When you think about guitar heroes, Ritchie Blackmore is certainly up there with Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi and many others. Born in 1945, the British musician helped to form Deep Purple in the late 60s, was a crucial part of their sound and then managed to also make his own band, Rainbow, one of the most influential Hard Rock groups of all time. But like Keith Richards, for example, Blackmore is also known for being a really sincere person. He never was afraid to tell his real opinion on other artists. In an interview with Cameron Crowe, who would in the future be a famous director, for Creem magazine in 1975, he  mentioned two artists he really didn't like at the time. The 2 musicians that Ritchie Blackmore criticized in the early 70s In 1975, Blackmore already was an accomplished musician and had sold millions of records worldwide with Deep Purple. He had just formed Rainbow and it would be the start of really successful years with his group. He was asked by Crowe about the state of Rock and Roll music during the last years and he said that names like Hendrix gave him faith but then criticized more recent acts (at the time) like David Bowie and Alice Cooper. "Anyway, he (Hendrix) gave me the faith. I had thought that people just didn’t want to hear good guitar solos anymore. I thought they wanted to hear harmony singers like – at the time -the Hollies, and the Beatles, and they were great, but musically nothing." Ritchie Blackmore continued: "I’m afraid at the moment, with David Bowie and Alice Cooper and people like that, the scene has dampened again. So it’s slipping back. There’s nothing happening musically with people like David Bowie and Alice Cooper, but some people seem to think they’re the new messiahs so, I guess that’s the way it is," Ritchie Blackmore said. The guitarist wasn't such a big fan of the theatrical side of many artists during their live performances. But as pointed out by Udiscover Music, Blackmore once said Jethro Tull used that wisely but that other artists used some kind of "tomfoolery". “I like theatrics to a point, especially Jethro Tull. He (Ian Anderson ) uses theatrics very nicely, he’s very musical, and he uses a touch of theatrics, which I think is very good. I’m not too sure about the Alice Coopers and the Rolling Stones, the way they have to use them. I don’t think they would maintain an audience if they didn’t get up to some tomfoolery, as we say back in England," Ritchie Blackmore said. When Blackmore said that, Alice Cooper was just starting his solo career, releasing the album "Welcome To My Nightmare". Bowie on the other hand, would release his praised album "Young Americans". Blackmore didn't allow Glenn Hughes to record with David Bowie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydLcs4VrjZQ&pp=ygUPeW91bmcgYW1lcmljYW5z When Blackmore left Deep Purple, the band had Glenn Hughes as the co-singer and bassist. Bowie watched the band performing at the California Jam festival in 1974 and decided to invite Hughes to sing on the album "Young Americans". But as the bass player recalled in an interview with Classic Rock in 2021, Blackmore blocked the contribution. "I was in LA and I got a call from David Bowie’s personal assistant Corinne. She said Bowie had been watching footage on TV of Purple playing the California Jam and he’d been impressed by my performance. So I met up with him and we sat up talking all night. At the time, he was into his blue-eyed soul thing. We shared a mutual love of Luther Vandross! Later Bowie asked me to sing on his Young Americans album. Unfortunately Ritchie Blackmore was vehemently against it. He thought it would be bad for Purple’s image. I was a bit pissed off about that," Glenn Hughes said. Although the collaboration didn't happen on that album, Hughes and Bowie remained good friends and he even lived in the bass players' house in Beverly Hills while writing "Station To Station" (1976). "I stayed friends with Bowie. We were both into blow, only Bowie’s paranoia on cocaine was far greater than mine. And I thought I was pretty crazy! Bowie was very intelligent but he suffered bizarre mood swings when he was high. Our relationship was very intense in 1975 and ’76." He continued: "He lived at my house in Beverly Hills for a time. I was loaded on coke, so was Bowie, the champagne flowed… it was a great period. I’ve never smoked a lot of pot, so my memories of those times are pretty vivid," Glenn Hughes said. Curiously, according to Hughes, it was Bowie who helped Deep Purple to continue after Blackmore left the band. They were living together at the time and Bowie told Hughes that they should continue, get another guitar, who shouldn't look or sound like Blackmore. It was actually Bowie who took Hughes to Tommy Bolin's audition. So Bowie liked Purple's music and there is another curious story that shows that. The King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp collaborated with the late artist on the albums "Heroes" (1977) and "Scary Monsters" (1980). As Fripp told Uncut magazine in 2020, Bowie once told him to "think Ritchie Blackmore" during the recording sessions. "It was on the 'Scary Monsters' session. The sessions began around midnight and I think it was “Up The Hill Backwards”. I said to David, 'Any suggestions?' David said, 'Think Ritchie Blackmore.' I knew exactly what David meant. So my playing was nothing like Ritchie Blackmore, but I knew what David meant – that was a direct piece of advice," Robert Fripp said.The post The 2 musicians that Ritchie Blackmore criticized in the early 70s appeared first on Rock And Roll Garage.

