From the category “stuff one stumbles across on the internets”.
I’m gonna be away for a few hours, so until better pickings come along, entertain each other.
This post is in: Music, Open Threads
From the category “stuff one stumbles across on the internets”.
I’m gonna be away for a few hours, so until better pickings come along, entertain each other.
by John Cole| 31 Comments
This post is in: Music
This post is in: Music, Open Threads, RIP
Here’s a thread for the insomniacs.
BB King has died. I’d embed a video, but I’m on my stupid iPad, and it won’t let me. So here’s a link instead, and a photo:
Open thread.
This post is in: Garden Chats, Music, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Readership Capture, Daydream Believers
Bonus garden pic, courtesy of faithful correspondent Marvel:
Just wanted to share a snapshot of our wood peony — this critter sat around with an unopened blossom for three weeks. The regular peonies are starting to bud-up like crazy, but the woody one…well, it only had one bud and it was lovely & all, but c’mon!
FINALLY, it bloomed yesterday. It’s gigantic — the petals are like lovely, fluttery pink hankies.
Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of Bartolomeo Cristofori, the man who invented the “piano-forte” (soft-loud) harpsichord (“gravicembalo col piano e forte”). Trust Google to be infatuated with technological innovation! (/smile)
And Big Bird’s — well, Carroll Spinney’s — autobiographical documentary is opening on Wednesday.
Throughout his 46 years playing Big Bird on “Sesame Street,” Caroll Spinney has always stood apart from the show’s other puppeteers.
For one thing, the full-body costume means he can’t easily interact with cast members. For another, it means he can cry without anyone noticing.
Those tears — as well as plenty of smiles — are explored in the new documentary “I Am Big Bird,” opening Wednesday at the IFC Center. Fans will see how Spinney, now 81, evolved from being a kid bullied for playing with dolls to developing Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch when “Sesame Street” debuted in 1969. It’s a bittersweet ode that’s also the love story of Spinney and his second wife Debra, who met on the show…
Spinney and the president of the United States share a distant great-grandfather, Josiah Cook, making them ninth cousins, twice removed. The puppeteer got the news via a cousin who had a genealogist trace the family’s history.
“He gave me a whole family tree that proves it,” Spinney tells The Post. When Michelle Obama came to “Sesame Street” for an appearance, she said to Spinney: ‘Well, cousin, at last we meet.’”…
Apart from daydream believing, what’s on the agenda as we start another week?
This post is in: Bleg, Music, Open Threads, Daydream Believers
Final Grateful Dead shows to be offered via pay-per-view
http://t.co/SNgwnKw3nw pic.twitter.com/zRYtF01sf2
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 24, 2015
… “Fare Thee Well: Celebrating 50 Years of Grateful Dead,” the summer concerts billed as the jam band’s final performances, will be broadcast live via pay-per-view from Soldier Field in Chicago, July 3 through July 5, the broadcasting company Live Alliance announced Wednesday…
A webcast of all five concerts will be available for $79.95 starting May 1. For details, check Dead50.net.
Other options for catching Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir together one last time (plus special guests Trey Anastasio, Jeff Chimenti and Bruce Hornsby) will include visiting some movie theaters that will screen the Chicago shows live, and video-on-demand, which will make the concerts available for 45 days…
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Long-time faithful commentor J. Michael Neal/Tissue Thin Pseudonym has a Kickstarter up towards getting his first novel published:
Eighteen-year-old Phoebe Rose spent her childhood in one foster household after another, never having a place she could feel safe or a group of friends she could say she belonged to. What kept her going was hockey. The rink was the only place she felt at home.
Now what she wants more than anything is to play on her college hockey team—where she hopes she can leave her past behind and create a new life. But she knows things are never that simple or easy.
Becoming Phoebe is about painful secrets, unexpected friendships, and joining a team so you can become your true self.
Read the prologue here.
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And Doug Hughes, campaign finance activist, has a GoFundMe page up for his legal expenses:
I’m Doug Hughes, the mailman who delivered letters to the front lawn of the Capitol building in a gyrocopter. At the moment, I’m under house arrest in Florida facing up to 4 years in jail for my civil disobedience.
I’m not whining – I know there would be consequences for my flight, but I hoped my actions would spark discussion and action to end the corruption of Congress. It has.
I do need help – I spent every dime I had, and then some, to accomplish my flight. I have expenses associated with the legal fight – my family and I need to eat, keep the power on and pay the mortgage. The flight was the opening round of a fight that will cost money. For info about the fight, go to thedemocracyclub.org. I’m conducting the fight now from my home…
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Apart from the daydream believers, what’s on the agenda as we wrap up a busy week?
Friday Morning Open Thread: Readership CapturePost + Comments (87)
by DougJ| 47 Comments
This post is in: Music
Percy Sledge has died at age 73.
If you haven’t yet, you should check out the Muscle Shoals documentary Anne-Laurie wrote about last year. Sledge got his start with a record cut at Muscle Shoals (“When a Man Loves a Woman”) and it’s also where Aretha started recording her breakthrough album “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”. There’s an amazing number of songs you hear on the radio that have a certain sound that is just somehow distinctive that were all cut in Muscle Shoals: “Never Loved A Man”, “When A Man Loves A Woman”, “Brown Sugar”, “I’d Rather Go Blind”, “Kodachrome”, just to name a few.
The movie should come with the label “Trigger Warning: Bono” because there’s way too much Bono. He’s so self-important and pretentious that he makes big egos like Mick Jagger and Aretha seem like regular people who just walked in off the street.
This post is in: Domestic Politics, Music, Open Threads
I’m just old enough to remember when “Easter bonnets” actually were a big deal — at least in the kind of working-class Catholic neighborhoods where ladies always carried chapel caps folded into their purses, in case they needed to make a quick church stop between errands. Peak bonnet, for me, was a white straw mob cap decorated with tiny navy bows, the year I was six. That was just before Vatican Council II eliminated the ‘women must wear head coverings’ edict. It’s still a good feeling to start packing away the heavy winter coats and boots, secure in the knowledge that there will be cold days and maybe even some snow, but the inclination of the sun has broken winter’s back.
Yesterday, in fact, was the first day that actually felt like Spring here. It was beautifully sunny, the snow piles have (mostly) disappeared, and the earliest daffodil clumps are finally greening up. Amidst the sad grey-brown wreckage of our brutal winter, of course… so it’s going to take that much more spring cleaning to get the yard back into shape. Not to mention the 18 shopping bags & counting that need to be delivered now that the donation bins have emerged from the snowbanks, which will make enough room in the garage that we can continue decluttering, one surface at a time. I’d buy Marie Kondo’s much-recommended book on the Japanese art of ‘tidying up’, but we’d just lose it in the clutter that results when two packrats haven’t moved house in twenty years!
What’s on the Spring Cleaning / Sprucing Up agenda in your neighborhood?
Sunday Morning Open Thread: Happy EasterPost + Comments (210)