Those who have been visiting my website(s) since way way back in the day may recall that from about 1995 until I shutdown the main index page of the site a year or so ago, all of the articles and pages had dark brown text on a green background. For short stuff, that worked fine, but I realized at some point that as I was posting longer articles here, I was frying the retinas of my readers: you would pore through, say, The Worst Rock Band Ever page for 20 minutes, and then when you looked up from the screen, the entire world would be pink as your rods and cones tried to adjust from staring at the green-ness for so long.

Now that there are a manageable number of public pages on this website (basically everything in the sidebar to the left, and that’s it), I finally went through them all and removed the remaining vestiges of green. Everything is now in crisp, clear black and white, in nice, large, easy to read Verdana font. At least I think it is. If you find any green, or broken links, or weirdly formatted pages, let me know.

I also appear to have been re-indexed by Google, so the changes I made to the .htaccess file seem to have done the trick. I still get hit by an amazing array of amazingly repugnant sites, but at least most of them are getting “403 Forbidden” or “404 Error” messages when they try to link to me. Not like they care, I guess, since they aren’t really linking to me, they’re just trying to fill up my referal log. Still . . . it makes me feel better to tell them “No!”

I have adjusted the frontpage of this site to keep seven blog posts up in real time. I am not yet going to re-open the archive files, since they seemed to be the things that were sucking in the most referrer bots. If you want something that used to be here and isn’t linked at left, I still have it all. Just let me know.

One Final HSR Post

I name-dropped the entire band except one person in my prior posts: bassist Chris MacLachlan, who left somewhere in the transition from Human Sexual Response to Zulus. (He doesn’t play on Down on the Floor, but he has songwriting credits on about half of the songs, so I assume he was still around in their early days). He deserves a shout out too, though, since so many of the HSR songs are completely anchored by bass lines: guitarist Rich Gilbert added splashes of color and washes of sound on top of things, but many of the band’s most memorable instrumental melodies were often delivered by the low four-string guitar. So hats off to him too for his impressive work on those two great HSR records.