This post truly is all over the place. I had the music part written earlier this week, but then things started happening in Texas. I probably should have turned this into two posts but here we are.

I’ve mentioned Robert Roberson here recently. He was going to be executed on October 17th, but through some elegant bipartisan maneuvering by the Texas House of Representatives, his execution has been postponed.
Previously, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles (TBPP) had declined to consider clemency for Roberson, meaning the only thing Governor Abbott could do is invoke a single 30-day delay of the execution. He wasn’t even willing to do that. SCOTUS also declined to hear any last-minute appeals, though Justice Sotomayor felt Roberson had “raised credible evidence of actual innocence.” So Tuesday night, the Texas House Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence subpoenaed Roberson to appear the week following his execution. At that point, his attorneys filed for a stay of execution so that he’d be able to fulfill the subpoena.
It came right down to the wire. Ninety minutes before the execution, an Austin judge imposed a temporary restraining order. The State Attorney General immediately appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which struck down the TRO. Then the Texas Supreme Court finally stepped in and stayed the execution.
At this point, Roberson will appear before the Committee on Criminal Jurisprudence, possibly Monday. His original death warrant has expired, so will have to be reissued. I’m not at all clear on the procedure or timing for that.
Under Texas law, the governor can’t commute a death sentence unless the TBPP recommends clemency. That seems to fly in the face of executive privilege. I think a governor should be able to override any sentence if they see the need to do so. The TBPP is appointed by the governor, and the current members are all Abbott appointees, answerable only to the governor. The governor is, of course, answerable to the voters, though they seem to like the job he’s doing so far; he’s on his third term, and Texas doesn’t have gubernatorial term limits.
We shouldn’t have to resort to such last-minute maneuvering to save someone’s life. Texas has tried to execute the wrong person a dozen times since 1987. Nationwide, we’ve tried to kill the wrong person over 140 times.
We need to end the death penalty. There’s no place for an irrevocable penalty in a modern society.
The Day The Music Died
Diana and I were coming home from Tahlequah last Saturday night and I had SiriusXM’s Radio Margaritaville on, trying to eke out the last few songs before my free trial ended. The clock ticked over to 11:00 PM Central Time (midnight Eastern) and that was all she wrote. The channel died in the middle of the song.
What am I going to do about music in the car now? There’s terrestrial radio, of course, and I’ve got free accounts at Spotify and Pandora, so I can stream stuff anytime. But Sirius had some stations I really liked.
Scott Cooper created XMPlaylist.com a while back. I’d found it during my free trial when I was trying to figure out what I’d heard on the channel a while back. He tracks what most of the Sirius channels play, then creates a playlist on Spotify or Apple Music. He updates the playlists on a semi-regular basis, too. Here’s the one for Radio Margaritaville.
Sirius offered $5/month by email, then $4/month by mail, then, perversely, $4.99 by phone, for the next year, then the cost would go up to $23 or so per month. Yeah, no thanks. I didn’t want to have to play the “give me a good price or I’ll quit” game every year, so I let the service expire. I’d have been happy to pay the five bucks a month, because $60 a year for several channels I really liked (besides RM, there was The Spectrum) was a nice deal. $260 or more a year was a little out of my range.
Since I was willing to pay that $60 a year, I’m going to toss Scott that amount via Scott’s Ko-Fi account. I figure that’s a reasonable amount to pay the man for his time and effort in putting this together.
Finding New Music
One of the things I really like(d) about Sirius was getting to hear new music from new artists, and new songs from old artists. I’ve listened to Jimmy Buffett since the fall of 1983, when my college roommate PJ Tucci introduced him to me in the early days of my first attempt at college life. We got 13th-row tickets to Buffett’s One Particular Harbor tour appearance at Miami (OH) University the week of the show. I was hooked.
Over the years, I bought a dozen or so albums and saw him again on the 1996 Banana Wind tour at the Buckeye Lake Amphitheater. I loved his music, and played a lot of it on the trips between Columbus and Pittsburgh, which I still think is one reason Oldest Son enjoys Buffett’s music so much.
But one of the cool things about Radio Margaritaville is how it’s been exposing me to more of Buffett’s stuff that I didn’t know much about. See, I’d bought a bunch of his older albums, but after Banana Wind and Barometer Soup. But I quit buying albums, feeling like a lot of what he was putting out was “just” concert recordings with mostly old music.
That wasn’t true at all.
Radio Margaritaville, aside from showing me lots of artists like Jimmy, has shown me a lot of his stuff that I missed over the years. And as the man said so long ago, “There’s some good **** back there.” I’m not even going to try to list all the songs I’ve rediscovered. But between Radio Margaritaville and The Spectrum, I’ve found a whole bunch of new music and artists.
Where do you find your new music?
Writing
Made goal by Wednesday this week. I’m struggling with some plot points in Ghost at the moment though. We’ll see what happens.
Image by Alexander Weichsel from Pixabay
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