over light drums and prominent, in-the-pocket, melodic basslines to back up the unobtrusively cool vocal stylings of Sam Prekop and Archer Prewitt, with the occasional synthesizers, or, in the case of the album's third track, only synthesizers. But even those are done artistically. This is all real music, made by real people, and probably the closest thing to a molecular distillation of chill.

7) Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys!

This is the band that's so British, they shat the Queen. They're from a city (in the greater Manchester area) called Ramsbottom. Ramsbottom! Frontman Guy Garvey creates a dreamlike soundscape to accompany his altogether otherworldly voice. Minimalist guitar riffs and ambient harmonies, which always run the risk of having the listener disengage, instead are utilized just so that they can be full and majestic when needed - on tracks like "The Birds" and "Open Arms" - or sparse, as on "Lippy Kids" and "Jesus is a Rochdale Girl" (I don't know what a Rochdale girl is, but, to me anyway, it sounds like Manchester slang for a butch lesbian.) But all Britishisms aside (including proper grammar in the lyrics) this is an album to regenerate your soul, or if not, to at least transport you, for an hour, to a pleasantly altered state.

6) Red Hot Chili Peppers - I'm With You

When you take 1995's minor false step of One Hot Minute out of the equation, every Red Hot Chili Peppers album since 1989 has been an opus in its own right. And each album in this continuum has had the challenge of providing a worthy follow up to its predecessor. So how does this concoction fare? Pretty excellent. Critics have claimed that this sounds like an awkward mish-mash of styles from previous albums, but this is nothing to complain about. I wish I could turn each of their previous albums into two albums, and this acts as a worthy consolation. As always, Flea's strutting basslines make you feel like a badass just by hearing them, and the riffs on "Factory of Faith," "Ethiopia," and "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" are among some of his finest. "Police Station" evokes By The Way-esque textures while "Even You Brutus" is a nod to Blood Sugar Sex Magic. And "Happiness Loves Company" is pure, fist-pumping ecstasy. Perhaps the emotional climax, however, comes from "Brandon's Death Song," which joins less celebrated but equally deserving category of "that one really good ballad on every RHCP album." And while the guitar work is noticeably different following John Fruciante's departure (again!), it's harmonically richer and more diverse.

The next four albums finished practically in dead heat, and every way I tried to order them left me unsatisfied. Places two through five are in the order that left me the least unsatisfied. It's only by virtue of quantum uncertainty that they're in the positions they're in.

5) TV On The Radio - Nine Types of Light

This effort, which is debateably the band's opus, could have come off as pretentious or flippantly ironic, especially since a music video was created for every song, with the intention of making it a kind of album-film fusion. And while that element may exist superficially, once you pay attention to the quality of the music as opposed to what it sounds like (theme of forever here), you realize that something this good can't be borne of pretension. It's their most mature album yet, and the most sonically complex, drawing on their art rock roots, mixing in funk and maybe a bit of music from frontman Tune Adebimpe's native Nigeria, especially on "Will Do," "Killer Crane," and "You." When someone accuses you of being a pretentious or whatever kind of media whore is the current terrorist of choice on the beatnik-hipster continuum, punch them in the face, because dammit, you like good music. (I can't personally vouch for your musical choices, but if you read the Ozone Shack, you get bonus points.)

4) Umphrey's McGee - Death By Stereo

This is a band that can channel Phish, Dream Theater, Dispatch, Coheed and Cambria, Yes, and The Vital Tech Tones. What's even more impressive? They channel all those in one song. Known primarily as a jam band, they avoided the traditional pitfall of live-to-studio disconnect by refining their repertoire of styles instead of resorting to mindless jam in the studio. The result is an intriguing cocktail which invites you to headbang while appreciating their musicianship. Something like this is increasingly rare and I hope more albums like it are made soon.

