What’s on Netflix Watch Now? The Flight of the Phoenix. Not a great movie, but it’s one that I remember enjoying on TV with my father, decades ago.
I’d forgotten that it features Academy Award® winner Ernest Borgnine. Long ago, my mother was with Borgnine in a traveling troupe of actors from the Barter Theater. She always called him Ernie. Ya know, I’ve never really thought about it before, but Borgnine bears something of a resemblance to my father. Hmm…
I’ve previously highlighted the Spider-Man reprint comics that are found in certain Sunday newspapers. They disappeared from my paper for a few weeks, but they’ve been back for the past four weeks.
Almost all of the art in these stories, now over 40 years old, was done by Steve Ditko. I don’t know about you, but I consider these figure drawings to be compelling and unique. Superb representations of the human form in space and motion, accentuated and made abstract by the best super-hero costume ever designed.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/TennisBall.flv 400 300]
Is this for real? I’ll leave it to you to try. Don’t blame me if you burn the house down trying to make the hole! If you use a knife instead, don’t cut yourself! And if you haven’t seen a demonstration of key bumping yet, click here.
As told back in October (before I figured out how to do embedded audio and video right), I was once a huge fan of Randy Newman, back in his satirical days. Newman is in Newsweek, and I caught him today on BBC radio, talking about his new composition, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country”.
Newman’s never-great singing voice seems to be failing him, so he just talks his way through this, and it isn’t one of his catchier tunes, but it’s good to have him despairing over Presidential politics enough to write about it.
Before I post another video with Pop songtress supreme Petula Clark, let’s back up a little to 1955-56 and put her career into perspective. Rock and Roll was on the horizon, and the Skiffle music craze was huge in England. Pet’s style obviously wasn’t going to mesh with that.
Skiffle was popularized by Lonnie Donegan, who had a huge influence on British kids, including John Lennon. Donegan seemed to have a wide range of musical interests and influences, including Woody Guthrie, who was later a primary inspiration for Bob Dylan. Donegan performs Guthrie’s “Grand Cooley Dam” in this video:
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/FEB07/LonnieDonegan.flv 320 235]
Donegan had a gigantic hit with “Rock Island Line,” a song that he apparently first heard on an old record by Leadbelly. It was such a big hit for Donegan that it crossed over to America, and Stan Freberg did a parody of it.
The audio player has Donegan’s “Rock Island Line”, along with a follow-up hit, “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour On The Bedpost Overnight?”
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/RockIslandLine.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/ChewingGum.mp3]And here is Leadbelly doing “Rock Island Line”, along with Freberg’s parody of Donegan:
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/Leadbelly.mp3,http://www.dograt.com/Audio/FEB07/StanFreberg.mp3]
I thought screen captures weren’t possible with the Netflix Watch Now player, but not so. I grabbed the picture above and shrank it. Another bit of good news is my connection speed is now consistently being rated as fast. On the downside, I’ve found a couple of issues with using the TV output from the computer, but these are within my NVidia graphics adapter, and have nothing to do with Netflix.
