Well, after 75 years, it's cooled off just a smidgen.
But it still sounds just fine.
Check out this startling tale involving a pair of Kansas City Star reporters reportedly presented with a proposition – a variation on Sophie’s Choice – that only one position remained for the two of their jobs.CAN YOU believe it? I knew that you could.
“They brought in two reporters – Karen Dillon and Dawn Bormann – and told them that one of them had to go,” says a staffer. “And that they had to decide which one would stay and they had until next week to figure it out. Sort of like ‘The Hunger Games.’ That’s the scuttlebutt anyway.”
There’s more.
“Karen Dillon has seniority, so she has the option of taking it or not taking it,” says the source. “And if she does, Dawn gets laid off. Dawn’s a great person but I think Karen will vote in favor of herself because she’s got teenage kids at home.”
This just in: Bormann is o-u-t.
Click on photos for larger, readable versions |
The big band session that took place on October 7 produced three vocals by Helen Ward and three instrumentals, including a Henderson-arranged "Alexander's Ragtime Band" as well as the solidly swung "Riffin' at the Ritz," during which Goodman melted into the reed section in a rare switch from clarinet to alto saxophone; the sax solo is by tenor man Vido Musso, who sounds a lot like Chu Berry or Coleman Hawkins. Henderson also arranged "Somebody Loves Me" and Jimmy Mundy drew up the charts for "Jam Session" and "Bugle Call Rag." These titles were waxed on November 5, 1936; on that same day Goodman sang "T'ain't No Use" and Chick Webb's star vocalist Ella Fitzgerald sat in on three recordings that generated flack from executives at Decca who protested that Ella was breaching her contract by getting with Victor. During a subsequent recall of product and reissuing of reshuffled titles, "Did You Mean It?" was pulled from the catalog entirely and would not reappear for many years.SOMETIMES, just when you think you have one kind of history on your hands, you find out you have another kind entirely.
It's a day that will live in infamy, and a day that Greg Camp's aging father has never forgotten.That's why today, Camp will sit down for lunch with his 92-year-old dad and four more survivors of the brutal Dec. 1, 1941, aerial attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese bombers.
"Pearl Harbor Day . . . Pearl Harbor Day . . . that's like in December, right? That crippled president said something famous about Pearl Harbor back in the day, dude.
"Uhhh . . . 'Tuesday, Dec. 1, 1943, a date that will live in the infirmary . . . .' THAT'S IT!
"OK, I got this. Kewl."
Molly the Dog, who is Important |
The Quicky's convenience store in Mid-City takes its parking lot rules seriously. Very seriously.
About 4 p.m. Friday, New Orleans paramedics rushed inside the store for a man with a life-threatening medical issue.
They worked on the patient with chest pain, put him inside the vehicle, then started to speed off.
The paramedics “heard a loud noise,” and the vehicle came to a screeching halt, according to Jeb Tate, spokesman for New Orleans Emergency Medical Services.
The medics stepped out and found a boot on their ambulance.
Convenience store employees allegedly put a restrictive parking boot on the ambulance. And now it was stuck.
The paramedics were perplexed.
Tate said the ambulance had its emergency lights on the whole time.
Store employees didn’t want to talk about it. They declined requests for comment.
Apparently one of the employees took the boot off. The tire was left flat.
And so the paramedics and the man with the emergency waited.
“We actually had to delay that patient's care by calling another ambulance out here to come transport this patient,” Tate said.
The man who booted the ambulance was a Quicky’s convenience store employee and New Orleans Police cited him for simple criminal damage to property for putting the boot on the ambulance.SO, do you need any more proof that New Orleans is not of this country, if indeed of this world? It's not just anywhere that you will find such a perfect storm of abject stupidity plus people always, always on the make and looking for somebody, anybody to shake down.
Eyewitness News saw workers continuing to boot cars in their parking lot Monday morning. A worker at Quicky's convenience store said the employee, identified in a police report as Ahmed Sidi Aleywa, who booted a working ambulance Friday has been fired.
“The guy that did this, he came from another country. He didn't even know what an ambulance looked like. He's been fired,” said Ali Colone, a man identified as a worker at Quicky’s. The owners declined to comment, but Colone said the owners are sorry it happened.
“We just have rules and regulations that we have to follow by. There are signs out here for our regular customers,” Colone said.