Bronze Medal
Portugal. The Man - In the Mountain In the Cloud

After just having missed the Ozone Shack's top ten last year, psychedelic rockers Portugal. The Man struck gold (well, actually bronze) with their cathedral of falsetto vocals and string beds. The hardest working band in showbusiness (this is their seventh album in as many years) has created an album about work, struggle, and the rediscovery of the astral body in a material world. The ethos of the album can either be summed up in the title of the last track, "Sleep Forever," or the lyric "Did you forget we were holy men?" It's an album about struggle, both physical and metaphysical. And it's about the tole that struggle can take. Or maybe it's just a fucking good album with some words that sound good in falsetto. What do I look like, a knower of things?

Silver Medal:

Iron & Wine - Kiss Each Other Clean

This is a far cry from The Creek Drank The Cradle, trading in the lone acoustic guitar for layered electronic instrumentation for an album even more Technicolor than its cover. From the haunting "Walking Far From Home," to the slick groove of "Monkeys Uptown," to the doo-wop throwback of "Half Moon," the Chimurenga-tinged "Rabbit Will Run," to the raucous and rockin "Your Fake Name is Good Enough For Me," Kiss Each Other Clean works its way through benignly psychedelic melodies and instrumentals, filled with both a reverence for the little things that make life enjoyable, while also touching on the Bigger issues of spirituality and injustice. Beautiful album. I'm a week late and running out of things to say about music, so now it's time for the...

Album of the Year:

3 - The Ghost You Gave To Me

That's right, it's the band that's a number. And while on paper they're a metal band, they draw on a wealth of genres, from funk to bluegrass, to create some of the best melodic prog being made today, for the maladjusted yet creatively inclined fringe member of society in all of us. The album is driven by frontman Joey Eppard, who plays guitar with a distinct fingerslap-style, whose distinct voiceh sounds like the kid that a rougher, more soulful version of Michael Jackson and a sexier version of Robert Plant never had, and backed up by guitarist Billy Riker, drummer Chris "Gartdrumm" Gartman, and bassist Daniel Grimsland, who all hail from the musically historic city of Woodstock, New York. (The working title of the album was Woodstock Democracy, possibly a reference to the snags that set this album's release back.) Over the heavy guitar riffs and high-intensity polyrhythms is something that a lot of metal acts seem to have forgotten: the melodic element, actual fucking songs! Throw in some fingerslap acoustic guitar work, scathing riffs and a busy drum battery and you get this opus, from a band that is deservedly breaking into the mainstream, at least of the metal world. In a side note, I met them after their show at the Key Club in Hollywood, and I'm pretty sure they all think I'm now crazy. I might as well have gone up to them and said "I'm pregnant, and all four of you are the father!" First time getting kicked out by a bouncer. I need to tune turn my fanboy dial down sometimes.

Pre-Gaming for the 2011 Albums Awards Show

There's an article floating around the internet based on a study that found that you (yes, you) are likely to stop liking a band once your friends start liking it. And this made me wonder if I'm the only person who still actually listens to the music part of music and not the cultural and commercial associations that go along with the people who make music. In other words, I fear that people no longer listen to how the music sounds, but instead listen to what it sounds like.

The albums recognized in the next three posts were selected for their merit in the first field: how they sound. They are not evaluated based on what they sound like, how significant they are, or who listens or doesn't listen to them. This is identity-free music. This... is... THE OZONE SHACK!!!

Compared to 2010, musically, 2011 can certainly be described as an improvement. Last year, albums that shouldn't have been featured were, and this year I had to leave out albums I think should be featured. We're at a weird place in music right now. We're in the doldrums of the hipster hegemony, where it's considered an asset to have a singer who sounds like an even more obnoxious version of Thom Yorke. In the last five years, hi-hop, for the most part, has ceased to be fun or bad-ass, and is sliding into the territory of bubblegum pop, although there are notable exceptions. Metal is gravitating towards the extremes of screaming and power ballads. And people seem to think that DIY means "it's ok to not know how to play your instruments, at all." And we have dubstep.

But the beat goes on and in the midst of this confusing epoch (or just a completely normal watershed era) there are still great records being made, by people who can still sing and who still use real instruments, or have figured out how to use electronic instruments to their artistic potential. This is a celebration of the really good ones.

