Her previous album was more acoustic/rock than jazz/blues. Tracks from her debut album made it to the silver screen in Bridget Jones' Diary and Shallow Hal. Her first tour was a supporting act for Melissa Etheridge and Meredith Brooks. Ever since that initial success, Rosey's creative path has led her back home to a rich heritage of passionate jazz.

Luckiest Girl is a return to those roots. Six years after her debut, Luckiest Girl sounds like an honest expression of a woman returning to her passion. It's been a lifelong love affair with music. Both of Rosey's parents were singers, and both grandparents were musicians. Listening to her sophomore album, you can hear the heart of timeless jazz classics in every song. 

I'm listening to her album for the ninth time, and it's great music. Perfect for a jazz club where posh urbanites sip martinis in trench coats and top hats, it's also the idyllic mood setter for a lazy Saturday afternoon at Starbucks while you type your next blog post or read a chapter from your favorite novel.

My favorite tracks are "Love" and "Be Somebody Blues", although every song is worth a listen. In fact, I enjoy the album most as an album. The entire album is one fluid piece of jazz/blues. Just hit play and let it play through. Rosey's voice has a soft, airy, hometown girl sound that delivers every song with a clarity and a sense of both wistful hope and somber heartache. 

Give it a listen. You owe it to your laptop and latte to experience the complete creative experience. 

I’m a sucker for NYC photo blogs (PBs) because I love the Big Apple but I never had the chance to live there on a long-term basis.

So NYC photo blogs are how I try to get my regular fix of things-New-Yoark.

With every photo I remember once again how much I love this sultry, chaotic, and majestic Mother of All Cities.

Here is a short list of my top favorite NYC PBs, plus another which has nothing to do with NYC but one you should really support by visiting.

1) Lightning Field

The granddaddy of all NYC PBs as far as I’m concerned. I have no idea for how long David F. Gallagher is keeping up this site. He is a freelance journalist who is published in some serious outlets including New York Times.

From time to time he takes us to different parts of the world but he is mainly a New Yorker. Follow him and he’ll take you to the corners of NYC that you never knew existed.

2) Quarlo

Owned by Todd Gross. This blog unfortunately stopped back in December 2006. But his archive is still amazing.

Probably the most self-aware stylist of them all, Quarlo managed to come up with the exact burnt color-palette with stinging greens and harsh yellows that to me conveys the daily struggle of life in NYC. Yet a lot of his photos reflects his own sense of visual humor as well.

I’ve sent him an e-mail to see what’s going on with the site but he didn’t answer. Worth a bookmark.

3) Satan’s Laundromat

A unique photo site specializing in the signs, graffiti and symbolic oddities of NYC. Also stopped in December 2006, unfortunately.

Most of these blogs are works of love and hard to keep them up when nobody’s paying you for your time, equipment and the overhead. You start with a camera and start roaming the streets like a drunk person; an artist drunk with the lust of life. Then, eventually, "life intervenes" and you find yourself a day-job with a steady paycheck, I guess... Goodbye camera.

4) Slower

Another once-great PB that is now over. By Eliot Shepard.

You can however now enjoy Shepard’s photos over at http://eliotshepard.com/ Check out his HORIZONTAL scrolling photo-bar. Fancy, eh?

5) Blue Jake

Still going strong, thanks god. A rich collection of amazing snapshots from Brooklyn, and other fine boroughs of New York.

6) Laura Holder

Gone! What a pity. It’s a silly directory now… What a waste of cyber space... There should be a law against such jarring domain transformations.

7) Joe’s NYC

Still fresh and live. Go Joe!

Mecca Pixel

What? Now it's a laptop computer store ??!! Sad and outrageous. It used to be a great photo blog.

9) NYC Photobloggers

A mega directory of all NYC photo bloggers. If there is anyone taking pictures of NY for over a year he or she is probably listed here.

10) Overshadowed

For those who like their photos large, unadorned, with no text. A site for the visual purists. A museum of fine arts, of sorts.

11) Rion

By Rion Nakaya. The only web site I know with a NU domain extension.

She is reporting from Paris for the last 2 years but gave us great panoramas of NYC in the past.

12) Infrangible

by Khoi Uong. Yes. Laudable.

