Sunday Serendipity

For something a little different an acoustical guitar duet blending Jazz fusion and Flamenco

Mediterranean Sundance by Al Di Meola

Performed by Paco de Lucía & Al Di Meola

From Wiki

consists of an acoustic guitar duet with flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía. With a duration of 5′ 13″, the song is a complex blend of jazz and flamenco influences. Set in 4/4 time and in the key of E minor, the song begins with a duet between Di Meola and de Lucía and then progresses to feature each guitar player taking turns playing rhythm and soloing, and occasionally soloing together.

The song consists of a relatively simple lyrical harmonic progression, adorned by a flamenco rhythm. It poses extreme difficulties to the performers, however, because of the speed and precision required of Di Meola’s picking on the steel-stringed guitar, playing extremely long melodic phrases, and to Paco De Lucia’s complex fingerpicking on the Flamenco guitar, as well as the exact matching of Di Meola and De Lucía’s solos which frequently consist of them both playing a rapid set of matching or corresponding notes. They make use of many guitar performance techniques and fingerstyles, such as drumming guitar tops, strumming (both solo and together), bare thumb plucking, palm muting, tremolo picking, hammer-ons and pull-offs, sweep picking, shredding, vibratos and glissandos. The song was a success.

Enjoy, Jack

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25 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”

  2. cold open not that great – again – but click here if you want to watch it:

    Russian Disinformation Cold Open – SNL – YouTube

    otherwise enjoy segments from last night’s weekend update

    Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week’s biggest news, like Melania Trump’s personal items failing to reach opening bid.

    and

    Peyton Manning stops by Weekend Update to discuss the NFL playoffs Tom Brady retirement rumors.

  3. TheHill

    The Biden administration has increasingly focused on calling out Russian disinformation and propaganda, making it a central pillar of its strategy to confront Moscow and help defend Ukraine in the face of Russia’s war tactics.
    The strategy reflects a shift for Washington as it seeks to challenge Russian efforts head-on following years of hard-learned lessons where Moscow moved to sow confusion and stir strife in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
    “We have made a decision — a strategic decision — to call out disinformation when we see it,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a briefing with reporters on Wednesday.
    “We are much more cognizant of the Russian disinformation machine than we were in 2014 … Russia has a boundless capacity to misrepresent truth and what it’s doing,” she said.
    The administration has offered extraordinary assessments in recent weeks describing the lengths Moscow is willing to go to overtake Ukraine. 
    This includes Psaki at the White House podium raising alarm that Russia intends to carry out a “false flag” operation in Ukraine to create a pretext for invasion and U.S. intelligence reportedly supporting an assessment by the British Foreign Ministry that Moscow intends to install a “pro-Russian leader” in Kyiv.
    Experts tracking Russian disinformation operations welcome the administration’s blunt assessments delivered by high-level officials. And while officials have withheld concrete evidence to support their claims, experts say this is likely aimed at protecting sources and methods.
    The U.S., while accusing Russia of fabricating a crisis in Ukraine, has pursued a vigorous path of diplomacy with Moscow to try to stave off an invasion of Ukraine. Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops along its neighbors’ borders in what it says is a defensive maneuver against threats from the West.
    The U.S. has rejected this pretense while carrying out other actions viewed as countering Russian disinformation, including last week sanctioning four Ukrainian officials it says are engaged in disinformation in Ukraine at the direction of Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB.
    The State Department last week also published two fact sheets debunking false Russian narratives, while the Department of Homeland Security has issued alerts warning of possible Russian cyberattacks against U.S. companies and infrastructure.
    The administration further said it sent support to Ukraine after government websites suffered a cyberattack recently, which officials in Kyiv have largely attributed to Russia. 
    All of this is viewed as a multipronged approach to countering Russia’s wide spectrum of alleged disinformation operations. 
    “I see the administration as having taken several steps, many of them in the past week to try and get ahead of Russian hybrid activity,” said Jessica Brandt, policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution.
    “These efforts to track and to catalog and to expose are very important.”
    Brandt added that calling out possible sabotage operations — such as the alleged false flag operation and “pro-Russian” government plot — can make “it impossible for, or at least considerably harder, for the Kremlin to carry out that plot with a straight face.”
    “By having made this claim quite strongly, definitively, from the [White House] podium, I think it does decrease the likelihood that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will use this specific tactic,” she said.
    [continues]

     

    to ms. jessica: you wanna bet? no way vlad stops with the diss. he’s the original mean girl.

  4. anyway, vlad has his puppet ready and willing with stupid stuff like this at rallies:

    “If I run, and if I win, we will treat those people from Jan. 6 fairly.”

    “And if it requires pardons, we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly.”

  6. Another balmy morning in East Bumfuck. 8 degrees F and cloudy. Forecast is for 51 degrees Tuesday. Saw crocus trying to join the world 2 weeks ago, confused by the warm weather then. They’re buried under 6” of snow now, no longer confused. 

    I saw the cold open on SNL last night. Definitely not one of their better ones although the Aaron Rogers bit was humorous. I’ll have to listen to WE. Fell asleep before it began.