Honorable Mentions for the Technically Inelligible


An EP is not an album. So sadly, these two don't get on the list. But if they were eligible, I would expect them to be top 11. If they were combined into a full length LP, then... well, I can't even begin to speculate.

Dispatch - Dispatch EP

They're back! They're back!!! This EP condenses most of what you loved about Dispatch into six new tracks by the newly reunited free-wheeling, genre-defying jam band. And while it sounds like they haven't skipped a beat since Who Are We Living For, this is a Dispatch that draws from its members' development as musicians during their time apart. "Broken American" might as well be off a State Radio album, and "Turn This Ship Around" echoes Re-Pete's solo effort from last year. But Dispatch is made by its synergy, and this EP couldn't be made by any other combination of three people.

Cynic - Carbon Based Anatomy

Technical Death Metal with a jazz-fusion influenced rhythm section and interspersed with ambient soundscapes? It can't be done!!! Cynic has created a sound as engaging as it is unique, combining screaming with a syncopated 16th-note bass line. Weather Report meets Opeth? Maybe... maybe.

Unrecognized Albums Worth Mentioning (And Honorably So)

(In No Particular Order)

Robbie Robertson - How to Become Clairvoyant

Explosions in the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care

Groundation - A Gathering of the Elders

Rise Against - Endgame

Dream Theater - A Dramatic Turn of Events

The Dodos - No Color

Eddie Vedder - Ukulele Songs

Within Temptation - Unforgiving

The Decemberists - The King is Dead

Mowgwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

British Sea Power - Valhalla Dance Hall

The Black Keys - El Camino
The Gourds - Old Mad Joy
Oki Dub Ainu Band - Himalaya Dub

Biggest Disappointment: Incubus - If Not Now, When?

I know this album had the impossible task of following up 2006's Light Grenades, but still, it took you five years to make this?

Albums on the Bubble

These could have made it but didn't. They at least deserve to be recognized with a blurb. They are arranged in ascending order by their ranking. (gets better as you go down)

Five O'Clock Heroes - Different Times

Maybe not as upbeat or raw as their previous efforts, but still a fun album full of good riffin'.

Cage the Elephant - Thank You, Happy Birthday

Music that makes you want to maniacally shuffle around while swinging your fists, and it doesn't matter if they hit any bystanders!

Adele - 21

Young British woman who sounds like large black woman gets heart broken, writes song, makes millions happy.

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues

Maybe it should have charted higher? I don't know. I can tell you it's a good album, but not one where they do anything new.

Cold War Kids - Mine is Yours
The thing that makes this album, and what really makes this bands sound, is really the texture that they have. Thick, mid-register piano and heavy on the toms.

Chadwick Stokes - Simmerkane II
Dispatch member and State Radio frontman makes an album loosely based on his time riding the rails around America.

My Morning Jacket - Circuital

The band's most nuanced album to date. There are some gems (Holdin On Black to Metal, Outta My System, Wonderful, and the seven minute title track) but it's a little hurt by its lack of consistency.

Matthew Good - Lights of Endangered Species

Thick horn beds and impassioned vocals about places nobody really wants to go, emotionally or geographically.

The Horrible Crowes - Elsie

Gaslight Anthem frontman Brian Fallon kicks off his side project with a slightly more soulful and less punky album than his main act. He keeps his knack for writing songs undercut with the sort of desperate love that can only come out of Jersey.

Scale the Summit - The Collective

This is the third album by the instrumental prog-metal group, which features an eight string guitar and a six string bass. They also have a song about whales. Any prog metal group that writes songs about whales is awesome in my book. And these guys are some of the best.

Social Distortion - Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes

Mike Ness continues to sing about confronting the world and failing, but on this album, he takes time to sing about being a lonely trucker and a 1930s gangster.

