Light show

It's such a great feeling to happen across a band that blows you away. Inspired by the Sabaijai blog, here is a video by Battles. I heard about this band because the drummer used to be in Helmet, one of my favorites of alltime. I especially like the 2:50 mark or so when the guitar kicks in and the lights come on.

Economy pageant

When I was growing up, only a handful of young women participated in the Miss SNPJ Pageant. We would visit the SNPJ Recreation Center near Enon Valley, Pa., and gawk at the old photos of Miss SNPJs past. It seemed like dozens of teens signed up for the pageant back in the 1960s and 1970s. By the early 1990s, there were only about four or five contestants per year.

This week, I opened my issue of the newsletter Prosveta to discover nearly a dozen contestants signed up for this year's pageant. I have a theory that perhaps the surge in interest is due to the economy. Here's why: several Miss SNPJ contestants will receive generous scholarships for college.

And perhaps this was the case back in the 1960s and 1970s, too. The success of the market in the 1980s and 1990s may have kept participation low. What's more shocking is that membership in fraternal insurance societies like SNPJ (which stands for Slovene National Benefit Society, in Slovenian) is generally down. Yet the pageant is soaring.

I'm not an economist, nor do I play one on the radio, but I thought I'd share one of the odd theories I come up with from time to time.