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Midweek Music Break: Madeline Kahn
Not only was the late Madeline Kahn almost unnervingly funny; she could seriously unhinge me with her voice. Says a writer for the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s Opera News: That note! Madeline Kahn’s sustained “Ah!” on A-flat, the first volley in Victor Herbert’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” and the climax of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein [...]
“What Is Hubris, Alex?” *
I’d heard of this little demonstration of computing power some time ago; last week I caught a documentary about it on PBS’s NOVA program. On the way into work today, I also heard a more up-to-date report of it on NPR’s Morning Edition. The event itself takes place tonight through Wednesday, during the regular Jeopardy! [...]
What’s in a Song: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes (2)
[Another entry in an occasional series about American songs with long histories. This one follows Part 1, about the history of the composition of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." You can read Part 1, posted last week, here.] [Video clip above assembled from the first film version of Roberta (1935); Irene Dunne sings it here. [...]
When Neurosis Calls
We all could use a miniature Bob Newhart in our brains…
If You Can Believe It (or Even If You Can’t)
[Image: backglass from a new(ish) pinball game by Stern, currently available from Premier Amusements] From whiskey river‘s archive (a/k/a the commonplace book): A physicist visits a colleague and notices a horseshoe hanging on the wall above the entrance. “Do you really believe that a horseshoe brings luck?” he asks. “No,” replies the colleague, “but I’ve [...]
Okay, I Still Hate the Name “SyFy”…
…and probably always will. But this is a pretty damned impressive advertisement/trailer: It sort of compresses all the memes from the SyFy cable network’s distinctive bumper spots into a big ol’ nearly coherent 2:40 whole (and avoids the corny-CGI temptations to which the network’s special-effects guys all too often succumb in the actual programs). Nice. [...]
A Quirky Eclectic Christmas Music Playlist (2009 ed.)
Taking off from the first edition… All I’m going to do for the music portion here is just add ten songs (and pray that, over time, I won’t blow the little WordPress audio-player thingie out of the water). As before, these artists and numbers appear, back-to-back, in the playlist: Peter Robbins et al.: dialogue from [...]
What’s in a Song: Cry Me a River (2)
[This is Part 2 of a two-part series about the song "Cry Me a River," made popular, originally, in a recording released in 1955. Part 1, about the song's history, appeared a few days ago. As I indicated there, if you hope to learn anything from this about the Justin Timberlake song of the same [...]
Loitering in Mind
A somewhat slapdash whiskey river Friday post this week, its author having been pretty much laid low by the stupidest of ailments — a cold — since Tuesday night. From whiskey river’s commonplace book (a thematic archive): Can You Imagine? For example, what the trees do not only in lightning storms or the watery dark [...]
At the Outset
From whiskey river: Morning Why do we bother with the rest of the day, the swale of the afternoon, the sudden dip into evening, then night with his notorious perfumes, his many-pointed stars? This is the best– throwing off the light covers, feet on the cold floor, and buzzing around the house on espresso– maybe [...]
