Opeth has managed to successfully create a real work of art on Watershed. The death metal band from Sweden took the anticipation of their album to heart and went to the lab to produce something far better than I think anyone could’ve anticipated.

The melodies, the patience and stoicism of every track makes progressive death metal my favourite niche genre. Opeth flawlessly produces a bounty of diverse sounds.

Best tracks include Coil, Burden and Heir Apparent.

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It always trips me out when friends of mine go off to do great things. Not because I’m particularly surprised by it, because I knew they were awesome. It’s just a neat thing when you move on to other things and then have people doing things that make you smile.

Recently, a few of my friends from college have been doing all sorts of interesting things. Well they might have always been doing them. But it’s especially fun in recent times when I load up my RSS feeder and read what Dan is writing about or that Kate is headed to Olympic trials or that Wyatt is writing computer books.

That’s just a few of them and this sort of thing has been happening for years. But…it still never gets old.

Ok, so here’s what happens when you make a song that your label probably doesn’t expect to “blow up” like it does, so they let you film a video on a shoestring budget that isn’t close to being what the song is about.

Take one Noel Gourdin. He made this song called The River. Steve Harvey played it on his radio show apparently and was such a big fan that it’s motivated stations that never played to pick it up. So I guess maybe label does know best? They probably didn’t think the song would get very far.

Hence that video.

Well, here’s how Noel Gourdin explains the song though (on his YouTube page, in marketing copy)

That’s apparent on the richly moving “The River.” Produced by Kay Gee, “The River” conjures up vivid images of family, faith, tradition and the journey towards becoming your own man. “We wanted to make a modern-day Negro spiritual,” concludes Noel, of the song’s inspiration. “Both my grandparents lived in Mississippi about 3 hours from Biloxi and I spent every summer with them, so I really soaked up that atmosphere and history. My grandfather had just died and I was really thinking about him, and in the Deep South the river represents something spiritual. The song means a lot because it’s so close to home.”

Ok, that’s cool dude. Really cool. So why did you let them talk you into making a video that has NOTHING to do with that? I know, I know. Rookie mistake. You’ll do better. First step? Re-shoot that video, before they start showing it on TV.

It’s been a ROUGH decade being a fan to Canada’s only remaining major league team. Despite back-to-back World Series titles in 1992 and 1993, it’s been the worst period in the franchise’s history since the late 1990s and into the 2000s. Our general manager J.P. Riccardi isn’t smart, doesn’t seem to have a clue of what he’s doing and despite spending more money, we’re getting pummeled in the division by lightweights such as Baltimore and even Tampa (who are impressive, don’t get me wrong.)

In any case, much to my moribund surprise, I read that the team fired John Gibbons (who I never liked) and FINALLY brought back Cito Gaston, the manager of our two World Series winning and four AL East pennant winning teams.

I’m not of the opinion that managers really make a huge difference in baseball. But you know what? Given that NO ONE has been able to do much of anything since he left, I feel like the guy has earned another shot to give it a go. If we can’t get rid of our sorry sack of a GM, then I’m down for this move. I’m so thrilled about this, it makes me feel like my team has FINALLY gotten out of its malaise and is ready to right the ship!

I started playing text simulations close to a decade ago. For a kid who grew up playing Sim City and Front Page Sports Baseball, text sims were a way to finally capture the essence of an entire sports universe that completely belongs to you and your imagination.

So when I ran into the Out of the Park (OOTP) Baseball series years ago, after graduating from playing Baseball Mogul for years, I was ecstatic.

OOTP is the most realistic baseball simulation in the world. It’s powerful, comprised of stats and has can be connected to databases that allow you to simulate pretty much any baseball scenario you can dream of from the past to present. It has a financial engine and a stat engine beyond comparison, too.

OOTP 9 was released this week. The trick to these games is that they’re not like run of the mill PS3 or high-quality video games where you SEE the action on your screen. Nope. Instead, you see the action in the form of a web cast or play-by-play screen that texts the action to you. This year’s version has sound, so you can hear and see ball animations. But I don’t generally care for that stuff, as I prefer to simulate through seasons fast.

I was a beta tester on the game this year, so I’ve seen it from its early stages to its launch and this is the most stable release of the game ever released and the most comprehensive. While there are things that I wish were added over others, it’s still hands down the most complete version of the game — without patches — ever and it’ll just get better as it’s patched down the road.

Want the major leagues to have 50 teams? You can do it. Wanna control your favorite team and do better than the GM using real life players? Sure, go ahead. Pretty much any conceivable thing you can come up with in a baseball simulation, you can do now with text sims. It’s the sort of thing that if you’re not careful, you can get completely immersed in for hours and days and longer. There are also online leagues you can play in, to compete with other real people from around the world. That adds a whole new dimension to the game and there are virtually limitless games you can create, so you can play with a major league and create a fantasy league or something else.

The question people ask a lot is “is it fantasy baseball?” Not in the sense that it’s tied to what’s really happening on the field. The game is a simulator. It will simulate the results based on the way the team’s are setup, etc., but you don’t HAVE to use real life players. You can go with invented players whom don’t exist, but over time you get invested in after watching the team year after year. These games are the perfect solution to fans whose real life team have them bored to tears or who they never get to see.

These games are often made by small teams often comprised of one or just a few developers. They don’t sell more than a few thousand copies, yet, they’re wildly popular among this small niche base of fans and are comprised of several intertwined communities with their own histories and interesting cultures.

There are a bunch on the market including the most popular game in the world — Football Manager — a game released by Sports Interactive and Sega, that allows you to simulate the world of professional soccer. The game has a massive following in Europe and around the world — even here in the U.S. The most realistic football sim on the market is called Front Office Football.

OOTP 9 is the most advanced baseball sim out there right now and is worth checking out. It might be a bit of a learning curve to the casual gamer to text sims, yet, if you like baseball…there isn’t a game that can give you more than you’d bargained for than this one.

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I don’t do well with all of these so-called soul singers who are young and British. I mean, they’re not bad. It’s just that they’re not particularly earthshattering and yet, the pop media goes all ga-ga for them as if they’re the next best thing, like they’re all inventive and different.

Adele is cut from the same cloth as the Joss Stone, Amy Winehouse and Duffy crowd. She’s a little different than each of the aforementioned artists, in that, she’s intentionally low-fi in her presentation and her arrangements are almost entirely designed to focus on her voice and little else. You can appreciate that, because the orchestrations aren’t exactly imaginative and don’t really give you a whole lot to work with.

Best For Last is probably the best song on the album. The single, Chasing Pavements isn’t bad, but a strange song to feature as a single. It’s doing well for her, though. The song titles are ‘there’ if you will, she’s got the right concept. But the criticism of young singers — especially female — is that they haven’t experienced enough to write songs that resonate with people under 25 yet. But I’m not even sure that’s the criticism that works in this case. The songs are introspective enough, it’s just the wrong combination of writing, music and singing that make them fall relatively flat.

Not terrible, but Adele and her debut LP “19″ aren’t the tour de force it’s been made out to be.

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