46 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”

  1. jack, thanks.  surprised that given the current news the YT algo didn’t cough up the 1812 overture with all the cannon volley at the climax.

    btw, wiki’s blurb about the bang-bang ending of the 1812:

    The carillon is sometimes replaced with tubular bells or recordings of carillons, or even church bells. In the sections that contain cannon shots, actual cannons are sometimes replaced by recorded cannons or played on a piece of staging, usually with a large wooden mallet or sledgehammer as in the Mahler 6th. The bass drum and gong/tam-tam are also regularly used as cannon substitutes or adjuncts in indoor performances.

  2. no new SNL, but a replay of 1/30/22 may cover for current situation for those who need their weekly snl fix

    White House employees (Kenan Thompson, Alex Moffat, Ego Nwodim) brief President Biden (James Austin Johnson) on Russian misinformation circulating in Ukraine.

  3. back to the 1812 and maybe TMI for you this early in the morning

    The 1812 Overture: the hit that Tchaikovsky hated – Classic FM

    Though he loathed it, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture won him fans the world over and made him a household name.
    In 1962, a Don Draper-like advertising executive decided to market the oaty goodness of an up-and-coming brand of breakfast cereal by detonating bowls of it from a cannon in time to the finale of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
    When Arthur Fielder led the Boston Pops through the same piece in 1974, during a televised 4 July concert, the 1812 Overture was elevated from advertising prop to full-on national anthem, one still performed today to mark American Independence Day.
    Woody Allen co-opted it for the soundtrack of his 1971 screwball comedy, Bananas. It has been referenced in The Simpsons and in 1967, British comedian Charlie Drake struck comedy gold when he ‘performed’ all Tchaikovsky’s instrumental parts and ended up in an exhausted, Norman Wisdom-like heap on the floor. Each re-imagining took us further away from the 1812 Overture as Tchaikovsky understood it.
    Not, we hasten to add, “as he knew and loved it”… because Tchaikovsky hated the piece.
    That infamous assessment of it as “very loud and noisy and completely without artistic merit, obviously written without warmth or love,” was penned by Tchaikovsky himself. The overture’s popularity was a source of deep frustration to this sensitive, serious-minded symphonist whose imaginative fantasy and whimsical, melodic turn of phrase had also managed to transform the art of composing ballet music to a high calling.
    The success of the 1812 Overture told him that the world cared more about theatrical spectacle than the hard fought-for personal expression of his symphonies, concertos and chamber music. The more successful his overture, the more Tchaikovsky became convinced that the world fundamentally misunderstood his art.
    […]
    But what happened to the ‘real’ 1812 Overture, and how did Tchaikovsky come to write his Frankenstein monster? It is the 1812 Overture because it was conceived to commemorate the Battle of Borodino, fought in September 1812.
    In the 1880s, Russian pride still glowed at the warm memory of Tsar Alexander I’s troops thrashing Napoleon’s army, although there was a certain level of rose-tinted hindsight going on here. Napoleon had retained the tactical upper hand throughout the battle itself, and was only forced into a long and arduous retreat when, during his subsequent occupation of Moscow, food supplies ran out as winter started to bite. Armies march on their stomachs, and Napoleon’s men marched out of Moscow to fill theirs.
    [continues]

  4. the muppets long long time ago did a bang-up version with good depiction of mother eating up those around her to the tune of the 1812

  5. Today’s pick is one I’ve actually heard before and it’s lovely. Jack, thank you.

    patD – Our ear-splitter for 1812 (band concert in middle school) was a gun loaded with blanks being fired into a tall, fiberglass garbage can of the type that folks in my area used for lawn clippings.

    Yes, the band teacher gave an 8th-grade boy a gun to shoot in the gymnasium where we held our concerts. Nobody thought a thing of it because school shootings weren’t a thing, so nobody thought much about guns. Although, most homes just had a rack of hunting rifles over the living room sofa. I’m not sure where Mr. P found a pistol. Ah, the good old days?

  6. Kutusov vs Nappy……Nappy and Talley haul ass. Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news.

  9. There were always guns in cars at school when I was a kid. There were even some who stashed their guns on the school bus in order to go squirrel hunting at the end of the route.   Different world. 

  10. Reminds me of a story…..resident 7th grade ne’er-do-well Ricky upon being gifted with 4 boxes of .22 shells didn’t come to school for 3 days.  When he came walking into home room on the 4th day Teacher glared at him and asked, “Why did you even bother to come back?”
      “I ran out of shells,” he deadpanned.
    These were the days when some only stayed in school and would spend several years in 7th grade cause they knew if they quit they’d have to get a job.

