Sugar, Sugar, Baby, Baby, I Do, I Do

One more time trying to put my appreciation of K3 into perspective. I once posted the Rubettes’ song “Sugar Baby Love,” but it was lost eighteen months ago when a bug-ridden WordPress plug-in allowed my database to be destroyed, forcing me to restore from a backup. Here again is “Sugar Baby Love.”

http://youtu.be/3X7PvU6qYEA

No, I never cared in the least for The Bay City Rollers, but this I love. If I were going to write and produce a pop tune, you can bet it would sound like “Sugar Baby Love.” Next, ABBA ranks right up there with the best of the 70’s sicky-sweet stuff.

Listen to the 15+ seconds that start at :45 into the song. That’s it! For me that’s the song. Perfection! The same bit is repeated at 1:45. (The song is over a little after 2:30, but they drag it out.) If you think my liking ABBA means I would be inclined to see “Mama Mia!” then you don’t get it. It’s the song itself. How it’s put together, and how it sounds, that I appreciate. Something that’s “based upon it” is of no interest to me at all. In the case of ABBA, the “how it sounds” aspect depended completely upon the girls, Anni-Frid and Agnetha.

And now K3, in a piece I can’t praise enough. “Hart Verloren” pushes all sorts of buttons in so many ways, even with the terrible quality of this video. And I’m speaking as a confirmed disco hater from the 70’s who favored The Ramones, Elvis Costello and The Clash.

http://youtu.be/sEackIhp-O4

The people who create this stuff really know what they’re doing. But the thing that I didn’t get when I first encountered K3, but I certainly do now, is that K3 is successful not because of the formula, but because of Karen, Kristel and Kathleen. Accept no substitutes, of which there are now two sets.

Finally, another reason why I push K3 so much is the fact they’re happening NOW. I caught them before they stopped having hits, broke up, or went into semi-retirement. Not everything I write should be about the pop culture I loved when I was 10-15 years old. There’s also the fact I can’t compete with the big sites that talk about the Beatles, Marvel Comics, etc., and here in America I have K3 practically all to myself as a topic.

Christmas, forty years later…

This is the 40th anniversary of my parents moving us to Massachusetts. Christmas of ’68 is indelibly associated in my mind with $1 Peanuts books and the Beatles record called “The Beatles”.

I don’t listen to the White Album every Christmas, but I’m glad that Fantagraphics made it possible to revive the Charlie Brown tradition by publishing The Complete Peanuts. I posted a picture of last year’s books, and I’ll start a new tradition by showing you this year’s books. One of them has a serious printing defect, but all of the pages are there so I don’t mind.

Complete Peanuts, \'67-\'70

We enjoy getting a few new ornaments every year, and Carol bought this one with Snoopy and Woodstock.

Peanuts Christmas Tree Ornament

Gene Colan wins Sparky Award

The Sparky Award, given by the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco, is named after Charles M. Schulz. This year the Sparky Award has been given to none other than Gene Colan. As I pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Gene is seriously ill, but he’s been feeling well enough for a trip to California. After Gene’s been back home for a few days maybe I’ll give him and Adrienne a call to offer my congratulations.

One of the first Web pages I ever composed, back in 2002, was about Gene Colan. You’ll find it at this link.

Beatles song titles hidden in ‘Emma’

Last summer I did a post on the anime called Emma. The second season is now out on DVD, and we’re watching it. Tonight we spotted a moment in a show where a ledger is being shown, but then we realized that instead of being an accounting of financial transactions, it’s a bunch of Beatles song titles. I’ve tried to make them legible in this image.

\"Emma\" anime

Jan’s Earth Mother Perspective

DogRat comment writer Jan, Arthur Godfrey fan and very nice person, has a blog. Jan needs some encouragement to keep writing, so go there and leave some nice comments. She’s on Blogger/Blogspot, and you’ll need an account with either that or Google to sign in.

http://folktress-mythoughtsonline.blogspot.com/

Jan, my suggestion is to just keep writing. A lot! Sheer quantity is the way to go, whether or not you think anybody is noticing. I don’t know how Google bloggers keep track of how many people are out there, but being my own webmaster I can see that in November I had over 7500 different addresses on the Internet accessing DogRat. But of those people, how many leave comments? An infinitesimally small percentage.