The Ellington Suites is an album by the American pianist, composer, and bandleader Duke Ellington. It collects three suites recorded in 1959, 1971, and 1972, and was released on the Pablo label in 1976. The album won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Performance by a Big Band in 1976. Ellington and Billy Strayhorn wrote “The Queen’s Suite” for Queen Elizabeth II who was presented with a single pressing of the recording, which was not commercially issued during Ellington’s lifetime.
The AllMusic review by Scott Yanow states: “Although there are some good moments from Ellington’s orchestras of 1959 and 1971-72, few of the themes (outside of ‘The Single Petal of a Rose’ from ‘The Queen’s Suite’) are all that memorable. But even lesser Ellington is of great interest and veteran collectors may want to pick this up”.
Katy Tur (Chloe Fineman) reports on the U.S. military shooting down a suspected Chinese spy balloon (Bowen Yang) with the help of a Pentagon official (Kenan Thompson).
and
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week’s biggest news, like George Santos lying about producing Broadwayâs Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.
in the meantime, get ready for Ireland’s newest national holiday
St Brigid is Ireland’s foodie saint. One of the nation’s three patron saints and the most associated with food (particularly farming and dairying), the Irish celebrate her for the first time this year with a new public holiday on 6 February.
St Brigid’s Day itself, also known as Imbolc or Ăimelg, falls on 1 February marking the beginning of spring in the ancient Celtic calendar. Associated with miraculous abundance of food and a powerful figure in Irish pre-Christian folklore, Brigid was brought under the church and proclaimed a saint.
The mixing of Celtic and Christian observances isn’t unusual in Ireland. The tradition of making, sharing and eating boxty pancakes, or bacstaĂ, a traditional potato dish cooked on St Brigid’s Day is influenced by both religions, creating a celebratory association unique to its food culture. Hailing from the north-western counties of Leitrim, Cavan, Fermanagh and Mayo, the traditional skillet-dish akin to a pancake is made with potato, milk and flour â and served with lakes of butter and sometimes a scattering of sugar as a treat for children. It was a dish reserved for eating on special feast days, and Brigid’s Day was celebrated with equal fervour to Christmas Day.
[continues with more history and a full blown recipe which sounds a lot like embellished latkes]
jack, thanks for the Ellington find.Â
I noticed on the drafts page you have a post titled “for a future sunday.” do you have a particular sunday in mind or is this just a backup in case of emergency?
Kudos to SNL last night – at least for the cold open and Weekend Update- the two pats of the show I watch regularly. I have to admit ignorance of the host last night – had no idea who he is.Â
Well, now that the balloon threat has passed I wonder what next threat to our privacy will arise – TikToc, Alexa? (Thank you Bowen).Â
After the PRCâs spy balloon was shot down off the Carolina coast on Saturday, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that it would never have been allowed to reach the United States in the first place if Donald Trump were president. But a Forbes report begs to differ.
Greene said that she had just been speaking with Trump about the situation, and that âhe would have never allowed China to fly a spy balloon over our country and our military bases and assets.â
âPres Trump would have shot it down before it entered the US,â Greene tweeted. âAnd so would I.â
A similar but no quite so definitive statement was made by former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo when speaking with Fox News host Sean Hannity this week.
âI can nearly guarantee you that that balloon would not still be flying if we were still there,â he said on Friday.
But an article at Forbes published on Saturday claims otherwise, and was shared in reply to Greeneâs tweet.
[…]
The Forbes article next reference an Associated Press report.
âCraig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said Chinese surveillance balloons have been sighted on numerous occasions over the past five years in different parts of the Pacific, including near sensitive U.S. military installations in Hawaii,â the Associated Press reported on Saturday.
President Biden has been in office for two years, leaving three years of Trumpâs presidency in that window of five years.
That AP reported also included cited U.S. officials and reported âsimilar Chinese balloons transited the continental United States briefly at least three times during the Trump administration and once that they know about earlier in the Biden administration.â
Pat
It was something I ran across last week from the youtube algo’s offering it looked fun. It is there for when I’m lazy, out of ideas, or absent.Â
Ha! Craig or my computer has a plug in that trys to guess what the next word will be. It suggested “absentminded” for the above sentence. Just what I need, to be insulted by a computer.