Those rules and regulations are self-imposed. Quicky’s parking lot is private property. Signs posted read, “If you leave the property your vehicle will be booted."
Akesha Allen is a private investigator and in September, she stopped to get a drink at Quicky's. Before getting out, she climbed to the back of the van to secure her equipment when it started shaking.
“I said, what are you doing? I'm not illegally parked. He goes, yes you are. You didn't pay the fee. I said I never got out of the van to pay the fee,” Allen said about a $5 charge for parking in the lot.
They gave her a sheet that said she owed them $120 to remove the boot.
“We had to come out there with cash. They wouldn't take a check,” said Mark Avery, Allen’s employer at Deep South Investigations.
“I’ve been amongst people all my life and if you put me in a corner someplace, you may just as well carry me out now.”ISN'T THAT a fine epitaph for anyone? Especially so for a musician.
That’s what musician Edward E. Svoboda told the American Rag newspaper in 2007, the year he retired from his day job. “He had a strong work ethic,” said his son. Musician Svoboda, 99, whose funeral will be Saturday, formed the Red Raven Orchestra in 1942. He last played publicly with the orchestra in July, at the Corrigan Senior Center.
Svoboda died Sunday at Compassionate Memory Care in Omaha after a brief illness, said son Edward “Sonny” Svoboda of Omaha.
The elder Svoboda led the orchestra for 70 years, eventually ceding the reins to his son. Svoboda was inducted into the Sokol Polka Hall of Fame in 1974.
“He grew up in a family of 10, and his dad was very strict,” said Sonny Svoboda.
Edward E. Svoboda, the family’s youngest child, ended his formal education after the third grade at Assumption School in Omaha.
(snip)
In the 1930s he bought a topof- the-line button accordion, paying off the $300 instrument a little a time at Hospe’s Music. He began playing for pay in 1937 in South Omaha.
He led the orchestra with the accordion until a machine accident damaged his fingers enough that he had to switch to drums.
Red Raven Orchestra played at Bluffs Run Casino, Sokol Hall and annually at the Czech Festival in Wilber, Neb. The musicians were popular at public and private dances throughout the region. The group also played the polka circuit in Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas and South Dakota.
“I feel good when I see people smiling and dancing. I know they’re enjoying themselves,” Svoboda told New Horizons newspaper in 2011. “It’s been a nice journey. We’ve met a lot of nice people.”
Ashli |
Cindy |
On Sunday night, while the Rolling Stones were performing for 20,000 people at the O2 in London – the first of five concerts they will be playing in London and New York to mark their 50th anniversary – one of their early heroes was also making an appearance a few miles across town, in the somewhat shabbier surroundings of the Kentish Town Forum.
Bobby Womack is the veteran soul singer who wrote, and with his group The Valentinos recorded, the original version of It’s All Over Now, which gave the Stones their first number one hit in Britain in 1964. Womack once recalled his chagrin at his mentor Sam Cooke giving the Stones his song, and depriving him of having the hit himself. “I was still screaming and hollering right up until I got my first royalty cheque. Man, the amount of money rolling in shut me right up.”
Womack, 68, who styles himself as “the Soul Survivor”, has survived drug problems, near-penury and cancer. He was performing songs from a new album, The Bravest Man In The Universe (modesty was never his strong suit), produced by another, younger admirer, Damon Albarn.
The Rolling Stones, who started out as a rhythm and blues covers band, borrowing heavily from black artists such as Womack (a debt which, to their credit, they have always warmly acknowledged), are now among the wealthiest entertainers in the world, a thriving corporation, steered by a CEO – Mick Jagger – who has demonstrated a mixture of shrewdness and business acumen that makes him the peer of any more strait-laced captain of industry.
The Stones are reportedly being paid more than £15 million for their five shows. Ticket prices for the London performances range from £95 to £375, with a “VIP hospitality” ticket priced at £950, and no concessions for the pensioners who are the group’s most devoted audience, many of whom will doubtless have travelled to the O2 on their Freedom Passes.
We can put aside Jagger’s blithe explanations that when it comes to ticket prices the group are merely hapless victims of market forces, or Ronnie Wood’s shrugging dismissal that “we’ve got to make something”. The Stones long ago set the benchmark for shameless cynicism when it comes to exploiting “the brand”. Among the luxury items on offer when the box-set of Exile On Main Street was released two years ago was a limited-edition box of three lithographs, “signed individually by Mick, Keith or Charlie”, priced at £1,999.99. Note, that’s “or”, not “and”.
