Oklahoma native JD McPherson and fellow American music torchbearer Pokey LaFarge have teamed up to record Bob Wills’ classic “Good Old Oklahoma,” which will be released digitally today. 100% of the proceeds from the sale of the single will be donated to Oklahoma City Community Fund’s Tornado Relief endowment. McPherson says, “This charity does the best work possible by contributing to dozens of local Oklahoma charities directly related to tornado damage relief: rebuilding, clean up, food and water disbursement, pet recovery… you name it. This fund applies to possible future tornadoes, as well as what we’re dealing with now.” […]

  HUFFINGTON POST: A few days after a judge ruled that a San Diego, Calif. man must stand trial on 13 counts of vandalism over anti-big bank messages written in water-soluble chalk outside Bank of America branches — which together carry a maximum of 13 years in jail or a $13,000 fine — comes this story out of Pennsylvania.  Corbett announced in February that he wouldn’t support expanding Medicaid rolls to at least 500,000 Pennsylvanians under President Barack Obama’s health care law. Democrats have been seeking to find a path forward, however, with lawmakers in the state Senate currently working […]

First proper new Pixies song since the breakup back in ’93 (the 2004 Zevon cover and the instrumental “Boom Thwack” don’t quite count). Charles Thompson (aka Black Francis) has not lost his capacity to be off-puttingly weird and stingy with the fuzzy pop hooks that offset the horror, the horror and made them irresistible back in the day. The fact that Kim Deal almost saves this song with her trademark angel-of-death vocal on the chorus only makes her recent departure all the more regrettable. Right at the 4:30 mark it sounds for a second or two like the Pixies are […]

Penn Station, NYC, sometime this week, photographer unknown UPDATE: Dear $9 cocktail, up here we call you more than a half-case of Yuengling. With love, Schuylkill County.

  READYNOTIFYPA: Tornado Watch until 10:00PM. Conditions favorable for severe thunderstorms with possible tornadoes. This watch means that conditions are favorable for the development of severe thunderstorms with possible tornadoes. Hail and strong winds are also possible. Persons in the watch area should be on the lookout for threatening weather conditions and listen for later statements and possible warnings. For additional updates and weather information, visit www.weather.gov/phi

The Goldberg in question is actor Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan, Dazed & Confused, Christmas On Mars). As for the Sisters part, not even sure if he has siblings, in any case none were involved with the making of this as Goldberg reportedly played every instrument in addition to doing all the vocals. Be that as it may this is a pretty mesmerizing video for the title track that Golberg patched together from Vine, which he has apparently been coronated king of. So now you know.

  TRUTH OUT: Google, the company with the motto “Don’t be evil,” is rapidly becoming an empire. Not an empire of territory, as was Rome or the Soviet Union, but an empire controlling our access to data and our data itself. Antitrust lawsuits proliferating around the company demonstrate its quest for monopoly control over information in the information age. Its search engine has become indispensable for most of us, and as Google critic and media professor Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it in his 2012 book The Googlization of Everything, “[W]e now allow Google to determine what is important, relevant, and true on […]

  East Tioga Street near Emerald Streets 7:27 p.m. Monday by JOE KACZMAREK GUN CRISIS REPORTING PROJECT: One man compresses a chest wound while another uses his belt as a tourniquet and a city medic holds a head wound after a 25-year-old man was shot seven times Monday evening in the Harrowgate section of Philadelphia. Police were responding to a report of gunshots on East Tioga Street near Emerald Streets shortly before 7:30 p.m. Monday and found the wounded man nearby on Helen Street. Medics rushed the victim to Temple University Hospital, where he was reported in critical but stable […]

  LOCATION: 3rd and South or between 11th and 12th on Walnut. CUISINE: Falafel pitas and Belgian fries. MENU: The Maoz sandwich consists of a fresh pita pocket, overstuffed with falafel balls, hummus and an optional helping of eggplant. If you don’t know what falafel balls are, well, they are really hard to explain, but if you think of them as a magical, fried and spiced, spheres of ecstasy that are somehow, inexplicably made out of chickpeas, you are getting close. Very close. Although Maoz isn’t long on variety — the menu pretty much begins and ends with falafel sandwiches, […]