As the old saying goes, "baseball is America's pastime." It was so important that during the second World War, Major League Baseball executives created all women's baseball teams since most of the young men were away fighting. The blockbuster hit movie, "A League of Their Own" details this era that not only provided fans with entertainment but proved women could be fierce competitive baseball players. One South Mississippi family found themselves in the middle of a battle they didn't anticipate when it came to the game. Their daughter Jewel has been playing baseball since she was 5-years-old on city recreational teams, eventually making All Stars and travel baseball. With the 7th grader aging out of the recreational program, she wanted to join the middle school team. That's where the problem came in. The girl's mom, Shannon van Duijvendijk says the Ocean Springs School District refused her a tryout for the baseball team. This is the same school district that has had girls step out of their football cleats to put on a homecoming crown after kicking for the high school team. So the decision seemed a bit confusing for the community who chimed in to support the parents petitioning for Jewel to play on the middle school team.Jewel is one of two girls planning to try out for the baseball team that many of their male teammates are competing for. But it was van Duijvendijk's husband who was determined to make sure his daughter got to play a the game that she loves."It was actually my husband. That sense of injustice rose up in him and he was just like 'no, uh uh.'"The initial call came from the school's athletic director who told them that it was a state rule that girls couldn't play on the baseball team because softball was considered an equivalent. That's when Mr. van Duijvendijk started contacting every person he could find in Jackson to help get his daughter a tryout. But the quest to speak with someone on the state level proved to be futile. After finding out the school's grievance policy, the determined dad emailed the superintendent who was extremely responsive according to van Duijvendijk. The mom tells Upworthy that the superintendent contacted people at the state level, eventually reporting back that Mississippi's High School Athletic Association (MSHAA) rule was unclear.The rule from section 7.6.2 of the MSHAA Handbook reads in part, "When a state championship is offered for girls, they may not play on a boys’ team in that sport.” As van Duijvendijk points out in her post, baseball and softball are two different sports and that ruling was made official by the NCAA in 2009. So a girls softball team would not be equivalent to a boys baseball team, according to the NCAA rules, the equivalent to baseball is baseball. van Duijvendijk explains that the family got the most pushback from parents of softball players, which it is suspected the original complaint about girls trying out for baseball originated. There was confusion over why a girl would prefer to play baseball over softball and speculation on if the parents felt that baseball was superior.But there was no feeling of one sport being superior over the other. In fact, in van Duijvendijk's social media post she writes, "I know a lot of people don’t understand why she chose to play baseball instead of softball, I didn’t for a while either. In the beginning I tried to convince her so many times to make the switch."Jewel was so steadfast in her determination to play the sport van Duijvendijk says could see it in her eyes. That changed everything for the mom when it came to her support of Jewel's love of the sport. Right now, softball isn't even a practical switch. "She has never played softball and doesn’t even own the equipment necessary to play the game. We have nothing against softball and we have so much love and respect for the girls that do play it, but that is not the sport she plays."Thanks to the determination of a dad who saw his daughter encounter an injustice, a mom who would do anything to support her and a superintendent that was intent on hunting someone down to clear up the rules–Jewel gets to tryout. Now that's what you call teamwork. As for Jewel, she's been playing with the boys since she was old enough to pick up a ball, she just wanted a chance to show them what she can do.

