Year: 2008

K*3=!

K3 from Belgium are Karen Damen, Kathleen Aerts and Kristel Verbeke. They started in the late 90’s, and they work with an outfit called Studio 100. They’re producing what I would call the Strauss Jr. waltzes of pop music.

I’m imagining myself as a Radio Disney executive, watching these videos of K3; one made in a studio, the other a live performance of the same song….

… and after watching these I would say, “Call Studio 100 and pay them whatever they want. We’ve got to have this.”

Disney would have to risk casting different women, because of the language barrier, although their English could be excellent, for all I know. I think the appeal of the three K’s themselves has much to do with their success in Belgium and the Netherlands, but Xuxa, considered a goddess in Brazil, failed terribly in her attempt to break into America with her broken English. The K3 sound is, however, so compelling to my ears that I’m surprised there hasn’t already been an attempt to import it to the US.

P.S. By the way, the song is called “Kusjesdag” — Flemish for “Kissing Day.” One and a half million YouTube viewers can’t be wrong!

Three From Three K’s

Coming up will be Petula Clark’s recent appearance on BBC TV, but a couple of posts ago I featured a British pop music video by Spiller (who apparently is Italian). A girl group that really pushes the bouncy boundaries of Euro Pop is called K3, from Belgium.

Their language is Flemish, a variant of Dutch, but there’s some French in the lyrics too. These ladies don’t act their age, and in fact they do songs and shows for kids, but I still like this stuff, especially the catchy first song, “Frans Liedje.” Perhaps that’s because years ago Xuxa conditioned me, and before her it was ABBA. More about Xuxa later.

Here’s “Frans Liedje” in stereo. This song annoys my twin sister, and it’s a brother’s lifetime duty to annoy his sisters!

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2008/JUN/FransLiedje.mp3]

Hello, Goodbye, Coffee Lane

Cover of The Comics Journal #290Of his essay “Regarding Schulz and Peanuts,” in The Comics Journal #290, Monte Schulz comments at this link, “I’ve had my say, as I wanted to say it, and that’s it.” In that spirit, I’d like to offer a closing of my own.

When the biography came out last fall, there was something of a companion piece in the form of David Van Taylor’s documentary for the PBS series American Masters, “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz.” I posted a few moments of it at this link, because I feel the emotional core of the program is in the ten minutes about the Schulz family during their years living at Coffee Lane in Sebastopol, California. Here is the complete segment.

[flv:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Video/Schulz/CoffeeLane.flv 440 330]

In my previous entry I included the song “Moon River,” and following the lead of the background music in the documentary, I used Henry Mancini’s recording. But in Monte’s essay he mentions the Andy Williams version, so I’ll toss that one in here.

[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Nov/AW.mp3|titles=Moon River performed by Andy Williams]

BBC Radio 2

The most enjoyable radio listening, by far, that I do these days is over the Net, playing BBC Radio 2. I first got interested because of Jonathan Ross, who did In Search of Steve Ditko. He does a Saturday show, and it’s so much fun, with such a fantastic range of music. Then I started listening to Steve Wright, because he’s supposed to have Petula Clark on as a guest soon. Again, I found the show to be fun, and I was really taken with the song mix. I have no interest in Rap, but Europop has a sound that I enjoy quite a lot. For example, this was one of the songs on Steve Wright’s program today.

[flv:/Video/2008/JUN/Spiller.flv 400 300]

This is “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)” by Spiller, with vocal by Sophie Ellis Bextor. I flip through Boston radio stations a lot, seeing if anything catches my ear, and almost nothing ever does, so it’s not as though I’m completely inattentive. So why is it I find so much on BBC Radio 2 I’ve never heard before that keeps me listening?

Google Goof

At the moment, none of the Google hosted Blogspot blogs I look at are working. It’s error 502, and that’s a bad gateway. Bad gateway! Bad!

This site is WordPress running on Web host iPower. They moved my site from Phoenix to Burlington, MA, not far from from here, and it’s home of iPower’s merger partner Endurance International. The latency times are a fraction of what they were, but throughput sucks. Often it takes 30-60 seconds after clicking log on, or save, for anything to happen. And FTP upload speed is now 150 KB/sec, compared to the consistent 550 KB/sec it had been (yes, that’s bytes, not bits, per second — I have FiOS!).

So either the line into the data center in Burlington doesn’t have enough capacity, or the server I’m on doesn’t have enough CPU for the sites it’s hosting. Maybe it needs TCP offloading. Whatever the cause, I won’t let this continue, and if I have to switch hosting services to see an improvement that’s what I’ll do.