Author: DOuG pRATt

Brit bitch on Mitch

We turn our attention yet again to Mitch Miller, this time for a British perspective on the late musician/talent scout/record producer. As the English news outlet The Independent said in its obituary of Mitch…

Miller loved coming to London. One of his slogans was “Thank God for the British” because he always felt that a record that had failed in America might get a second chance when it was released here. “Cool Water” (Laine), “Christopher Columbus” (Mitchell) and “Where Will the Dimple Be” (Clooney) had been overlooked in the US, but became successful in the UK. “I like the British,” he told the New Musical Express in 1955. “They are not in as much a hurry as we Americans are. They take time out to really listen.”

Russell Davies on BBC Radio 2 (who isn’t BBC TV’s Russell T. Davies) spent fifteen minutes of his Sunday programme talking about Mitch, and he played Rosemary Clooney singing a very odd novelty song, “Where Will the Dimple Be?” which was a #7 hit in England.

[Audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2010/AUG/RussellDavies.mp3]

Davies points out that Thurl “Tony the Tiger” Ravenscroft (“You’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch”) is credited for singing bass, and thanks to 78s4FR on YouTube we can see the original record label as it appeared in England in 1955.

The Compleatles

Denro and I have various catch-phrases we like to use, and at least a couple of them are Beatles-related quotes. One of them is, “I can say no more,” from HELP! Another is “Touring became intolerable,” from an 80’s documentary, now out-of-print, called The Compleat Beatles. Here’s the complete Compleat. The quote is at 1h 12m into the video.

http://youtu.be/DrvhyL0cIm4?t=1h12m10s

Just another web site

It’s not the Internet, which was developed under the direction of Bob Taylor. It’s not Xerox PARC, where the GUI, Ethernet, and laser printing were developed under the guidance of the same Bob Taylor, and it’s not the Wordwide Web, developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN. It’s just another Web site. A Web site that only now is going to have its own data centers. It’s Facebook.

Does the human interest story behind the start of Facebook, and the fact that it’s current and has 20-something appeal, make it more worthy of a major motion picture than the creation of the Internet and the WWW? Doesn’t matter, because the movie The Social Network is coming…

I like Facebook. Has it changed my life? No, WordPress has had a much bigger effect on me personally. I’ve been on the Internet from home since early 1994, and Facebook came along much too late in my online experience for me to be awed by it.

By the way, the version of radiohead’s “creep” that’s heard in that movie trailer is by the Belgian singing group the Scala & Kolacny Brothers Choir, who I featured here a couple of years ago.

Runners ruin running

Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, lawyer Cameron Stracher said,

The demise of the American runner was hastened by the success of the first running boom in the 1970s and the embrace of running as a “pastime” rather than a sport.

Stracher has some impressive finish times in races, but this attitude he’s copping won’t win him any fans. Yes, U.S. runners are pokier than they were in 1979, and that’s because they/we are a lot OLDER than they were in 1979, and there’s no next generation in their teens or twenties that’s catching the running bug. But it makes no sense to blame the recreational and/or average runners who provide the money to support all of the road races, and the running shoe industry.

A month ago I said I’d be looking for a different running shoe, and I’ve found one. It’s the Asics GT-2150.