Tinariwen - Tassili

This band has an interesting story. The cliffnotes are that the members met while living in a refugee camp in Northern Mali, and now they're exporting their music, which sounds like ragged delta blues sung in a language related to Arabic, to the world. This is the most mellow and contemplative of their albums, not nearly as raucous as Ammoukasol or Ama Iman, and since their female vocalists do not appear on this record, the register is almost uniformly low.

Feist - Metals
Canadian singer with distinct voice makes eclectic music that your obnoxious, smelly neighbor loves, and that you secretly love deep down inside.

Miracles of Moder Science - Dog Year

Can you make a rock band with a bass, chello, violin, and mandolin? Can Princeton grads produce anything cool? This album answers all your of questions with "YES!"

Foo Fighters - Wasting Light
Dave Grohl is still alive and kicking, still possessing the algorithm for the perfect hook, and the Foo Fighters can still rock out as hard as they ever did.

Rob Crow - He Thinks He's People

An artist I didn't know about, and who, based on a gut feeling, I didn't think could produce a good album, does, and one that was considered as an outside, outside shot to make the top 11. Deceptively complex at points, good music for thinking about things of moderate amounts of importance.

Beirut - The Riptide

Three minute pop chord progressions with a Balkan horn section and drums is pretty harmless, as guilty pleasures go. The second track, "Santa Fe" may be Zach Condon's best creation to date.

Jay-Z & Kanye West - Watch the Throne

This is the most sci-fi album to ever come out of mainstream rap. "We formed a new religion / no sins as long as there's permission," on the opening track, sets the stage for an album about rebuilding the world in an ethical and spiritual void. Nietzsche would be proud.

The Strokes - Angles

In my opinion, this album is everything that This is It? should have been. Nuff said.

Paul Simon - So Beautiful or So What

Unlike most crusty old rockers, Paul Simon can still make an album that sounds new and relevant in his... advanced age. And he's still drawing inspiration from music from around the world. It's about being old, and making meaning in your life as you age, but it still has a universal appeal to a young asshole whippersnapper like myself.

Album Cover of the Year

Abigail Washburn - City of Refuge

This album also gets an honorable mention, (in the strata, it's somewhere near Watch the Throne) but it gets its own recognition for having the best artwork. Furthermore, it's a female artist's solo album, but it doesn't actually have a picture of the artist on the cover, which is incredibly refreshing. And it's complicated. The album itself is another excellent piece of work by the empress of the banjo. Rich bluegrass harmonies and a good dose of banjo pickin are interspersed with themes of searching for spirituality in a confusing and bereft world.

Drug Culture

"Is there anybody left alive
What's the point of choosing sides
When you know what the mirror hides"
-3, High Times

When you take professional sports out of the equation (because sports are important), drugs just may be the only thing holding our society together.

Some of these drugs allow us to be ourselves without having to justify being ourselves. These are what we traditionally think of as drugs, the kind of drugs that can develop into a drug problem, the kind you will go to jail for possessing, manufacturing, or selling. In a broad sense, these allow you to attribute aspects of your intrinsic nature to the drugs, while removing yourself from your own intrinsic nature. (If there is an intrinsic nature to anybody, but we could start a whole nother Ozone Shack dedicated to that debate.) These allow us to hide from ourselves and hide ourselves from others. We're not justifying the morality (or for those of us who no longer operate with a conscious moral framework- for this is a time when such mindsets have become mainstream - social expectations of right and wrong) of our actions, we are simply justifying ourselves. In some ways, drugs, alcohol included, are wonderful wonderful things. They make us more fun, they make life less depressing, they allow those who are challenged in the area of lateral thinking to conceive of things that are beyond the superficial. But increasingly so, I have observed that drugs are now the only things that people choose to make themselves fun, undepressed, and cerebral. And even more disturbingly, these are becoming the only acceptable ways to be, if not undepressed, fun and cerebral. I have had people ask me, after I post about the more minute details of robot hegemonies, "were you high when you thought of that?" or even more damningly, "how high were you when you thought of that?" the implication there being that I must have been some degree of high.