By one account, the biggest crush of the night at the O2 was not at the front of the stage but at the merchandising stand, where eager customers were spending £200 on a poster of a gorilla’s face – the artwork on the cover of the the band’s newly released greatest hits, Grrr!. Of course, one should not begrudge a handful of pensioners a few bob in their declining years, but as Johnny Rotten once said, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
(snip)YEAH, I can agree with that. The Stones lost me with "Some Girls," on which they tried to be disco-relevant in 1978. The lowlight was the title track -- Google the lyrics and cringe.
It is an odd paradox that while the Stones have not made an album worth listening to since Tattoo You in 1981, they are bigger business now than they ever were – the prime example of Sixties and Seventies rock music as heritage industry. The Stones performing their greatest hits, Brian Wilson performing Pet Sounds, Van Morrison performing Astral Weeks – these are rock music’s equivalent of the blockbuster Jackson Pollock or David Hockney retrospective.
Some manage this trick better than others. It is a tired and familiar trope to point out the irony of old rockers, who can barely make it to the stage unaided, singing the anthems of their rebellious youth: The Who, for example, singing My Generation at the Olympics closing ceremony (or to be more precise, half the Who, the rhythm half having sadly fulfilled the song’s prophecy). Paul McCartney has become a national institution, wheeled out at state occasions to sing the creaking Hey Jude – the post-war generation’s We’ll Meet Again – with ever-diminishing effect. Surely it’s time to give it a rest?
Watching the splendid documentary Crossfire Hurricane, shown on the BBC over two consecutive weekends, reminded you of just how glamorous, how dangerous, how romantic the Stones were in their prime; a different species altogether from the cadavers who emerged, as if from creaking coffins, on to the O2 stage. Jagger is, as they say, marvellous for his age but nobody would describe him as “a soul survivor” – unless one counts surviving the inconvenience of tax exile, two expensive divorces and, by his own account, “dozens” of paternity suits.AT LEAST we still have the albums from when the Stones still mattered.
It was always said of Jagger that his ambitions were to mingle with the aristocracy. He achieved that and more; in a sense, the Stones became the aristocracy themselves, in the process exhibiting some of the more disagreeable characteristics of their caste, with all the air of entitlement and the barely concealed disdain for the paying punter.
Another song comes to mind. “Let’s drink to the hard-working people/Let’s drink to the lowly of birth/Raise your glass to the good and the evil/Let’s drink to the salt of the earth.”
The song is Salt of the Earth by … the Rolling Stones. It was not a song they found time to play at the O2. They did, however, perform It’s All Over Now. Surely now, it’s really time it was.
Oh . . . and there's thi |
Thanksgiving has just passed and Sarah Henderson has already taken the holiday lights off her roof.TAKE THIS incident and transpose the psychology to the realm of governance, politics and what passes for civil society in Louisiana, and you might gain a little understanding of the place. Then you'll do a face palm.
A visit from the police prompted by complaints from her neighbors might have hurried the process.
The lights were in the shape of a hand flipping the middle finger, neighbors said. Henderson said that’s what she intended.
“I got to looking, and I said is that what I think it is?” said Gemma Rachal, who lives at the far end of the street. “I put on my glasses just to be double sure.”
“I’m furious,” Rachal said “My 6-year-old tried to make the symbol with his hand.”
She said she was afraid her son might mimic the gesture again at kindergarten.
Neighbor Hunter Lee said the lights bothered him because of his children, ages 3 and 9.
He said he didn’t like “having to explain to the kids what it means.”
Amy Bryant, who lives a block away, said that when she first saw the lights this weekend she thought, “I can’t believe she did it.”
Police Chief Scott Jones said an officer went to Henderson’s house on Starlite Drive on Monday and talked Henderson into taking the lights down.
The finger was intended for neighbors with whom she’s had a yearlong disagreement over personal matters, she said.I THINK I had a flashback just now. Yes, I definitely had a flashback just now. That's because I can picture my mother doing the exact same thing.
“This is how I expressed myself,” Henderson said. “It’s the only means I have to express myself to these people.”
She said she has thought about replacing the extended finger with a swastika.