  7. Jack…  magnificent!
     
    patd…  I really miss those Brady vs Manning games.  I always had a good time…  even if the Patriots lost.  And I have to admit… Peyton Manning is one funny dude!  He delivers his lines flawlessly.
     
    We did end up with a foot of very light snow.  No big deal.  But I bet OldSeaHag doesn’t have power right now…

  9. just a matter of time now

    [transcript face the nation today]

    SEN. GRAHAM: Here’s what I’ll tell him and the nation, I- I can’t think of a better person for President Biden to consider for the Supreme Court than Michelle Childs. She has wide support in our state. She’s considered to be a fair minded, highly gifted jurist. She’s one of the most decent people I’ve ever met. It would be good for the court to have somebody who’s not at Harvard or Yale. She’s a graduate of the University of South Carolina, a public education background. She’s been a workers comp judge. She’s highly qualified. She’s a good character. And we’ll see how she does if she’s nominated. But I cannot say anything bad about Michelle Childs. She is an awesome person.

    […]

    SEN. GRAHAM: if she’s nominated, she will not be treated like Judge Kavanaugh, I promise you, by Republicans. Let’s see how she does at the hearing. But I think I’ve made it pretty clear that I’m a big admirer of–

    MARGARET BRENNAN: Yes, you did–

    SEN. GRAHAM: Judge Charles. And I’d like to see the court have- a have a lot more balance, some common sense on it. Everybody doesn’t have to be from Harvard, Yale–

    MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.

    SEN. GRAHAM: It’s okay to go to a public university and get your law degree.

    MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, you have been glowing in your descriptions, but your colleague, Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, said picking a female black Supreme Court justice is affirmative racial discrimination. He questioned her- any potential impartiality from any of the candidates named. Nikki Haley of South Carolina also tweeted the president should not have a race or gender litmus test. President Reagan promised to nominate a woman, Sandra Day O’Connor. So why is this different?

    SEN. GRAHAM: Well, it’s not different to me. Put me in the camp of making sure the court and other institutions look like America. You know, we make a real effort as Republicans to recruit women and people of color to make the party look more like America. Affirmative action is picking somebody not as well qualified for past wrongs. Michelle qual- Childs is incredibly qualified. There’s no affirmative action component if you pick her. She is highly qualified. And President Reagan said running for office that he wanted to put the first female on the court. Whether you like it or not, Joe Biden said, I’m going to pick an African-American woman to serve on the Supreme Court. I believe there are plenty of qualified African-American women, conservative and liberal, that could go onto the court. So I don’t concede- I don’t see Michelle Childs as an act of affirmative action. I do see putting a black woman on the court, making the court more like America. In the history of our country, we’ve only had five women serve and two African-American men, so let’s make the court more like America. But qualifications have to be the- the- the biggest consideration. And as to Michelle Childs, I think she’s qualified–

    MARGARET BRENNAN: All right.

    SEN. GRAHAM: by every measure.

  11. horsey’s take in his seattle times op ed

    […]
    Besides being sadly amusing, the comments being spouted by Carlson, Hannity and the rest of the right-wing media conveniently and hypocritically ignore history. While condemning Biden for making his pending nominee’s gender and race explicit criteria for his choice, they gloss over the fact that their patron saint, Ronald Reagan, made a campaign pledge in 1980 to appoint a woman to the high court and their demigod, Donald Trump, announced his intention to appoint a woman to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
    Could it possibly be that Carlson, Hannity and friends are mostly troubled by the fact that the woman Biden plans to appoint will not be white?
    Biden’s critics claim to be upholding the principle that race and gender have never been and never should be factors in picking a justice for the court. Somehow, following that principle, 95% of the 115 jurists who have been chosen have been white men. Some might insist that such an imbalance was not intentional, that it was simply the result of there being so few non-white, non-male judges to choose from for most of American history. But that is precisely the justification for Biden’s choice.
    No, appointments to the court should not become a politically correct process of doling out slots to every aggrieved identity group in the country, but, given the fraught history Black Americans have experienced with America’s judicial system (can you say Dred Scott?), it is not hard to make the case that adding the perspective of a highly qualified Black woman to the court is far more than tokenism.
    Now that our country has progressed beyond the centuries of discrimination that discouraged women and non-whites from pursuing legal careers, there are numerous exceptionally qualified jurists to choose from who are not white and male. Announcing that it is time to reach into that pool of talent and broaden the viewpoints on the court is far from a radical idea. It is an idea whose time has come. 

  13. Interesting fly over, warthogs and helicopters. I guess the Darth Vador stealth bombers are deployed elsewhere
     
    Jack

  17. And that ladies and Gentlemen is why he ain”t no Brady, Aikman or Montana. Yet!

    Conrats to the Bengals for playing a tough game
    Jack

  19. Renee, there are some really good young quarterbacks out there. But unlike the Bills, the Bengals have a defense too.
    Jack 

  23. Funny ole dog Dept.
    I just saw Nick Adams as the only American actor in a Japanese movie with aliens on Planet X, Godzilla, Monster Zero, and that pterodactyl-lookin flying monster, maybe Rodan.

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