Arizona may not like Daylight Saving Time, but I sure do.
The Big Snit
If you like cartoons, and you have never seen The Big Snit, you should watch The Big Snit.
Better Slate than never
The online magazine Slate.com has a Beatles blog. They’re late getting to the party, and I don’t how long they’ll keep it going, but it’s always good to see general media outlets showing interest in the boys, now that we’re fifty years into Beatlemania.
A few posts ago I mentioned Ringo’s Premier brand drum kit — the one that predated his famous Ludwig drums. The kick drum had a squeaky pedal, as can be heard quite clearly on the Please Please Me album, especially in the twin-track stereo recording.
In the picture above is Ringo’s original drum kit, with his name on it, from his days playing with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. A couple of months later, as seen below, the first official Beatles logo, as originally designed by Paul, was introduced. It didn’t last long, however, because a few months later it was replaced with the classic Beatles logo that was designed by Ivor Arbiter, and delivered with Ringo’s Ludwig drum kit.
Where are the K3?
It’s time once again to indulge my not-so-secret shame, K3. Hey, it’s been over six months! This is the video for their song Where Are the Angels?
And this is the promo for their new movie, featuring the song.
Twilight of the greaser zone
Written by Earl Hamner, Jr. of The Waltons, this episode of The Twilight Zone is a favorite of mine. It has a totally wacky premise, about aliens disguised as 50’s greaser bikers moving into a 60’s residential neighborhood, like a sci-fi version of The Wild One. Harvey Lembeck as Eric Von Zipper would have fit right in with these guys.
But it’s Shelley Fabares who makes this episode worth watching. By then, Shelley’s hit Johnny Angel was in the distant past — two years before — and she was making only guest appearances on The Donna Reed Show. Nine days after Black Leather Jackets aired on January 31, 1964, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show.
National Recording Preservation
With the move to an online world without physical media — the so-called “cloud” — I wonder what sort of evidence of our existence there will be hundreds of years from now. NPR has this feature on what the Library of Congress is doing to preserve America’s audio past and present for the future.