When my first book was published (Raven:  The Call from Central), I opted for the name ‘Stephen E J Tomporowski’, first because it is my name, second to distinguish myself from another Steve Tomporowski.

The E is for Edward, my birth middle name while the J is for Joseph, which was a confirmation name.  That name came in handy, because otherwise my initials would have spelled a word (SET) and caused confusion on documents.  When initialing, I always use four initials, SEJT, not just because I want to be unique (don’t we all?) but to avoid the confusion of my initials with a word.

Now you would think that with a name like ‘Tomporowski’ it would be a cinch that I’d have a unique name.  Nope, didn’t happen, but it only fell short by one similarity and the habit of search engines of making sure that Stephen, Steven and Steve are equivalent and all show up in the results.

And there’s the problem.  There is a Steven M. Tomporowski out there, or rather in there, in jail.  Here’s a link to one of the articles on him from 2004:

https://www.wave3.com/story/1648898/three-found-dead-at-wisconsin-farmhouse-suspect-arrested-in-kentucky/

In short, Steven M. Tomporowski killed his parents and his uncle, and was convicted. 

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2004-11-19-0411190276-story.html

He got life in prison without hope of parole with the judge calling his crimes “vile, vicious, premeditated and cold-blooded”.

Needless to say, that’s not me and you can understand that I really want to distance myself from this guy with a similar name.

Apparently this guy was also a stand-up comedian of the foul-mouthed kind, probably just a local Illinois phenomenon.  I had originally thought that there were two of them out there that I needed to be disassociated from.  Subsequently I found out that the killer and the comedian were the same person.  Phew!

In a bit of irony, once I was contacted by this guy via email.  He was probably 11 or 12 at the time and as you would have guessed (this was the mid-90’s), his email was via AOL and in all caps.

If you ever wondered what your cat thinks when you go to the beach:

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Recently Katy Perry was sued by the Christian rapper Flame about, of all things, a synthesizer riff in the song Dark Horse (2014).  The accusation was that that synth riff was stolen from the song Joyful Noise (2008).  While there were several irregularities in the proceedings, Katy Perry was found to be guilty of this plagiarism.

Note that this was not the melody, nor was it even in the foreground, but in the background of Dark Horse.  Musically it is referred to as an ostinato, or an element to support the melody.  Otherwise the songs did not share the same melody, chord progression or drum rhythm.

If you are interested in the whole discussion, you can see it in a short 9 minute video by Adam Neely on Youtube here:

If songwriters are able to copyright short sequences of notes, then we have a big problem.  There are only so many keys and so many notes and only so many ways to combine them.

This was the situation that caused another lawyer, Damien Riehl, to ally with a programmer by the name of Noah Rubin to do the unthinkable.  They created a program that would generate every possible melody.  Once generated, the melodies occupied 2.6 TB of drive space.  By copyright law, once those melodies were ‘afixed’ to a physical medium (the hard drive), they are copyrighted. 

Adam Neely (again) interviewed the two in a Youtube video here:

Then the duo also did one more unthinkable thing, they made the file available to everyone.  If you have 2.6 TB of free drive space and plenty of time to wait, you can get the file here:

https://archive.org/download/allthemusicllc-datasets

Why did they do that?  By putting all the music in public domain, now anybody who writes a song has to prove, in a court of law, that they did not have exposure to this file.  Pretty difficult to prove a negative.  In short, these two have thrown a monkey wrench into the copyright works to show the problems with the current situation with music.  In essence, music is demonstrated to be just math with a limited number of possibilities.  So, similarities may not be plagiarism but merely the result of the limited mathematical equations that the artist has to work with.

Damien Riehl originally revealed their feat in a TED talk called ‘Copyrighting all the melodies to avoid accidental infringement’.  You can find it here:

I never thought I would be this age.  You just don’t consider it when you are younger.  So many things take up your time and thought processes that years pass without you realizing that the time has passed.

At this point, I have now lived 10 years longer than my father, who passed away at 58 from pancreatic cancer.  My father only survived his father by four years.  My grandfather lived to 84 or 86 or 88 depending on which agency you consult for his age.

At 68, I’m now two years past retirement and still working with no definite end date. I’ve held some sort of job for 51 years and now up for a promotion at the current company.  I now have four published books with the fifth to be released sometime in April, with at least three more books in the process of being written.  I have released 81 music tracks on Soundcloud with probably another 20 or 30 in some state of progress.  I’ve been selling on eBay for over ten years now.

And, no, none of this should matter to anyone but me, just taking inventory so to speak!

I’m too busy.  I think I’ll stick around for a while.  The Bible says (Genesis 6:3) that men will live 120 years.  I think I’ll claim that.

Finally, thanks for all the Birthday wishes.  It’s motivating to see everyone who has responded.

Thank you.