The DJ Rollie D Story

This week, millions of small children and children at heart will take to the streets in celebration of Halloween.  They'll dress up in lots of different costumes and say "trick or treat" for candy bars ranging from Twix to Almond Joy, and maybe even get a popcorn ball laced with lead (I'm only kidding).  It's a lot of fun, and a small part of me longs for the days when my family would walk around the Thunderbird Mall in Virginia and get candy from the store employees.  Of course this was back before about half of that mall shut down. But there is one thing about Halloween that I don't like, and it technically applies to the rest of the year too.  It's the part that the little kids don't see because their parents would rather they not be exposed to it, and some adults and older children don't even spend time watching it either. If you haven't guessed already, I'm talking about the art of scaring people and watching horror movies,...

It was a few weeks ago that a friend of mine turned to me and said "Rollie, you're an old soul."  Realizing that he was probably right but still in denial myself, I asked some of my closer friends this question, and the answer they gave was also "Yes".  Now that I feel older than I really am (21), I start to realize some things, and I'd like to point those out while also doing some internet research on this ideal, because even little things like this are things I feel should be fact based, and not just solely on my opinions.  The first thing I wanted to find out was what it actually meant to be an old soul, so I turned to the internet, which I know you can't believe everything you read on there, but I feel  this article  from the website Psychic Today at least gets us a basic description of what it means to be an old soul.   Per the article, "Most old souls feel a certain disconnect from the Earth, and most are inherently aware that they a...

Being a radio personality and a DJ, it's more or less an imperative that I listen to music on a daily basis to continue exploring and curating new music for the various things I use it for.  Some of the songs I find get listened to on an almost daily basis by me, and others may only be checked out every so often.  Others are used solely for my drumming practice and not much else, if anything past that.  And then there's that collection that I hear once or twice and decide never to listen to again.  It's a wide mix. But the problem I always have is trying to describe what my favorite type of music to listen to is to my friends and co-workers.  Listening across a wide variety of genres gives me this issue and I don't really have a favorite genre, though I do have a mixture of favorite sounds that make me ten times more likely to put a song on repeat for my personal collection.  It's a strange criteria for me, but after I describe it a little bit you may ...

This week my Astronomy class was supposed to go out and look at the stars and planets out near the Buffalo River, which is about twenty minutes east of Fargo-Moorhead.  I was so excited to get out into the country side and see the universe so close up, as it had been a while.  But when the clouds rolled in, I was stuck and couldn't see them anymore. Having grown up in the countryside from birth to graduation, I'm no stranger to looking up into the night sky and seeing the stars come out, dancing across the sky and twinkling the whole way.  I saw the Northern Lights a few times too, and even some of the most basic constellations appeared for me after I learned them back in 2006 at the Palucci Planetarium in Hibbing through a fantastic presentation on the night sky.  It was always a truly amazing sight. Living in this area though, I never really see the stars that much anymore.  Everything's covered by the city lights and you have to drive at ...

It was a cold day in February, and I was at the bowling alley with my homies.  The bowling alley we're at uses Touch Tunes to pump out the tunes, and it's a win-win for both parties, because the person paying the money can subject everyone at the bowling alley to their favorite music, and the bowling alley will definitely profit from it. But on this night in February, someone chose to play a certain track, and it was instantaneously music to my ears.  They just had such a great sound, with tambourine and multiple guitars, and I think that's a little bit of sitar that we hear during the instrumental breaks, and then bongos to top it all off.  I had to pull out my phone and crack out Shazam to see what all the ruckus was, and man was I glad I did. Folk-rock band Lord Huron has been doing what they do for just over five years now.  They've released three albums and gone on the road several times to share their music with those who purchase tickets to their conc...

Chances are that sometime in the last year, you've watched something on a streaming service, such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime TV, or maybe even Crackle.  When you choose to pay for multiple streaming subscriptions, and finally get a device that supports all of them (thanks Roku!), you don't really want to spend time looking everything over five times to determine what you should watch.  Instead, you want to make your TV time as worth it as the money you're spending on it. So, before you spend time paging through TONS of suggested series, let me ramble off a couple of my favorites.  Some of these are origninals to the streaming service, and others are from different networks that have streaming deals with the services.  Read away Adam Ruins Everything (TruTV/TruTV App) Adam Conover has made a name for himself on TruTV series Adam Ruins Everything by comically debunking major facts/assumptions about everything from the government to the TSA to even ...