How's everybody feel about their Spotify Wrapped this year? The streaming giant dropped their annual year in review last year, giving listeners a recap of their listening habits from the past year. (And also inventing some new genres in process...apparently one of my top genres was "Sweater Weather Tavern Country Folk," whatever that means). But anyway, with the annual drop of Spotify Wrapped naturally comes listeners sharing their own stats, and others judging people for how bad (or good) their music taste is. Naturally, Taylor Swift was the most streamed artist of the year - and surprisingly, there weren't any country artists in the top 10, which included pop artists like The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Drake and Billie Eilish. But honestly, that's not what's interesting to me anyway. What I wait for every year is for artists to post their own year-end stats showing just how much their music was streamed. The reason I find it so interesting is because this data generally isn't made available to the public, so it's one of the rare glimpses behind the scenes that we get into just who people are listening to, and how much they're listening. It's an interesting way to gauge whether an artist really is as big as you thought they were, whether there's somebody that you may have missed, and just get a peek behind the curtain into how many streams these artists really get. I love to see who's being streamed more than I expected, or whose streams are low for an artist of their size. What can I say, I'm a numbers nerd. So as usual, I tried to catch all of the artists who have shared their Spotify Wrapped for Artists stats this year so we could take a look at the numbers and see if anything stands out. Of course, there are some things to keep in mind when we look at these numbers. First, an artist's streams are obviously going to be heavily dependant on whether they released new music that year or not. So a guy like Zach Bryan who drops new music every other week is obviously going to get a boost in streams when he releases new music versus an artist like Morgan Wallen who didn't drop a new album this year (though he did release a couple songs). These are also only stats from a single streaming platform, so we have no idea how much an artist is streamed on other platforms like Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube, or any of the other dozens of platforms out there. (Drop those Amazon Music stats, Garth). And we also obviously have an incomplete data set here, because not all artists share their stats publicly, so we can only work off those who do. But keeping all that in mind, there were still some numbers in the data that we have that I found surprising. Let's start with one of the most-streamed country artists of the year: Lainey Wilson. Obviously Lainey had one of the biggest years of anybody in country music, headlining her Country's Cool Again tour and dropping her album "Whirlwind" back in August. She was also the reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year coming into 2024, so Lainey is no doubt one of the hottest names in country music right now. Just how hot? Well she outstreamed names like George Strait and Eric Church. Lainey finished the year with 613 MILLION streams, while King George had a (still incredible) 608 million despite releasing an album of his own earlier this year. And Church, who hasn't released an album since 2021 but is still a staple of playlists with songs like "Springsteen" and "Drink In My Hand," had 536 million streams. Meanwhile, one of the hottest new acts of the year was the Red Clay Strays, who not only gave us their stats from the year but also shared that their streams had gone up an insane TWO THOUSAND PERCENT over last year. And Zach Top also had quite the increase in streams, more than doubling his listenership from the past year and racking up nearly 200 million streams thanks to viral hits like "I Never Lie" and "Sounds Like The Radio." Parker McCollum's numbers also surprised me - not because of the numbers themselves, but seeing that he managed to rack up nearly half as many streams as George Strait, despite being (to state the obvious) significantly newer and with a much smaller catalog to stream. Now, my guess is that's due in large part to the difference in audiences. Strait naturally has an older crowd that probably doesn't stream music as much, while Parker has a much younger crowd who grew up only listening to music on streaming. But still, I expected the gap between a legend like George Strait and a relative newcomer like Parker to be higher. (I'd say Parker would still prefer to have the King's 60 number one hits though). It was also nice to see that one of my favorite artists, Charles Wesley Godwin, managed to double his streams from 2023 - despite his most recent album coming in September of last year. Nice to know that people have good taste in music and are finally discovering CWG. Obviously those are just a few of the interesting things that I saw in the numbers that were posted this year. I'm sure we could go through and make plenty of assumptions about what the data tells us, but in reality, it's just a cool little peak behind the curtain and a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. Ultimately, these may not tell us much, but if you're like me and enjoy looking through the numbers, we can thank these artists who share their stats for giving us something to talk about. Here are a few more from country artists who shared their Wrapped for Artists: Kaitlin Butts Jake Worthington (This number should be a lot higher, by the way. This guy is incredible). Vincent Mason Randall King 49 Winchester Josh Meloy Muscadine Bloodine It's pretty cool to see these kinds of numbers from an independent artist - and I'm sure being on tour with Post Malone led a lot of people to check them out, which is well-deserved for the boys from Alabama. Craig Morgan Evan Honer Travis Tritt Jesse Daniel (This is another one that should be a lot higher. Need people to wake up to Jesse Daniel, because for my money he's one of the best out there doing it right now). Josiah and the Bonnevilles Drayton Farley Mason Ramsey Shoutout to all 6.5 million of you out there still listening to the Yodel Kid.

“Dominick The Donkey,” Lou Monte's 1960 holiday earworm, is a novelty song even by Christmas music standards.

The Mattel hovercraft was a figment of imagination, but that didn't stop kids (and their parents) from demanding where to buy one.

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The following article, New York City- Another Day, Another Murder, was first published on Conservative Firing Line. This morning (12/04/24) I read that United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson had been shot and killed while standing outside the New York Hilton Midtown hotel. New York City’s police commissioner stated that it was a, “brazen, targeted attack”.  He was one of the latest victims of another murder in the city. Murder in gun-controlled New … Continue reading New York City- Another Day, Another Murder ...