Jack
Americans for Prosperity Action, the main political arm of the Koch network, âis prepared to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win,ââŚ
âThe memo does not mention Donald Trump, but an official with AFP Action confirmed to CNN that the network is not planning to support the former presidentâs White House bid.â
âThe Koch decision to engage in the GOP primary â after sitting on the sidelines for the two most recent White House nomination fights â is likely to set off a scramble among Republican presidential contenders to win over the Kansas-based industrialist and the hundreds of wealthy donors who help finance his influential, free-market network.â
speaking of looking up, there is a full moon tonight for those with clear skies who like looking at such things.
So, one of my boomer relatives is in my ear about the potential nefariousness of the âballoonâ, to which i posited âmaybe itâs just a weather balloonâ, a possibility they arenât willing to entertain, it must be an evil balloon, in their view
My view is it would be pretty dumb to deploy a military asset so easily identified and intercepted, itâs like sending a spy behind enemy-lines wearing an âi am a spyâ t-shirt
It was intentional. Â This is about the Philippines/Taiwan. They wanted it to be detected, and more importantly, they wanted the general public to know about it.
The Chinese play the long game.
 As it was not the only balloon deployed, I am hoping BB was right in thinking that it had something to do with correcting the positioning of their satellite(s).  Â
So, it sounds as if a Republican was in the WH, they wouldâve had it shot down over air traffic and folks on the ground? Â
Thank God for POTUS Joe.
âA former prospective staffer to Rep. George Santos said he filed a police report and House ethics complaint alleging that the freshman congressman made an unwanted sexual advance toward him during a private encounter in his office and was later denied employment there.â
âThereâs no corroborating evidence whatsoever,â Myers said about his alleged encounter with the congressman. âItâs simply going to be his word against mine.â
Well, given George/Anthonyâs track recordâŚ
Well, if thatâs the best Chinaâs espionage agencies can come up with, iâm a little less worried about the threat of their regime
âTwo Chinese coast guard ships and two militia vessels tailed a Philippine warship near Mischief Reef in the South China Sea, the Southeast Asian nation said.â
âThe President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan will meet in Tokyo on Thursday (Feb. 9), where they are expected to sign several agreements to boost bilateral relations.â
âAmong the agreements, the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) are expected to finalize a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) which has been in negotiation since April 2022âŚâ
This was not the first of the balloons which sailed across territorial U.S. At least three were sent during the reign of the former guy, seems he did nothing with them. One could be cautious in thinking that due to his and his family “business” deals with the Chinese he would not like to cause them harm. There were probably many more that went unannounced over the years.Â
The U.S. sends many weather balloons aloft to learn about the weather. One of the funny stories is there was a U.S. weather balloon floating up there at the same time as slow mo spy guy and it had a following of admirers, so many that the service had to send out a notice that that balloon was not the Chinese balloon. I would hazard a guess that the Chinese hoped to use the U.S. balloons would provide cover for theirs.
As for the Chinese saying the thing was civilian and accidentally went rogue, blaht. If it was so innocent why did they not announce it before it came wafting over Canada and the U.S.?
why tf would anyone make a âspy balloonâ bright white
Groundhog is off to a bad (good for us) start to his 2023 prediction of 6 more weeks of winter. While according to the calendar it might be winter for 6 more weeks, the first week and a half has predictions by actual weather guys of highs in the 40s and 50s (one day of predicted 38 w/50% chance of snow) and lows around freezing +/- 6 degrees. That’s mild winter in Birmingham but in East Bumfuck it feels like early spring. It’s 58 degrees this afternoon, very light overcast (filtered sun) and light breezes. That’s shorts skiing weather.
Bink – thermal control. If it was dark it would absorb a lot of solar energy at that altitude and expanded. Maybe get to big and go boom.
shittiest op everÂ
âHey Boss- good news bad newsâ
ââŚhit meâ
âWe got some great meteorological dataâ
ââŚbad news?â
âi started a cold war with our #1 trading partnerâ
âOMG! Â How?!â
âi used a balloon.  i mean, it worked the first 3 times during the trump administrationâŚâ
âWell, what color did you make the balloon?â
âBright-white, like the brightest fucking bright-white we hadâ
âGoddamnit, dude, we are the worldâs 4th largest producer of nylon, you literally could have chosen any other color, i am going to have to âfireâ you for PR purposes, hands are tied, hereâ
âSir, in my defense, they are losing the goddamned minds over itâ
âOver what? Â A balloon?â
âYeah, like full-on batshit crazy, left AND right, they even shot it downâ
ââŚwith what?â
ââŚlike an F-22 or F-16 or some shit like thatâ
âDamn, talk about âusing a cannon to kill a mosquito!ââ
đĽ
Bink – using the big ass tools does cause questions. My thinking is these things have been floating over the U.S. since they were invented in France in the Seventeen hundreds, Ben Franklin was impressed. Who, over in military R&D, or perhaps mega-Military-Industrial Complex, has designed a tool of a bunch of knives to slice, many slices, balloons, or even dirigibles?
