signal

This year is the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd’s album, Dark Side of the Moon.  In Baltimore, a cast of more than forty musicians has reimagined the album, and the project’s executive producers, ellen cherry and Sandy Asirvatham, join The Signal’s Aaron Henkin for an unveiling of Mobtown Moon

Benn Ray from Atomic Books in Hampden is always happy to recommend a good read. He joins the Signal’s Lisa Morgan with a stack of books to keep you entertained and well-informed all summer long.

Summer officially begins in Baltimore next weekend with Patterson Park’s Latinofest, the city’s annual open-air celebration of Hispanic food, dance, and music.  Latinofest organizers have booked an impressive roster of live bands for the occasion, including some high-quality local talents.

The New Gospelites started their vocal harmony group in the 1970s, but they’ve been singing the old hymns since they were kids at Wharton Point’s Saint George Methodist United Church on The Eastern Shore.  They’ve absorbed the musical style of their elders, they’ve made it their own, and today, they’re keepers of a rare and powerful repertoire of songs in praise of The Almighty.

The cicadas have resurfaced, and while we may not be experiencing the ‘swarmageddon’ we endured back in 2004 with Brood X, this year’s visitors, Brood II, have been buzzing up and down the East Coast form Georgia to Connecticut.  Writer D R Belz has done some research on the subject, and he tells us there might be a bright side to these invasions - for our gardens and forests.

These days, when Jill Yesko shows up at the local dog park with her basset hound, the other folks there can be forgiven for keeping their distance.  Yesko has written a crime novel titled, Murder in the Dog Park:  Bad Girl. Good Cop.  Bad Dog.

Marion Winik thought she knew what she was getting into when she started dating again in her early fifties.  Then she went on a few dates. Her memoir, Highs in the Low Fifties, explores the ups & downs of middle-age romance and her comical misadventures on her quest to find Mr. Right. 

A Lumbee proverb:  “Seek wisdom, not knowledge.  Knowledge is of the past.

We learn about the right-wing troubadours who pioneered an obscure genre of music known as “conservative folk” in the 1960s. They saw their music and lyrics as a way to fight the influence of communists and hippies on the youth of America.    

It sounds like science fiction, but neuroscientists may be on the verge of altering our brains to erase the fear we associate with traumatic memories.  Dr. Richard Huganir tells the story of his lifelong scientific quest to understand (and control) human memory.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we can all probably remember back to a childhood instance when we felt insufferably bored by a grade-school history textbook.  It wasn’t the history that that was boring – it was reading about it in those dry pages peppered with long-ago dates and unfamiliar names.  Well, guess what?  The textbooks are still like that, and today’s kids are still bored.