We sometimes do a thing called Free Sample Friday. Which is just what it says, a bit of 10th Rule Book’s pulp fiction that skips the boring parts. We are not doing that this week. Instead we are letting people download a whole fucking book for free on the Kindle. You see on this weekend a few years ago a man calling himself Cooke walked out of a Colorado prison a free man*. He made his way to Oceanside, CA where he found himself some trouble, a lot of trouble. So to celebrate the anniversary of his freedom we are giving away the story of that trouble - Captain Cooker . Not just a chapter, but the whole damn thing. Come Monday it will cost money again (only three bucks), so get on it and get yourself some free hard-boiled action noir one reviewer called a ‘Chain of fistfights’.** Of course we could have stopped there but we did not. Look for the second Cooke novel, Best Laid Plans of Idiots and Fuck-Ups for only .99 on the Kindle this weekend. That’s right the whole Cooke...

Since we have a podcast doing the 80’s crime fiction story Fiero over the sounds of electric guitar it seemed a good time to bust out our sporadic 5 cool things column and name the 5 best rock guitar solos from the 1980’s. 1 - The outro to Mr. Crowley - Randy Rhoads (Ozzy Osbourne). The first solo made the Rolling Stone top 100 solos and it is killer without a doubt, but the second one is one of the all time metal monster solos. Starting with a string of arpeggios and then going into some inspired D harmonic minor madness the under appreciated Randy Rhoads expands on what the even more under appreciated Ritchie Blackmore started doing with rock guitar in the 1970’s. 2 - Rainbow in the Dark -Vivian Campbell (Dio). Jimmy Page showed how great Am, G, and F * (I, VI, bVII if anyone cares) are to solo over (sorry that one was in the 70’s so it doesn’t make the list) and while the even more underrated than Rhoads and Blackmore Irish man Viv Campbell doesn’t match Page (Who does?) ...

“Man, people sure looked funny back the 80’s with their mullets and shorty shorts,” says the guy with a man bun wearing skinny jeans while he plays with his overgrown beard. Yes we are talking about the 80’s, the decade before dressing like a lumberjack and being depressed became cool. Why are we talking about past? Well, the new season of the Podcast is doing Todd Morr’s Fiero which happened to take place in the 80’s. So in the spirit of the 1980’s we take a look back at some of the cool stuff from the decade, with our not regular feature five cool things. People could play the shit out of the guitar. Sure dressed like an aging whore in desperate need of electrolysis a lot of them looked funny doing it, but even the silliest of the silly glam metal bands of the era had a guy who could play (check out Reb Beach from Winger,  George Lynch from Dokken, Chris Holmes from W.A.S.P., Brad Gillis and Jeff Watson from Night Ranger* ). When they weren’t buying hairspray and eye...