As a soccer match between German teams Preussen Munster and Würzburger Kickers went into its final minutes, a defender from the Kickers, 23-year-old Leroy Kwadwo, stopped to point out a problem in the stands.A Munster fan was making monkey noises at Kwadwo, a black player of Ghanaian descent. It was a clearly racist heckling—an issue that has publicly plagued the international sport in various venues, even as recently as last week. But this time, the response from the crowd far outshined the racist in the stands.First, the man was quickly identified by his fellow Munster fans and ejected from the game. While stewards escorted him from the stadium, the crowd chanted, "Nazis out! Nazis out!"Some fans also stood and applauded Kwadwo and the player received supportive pats on the back from opposing team members as well. \u201cChills.\n\nIn Germany, a fan hurled racist slurs towards Leroy Kwadwo, a Ghanian football player.\n\nWhen other fans saw it, they alerted security, who escorted the man out.\n\nThen, as opposing players came to hug Kwadwo, the entire stadium stood up and chanted "Nazis Out!"\u201d — Muhammad Lila (@Muhammad Lila) 1581795227 This is how it's done, folks.Kwadwo thanked fans via social media the next day for their "exemplary" reaction, the Associated Press reported:"I was racially abused by one single spectator. It just makes me sad. I indeed have a different skin color, but I was born here in this wonderful land that has given my family and I so much and made so much possible. I am one of you. I live here and can live my calling as a professional with the Würzburger Kickers.Something like yesterday just makes me sad and angry because everyone has to know, racism does not belong in OUR world. We all have the opportunity to oppose it and stop it if it happens."Munster said it would seek to ban the racist fan from all German stadiums for three years, which is the toughest sanction the sport itself can implement. However, the man also faces legal consequences and is being charged with incitement."As repulsive as the monkey noises against the player were, the subsequent response from the rest of the spectators were so impressive," the Preussen team said in a statement.According to CNN, Preussen Munster president Christoph Strasser said of the heckling: "It is not something that belongs on the soccer field and certainly not in our stadium. We don't want and need people like that here. We clearly distance ourselves from such statements and I apologized to the Würzburgers immediately after the game."If we have to live with nasty racists in our midst, it's at least encouraging to see a huge crowd reject it with such immediacy and fervor. Nazis out, indeed.This article originally appeared on 3.1.23

Years ago, a friend went to a party, and something bothered him enough to rant to me about it later.And it bothered me that he was so incensed about it, but I couldn't put my finger on why. It seemed so petty for him to be upset, and even more so for me to be annoyed with him.Recently, something reminded me of that scenario, and it made more sense. I'll explain.The party was a house party.One of those parties people throw if they're renting a good-sized house in college. You know the type — loud music, Solo cups of beer, and somebody doing something drunk and stupid before the end of the night.At some point, my friend had occasion to use the bathroom. When he went into the bathroom, he was disgusted to see that the hostess had left a basket of menstrual hygiene products on the counter for guests to use if needed.Later, when my friend told me about it, he wrinkled his nose and said, “Why would she do that? Guys don't want to see that!"When I suggested that she was just making them available in case someone needed them, he insisted they could be left in the cabinet or under the counter. Out of sight, anyway.I wish I'd had, at the time, the ability to articulate what I can now.To me, this situation is, while relatively benign, a perfect example of male privilege.A man walks into the bathroom and sees a reminder that people have periods. And he's disgusted. He wants that evidence hidden away because it offends his senses. How dare the hostess so blatantly present tampons and pads where a man might see them? There's no reason for that!Someone who gets a period walks into the bathroom and sees that the hostess is being extra considerate. They get it. They know what it's like to have a period start unexpectedly. The feeling of horror because they're probably wearing something they don't want ruined — it is a party after all. The sick embarrassment because someone might notice, especially if they're wearing light-colored clothes, or worse, they sat on the hostess' white couch.The self-conscious, semi-nauseated feeling of trying to get through a social event after you've exhausted every avenue to get your hands on an emergency pad or tampon, and you're just hoping to God that if you tie your jacket around your waist (you brought one, right?), keep your back to a wall, clench your butt cheeks, squeeze your thighs tightly together, and don't ... move ... at ... all — you might get through the