“We hold these truths to be self evident,” that the USA wasn’t born on July 4, 1776. The seeds were sown, though.

Earlier this year, I posted a list of the Top 100 songs from Music Tampa Bay for 2016: Converting the image list to text and linking to various locales where you could actually listen to the songs (side note: I’ll still take link and genre submissions for some of theRead More

Let me start with a link to an old article on Raw Charge by one Mister John J. Fonts Esq. (me, it’s a pseudonym ): Suffering Mike Milnury and the NHL on NBC. It’s an issue that doesn’t get highlighted enough during hte regular season. That, or a base groupRead More

I believe it was exactly 20 years ago today that I graduated from East Lake High School at a ceremony at Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater, Florida.  It’ll be this weekend that a few dozen of the 600+ members of the graduating class get back together for a little shindig.Read More

I like Reddit. I’ve already posted here about Reddit and promoting content on Reddit. I also know Reddit doesn’t work for everyone, especially at the community-level where commentary can get volatile and discussion stunted by way of sarcasm and reactionary responses. I want to speak of ill I’ve encountered, butRead More

If you’re a musician in the Tampa Bay area – a recording artists with your own records to show for it – you may want to take a look at WURK Radio’s web site and their submission process. WURK went on the air in May 2017 in the Tampa areaRead More

A couple of months ago, I had written a post here complaining about how “-gate” was an overused scandal term. “Russiagate” just ties Donald Trump to Richard Nixon, while the two presidencies were mired by dissimilar corruption. Here’s the alternative to -gate that is appropriate here: сговор. It’s the Russian word forRead More

In my time as managing editor and lead writer at Raw Charge, I got pushed onto a load of public relation emailing lists with only a fraction of them being relevant.  Though my contributions to Raw Charge are now vastly dialed back, I still get all the PR emails fromRead More

I hate posting this. I do. It’s just that a flaw in a featured piece about the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album anniversary over at Creative Loafing Tampa has an outright flaw quite early in the piece: Sing it with me, children, all together now … “It was 50Read More

Ah, yes, here we are… Memorial Day Weekend 2017. While I could cue Dancing in the Street or Summer in the City or many others from a very broad girth of other pop and rock classics, let me share with you a (mostly) instrumental number by Gypsy Star that you’ve likelyRead More

(Written with remorse and in memoriam. Rest in peace, Sir Roger Moore) At Loss to Moore More today is sad to see Somber sorrows and infamy Less renown is our grief Nostalgic remorse from years gone by More today is gone tomorrow To the halls of memory and accolades SpiedRead More

You ever encounter something in music that you initially appreciate and hold in high regard but it doesn’t stand? Time passes, you engage yourself in the ditty and it starts showing flaws that start standing out? It’s this realization that both worries you (“Am I a critic now?”) and makesRead More

Hush Yer Mouth  Better hush yer mouth now baby if yer talkin’ to me How the hell you end up some place ain’t supposed to be You’re pretending it’s your first time but I’ve seen you before I’m pretending I don’t like it but I come back for more YouRead More

Are you a fan of an indie band that’s actually got stuff out on the market? I don’t mean tracks-for-purchase on Bandcamp, I mean the major players – iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, CD Baby and the like. Is that small time band you like out there? Have you actually purchasedRead More

Grease Fire by Pretty Voices She’s a self-confessed killer of innocent house plants Wearin’ business suits and librarian glasses Hair piled high and a witty reply Askin’ pointed questions has gotten my attention…. My Love’s a grease fire Baby It’s getting hotter My love’s a grease fire baby Don’t bringRead More

Forget the politics for a second. Forget the anti-NAFTA scree coming from the White House. Go to sports, go to the National Hockey League and the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoff which are in their second round. This evening, the Edmonton Oilers host the Anaheim Ducks in game 3 of theRead More

I’ve come to a conclusion: The waitress practicing politics while the businessmen slowly get stoned would be a more politically affluent and effective President of the United States than Donald J. Trump. Your move, Billy Joel. — John Fontana, April 30, 2017  

I happened on this, “Be My Friend” by Tomas Fornstedt, by chance while tuned in on Lonely Oak Radio. Give it a listen, what do you think?

You ever come across something totally foreign to you and yet you distinguish it? You know of things even if you have never physically interacted with them? I’m not talking about watching commercials for amusement parks or other famous locales and then going to them.  I mean something more personalRead More

If you haven’t heard, Bruce Springsteen has partnered with an old chum and his group to protest President Donald J. Trump by way of a song. If you haven’t noticed, protests are becoming a mainstay and for the entertainment industry to show issue with Trump was to be expected. There’s aRead More

Earworms are common in life. They happen – a song pops up at random or a snippet of something musical that you’ve heard, be it a professional song, a TV theme, a commercial, or something else. It happens. I’ve been haunted in the past by a piano riff to aRead More

Some movies end with what you see as a clean ending. Some movies end with aspects of the story still open for speculation when you care about the characters involved. I usually end up thinking of 1993’s The Fugitive and wondering what happens next with Dr. Richard Kimble and DeputyRead More

