K3 10 Jaar Show

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Why the “K3 onslaught,” as Eric calls it? Because this month is their 10th anniversary, and they’re celebrating with a series of shows.

K3 10 Jaar show 2008

So what I’m doing is jumping on the bandwagon. And here’s the bandwagon.

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How do I keep up with with K3’s concert schedule? I use the RSS feed you’ll find by clicking here. Then click the picture below to enlarge it, and keep in mind that the ladies have been at this for ten years, and they’re busier than ever.

Kathleen Aerts and Karen Damen

I’d like to think this was taken after a show, but it looks to me as though they’re just setting up for a rehearsal. Poor Kathleen! She’s the youngest member in the band, and if she looks this beat, I assume Karen and Kristel must sometimes feel the same way. How much longer can they keep up what is obviously a very grueling schedule? Even Petula Clark had to take some time off every so often in her younger years to attend to family and personal matters.

Another side of K3

If you go through the conveniently categorized K3 posts, it’s obvious there are two different acts — one primarily for kids, and another for their parents. Here’s an example of the latter. According to Google, “Een Rustige Ouwe Dag” translates into “A Quiet Old Day.” A while ago I linked to another take of this video on YouTube, but the audio cuts out in places. This copy is OK. Does it sound to you as though they’re singing “Tom Hanks”?

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This is how the studio version sounds. Very nice.

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I’ve always been fascinated by what works and doesn’t work in popular music, but somewhere along the way, after getting out of the radio business, I stopped keeping up with much of anything new. A few bands caught my attention, including REM and Green Day (Eric can’t stand Green Day!), but for the most part I continued to enjoy the old stuff. Carol got me listening to Steve Earle and Lucina Williams, along with a local singer-songwriter here in Massachusetts named Lori McKenna, who’s had some national success.

Not that I feel the need to justify my appreciation of K3, but as a popular music act, I think they have it. The fact that I don’t understand Flemish is inconsequential.

Catchy songs and production values, with cute costumes and dances, aren’t enough. Thirty seconds of Wir3 performing a K3 song is proof of that. Karen Damen, Kathleen Aerts and Kristel Verbeke are why K3 has been successful for ten years, and seem to be more popular than ever.

Krugman wins Nobel for Economics

What a welcome bit of news. Princeton economist Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize. Krugman is one of the most pointed critics of the George W. Bush administration, and I read both his NYTimes column and blog regularly.

With this award comes, I hope, a move away from the ideas of Milton Friedman, who won the Nobel in 1976. That recognition quickly led to the development of the “trickle down” policies that were implemented by Ronald Reagan starting in 1981. The worldwide economic mess we’re in right now is proof that Friedman was wrong about laissez-faire economic policies in the 1920’s not being one of the causes of the Great Depression.

Kirby Kreations

Browsing through a box of old comic books recently, I realized they were all from the mid-70’s, when I was in college. I had next to no spending cash, so even at 25¢ each, I was very selective in my purchases.

Yet the undeniable reality is that most of them are awful. Even if the art was worth the price of the comic, as was the case with Gene Colan’s Tomb of Dracula, the writing and ideas were mostly junk, compared to what I had read in the 60’s, into the first couple of years in the 70’s. These were the comics that Stephen Colbert grew up reading??

Even the creative legend Jack Kirby began turning out work that could be called eccentric to the point of being incomprehensible. One such example was “The Dingbats of Danger Street,” from 1975.

Dingbats of Danger Street splash page

I’m second to nobody in my admiration of Jack Kirby, but he needed an editor and a dialogue writer, although I suspect nothing could have saved this clunker. Kirby drew three issues, but DC published only one of them.

No wonder the Marvel Comics adaptation of Star Wars, which started months before the movie’s release, seemed so good, despite mediocre art. I hadn’t read a good story in years.

PT cruiser

Are you scared yet, or still merely worried, about the economy? The effects of the stock market collapse, credit crunch and mortgage meltdown are everywhere. The only upside is gas prices are down.

The good news for myself is that I’m in physical therapy for the meltdown of my back, and although I still have some tightness, I’m completely free of pain. I went for a 2-mile walk with Carol today, then I ran two miles. Three weeks ago I couldn’t get out of bed or take a step, and now I feel as though nothing was ever wrong!

But I can’t go back to what I was doing, which was some light stretching before heading out the door to bang out ten miles on the pavement. My PT is teaching me how to strengthen my lower back, while getting a good warm up for running in the process.