Goin' each and every place with the mic in their hand...

SC, Maryland, New Orleans, Motown...

How about a little Hump Day Round Up…

All Merriweather, all the time: Wordbones' off-line alter ego wrote a nice column for the July edition of the Business Monthly about the Little Ampetheater (and Community Movement) That Could. I don't really have anything to add, but like WB, I'm glad he got this one wrong.


More Merriweather: My off-line alter ego also has a piece about Merriweather running in a local publication. Here's the cover story from the summer edition of Howard Life magazine.

Still more: I was feeling a little blah about this season's line up for Merriweather. Don't get me wrong, I love brooding, wannabe guitar heroes as much as the next 16-year-old girl, but John Mayer just isn't doing it for me this year. But two recent concert announcements have turned my blah into… uh, blazam? First, Rock the Bells, a tour of hip hop heavyweights, on July 27 and second, The Allman Brothers on September 30. They still don't totally make up for the lack of Jack Johnson – stupid Virgin Fest – but I'm happy.

As for non-Merriweather stuff, it's just this: Good riddance, Pooh Bears!

Devotees will tell you that Padonia Swim Club is more than just a place to go swimming. For some, it is where they got their first job, sent their kids to day camp, paddled on the pond, sparked summer romances, got married and sipped cocktails at the cabana bar.

So when the 49-year-old club announced that it was selling the Cockeysville property to a church and shutting down operations - albeit in fall 2010 at the earliest - the news hit members like an afternoon thunderstorm after a cloudless morning.

Padonia was the arch rival of my childhood swim team. They won every single meet for something like 73 years… until they ran into the buzzsaw that was the Crofton Swim and Tennis Club in the mid-1980s.

Yeah, that's right, I'm still living a 20-year-old rivalry. And, yes, sometimes I embarrass myself.

(Although I just saw this story today, thoughts of childhood swim meets have resurfaced recently thanks to my re-adoption of swimming as a preferred method of cardiovascular activity and the airing of the Olympic trials [in HD!] on television.)

Yeehaw!