One of the things many people notice about the Evansville music scene is that it is known for its cover bands. It seems like anytime you walk into a bar you’re going to be hearing the same cover of a Guns N Roses or Big & Rich song. Not all bands are doing cover songs, though. We caught up with Stephen Horning, the lead singer of Namasté. Namasté is a local band playing all original tunes.

How long has Namasté been together?

We’re coming up on our 9th year. We got together more out of necessity than anything. There aren’t that many musicians around the area that play the style of music we do. I was actually coming back from Boston where I had lived for quite a while. I was trying to figure out what to do with my musical abilities and I ran out of money. A buddy of mine had met a few of the guys from the band. They were, at the time, playing in a cover band around town. He introduced them to me the night I came back from Boston and we decided to start jamming together.

Did you start out playing original music or as a cover band?

The original intention was to play original music. We used covers to get to know each other since we all knew how to play the songs. We started writing songs immediately, and as soon as we had enough original material to play a show with, we started trying to get gigs.

Continue reading Interview: Stephen Horning of Namasté…

We recently learned about a charitable cause that combines two of our favorite pastimes: the Internet and school children.

DonorsChoose is an entirely web-based nonprofit organization that provides an easy way to help students in need get the resources that public schools often lack. On the website, teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become a classroom reality when you choose to fund them.

The projects are searchable by subject matter, school district, project cost, school poverty level, and lots of other variables. You can give a lot
or a little—you’ll receive an email thank-you note from the teacher you helped. And if you donate more than $100 to a project, you’ll also receive a
feedback package from the teacher and students you helped that includes tons of pictures and thank-you notes from the kids

Several Evansville-Vanderburgh and Warrick County School Distrct proposals are on the website right now, including these:

• Celebrate Reading At Home - Evansville
• Teaching With Technology - Newburgh

Or you can browse projects from all over the country.

If you’re one of those people who’s called to action only by celebrity endorsements (heaven knows we had no interest in wearing Sketchers until Ashlee Simpson jumped on that bandwagon), try this one: Oprah Winfrey called DonorsChoose a “revolutionary charity.”

And Oprah knows philanthropy.

Let’s say you’re having dinner with friends at a local chinese buffet. Now, let’s say your friend dares you to drink a teaspoon of Soy Sauce. He bets you $8 that you won’t do it.

Oh yea, I forgot one part of the story. Your friend urinated in the bottle of soy sauce. Still need that $8?

Owensboro police charged a 16-year-old Owensboro High School student with misdemeanor criminal mischief and menacing, after he admitted to urinating in a bottle of soy sauce and leaving it on the table of a Chinese restaurant. Acting on a dare, he took the bottle into the bathroom, emptied half of it and filled the rest with urine.

After completing the dare, the high schoolers left the restaurant and the tainted bottle of sauce stayed on the table for 2 weeks.

This is far more disgusting than watching someone dip their egg roll in the spicy mustard container.

photo courtesy of sabellachan

We’re running out of photos, photographers. Start snapping more and posting them to Flickr.

• Gas prices are up, and so are drive offs.
• Jim Nabors is ill and won’t be singing Back Home In Indiana at the Indy 500 this Sunday. He had sung it for the past 35 years.
• The Twin Bridges 10ft Lane Fun begins on Monday. In other news, I won’t be going to Henderson ever again starting Monday.
• Governor Daniels is looking into whether he can suspend the sales tax on gasoline.
• A $5.5 million fund-raising drive has begun for the construction of a Ronald McDonald House where the families of hospitalized children can stay. The house would be on the campus of St. Marys.

photo courtesy of andyrobe

While police officers aren’t required to, and often don’t, buckle their seat belt, they will be making sure that you fair citizens keep that belt around your waist this evening. The Evansville Police will be having a seat belt checkpoint tonight from 7 to 11 near South Green River Road and Covert Avenue. This is part of a statewide click it or ticket campaign.

These checkpoints will be a thing of the past come July 1 when the new seat belt law goes into effect. I say good riddance. Don’t the police have something better to do than pass out seat belt tickets?

Whenever I have had a pet that died, we bury it in a backyard or at my dad’s office. If Titzer Funeral Homes has it’s way, I can have my pet cremated and put in an urn on my mantle next to grandmother and Aunt Judith. The Titzer’s are proposing putting the pet crematory across the street from their funeral home, but residents in the neighborhood are not pleased.

Residents say that the crematory will be noisy and emit a lovely odor. To combat the proposed doggie kiln, they have presented a petition at a city zoning hearing last week with nearly 100 signatures of neighbors against the proposal. The board of zoning appeals gave Titzer until June 21 to work out a solution with the neighbors before they get involved.

There’s presently no pet crematory in the Evansville area. If you want such as service presently, you need to drive to Louisville. Personally, I am not so sure I want my yorkies or bichon forever on my mantle, nor do I really want them to continue marking their territory by spreading ashes around the backyard. What about you? Would you be interested in cremating a pet?

photo courtesy of lee3dhighway_

As promised, we were down at the Evansville Otters Opening Day parade this afternoon. There was a pretty nice turnout and everyone seemed to have a good time. Thanks to everyone who said hi to me, and hello to all the new readers we hopefully get from the stickers I passed out!

Continue reading Evansville Otters Parade Photos…

The Courier today posted an article about all of the construction going on in downtown Evansville. To complement it, we decided to showcase one of those buildings currently under construction. Flickr user SUPERBANANABOMB! took a stroll downtown and captured some photos of the ongoing construction projects.

This building has been gutted from the inside and will be turned into upscale loft apartments. If you go to the corner of Main & 3rd you can see it in person.

In Focus features a photograph taken by a reader of It’s Evansville. If you’d like a chance to have your photo featured as part of In Focus, upload your photo to Flickr and tag it with “itsevansville”.

Newsweek came out with its rankings of the of “the top public high schools in the country,” and Evansville has a single school in the top 100: The Signature School. The Sig School came in at 255, which is the highest ranking of any school in the state.

Newsweek ranks these scores based on the number of advanced placement tests to the number of graduating seniors. Sadly, our fair state didn’t do so well in the rankings only having 3 Indiana schools listed, and none of them being from the Southern Indiana region.

If you’ve been keeping score at home, you might remember that in last year’s rankings, the Sig School was #54 in the nation. Sadly, they plummeted 200 spots because not as many kids took the AP tests this year. Ranking solely on AP Tests is a point of contention with some schools in fact. Out in San Francisco, the entire Palo Alto school district refused to participate in the study saying that there was already too much emphasis on test scores at the expense of actual learning. You go Palo Alto!

• That kid who took a gun into Stringtown Elementary allegedly pointed it at a another kid. A different boy reportedly pointed the gun directly at himself while staring down the barrel. Kids these days.
• Police arrested two men in Evansville for posing as salesmen and trying to sell $2,500 water purification system. People would pay for the system, but they’d never receive it.
• No Super Bowl for Indianapolis. The NFL decided to ship the 2011 game to Dallas.
• We’re getting a Gander Mountain store this fall. Not sure where it is going to be just yet, but it will have outside selling areas for boats, ATVs and other large items.

photo courtesy of trisheroverton