This home movie supposedly shows Marilyn Monroe smoking a marijuana joint. Seems strange, because she was smoking it like a regular cigarette. (Extra credit if you get the reference in the title of this post.)
BTW… as 50’s female icons go, I think Grace Kelly had it all over Marilyn.
Available online until Saturday from BBC Radio 2 is The Songs The Beatles Gave Away. Of particular interest, I think, is Cilla Black and her explanation of how she came to have such a “big voice.”
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/DEC/SongsBeatlesGaveAway.mp3]Today, former Monkee Peter Tork is at the BEATexpo Beatles show in Connecticut. Last weekend, along with Mickey Dolenz, Peter was at the SuperMegafest show in Framingham, MA, west of Boston. Peter took the stage Saturday night, first solo and then backed by a local Monkees tribute band called Loose Salute, named after a Mike Nesmith album. Mickey joined Peter during the concert to do a set, and here is Mickey’s entrance…
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/NOV/MickeyPeter.flv 512 384]
Denro was quick to point out to me that Mickey was stretching the truth about hearing “Oh, Darling!” at Abbey Road studios. Mickey hung out with the Beatles at EMI in ’67, but there’s no way he was there two years later. I’d neglected to swap the nearly-full SDHC card in my camera, so I missed the rest of the song, but somebody else who was there has posted the whole thing.
Tech note: That thin column in the middle of the stage is probably a Bose L1 speaker. The Bose corporate headquarters is right behind the Sheraton hotel where the convention was held.
The History Channel is showing “The Beatles on Record,” an official Apple Corp. documentary. It’s sort of a mini-Anthology, focused solely on their studio work. Parts of it appear as the mini-documentaries on the remastered Beatles CD catalog. For a knowledgeable Beatles fan there’s nothing new in “The Beatles on Record,” but the movie clips are in the best possible quality, and there are some fun studio audio outtakes.
If I’d been paying better attention, I would have noticed that back in September somebody posted the program as it had appeared on the BBC. The American version is exactly 45 minutes without commercials, whereas the British version is a smidgen under one hour. Once again we Americans get an abridged version of a Beatles product! When will it end? I’ve collected the parts into a single YouTube player. It’s window-boxed within a letterbox, but the quality is otherwise excellent.
For comparison, here’s how it looked on the History Channel. This segment covers the middle period, from “Beatles for Sale” through “Sgt. Pepper.” Along the way, the title of Engineer was passed from Norman Smith, whose stint ended with “Rubber Soul,” to Geoff Emerick, who took over the console starting with “Revolver.”
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/NOV/BeatlesOnRecord_03.flv 512 384]
Kudos to Google for its subtle recognition of Charles M. Schulz’s 87th birthday, by using Snoopy and Woodstock for its logo on November 26th, Thanksgiving Day.
Anybody in the U.S. who uses Netflix but doesn’t have a Netflix player for connection to a TV is really missing out. There are now a lot of Netflix-compatible devices. The one that I use, and love, is the Roku player.
Netflix seems to be on top of the movie game, and I think the industry has no choice but to deal with Reed Hastings and his vision of the future, the way Steve Jobs forced the music industry out of digital indecision. But I’m not on iTunes, in part because there are so many other options for music, especially for casual listening.
Roku offers services besides Netflix, and last night I took an update that enabled a bunch of additional channels. The one that caught my eye — actually, my ear — is the Pandora music service. A year ago I started using TheRadio.com, and it’s good, but I have to give the nod to Pandora, now that it’s on the Roku player. I want to hear everything that Elvis Costello has done that I don’t own, and Pandora makes that possible. I assume Costello gets money in the process, so everybody wins.
Another new Roku option is Revision3, with videos about tech topics. Looks promising. One of Revision3’s channels is Film Riot, where a guy named Ryan, who has some of Leonard Maltin’s mannerisms, teaches videography. Ryan’s latest entry features Popeye, which I liked, and I was impressed that he got into some history by talking about a technical innovation invented by Max Fleischer nearly a century ago.
Mediafly, sort of a news aggregator, is the only other Roku channel I wanted to try. Mediafly is rather rough around the edges, and not only is it slow to come up, there seems to be a bug that causes occasional lockups. Sometimes these are local to Mediafly, but sometimes they affect everything else on the player, and a restart is needed.