Plus this:

13) Ziboy

A distinguished Chinese photo blog by Wen Ling. He is a guy who lives with his finger glued to the shutter release button of his digital.

I’ve seen photos on this blog over the last couple of years that made me wonder how the “Chinese authorities” allowed this blog to continue since Ling never hid his identity.

An honest photo appraisal of daily life in China (I think). Recently he published tons of photos from his USA visit (including NYC) but most of his archive is still about China.

It’s always a pleasure to read what he thinks on any topic.

Deford’s recent column on Olympics again got me thinking about the whole hoopla around the Olympic torch, the Tibet issue, etc.

First off, did you know that the Olympic torch itself was invented by the Nazis, in 1936?! I certainly did not know that.

Second, I believe that as long as China hosts this year’s Olympics she cannot eat her cake and have it too.

In return for the prestige and publicity of the Olympics she has to endure non-violent protests of her occupation of Tibet. What goes around comes around.

To those who say sports and politics should not be mixed, I say: what is being protested is neither the Olympics nor the Chinese people but the foreign policy of the Chinese Communist Party, and for a very legitimate reason at that.

But come to think of it, are we perhaps making too much of the Olympics itself?

What’s the big deal about track and field, anyways?

Don't get me wrong. I love track and field and I'm an amateur runner myself. I try to do my 8 to 10 miles every week.

But as Deford asks, “how many of you can even name a single American track athlete in this year's Games? How many of you can name a single track athlete from any nation?”

The International Olympics Committee can call the Olympics a “movement” or whatever it wants but we know what it is – it's a big fat commercial event, attended by all the semi-amateur athletes that under-the-table "incentives" can "motivate."

Is there anyone among you who still believes that our modern day Olympics has anything in common with the original Greek sport event of its day?

As a spectator event, Olympics is a great diversion. It's fun and entertaining.

But all this torch relay charade with the symbol of “supposedly-amateur spirit” jumping from one puzzling city to another and turning into a tug of war between the Chinese government and her detractors is a little bit too much for me.

Why don’t we just collect the billions of dollars spent on Olympics every four years across the globe and spend it on something truly worthwhile, like eradicating HIV/AIDS perhaps? Or bringing a laptop computer to every child in the world?

In the very least, can we please change the symbol of Olympics to something else? Honoring anything that was originally invented by Hitler’s crack troop of designers still rubs me the wrong way.

So be it. I'm no Seth Godin, but I understand the value of being true to self. A blog is a blessed and dangerous thing. It is my opportunity to leave behind a trace of my mental DNA. Perhaps something in it will make a difference to someone.

Random thought: I just remembered that I promised Karen I would post a list of tips on how to become a copywriter and I never finished. That's what finding out you're going to be a dad will do to a guy... everything else fades from memory.

Back to the point, the day will come when this blog (assuming it survives the years to come) stands alone as a rich source of interesting opinions, prose, and ramblings. This site already drives anywhere from 120 to 170 visitors per day, and that's after having lost all search results for more than a month after I switched the blog platform from Blogger to WordPress.

I don't really care what potential clients or employers think about this blog. At some point, you have to draw the line and say, "This is my area and no one else's. This is my personal space - even if it's public." I'm having a blast with it. Who knows? I may even land a client for my current agency with it through this experiment I'm conducting for Papaya Clothing. If they notice how much I am promoting their site and collecting valuable information and recommendations from their customer base, perhaps they will hire us to complete their site (so their loyal customers can shop online).

With experiments ongoing and fatherhood approaching, I'm really looking forward to this blog. Maybe I'll start getting traffic for baby related terms. You just never know.

Think about it. If you are a blogger and mention anything not completely divorced from who you are, you have just posted yourself out there for the world to see. This could make for a sensational tv series, but a horrifying reality.

What if someone wanted to frame you for a crime you didn't commit? What if "they" wanted to plan a crime and pin it on a scapegoat? Or what if you belong to any type of racial, religious, or socioeconomic group that someone wants to remove?

If you're a blogger, you've shown them how you think, what you like, what you dislike, what you believe, where you shop, what you eat... the list goes on. Every post is another sample of who you are. And you are willingly making yourself public. Sure, you wouldn't mind making a little money from it, or getting a little fame. But what if your words can be used against you? I'm not just talking about lawsuits, I'm talking about psychological profiling. Write enough blogs and any psychologist or keen observer could begin to predict your behavior based on the information you have provided.