Of course, the only way that I was able to think of something offbeat or original must have been because there was enough THC in my brain to alter my neural pathways to the point where robot overlords entered the picture. But that's just what I think about. This would be like looking at an MC Escher sketch and wondering how much acid he dropped to have birds turn into fish turn into castles. MC Escher just had an imaginative mind, something that made him a little rough around the edges. And people are scared to be rough around the edges when they're sober. And we would like everyone to believe that it's not us that's causing that roughness, it's the drug.

Within my demographic, parties revolve around the around the drinking game, contests requiring varying amounts of skill, designed to speed up the process of intoxication, and since playing a game called "drink your beer," where the only rule is that every player must drink their beer on command, some of these games have become very elaborate over time, reinforcing my suspicion that all aspects of any drinking culture are simply to mask that the intent, if only superficially, is to get drunk. One of the most popular of these games is beer pong (or beirut, for all you jaw-clenching, polo-popping, Ivy League assholes). If I need to explain the game to you, you're either too young or too old to be reading this. Instead read something else.

Now I want to try an experiment. Go to a highly rural place in a heavily theocratic Islamic country, or if we could, time travel to the Roaring Twenties (so we can kill Hitler, because according to every bit of bad sci-fi it's the first thing you should ever do if you discover time travel), where alcohol plays no role in the culture, and set up a game of water pong, which is beer pong with water instead of beer, for those of you unable to make the connection (which you shouldn't try to justify by saying you're high, because I'll accept you anyway.) We teach the locals to play, and hype it up like it's the most exciting and important thing we'll ever do. In other words, we act like any male college student playing a game of beer pong. The fate of civilization is on the line!

Then once we get them hooked on water pong, we leave, but set up secret cameras in popular haunts throughout the village. We observe how long it takes them to get bored of it. I would give them a week, maybe ten days during the harvest season. Because without alcohol, this game is nothing but tossing a ball into a cup.

And without games like beer pong, parties are something where people have to actually interact with other people. And this terrifies everybody. People either have nothing to say or the things they say are too outside the box. Making friends is an elaborate dance of hiding your quirks, your rough edges, and your idiosyncrasies. But the best way to hid these things is not even to hide them at all, it is to pass them off as not being your own.

And that's why the best friends are the ones who have your same quirks, and aren't afraid to show them. And that's also why so many people have a drug for a best friend.

Everything needs to be justified. Nobody wants to show their quirks.

Steve Jobs is Alive!

Mac people everywhere, your leader is alive, albeit in a limited sort of way. And for right now, I am one of the few people who knows this.

This is not some sentimentalized eulogy about how the spirit of Steven Victor Emmanuel Garcia-Jobs IV (I don't know his middle name so I made one up) will live on, in a metaphorical sense, as long as his slick and impeccably marketed computers are used. This is not to suggest some sort of conspiracy either. Steve Jobs did not fake his own death, and he will not return in three years time at the press conference for the iMbryo so that Apple stock will once again skyrocket. His body or brain does not exist in a freezer somewhere, and his consciousness has not been uploaded to the Apple mainframe. He has not been abducted by aliens or kidnapped by Somali pirates. All of the above statements are true, to my knowledge.

The night after he died, I was rummaging around a drawer trying to find the DVD for 127 Hours. I had borrowed it because I didn't understand how they could make a full-length feature film consisting of a guy with his arm stuck in a crevice. I never got around to watching it, so I still don't know. But as I was rummaging around, one of my fingers must have pressed the button of my ipod which was sitting in the back of the drawer. It had broken a few months ago when I dropped it for the umpteenth time. The geniuses had left it for dead. The screen lit up, but instead of the error message I had been used to seeing, I instead saw the main menu.

The only plausible explanation is that the soul of Steve Jobs now dwells inside my ipod, just like that TV show where the guy's mom gets reincarnated in a car. All I can say is that he probably doesn't like what he sees in there, since almost none of the music on there was purchased off itunes. Life, and a metaphysical backup life, can be a bitch sometimes.