i thought we had space-lasers for exactly this type of situation đ¤ˇââď¸Â
Hey, in these states that want to ban âdrag performancesâ, will that include bagpipers at funerals, because you could call that a âkiltâ, but you could just as accurately describe it as a âplaid skirtâ.
Not for nothing, i wouldnât call the the sartorial standard for priests âmenswearâ, with the robes and the lace. Would that be banned, also?
ok, food for thought đ¤ âď¸
Bink, isnât it the Jews who have space lasers according to the Greene lunatic? Â And arenât they space lasers? Â Or are the space lasers we have Jewish? Iâm unclear on her accusations. Couldnât they just have been aimed at the balloon – if this particular fantasy of the RWNJ contingent of Congress is right, and if the Jews who control them or the folks who control the Jewish lasers donât like the Chinese ? Just riffing here.
lol all valid questions based on contemporary standards of the chattering class
NEW THREAD
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Katy Tur (Chloe Fineman) reports on the U.S. military shooting down a suspected Chinese spy balloon (Bowen Yang) with the help of a Pentagon official (Kenan Thompson).
and
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week’s biggest news, like George Santos lying about producing Broadwayâs Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.
in the meantime, get ready for Ireland’s newest national holiday
Recipe: Boxty pancakes and bacon for St Brigid’s Day – BBC Travel
jack, thanks for the Ellington find.Â
I noticed on the drafts page you have a post titled “for a future sunday.” do you have a particular sunday in mind or is this just a backup in case of emergency?
Kudos to SNL last night – at least for the cold open and Weekend Update- the two pats of the show I watch regularly. I have to admit ignorance of the host last night – had no idea who he is.Â
Well, now that the balloon threat has passed I wonder what next threat to our privacy will arise – TikToc, Alexa? (Thank you Bowen).Â
Hmmmm
Compare and contrast
speaking of the green one, this from mediaite:
Pat
It was something I ran across last week from the youtube algo’s offering it looked fun. It is there for when I’m lazy, out of ideas, or absent.Â
Ha! Craig or my computer has a plug in that trys to guess what the next word will be. It suggested “absentminded” for the above sentence. Just what I need, to be insulted by a computer.
Jack
today’s meme…
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/05/politics/koch-network-republican-primary-2024/index.html
Americans for Prosperity Action, the main political arm of the Koch network, âis prepared to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win,ââŚ
âThe memo does not mention Donald Trump, but an official with AFP Action confirmed to CNN that the network is not planning to support the former presidentâs White House bid.â
âThe Koch decision to engage in the GOP primary â after sitting on the sidelines for the two most recent White House nomination fights â is likely to set off a scramble among Republican presidential contenders to win over the Kansas-based industrialist and the hundreds of wealthy donors who help finance his influential, free-market network.â
speaking of looking up, there is a full moon tonight for those with clear skies who like looking at such things.
So, one of my boomer relatives is in my ear about the potential nefariousness of the âballoonâ, to which i posited âmaybe itâs just a weather balloonâ, a possibility they arenât willing to entertain, it must be an evil balloon, in their view
My view is it would be pretty dumb to deploy a military asset so easily identified and intercepted, itâs like sending a spy behind enemy-lines wearing an âi am a spyâ t-shirt
It was intentional. Â This is about the Philippines/Taiwan. They wanted it to be detected, and more importantly, they wanted the general public to know about it.
The Chinese play the long game.
