Category: All Posts

Pretty ballerina

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.

Prudence Bury, age 17

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.

http://youtu.be/uyIZtrvzGEM

Donald toots his own Trump-et

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…

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/19/us-donaldtrump-idUSTRE73I5Z620110419

If we stop buying from China, China will go down like no other country has ever gone down before. China needs us more than we need them.

Poor, uninformed Donaldo is wrong, because one way or the other we have to buy from China.


http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/37344/

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…

… and what they should be — if anything.

That’s Entertainment!

I dropped off some friends at the Worcester, Massachusetts airport today, and on the way back home I stopped at Paul Howley’s super-duper store, That’s Entertainment, to spend some of my unexpectedly big tax refund. I was very pleased to see LP copies of Bob Dylan: In Concert, Brandeis University, 1963, so I bought one of those. I was equally inspired when I spotted The Beatles Box of Vision, an item I’ve been tempted to get many times, but had never managed to pull the trigger until today.

Both of my new acquisitions exceeded my expectations, which were high to start with. Dylan’s concert was recorded well, especially considering when it was done, and the LP sounds great. This is Bob Dylan at the height of his early folk period, with his politics freshly awakened by his passionate girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.

Although the Beatles Box of Vision came out with the remastered CD’s in 2009, my idea was to use it to dress up the original CD’s released nearly 25 years ago. Well, that’s what I did, and I’m very pleased with the results. The only problem is, I’m missing a couple of the discs, so now I’ll have to get those or forever be bugged by the empty slots in the sleeves.

One of the more interesting Beatles reissues is Yellow Submarine Songtrack, which is in the picture. This must-have CD offers a generous sampling of tracks that weren’t only remastered, they were remixed. In terms of sheer sound quality, they’re noticeably superior to the 2009 remastered stereo master tapes, and they’re proof that the Beatles catalog will need yet one more release.

Hawks vs. Hunks

In the post right before this one, while discussing the composer Leroy Shield, R. Crumb said that he prefers Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks to the Dutch dance band The Beau Hunks. Let’s do a comparison. First, the Nighthawks…

http://youtu.be/P8y_AglUPR8

… and now the Beau Hunks, with the same three tunes by Leroy Shield.

[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/26+Look+at+Him+Now.mp3,http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/02+Beautiful+Lady.mp3,https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Apr/05+Bells.mp3|titles=The Beau Hunks – Look At Him Now,The Beau Hunks – Beautiful Lady,The Beau Hunks – Bells]