Thursday, October 23, 2014

Review: Neil Diamond's New CD #MelodyRoad #O2O

I love me some Neil Diamond!! And I am LOVING this new CD Melody Road. That voice, that music, those lyrics - that voice. There is just something about Neil. I've been listening to Neil since I was a teenager. His music has been the soundtrack to many a cross country road trip with songs like "Let the Little Boy Sing" and "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" to name a few.

Obviously I'm not the only Neil Diamond fan out there:
Throughout an illustrious and wide-ranging musical career, Neil Diamond has charted 37 Top 40 singles and 16 Top 10 albums in the U.S. His most recent original studio release, 2008’s Home Before Dark, debuted at #1 in the U.S. and the UK on the Billboard Top Albums chart.

A Grammy Award-winning artist, Diamond is a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Songwriters Hall of Fame and a recipient of the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement Award, one of the highest honors bestowed upon songwriters.  Diamond’s many other achievements include a Golden Globe Award, 13 Grammy nominations and 2009’s NARAS’s MusiCares Person of the Year award.  In 2011, Diamond received the prestigious Kennedy Center Honor for his lifetime of contributions to American culture.

I have been looking forward to this CD, ever since I heard that Neil Diamond was releasing a new one - his first in 6 years.   I've been listening to it the last couple days, and I am not disappointed at all.  I am enjoying it very much.  I wish I could write a great review like this one on Amazon, but I'm not really musical or able to understand what makes a song or an entire CD good.  What I do know is what I like, and I like this!  Do yourself a favor and grab your copy.  Melody Road is available now through Amazon and iTunes.  Through Saturday you can even save $2 and get it for $7.99 at Best Buy with this coupon. You musicians will want to grab that - even though the MP3 CD is also $7.99 on Amazon - because there will be a special 36-page lyric book with guitar chords included in the packaging of each album, or you can grab it at Target and get 2 bonus tracks.


You're the sum of all my heartbeats
I participated in the Neil Diamond Melody Road album review program as a member of One2One Network. I was provided a free album to review but all opinions are my own.

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

I Want My Sunday Ads

When we moved to Anderson, we wanted to subscribe to the Sunday paper - for the ads.  While I know you can access pretty much any store's ad online nowadays, we still like getting them in the paper.  We really don't read the paper, but we like to sit down on a Sunday morning with our coffee and the newspaper ads.

We'd been getting the Milwaukee paper in Wisconsin so we decided to subscribe to the Indianapolis Star instead of the local Anderson paper because we figured the big city newspaper would have more of the ads we wanted to see.  WRONG!  There really weren't very many ads in the paper at all.  Jeffrey even drove to the gas station a Sunday or two just to buy the Anderson paper so we could compare.  Every time, there were more ads in the Anderson paper.  So we canceled our Indy Star subscription before too long and subscribed to the Anderson Herald Bulletin.  It costs a bit more, because you can't get just Sunday but also have to get Friday and Saturday.  Still, definitely more ads.

After canceling the Indy paper, I would periodically get phone calls trying to get me to re-subscribe.  Every time I told them exactly why I'd canceled the subscription - not enough Sunday ads.  Each time I was assured that they had added more ads, or that the holiday season was coming up so there would definitely be more ads.  I was even offered a Sunday only subscription for only $6/month.  My cheap frugal little heart really wanted to grab that one, but I said NO.

But in July I got another call offering me three months for the price of one, and I was again assured that there were more ads in the Sunday paper and several ads in the Thursday paper, which was also included in my subscription.  So I decided to give them another try.  It had been almost a year since I first canceled the subscription so maybe they really had changed.  We also kept our subscription to the Anderson paper, so I kept track of the ads every week in this Sunday newspaper ad comparison.

The results were pretty interesting - The Indianapolis paper usually contained about half the number of total ads compared to the Anderson paper, and there were usually more coupons in my Anderson paper, too.  One week the  Indianapolis Star only had 3 ads.  Three! Talk about ridiculous.  And that Thursday paper they told me had ads only contained a Kroger ad - which I get in the mail either Wednesday or Thursday anyway - and sometimes an ad for a weekend sale at Kohl's.

Needless to say, I have again canceled that subscription, and I have no intention of ever subscribing again. If you live in the Anderson, Indiana area and you like your Sunday ads, avoid the Indy Star.  The 'big city' paper really has nothing on our local paper here in Anderson.

Anybody else look forward to their Sunday morning ads?  And comics!