  11. Early voting starts tomorrow.
    Do I get a Republican ballot so I can vote AGAINST Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott and…? I know I’ll vote for Beto in the general. There’s no way he won’t be our nominee for guv.

  12. Pat
    The 1812 would be a bit rough on those folks out there recovering from their Saturday night excesses. The Algo has long ago learned I look for soothing peaceful tunes for Sunday.
    Jack 

  13. Pogo
    I see where the Canadian police are doing as you suggested and towing any truck blocking the road. Given that a semi truck costs as much as my house, I understand that they are leaving peacefully while blasting their air horns in defiance.
    Jack

  14. BiD
    I have lived most of my life in one party districts and have always voted in the ruling party’s primary. It is the only way your vote counts for anything. So if your intention is to vote for the best of a bad bunch or to vote for the biggest idiot in hopes he gets on the ballot so the democrat can win. Go for it.
    Jack

  15. For a few years, my mother was married to a Deputy Sheriff.  When he came home, the gun belt, complete with gun, was hung from a dining room chair.  It never occurred to me to touch it unless he handed it to me at the end of a hike when I was allowed to shoot tin cans off of logs.  Definitely different times.

    Jack, Thanks for today.  Tchaikovsky is always welcome.

     

  16. jack, there i went and spoiled your algo’s soothing sunday choice.  apologies.

    as to those bills facing the kooky convoyers, send ’em to sen. rant appall who yesterday said:

     “I hope the truckers do come to America, and I hope they clog up cities.”

  17. An interesting article form the Atlantic about Facebook. I remember back in the usenet days Live Journal, (now a Russian asset) and Facebook were going to cure the toxic problems that could affect usenet groups.  From this article it appears that not only did the not succeed but Facebook’s algo makes it even worse.
    Oh well
    Jack

  18. more from the wapo story:

    The threat of truckers potentially clogging up U.S. roads was elevated on Tuesday when the Department of Homeland Security distributed a bulletin to law enforcement agencies. The DHS warned that a convoy of protesting truckers will potentially begin in California as early as mid-February and arrive in D.C. as late as mid-March, according to a copy of the bulletin obtained by The Washington Post. The agency noted that truckers from Canada may potentially join the convoy as it travels east.

    The bulletin highlighted how the convoy would potentially affect Sunday’s Super Bowl at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., featuring the hometown Los Angeles Rams and the Cincinnati Bengals. It also warned how D.C. was a possible destination in March before Biden’s first State of the Union address to Congress.

    “While there are currently no indications of planned violence, if hundreds of trucks converge in a major metropolitan city, the potential exists to severely disrupt transportation, federal government operations, commercial facilities, and emergency services through gridlock and potential counterprotests,” the memo said.

    of course all those cheering them on will no doubt grumble and blame joe for the supply chain and traffic slowdowns caused by their good buddies.

  19. For those of you following the Ukraine stuff an interesting POV about the total screwup diplomacy of the various NATO diplomats. Really cruel to Great Britains foreign secretary, seems BJ’s crew is operating at Trump level of competence. 
    Link 

  20. I think we have lovers of owls here. Pictures of owls,
    From the Atlantic

    A special Sunday event: our sixth annual photographic essay celebrating such magnificent birds of prey. These nocturnal hunters hail from Europe, Asia, North America, and South America and are captured here in photos from recent years. If you have some time today before the big game (or are skipping the event entirely), I invite you to take a look. It is always a hoot to put this collection together.

     
     
    Three great articles in a row. Now you know why I subscribe to the Atlantic.
    Jack

  22. kyiv or kiev?

    npr explains:

    How do you pronounce Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine? : NPR

