Will the criminal con man be sent back to the White House to complete his destruction of American democracy? To calm my nerves on this very scary night, instead of following the election results I’m doing what I did before Halloween, watching The Munsters on the Universal Monsters Channel.
Category: All Posts
Elec-tion-tricity
This is a first for me, posting with my phone over the cellular network. The power is off here, due to a long-delayed utility project in the center of town. Scheduling work on this election day shows some very poor judgment.
Update: I’m using my phone as a wi-fi hotspot for my laptop PC, which is something I have done before. The power is supposed to be on by 10 AM and it’s 8:30 now… and just a few minutes later it’s back.
You know how people get with giant lottery jackpots? “You can’t win if you don’t play” is their logic. But on election day those same people have the attitude, “Why bother? My vote doesn’t count.”
A Capitol Idea
More about Stu Phillips. In the Sixties he was behind the Hollyridge Strings series of albums.
I approached Karl Engemann at Capitol [Records] with a far-out idea of recording an album of Beatles songs in an orchestral setting geared toward easy listening. A sort of “Beatles for the older set.”
Phillips wasn’t the only one with that idea in 1964. Beatles producer George Martin produced instrumental versions of Beatles songs, starting with the A Hard Day’s Night soundtrack.
George Martin then released his Off the Beatle Track album. I checked Martin’s memoir, All You Need is Ears, and there’s no mention of the Hollyridge Strings records.
Music from the first Hollyridge album by Phillips is featured on the Capitol album The Beatles Story.
Helloween
Remembering Mike O’Neal on his birthday.
Sound Noir
The Big Sleep this ain’t. It’s the Firesign Theatre’s gleefully twisted parody of the hard-boiled detective genre, “Nick Danger, Third Eye”.
Rogue Redux
Archive.org is back online with some limitations. For example, iframe embedding seems to be disabled, but the things of interest to me that I have checked are mostly functional.
A year ago I shared an outstanding audio book. Rogue Male, by Geoffrey Household, is an entertaining, engrossing and influential wartime story of British espionage. With embedding broken on the Archive, I can only link to the page.
https://archive.org/details/rogue-male-episode-1
The reading was by Michael Jayston, who passed away last February. YouTube has the complete audiobook, but the chapters are in need of indexing.
Jayston appeared with Alec Guinness in the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. The best quality video I found likewise lacks chapter indexing.