Indie music is…well, independent to the point it adds additional responsibilities to the artist to expose their tunes to the masses. Sometimes that comes with ease. Sometimes that’s an afterthought. I cited the other day when talking about Gypsy Star, keeps a competitive Top-40 list (which listeners and web visitorsRead More

I was not a fan of the last Republican president, George Walker Bush. There are plenty of posts in the history of this web site that show it. Partisanship and ideology were the key areas that divided me from the president known as Dubya. Partisanship seems to be the basisRead More

I was on the Music Tampa Bay website yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, it’s an indie rock/music station in the Tampa Bay metro area (96.7 FM). I’ve interacted with the site before as I helped get the Pretty Voices on air on the station. One key elementRead More

Insecure, narcissist and self indulgent. These words are commonly thrown toward current United States President Donald J. Trump (as they should be). Yet what’s inspiring these words at the moment is reflecting on a city; one town in a grander regional area that wants to be on top. It’s aRead More

A month ago, a little further back perhaps, I saw a post on Reddit pointing to a new web site that vowed it would predict the movie you were thinking of in 30 questions or so. Filmillion piqued my curiosity, so I gave it a whirl (more than once) andRead More

A disappointing season in sports – both professional and amateur — is just that, a disappointment, a downer. Things don’t go as planned and the results are lesser than you (as a fan) wish. It’s something that you can’t hold against a high school or college team while the proRead More

It’s easy to come to a dead end when you’re trying to find more music of a certain sound, temp, or variety. I’ve posted requests for song suggestions before as proof of that. Suggestions can lead to other people’s tastes from a wide variety of performers, but that doesn’t necessarilyRead More

I’ve got a couple of short stories that were originally intended as submissions to print media in attempts of becoming a published author. Yet finding that print media and not playing the waiting game / not suffering repeated rejections kept me from actually doing it. Instead of anything happening to theseRead More

It’s arguable to write that the greatest song the Beatles ever recorded and didn’t release as a single was “You’re Going to Lose That Girl”, which was released in 1965 on the album “Help!”. It’s a standard Lennon/McCartney scribed ode that has ties to “She Loves You” as if itRead More

There’s another scandal – a long living one at that – taking placing Washington D.C. at the moment. While ties between Russia and the Donald J. Trump campaign/presidency are bubbling to the surface (with the what, why and how never to be clear if the mess continues as-is), the albatrossRead More

There’s one thing that tops every little caveat you can find ion someone’s profile on a dating site. Communications can top all, though it won’t lead to dating or a romantic relationship in some cases (all those caveats do play in to things that way), but it can be aRead More

From the Tampa Bay area indie rock group the Prety Voices, “Haircut” is off of their 2016 album Jangular: Haircut Goin’ out to see a band, by the stage is where I’ll standYou look good standin’ next to me in a white t-shirt and blue jeansA pretty face and crooked frame,Read More

I’ve been going through older poems that don’t appear on the site, I’ve been going through a collection of my works over the decades . Things I wrote as poetry sure sound like songs (or at least look like them, and I can imagine melody to go along with them).Read More

Thoughts that are tied to Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue from the 2017 Academy Awards.

I posted over on Raw Charge last night in the wake of goalie Ben BIshop’s trade from the Tampa Bay Lightning to the Los Angeles Kings. Click over to read.

When you’re president of the United States of America, you’re exposed to loads of data.  Most presidents are exposed to private data that the public never knows (intelligence briefings, security stuff). And the world roasts and laughs at stuff known as “fake news” – satire, humor – that comes outRead More

I’m choked up upon reflection this afternoon. I just had physical therapy formally end. Therapy that was assigned to me after the shit hit the fan in December 2016. It’s also exactly one week after I met the surgeon who saved my life on Dec. 6th, my opportunity to expressRead More

When I was on Plenty of Fish in 2016, I “Upgraded” my account. That upgrade was just affording me a little more access to the site with profiles and this-and-that. Between the lack of responses to social attempts and other judgments against POF, I cancelled my account in early fall.Read More

Read my full column/blog post HERE.

The Gasparilla season in Tampa, Florida is forthcoming. That’s weeks (if not a month) of civic events around Tampa tied to the grandiose kick-off celebration event: the invasion flotilla of locals, politicians and civic leaders and the “invasion” of Tampa, with the city being claimed by the pirates to officiallyRead More

As a young teen, I was pretty fixated on Aerosmith’s 1993 album release “Get a Grip” and the hits that came from it. It was such a mix of Hard Rock and Pop, along with a mix of Steven Tyler’s attitude (which was most shown off during video performances –Read More

In the late 1990’s I was a poet and lyricist first and foremost. You can find some of the poetry I wrote and have written over the years on the site (click the writing tab above and move down to the poetry selection). That’s not the point though. One poemRead More

There’s another aspect to talk about regarding life and where things for me stand at three weeks after I had an emergency brain operation which I talked about last week. What I focused on squarely during that write-up was post-op and the world I was involved in as I triedRead More