The FBI has issued a warning to Americans about sending regular text messages between Androids and iPhones. The agency revealed that exchanges between the two brands leave messages vulnerable to hackers.  Instead, users are advised to use secure, encrypted messaging and phone calls on apps like WhatsApp to prevent third parties from accessing conversations.

President Biden has pardoned his son Hunter Biden of federal gun, drug, and tax charges. The pardon, which was issued on Sunday, is “full and unconditional,” for “offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024.” Over the past year, the president had said multiple times that he wouldn't pardon his son. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be sentenced for gun and tax charges...

Every generation has songs that help define the era. And without question, MGMT’s synthy, upbeat pop jam “Kids” helped define the early 2000s. Its playful irreverence matched the sort of unbounded optimism felt in a time just before the internet—and all its consequences—would change the world forever.And this is why people are giddy over finding an unearthed clip of MGMT playing the hit song before it became a hit. It’s taking them right back to that simpler pre-internet time. In the clip, which has been making the rounds across Reddit and Instagram, we see two goofy college aged dudes (Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser, respectively) circa 2003 and having the time of their lives while playing the catchy tune for one of the first times, if not the first time ever. Zero pretense, zero phones. Just good vibes. - YouTube www.youtube.com Besides just having a revived appreciation for the band, people were really yearning for a time when cell phones didn’t dominate shared social experiences. “This video represents the essence of life. Being in the moment, having fun and not taking yourself too seriously,” one person wrote on Instagram. Another said, “The way I'd do anything to go back and appreciate the early 2000s more is insane.”Another noted “This slapped me right across the face with memories I no longer thought I had.”As any MGMT fan will tell you, fun was always the name of the game for VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. While trying to balance out the rigidity of their formal music studies, Goldwasser sought to “write the most stupid song possible,” he told the Times.Never did he imagine that it would end up catapulting their careers. “One moment we were being irreverent with the academic world, the next we were playing festivals, and I don’t think we understood the implications of that,” VanWyndgarden said. “On college campus we were happy to play out rock star fantasies in front of 15 people. All of a sudden we’re on Late Night with David Letterman and we’re thinking: we can’t do this any more. We were becoming the things we were making fun of.”Even if the lyrics to "Kids" was written as a sort of parody, they do inadvertently express the pain of wanting to hold onto innocence, while, due to being human and the laws of time and whatnot, simply cannot. This universal message lying underneath its catchy hooks is what gave the song a lightning-in-a-bottle quality in the first place, and it's what makes it so impactful many years later. We might never be able to truly go back in time, but being able to at least tap back into those bygone feelings—be it through long lost footage, forgotten mementos, or just by listening to a once beloved tune—is a pretty sweet consultation prize.

Few things strike fear in the heart of parents and doctors more than a cancer called diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG. Primarily found in children, DIPG is a highly aggressive brain tumor that is uniformly fatal, with less than 10 percent of children surviving longer than two years after diagnosis. But for the first time ever, a 13-year-old boy from Belgium named Lucas Jemeljanova has beaten the odds. Diagnosed with DIPG at age six, Lucas’ doctor Jacques Grill told Lucas’ parents, Cedric and Olesja, that he was unlikely to live very long. Instead of giving up hope, Cedric and Olesja flew Lucas to France to participate in a clinical trial called BIOMEDE, which tested new potential drugs against DIPG. Lucas was randomly assigned everolimus in the clinical trial, a chemotherapy drug that works by blocking a protein called mTOR. mTOR helps cancer cells divide and grow new blood vessels, while everolimus decreases blood supply to the tumor cells and stops cancer cells from reproducing. Everolimus, a tablet that’s taken once per day, has been approved in the UK and the US to treat cancers in the breast, kidneys, stomach, pancreas, and others—but until the BIOMEDE clinical trial, it had never before been used to treat DIPG. Lucas Jemeljanova poses with his mother(lesja Jemeljanova / Facebook) Though doctors weren’t sure how Lucas would react to the medication, it quickly became clear that the results were good. “Over a series of MRI scans, I watched as the tumor completely disappeared,” Grill said in an interview. Even more remarkably, the tumor has not returned since. Lucas, who is now thirteen, is considered officially cured of DIPG. Even after the tumor was gone, Grill, who is the head of the Brain Tumor Program in the Department of Child and Teenage Oncology at Gustave Roussy cancer research hospital in Paris, was reluctant to stop Lucas’ treatments. Until about a year and a half ago, Lucas was still taking everolimus once every day. “I didn’t know when to stop, or how, because there was no other reference in the world,” Grill said. While Lucas is the only one in the clinical trial whose tumor has completely disappeared, seven other children have been considered “long responders” to everolimus, meaning their tumors have not progressed for more than three years after starting treatment. Lucas Jemeljanova with his mother (Facebook)(lesja Jemeljanova / Facebook) So why did everolimus work so well for Lucas? Doctors think that an extremely rare genetic mutation in Lucas’ tumor “made its cells far more sensitive to the drug,” Grill said, while the drug worked well in other children because of the “biological peculiarities” of their tumors. While everolimus is by no means a cure, the trial has provided real hope for parents and families of children diagnosed with DIPG. Doctors must now work to better understand why Lucas’ tumor responded so well to the drug and how they can replicate those results in tumor “organoids”—artificially-grown cells that resemble an organ. After that, said Marie-Anne Debily, a researcher in the BIOMEDE trial, “the next step will be to find a drug that works as well on tumor cells.” In the meantime, however, Lucas’ doctors are thrilled. “Lucas’ case offers real hope,” said Debily. Lucas Jemeljanova with his parents and sister(lesja Jemeljanova / Facebook) This article originally appeared in June