evening, bow out gracefully, and find an all-night convenience store with a public restroom.Or maybe they came to the party during their period, but didn't bargain for the flow to suddenly get that heavy. Or they desperately need a tampon, but their purse or bag is in a room where a couple is not to be disturbed. Maybe they don't know the hostess well enough to ask if they can use one. Or they don't know anyone at the party well enough to ask. Or they figure they can make do with some wadded up toilet paper or something.Whatever the case, they walk into the bathroom and hear the hostess saying, “Hey, I know what it's like, and just in case, I've got your back." They see someone saving them from what could be a minor annoyance or a major embarrassment.The hostess gets it.The person who just walked into the bathroom? They're either going to see that the person throwing the party is super considerate or they're going to be whispering "thanks to Jesus, Krishna, and whoever else is listening" because that is a basket full of social saviors.But to the guy who wrinkled his nose, it's still offensive that those terrible little things are on the counter, reminding his delicate sensibilities that the playground part of a person is occasionally unavailable due to a "gross" bodily function that he should never have to think about.In the grand scheme of things, it's a tiny thing. It's a tiny annoyance for the man and a more significant, but relatively tiny, courtesy for the person with their period. After all these years, my friend has probably forgotten, but I never have. As a person whose life is partially governed by a fickle uterus that can ruin an evening faster than a submerged iPhone, his story has stuck with me.How can you be so offended by a small gesture that has zero effect on you, but could make such an enormous difference to the person who needs it?It occurs to me now that this is a small but effective illustration of how different people can see the world.It's part of the same thought process that measures a woman's value through her bra size and her willingness to have sex with him — that everything about us is displayed or hidden based on how men perceive them or what he wants to get from us. Unattractive women should be as covered as possible, while attractive ones shouldn't be hiding their assets from male eyes (or hands, or anything else he wishes to use).A woman who isn't smiling is an affront to him because it detracts from her prettiness, despite the fact that there might be a legitimate reason for her not to smile (or more to the point, there isn't a legitimate reason for her to smile). Her emotional state is irrelevant because she's not being pretty. It's the line of thinking where a man blames anything other than cheerful sexual consent on the woman being a bitch, being a lesbian, or — naturally — being on her period. Everything we do, from our facial expressions to our use of hygiene products, is filtered through the lens of “how it looks to a man.”It's the line of thinking where a small gesture from one person to another, an assurance that someone else understands and will help without question or judgment, a gesture that could save a person's evening from being ruined is trumped by a man's desire to see an untainted landscape of pretty, smiling women with visible cleavage and bodies that never bleed.And people wonder why we still need feminism.This story was written by L.A. Witt and originally appeared on 8.12.16

I'm pretty positive that Edgar Allan Poe had (has?) the power to travel through time. Hear me out on this one.It's not just the well-known circumstances of his life — orphaned at a young age, father of the mystery novel, master of cryptology, maestro of the macabre. Nor am I referring to the head-scratching details of the days leading up to his death: how he was found on the street near a voting poll wearing someone else's clothes, and during his subsequent hospitalization, he was alleged to babble incoherently about an unidentified person named “Reynolds."And I won't even get into the confounding reports of a nameless figure who, for seven decades, would show up to Poe's gravesite in the early hours of his birthday with a glass of cognac and three roses.Tragic and curious, yes, but hardly evidence that the acclaimed horror writer could transcend the limits of space and time. No, my time travel theory concerns the author's creative output, which you'll soon see is so flukishly prophetic as to make my outlandish claim seem plausible — nay, probable!The proof is in the pudding, and the pudding is a loosely linked map of flesh-eating floaters, crunched skull survivors, and primordial particles. OK, here we go…Exhibit A: "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket"Published in 1838, Poe's only completed novel details a mutiny on a whaling ship lost at sea. Out of supplies, the men revert to cannibalism, drawing straws to elect a sacrifice. A boy named Richard Parker draws the shortest straw and is subsequently eaten.Now here's where it gets weird(er): In 1884, 46 years after the novel's publication, four men would be set adrift following the sinking of their