I think about Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory, or Taye Diggs in Day Break. In any conspiratorial situation, public information is used against the victim. If you haven't seen Day Break, I recommend you visit ABC today and watch the full season, half of which didn't even make it on television.

Last night it hit me. It was the sum of several influencing factors, truth be told, but I give most of the credit to two sources: the film Two for the Money and the blog posts about converting a blog into a book by lifehack.org.

You can read a little more into this on the soon-to-be-updated About Us page. I am going to change the way CultureFeast presents information. Instead of yet another cultural/social commentary, each post will contain original prose and poetry I have written. Not just random prose and poetry, but prose and poetry inspired by specific songs, television episodes, films, news events, etc. I will credit the muse for each piece, and allow you to see for yourself if you can find the subtle cause of inspiration which links the muse to my art.

Comment as often as you like. Guess the connection if you want to, or tell me how the particular piece of pop culture affects you.

Thanks for your patience.

"What am I supposed to do?" I ask. "How could I do it any better? It's not like anyone is going to read this crap anyway!"

"Slow down for a second... take a deep breath... there you go. Now imagine each blog you write as a valuable part of your life. The precious time you spend writing a blog and thinking about blogs is time you will never live through again. Picture yourself looking back at today from your fifties. How will you feel then about the time you spend now? Will you wish you could go back and redo it all? Will you see that you spent too much time being fake? I wonder."

"I'm not being fake! I might not share the deepest parts of my heart with complete strangers, but that doesn't make me a fake! I'm selective."

"Call it whatever you want. The truth is that you are still focused on the masses. You want to please the masses so you can make money, but what you keep ignoring is the simple truth: the masses will approve of your work when it stands on its own merit. And your work will stand on it's own merit when you focus on finding the message within and sharing it rather than finding what topics people are interested in and limiting yourself to them."

"Maybe you're right... but it's hard to know. I sit here and wonder if it's all a waste of time. I wonder if I'm going to grow old and waste away because I've focused on the wrong things. I lose sleep at night wondering about that. But I don't get any answers."

"I wouldn't think so. well, it's for you to decide. Do what you will; just remember that you will never be 29 again. You will never see this day again. Each moment you breathe, it is a joyous and unprecedented moment and it is also a most grievous and unsettling realization. The finality of Time allows for no second chances. There are no 'redos'. You can continue to write for AdSense if you want, but I think you will see that writing to express the beauty within is rich and satisfying enough."

"You could be right... I'll think about it."

Days like today, I question why I ever started blogging. I had journals before this, and those took less time to design and update.

There are days when nothing seems to go right, and it feels like the world is against you, and you wonder why you waste your time writing down your thoughts when they aren’t good enough to keep you out of trouble.

On days like today, it’s not worth writing. It’s not worth it.

Thanks for your patience.

CultureFeast is in the process of switching to a Linux server as we speak. It may or may not become inaccessible for a few hours sometime today. We’ll have to upload the new content management system to the server as soon as all the current files have successfully transerred over.

I’ll keep you updated

It’s a brilliant blog platform. It’s more than that, though. You can do almost anything with it. With WordPress plugins, I’ve added an online forum and multiple cms functions (including the ability to add META Descriptions and META Keywords to each individual post.

It’s a lot of industry talk, but I really like it. Bottom line, if you are going to start writing a blog, you absolutely cannot do better than WordPress.

The forum, aptly named The Writer's Block, is attached to my personal blog, http://www.danieldessinger.com/, simply because the forum was available as a WordPress plug-in and I didn't want to wait to transfer CultureFeast from Blogger to get started. There will be all sorts of topics available for you to weigh in on. I really want to know the thoughts and opinions of you, the reader. Don't plan on using this forum as an opportunity to post link spam, though. All link spam will be deleted and forum users banned. I work on SEO for a living, and I'm not about to turn my website into a link farm. That being said, I hope you'll visit and tell us your thoughts on all aspects of culture: arts, music, film, television, politics, spirituality, sports, technology, and much more.