Barely treading water here with the blog, I’m sorry to say. Unavoidable, with Boston Marathon training underway, so I’ll do another quickie post.
Motown Records just had its 50th anniversary. Label founder Berry Gordy made a point of catching up with the Beatles in 1964 before they returned to England to film “A Hard Day’s Night.”
At the movie studio there was some overlap between the filming of “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Mary Poppins”. Here’s Paul with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke.
To do a quick security check of websites you can use McAfee’s free Site Advisor. There’s a plug-in for Internet Explorer and one for Firefox, or you can enter an address at this link.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/download/ff.html
In June Microsoft will be ending its Live OneCare security subscription and introducing a free service, called Morro. This could, and should, be your chance to let go of the security software you use now.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/nov08/11-18NoCostSecurityPR.mspx
pret•ty (prit’ee) adj.
1. See Cheryl Holdridge
Cheryl Holdridge has died. The first time I saw her was close to fifty years ago. Annette has been ill for so long, I assumed she would leave first. And nothing against Annette, but she was a distant second to Cheryl.
Recently I posted comedian Morty Gunty’s rendition of “There’s A War.” Here is the flip side of the single, a comedy routine called “Blind Date,” with Morty backed by a cool jazz ensemble.
[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JAN/GuntyBlindDate.mp3]The writing credit is “A. Cogan,” presumably a misspelling of comedy writer Arnie Kogen, who can be seen with Mark Evanier and some other noteworthy gents, all associated with MAD Magazine.
Arnie Kogen, Al Feldstein, Sergio Aragonés, Mark Evanier, Al Jaffee
I’ve lost a lot of my vituperous political vitriol, now that the Presdent-elect is close to being inaugurated. Obama has been reticent concerning Gaza, but vocal about the domestic economy. A few things concern me about the plan to spend our way out of the recession, which is shaping up to being a Recession with a capital “R”.
The feds have already borrowed up to the hilt, and interest rates are already as low as they can get. There’s no give in either direction, but we’re going to borrow even more money from China. Eventually, the Chinese are going to feel they’re in a position to dictate terms, the way Washington should be dictating terms — but isn’t — to Wall Street.
Something else that has been brought up lately by pundits is that the Great Depression wasn’t ended by the New Deal, but by World War II. This time around I don’t see how a war is going to help, because we’re already in a war, and in fact it’s one of the reasons why the economy is in such a mess.
Regarding how the stimulus package money should be spent, there’s a double challenge. First, immediate job creation would come from infrastructure repairs — roads and bridges — which would require relatively little planning and could be ramped up quickly. But bigger projects shouldn’t be for civil engineering, like FDR’s Hoover Dam, but must instead be for energy technology. People used to point to the offshoot technologies that came from NASA in the sixties, but those had only a minor impact on the economy. The creation of the Internet and the GPS were of incalculable value, and both came from Defense Department dollars. Let’s get out of Iraq and spend the money on the biggest security risk facing America — oil dependency.
Many YouTube videos have such low technical quality as to be barely watchable, so my sister Jean was impressed by an OK copy, despite being a vertically cropped version with the wrong aspect ratio, of the Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night doing “If I Fell.” Here’s how it appears and sounds on YouTube…
… and here’s my own transfer, from LaserDisc, captured on a Pinnacle 500 PCI. Better?
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/2009/JAN/IfIFell.flv 480 360]