    […]
    This week, NPR decided to officially adapt on-the-air pronunciation of Kyiv, the capital formerly spelled Kiev, to sound closer to the way it’s said in Ukrainian. NPR already changed the spelling to Kyiv in 2019.
    All Things Considered co-host Mary Louise Kelly — on her way Monday to Kyiv to report on the threat of a Russian invasion — tweeted about both decisions.
    “For those asking, @npr goes with Ukrainian spelling & pronunciation (not Russian) wherever possible when reporting on Ukraine. Kyiv not Kiev. KEE-eve not KEE-yev.”
    “Kiev” comes from Russian, and Ukraine has been campaigning for the Ukrainian spelling and pronunciation since the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. After Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to invade Crimea and other parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, many Western news outlets started complying.
    Even before this week’s decision on pronunciation, some NPR hosts and reporters were already saying Kyiv of their own accord, generating a debate online about whether all cities should be pronounced in the vernacular, and recalling a 2019 congressional hearing where some lawmakers used yet another pronunciation of the city’s name, which turned it into one syllable.
    “Now that everyone’s saying ‘Keev,’ is ‘Paree’ far behind?” Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal asked Monday on Twitter, invoking the French pronunciation for Paris.
    Pronunciation is tied up in geopolitics and identity
    While it’s easy to make light of a debate about nomenclature, for the people involved it’s often a serious matter that is entwined with identity, geopolitics and national security.
    Nina Jankowicz, a fellow at the Wilson Center and former Ukrainian Foreign Ministry communications adviser, recalls that many years ago the definite article in “The Ukraine” was dropped because that formulation is connected to Russian nationalism.
    “How we describe Ukraine and Ukrainians and their cities is paramount to how the world perceives Ukraine,” says Jankowicz, who wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2019 about the pronunciation debate and made a video too.
    “And part of that perception,” she says, “is about you describing Ukraine as its own distinct entity, not as a part of this alleged sphere of influence that Vladimir Putin wants to resurrect, in which all Slavic countries are part of a giant brotherhood and he is the king of them.”

    The debate about mimicking the vernacular is more intense in English than in other tongues, because of its current status as a global language.
    Vitaly Chernetsky, a Ukrainian-born professor in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Languages and Literatures at the University of Kansas, says most Ukrainians don’t mind that Polish has its own names for cities in neighboring countries — including Kyiv, which Poland ruled in the 16th century and which Poles still spell Kijów.
    “We’re not telling Polish people that they should stop doing it that way in their language because it’s much more of a complicated and tangled history,” he explains.
    While it may seem difficult for people who are not familiar with Slavic languages to get the exact pronunciation of Kyiv, Chernetsky says they can come pretty close because in Ukrainian the “K” and the “V” are pronounced similarly as in English.
    He says old spellings and pronunciations are still okay when talking about food.
    “Just like we can still say Peking duck, it’s okay to say chicken Kiev.”

  23. Pat
    If you can just get the BLM/Antifa types to stay home it could be a win for the Democrats. What I’ve noticed is that protestors tend to turn off the average voter.
    Jack

  24. jack, great owl pictures.  thanks and i bet jamie loves them too.  

    some of those critters sure resemble a few folk of note, for instance fritz mondale and madeleine albright come to mind.

    my favorite of the bunch

     A portrait of a snowy owl

    sure looks like miss kelly, fav teacher in high school, tsk tsking my many mispronunciations and poor declensions in latin class

  25. Do I get a Republican ballot so I can vote AGAINST Ken Paxton and Greg Abbott 

    Yes.  i had an epiphany that the only way we bring this nation away from the brink is to have reasonable progressives influence the Republican party, i’ll probably switch my affiliation for that reason 
     
    *insert Cicero quote here*

  27. Or maybe better a Vonnegut quote. From Mother Night as I recall
    “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. ”
    Jack

  29. Owls –
    I worked for Dr. Jimmy on his mule ranch North of Dickens , Texas . An old relic from the Depression.  This was right after he bought the place.  Lots of rats running around the wreckage of 50 years sitting off the Caprock, it was rough as a cob.  Had one of those water color windmills where the blades had been hit by lightening  five or six times .
    The second time I camped out there , I hear this strange sound that night.  My next time to over night I was armed with a big flashlight.  There on the top of that windmill were a pair of Barn Owls . 
    Big ones.  Never found their nest, but I had many  hours of watching them use that windmill to hunt rats. 
    Dr. Jimmy named his ranch after James Dean’s oil company in “Giant”.  Riata , Spanish for rope. 
     

  32. Riata and Ole’ Blackie –
    Turned into the driveway once , and there was “Blackie” , an ole’ cow pony Dr. Jimmy got from the 6666 Ranch for his stepson to ride.  A sweeter creature never lived,  but a clumsy one as horses go.
    So there was “Blackie” with both his front legs standing in the cattle guard . This was 30 years ago , and there were no phones 
    So I had to drive 30 miles to Dickens call the Doc , and get him to find an oilfield welder to come out and cut the pipe in the cattleguard.  All that time,  ole’ Blackie  just stood there . I watered him fed him some green pears.  He was calm as a clam.
    We freed him and he just walked back to corral .
     A few weeks  later , I was sitting in my S-10 pick-up eating lunch.  There was a pile of T-posts sitting in front of the truck on a pallet. ( T-posts are modern barbwire fence posts )  Blackie wandered by the door grazing , and around to the front of the truck.  Then I hear a clunk , like a horse kicking a pile of T-posts .
    I look up and there is Blackie looking right at me , and an arc of blood like some Italian fountain .