yacht. Shipwrecked and without food, they too would go the survival cannibalism route, electing to kill and eat a 17-year-old cabin boy. The boy's name: Richard Parker.The extraordinary parallel went unnoticed for nearly a century, until a widely-circulated letter from a descendant of the real Parker outlined the similarities between the novel's scene and the actual event. The letter was selected for publication in The Sunday Times after journalist Arthur Koestler put out a call for tales of “striking coincidence." Striking indeed.Exhibit B: "The Businessman"In 1848, a railroad worker named Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury after taking an iron spike through the skull. Somehow he survived, though his personality would change drastically. These behavioral changes were closely studied, allowing the medical community to develop the first understanding of the role played by the frontal lobe on social cognition.Except for Poe, who'd inexplicably understood the profound personality changes caused by frontal lobe syndrome nearly a decade earlier. In 1840, he penned a characteristically gruesome story called “The Businessman" about an unnamed narrator who suffers a traumatic head injury as a young boy, leading to a life of obsessive regularity and violent, sociopathic outbursts.Poe's grasp of frontal lobe syndrome is so precise that neurologist Eric Altshuler wrote, “There's a dozen symptoms and he knows every single one… There's everything in that story, we've hardly learned anything more." Altshuler, who, to reiterate, is a medically-licensed neurologist and not at all a crackpot, went on to say, “It's so exact that it's just weird, it's like he had a time machine."Exhibit C: "Eureka"Still unconvinced? What if I told you that Poe predicted the origins of the universe 80 years before modern science would begin to formulate the Big Bang theory? Surely, an amateur stargazer with no formal training in cosmology could not accurately describe the machinery of the universe, rejecting widely-held inaccuracies while solving a theoretical paradox that had bewildered astronomers since Kepler. Except that's exactly what happened.The prophetic vision came in the form of "Eureka," a 150-page prose poem critically panned for its complexity and regarded by many as the work of a madman. Written in the final year of Poe's life, "Eureka" describes an expanding universe that began in “one instantaneous flash" derived from a single “primordial particle."Poe goes on to put forth the first legitimate solution to Olbers' paradox — the question of why, given the vast number of stars in the universe, the night sky is dark — by explaining that light from the expanding universe had not yet reached our solar system. When Edward Robert Harrison published "Darkness at Night" in 1987, he credited "Eureka" as having anticipated his findings.In an interview with Nautilus, Italian astronomer Alberto Cappi speaks of Poe's prescience, admitting, “It's surprising that Poe arrived at his dynamically evolving universe because there was no observational or theoretical evidence suggesting such a possibility. No astronomer in Poe's day could imagine a non-static universe."But what if Poe wasn't of a day at all, but of all the days?What if his written prophecies — on the cannibalistic demise of Richard Parker, the symptoms of frontal lobe syndrome, and the Big Bang theory — were merely reportage from his journey through the extratemporal continuum?Surely I sound like a tinfoil-capped loon, but maybe, maybe, there are many more prophecies scattered throughout the author's work, a possibility made all the more likely by the fact that, as The New York Times notes, “Poe was so undervalued for so long, there is not a lot of Poe-related material around."I'll leave you with this quote, taken from a letter that Poe wrote to James Russell Lowell in 1844, in which he apologizes for his absence and slothfulness:"I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass… You speak of “an estimate of my life" — and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things, to give any continuous effort to anything — to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim — impulse — passion — a longing for solitude — a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future."This story was originally published on HistoryBuff and first appeared on 8.16.16

Upvoted, an online publication from Reddit featuring the most compelling content from their site, recently republished this "classic" piece originally posted around 2011. The beautiful piece of writing was done by a commenter in response to a poster asking for advice on grief.The original post simply read: "My friend just died. I don't know what to do."Here was Redditor GSnow's moving advice:"Alright, here goes. I'm old. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not. I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents.I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see.As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks."Here's the original post:This article originally appeared on 9.21.21

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