This Easter Sunday is Prue Bury’s birthday, and for it I’ll be posting a very special photograph of her, taken by a Beatle on the set of A Hard Day’s Night. Prue’s on the right in this photo, age 17, at the Royal School of Ballet in London.
In 1958, Antony Armstrong-Jones, later titled the First Earl of Snowdon, was appointed the court photographer for the Royal Family. That same eventful year, Armstrong-Jones took this portrait of Prue.
Soon afterwards, Prue would meet Mary Quant and Vidal Sassoon, and be a witness to, and a part of, the start of what later came to be known as Swinging London.
OMG! NFW! I actually agree with Karl “Weasel” Rove about something. The idea that Donald “Gasbag” Trump running for President is a joke.
I suspect the reason why Rove doesn’t like the presence of Sarah Palin or Donald Trump on the national political stage is that they’re wild cards. They don’t play the Republican game by the rules in Rove’s playbook. Trump simply has no credibility, and not just for the birther nonsense. For example, he says…
With worldwide demand for the materials exploding, the site’s owner, Molycorp Minerals, restarted mining at Mountain Pass last December. It is now the Western Hemisphere’s only producer of rare-earth metals and one of just a handful outside of China, which currently produces 95 percent of the world’s supply.
The GOP’s best bet for the 2012 ticket are the Massachusetts Republicans — Mitt Romney and Scott Brown. Go for it, guys.
And while I’m feeling all politic-y, with the tax returns out of the way, and with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert off this week, I’ve been getting caught up on NPR Planet Money podcasts. This pair of reports from a couple of weeks ago is good, about what Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were…
Roku’s top streaming video player, the XDS, is ten bucks off at BJ’s Warehouse stores until May 1st. The package includes a 6-ft. HDMI cable.
If you aren’t into iTunes, and you’re a Netflix user, Roku is the best streaming video player to get. I say that having also used a Wii, Xbox 360, and Sony Blu-ray player for Netflix Watch Instantly. The Wii interface is fun but it doesn’t do HD, the Xbox starts up really fast but it only does Netflix, and the less said about the Sony the better, because it’s a mess by comparison, which makes me wonder about their Blu-Ray player with Google TV.
My wish list for Roku channels includes Slacker and Amazon’s Cloud Player, but the offerings are otherwise excellent. One of my players is on Wifi (802.11g), the other is wired, and they perform identically. Standard definition Netflix videos are encoded at 1.5 Mbps, which shouldn’t be a problem on most broadband connections.
I’ve only recently begun to get caught up on the original Doctor Who series, starting with Tom Baker’s run and featuring Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith. From the episodes I’ve seen, including her recent return with David Tennant as the Doctor, I can understand now why the words “beloved” and “iconic” are used by fans discussing Elisabeth as Sarah Jane. Bismo and I were talking about her just last night.
Elisabeth Sladen died today. The news that she’d had cancer for some time was a sad surprise and a tragic shock to everyone.
Another Marathon Monday, with me merely a spectator. I’ve done Boston seven times, and maybe I have one more in me, but it’s too early to say. It’s been a long, slow road back from the injuries I’ve had, but I’m getting there.
The online tracking system was working until a few minutes ago, but the service has crashed.
Server Error
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Application server is busy. Either there are too many concurrent requests or the server still is starting up.