    I pile out of truck , and there , just above his hoof is the stream of blood. I find a towel , don’t ask how , and get it around the wound.
    Now The Doc had a goose neck 6 horse trailer , and my little
    S-10 had a fifth wheel ball . So I hitched it all up , and loaded Blackie for the 60 mile drive to the Vet at Spur .
    The wind encased the blood soaked towel around the wound , and every Texan we passed thought –
    “Doesn’t that ass hole know you can’t haul that trailer with that truck”.
    When we got to Spur , Blackie’s lips were white.

    But I saved that horse twice.
    Riding him was a bone. shattering experience the most jarring gate of any animal anywhere.
    But a sweeter creature you’ll never meet.

     

  33. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2022/02/11/28-of-dallas-county-mail-in-ballots-rejected-so-far-as-early-voting-opens-monday-in-texas-primary/

    “More than a quarter of absentee ballots mailed to Dallas County election officials as of Thursday for March 1′s party primary have been rejected…”

    “Voter suppression is alive and well in Texas,” said Wesley Story, spokesman for Progress Texas in a news release. “Texans warned Republican lawmakers about the impact their anti-voter law would have but they passed it anyway, and now we’re seeing the consequences in real time.”

    Can’t wait to rally vote tomorrow. Will their be Republican watchers breathing down our necks as we vote?

    Meet the candidates for Texas governor in 2022

    “It’s Rick Perry, but it’s not the Rick Perry you’re likely thinking of. Rick Lynn Perry, a computer engineer from Springtown, drew eyebrows by throwing his name in the hat. The Texas Republican Initiative, a political organization that formed last year in response to party infighting, took to Twitter to imply Perry’s campaign is a political trick from detractors of Abbott.”

    Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a winner.
    ***

    TX AG is a tougher call. My choices to vote against Ken Paxton (whose ads are just SFB praising Kenny for working against Biden on border concerns) are:

    Shut down the border so I can see the White House from my front porch George P. Bush

    Ivermectin-loving Louie Gohmert

    Eva Guzman (the daughter of legal immigrants, whose ads are all about illegal immigrants, because her dad was killed by one)

    ***
    I detest voting for tRUMPER, Beth Van Duyne, or her only opponent. She wanted to block schools from getting federal funding if the had a vaccine mandate. Her opponent loves the Canadian truckers and thinks Covid numbers are exaggerated. If inky we’d stop testing.

  35. Dr . Jimmy rebranded  the ranch when he really got into the mule show.

    Home


     
    Owners of Rancho Santiago are Jim and Maria Gamble. Thanks Arthur (Dad) for your love and support and for giving us the appreciation of equines and the great out of doors.

    Advice Art, an old Texas landman, and Dr. Jimmy’s dad gave me.
    ” Bob what you want to do is get in between where a whole lot of money is changin’ hands, and hope that some of it sticks to you.”

    But I was closest to the youngest Gamble , Robbie aka P.J. Belly.

    http://westtexasguitar.weebly.com/pj-belly.html

  36. In 1986 he produced Buddy Holly’s  50th birthday  here I was all in with him.  Graphics , t-shirts , posters , caps , you name it .
     
    We lost our ass , no body showed up.  It was one of the last times Del Shannon  played on stage.  We had Carl Perkins  on the bill. 
     
    I lost  ten grand.  Making it the second time I lost ten grand on a sure thing. 
     

     
    Fuckin’ Lubbock
     
     
     


  37.  
    Me and Del were singing  “Little Runaway” . 
     
    Colorado Bob’s meaning of life –
     
    ” Life is a series of seemingly  random events, some of which are designed to knock you on your ass.  The meaning of life is standing back up. “

  39. So far, Mickey Guyton is the MVP. 

    Why couldn’t they let Mary Mary sing “Lift Every Voice” inside the stadium?

    LA County did not lift their mask mandate and the news announced that a mask would be provided with every ticket. I don’t see many masks in the stadium. Can’t wait for everyone to fly home.

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