So I should probably post... (We All Write Wrong)

It's been a while. I have writer's block (the ultimate first world disease) and I think it's because my throat chakra is closed. My heart chakra is also closed. This means that I can't communicate and I can't love. I have been told that I need to meditate while making my hands into certain positions (called "mudras") and chant YAM and HAM for the heart and throat respectively. The rest of what I know about chakras comes from watching the animated show "Avatar, The Last Airbender," which is probably not a good way to learn about Eastern metaphysics. But since these chakras are blocked, I am physically incapable of expressing myself. The last real post was such an effort that I patted myself on the back and felt like I would never have to post again, ever. I would like to say I have been distracted by other projects, but so far all I have been putting any serious effort into is a project with the working title of "Gilgamesh, Part II," which will some day be my ticket out of this shitty Ozone Shack and into an Ozone Mansion with Ozone Butlers and a swimming pool filled with ozone. (This will soon turn into a swimming pool filled with asthma.)

A flaw of our educational system is that we no longer know how to write. When they teach you to write they are actually instilling inside you a cancer that will slowly destroy your ability to write correctly.

The way we are taught in schools makes writing a process. I was told that an essay needed five paragraphs, each with its own kind of structure. The key piece of this process was a single sentence they called the thesis, which represented just that, a single sentence, not an idea to be communicated. Of course, the essay was meant to revolve around this thesis, but we had no real idea what a thesis actually was, other than a rather long and awkward-sounding sentence that usually had to begin with "however" or "although" and ended with three enumerated reasons on why dogs were better than cats, then later in our educational careers evolving to why Andrew Jackson shouldn't have forced the Cherokee to relocate, and then how some romantic poet uses three high school English class buzzwords to prove his point.

From there you would fill out the template. Start with a vague and general sentence, and three or four increasingly specific sentences later you get to that contrived thesis. Then you have three paragraphs, each stemming from that three headed monster of a thesis, alternating between sentences that are fact and sentences that are commentary. They were sentences that were by themselves, no regard was paid to the sentences around them, and no regard was even paid to what the sentences actually sounded like. They were just sloppy regurgitations of information and formulaic ways of making connections. After a few paragraphs of this tedium your even more awkwardly restate your awkward thesis, then gradually get more general, capitulating it with a lame generalization about how this particular topic affects everything else in the world today.

And you haven't learned to do anything but hide your thoughts from yourself and from others. This teaches us that writing is a task or a formula, and not a way to communicate. It was an epiphany of sorts when I realized that writing could be more than just that kind of process, that it was actually a richly intensive form of communication.

Writing is speaking with your hands, it's speaking that's not bound by time.

And our generation does not know how to write because we have learned the technical aspects before any of the governing ideas. I can blame many reasons as to why this must be but certainly can't offer very many constructive solutions; such is the condition of a young idealist. But I do know that aspects of the problem lie in the overemphasis on standardized testing, and the belief that a bottom-up approach will somehow be able to instill a respect for and understanding of the power writing holds.

I am convinced that there are only two requirements to writing well. The more specific, technical aspects will take care of themselves. These rules are:

1. Have something to say.
2. Say it in such a way that people will want to listen.

Anything else your high school English teacher taught you was superfluous. (Note: I do not intend to offend the illustrious Mr. Dan Doyle. I was under his tutelage long after I had realized these two rules, and he taught me a great many things, the most notable of which was that the Allman Brother's Eat a Peach was not exactly about getting your five servings of fruit, unless of course by "five servings of fruit" you actually mean "five servings of pussy.")

Told You There Would Be a Prize

So as I mentioned in my last post, The Ozone Shack's first follower on Twitter would get a prize. It appears that Jane Jewett will be receiving a... FREE OZONE SHACK COFFEE MUG PROTOTYPE! That is, as soon as I figure out how to economically make a single prototype. Jane, email me your mailing address so I can get on that as soon as possible. And as for the rest of you, there may still be some incentive to subscribe to all my bullshit.