 As it was not the only balloon deployed, I am hoping BB was right in thinking that it had something to do with correcting the positioning of their satellite(s).  Â
So, it sounds as if a Republican was in the WH, they wouldâve had it shot down over air traffic and folks on the ground? Â
Thank God for POTUS Joe.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/05/politics/george-santos-prospective-staffer-complaint/index.html
âA former prospective staffer to Rep. George Santos said he filed a police report and House ethics complaint alleging that the freshman congressman made an unwanted sexual advance toward him during a private encounter in his office and was later denied employment there.â
âThereâs no corroborating evidence whatsoever,â Myers said about his alleged encounter with the congressman. âItâs simply going to be his word against mine.â
Well, given George/Anthonyâs track recordâŚ
Well, if thatâs the best Chinaâs espionage agencies can come up with, iâm a little less worried about the threat of their regime
It wasnât meant to be undetected. Â
War Games: The Battle For Taiwan
iâm more afraid of Americans and state courts invalidating all gun-control legislation thanks to facist-majority SCOTUS, keep your head down
The SOTU timing is good for POTUS Joe. Â He gets to make a statement to us and to Xi and his band of merry-scary asshats.Â
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-05/philippines-says-four-chinese-vessels-tailed-its-navy-ship
âTwo Chinese coast guard ships and two militia vessels tailed a Philippine warship near Mischief Reef in the South China Sea, the Southeast Asian nation said.â
https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4801008
âThe President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan will meet in Tokyo on Thursday (Feb. 9), where they are expected to sign several agreements to boost bilateral relations.â
âAmong the agreements, the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) are expected to finalize a Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) which has been in negotiation since April 2022âŚâ
This was not the first of the balloons which sailed across territorial U.S. At least three were sent during the reign of the former guy, seems he did nothing with them. One could be cautious in thinking that due to his and his family “business” deals with the Chinese he would not like to cause them harm. There were probably many more that went unannounced over the years.Â
The U.S. sends many weather balloons aloft to learn about the weather. One of the funny stories is there was a U.S. weather balloon floating up there at the same time as slow mo spy guy and it had a following of admirers, so many that the service had to send out a notice that that balloon was not the Chinese balloon. I would hazard a guess that the Chinese hoped to use the U.S. balloons would provide cover for theirs.
As for the Chinese saying the thing was civilian and accidentally went rogue, blaht. If it was so innocent why did they not announce it before it came wafting over Canada and the U.S.?
why tf would anyone make a âspy balloonâ bright white
Groundhog is off to a bad (good for us) start to his 2023 prediction of 6 more weeks of winter. While according to the calendar it might be winter for 6 more weeks, the first week and a half has predictions by actual weather guys of highs in the 40s and 50s (one day of predicted 38 w/50% chance of snow) and lows around freezing +/- 6 degrees. That’s mild winter in Birmingham but in East Bumfuck it feels like early spring. It’s 58 degrees this afternoon, very light overcast (filtered sun) and light breezes. That’s shorts skiing weather.
Bink – thermal control. If it was dark it would absorb a lot of solar energy at that altitude and expanded. Maybe get to big and go boom.
shittiest op everÂ
âHey Boss- good news bad newsâ
ââŚhit meâ
âWe got some great meteorological dataâ
ââŚbad news?â
âi started a cold war with our #1 trading partnerâ
âOMG! Â How?!â
âi used a balloon.  i mean, it worked the first 3 times during the trump administrationâŚâ
âWell, what color did you make the balloon?â
âBright-white, like the brightest fucking bright-white we hadâ
âGoddamnit, dude, we are the worldâs 4th largest producer of nylon, you literally could have chosen any other color, i am going to have to âfireâ you for PR purposes, hands are tied, hereâ
âSir, in my defense, they are losing the goddamned minds over itâ
âOver what? Â A balloon?â
âYeah, like full-on batshit crazy, left AND right, they even shot it downâ
ââŚwith what?â
ââŚlike an F-22 or F-16 or some shit like thatâ
âDamn, talk about âusing a cannon to kill a mosquito!ââ
đĽ
Bink – using the big ass tools does cause questions. My thinking is these things have been floating over the U.S. since they were invented in France in the Seventeen hundreds, Ben Franklin was impressed. Who, over in military R&D, or perhaps mega-Military-Industrial Complex, has designed a tool of a bunch of knives to slice, many slices, balloons, or even dirigibles?
i thought we had space-lasers for exactly this type of situation đ¤ˇââď¸Â
Hey, in these states that want to ban âdrag performancesâ, will that include bagpipers at funerals, because you could call that a âkiltâ, but you could just as accurately describe it as a âplaid skirtâ.
Not for nothing, i wouldnât call the the sartorial standard for priests âmenswearâ, with the robes and the lace. Would that be banned, also?
ok, food for thought đ¤ âď¸
Bink, isnât it the Jews who have space lasers according to the Greene lunatic? Â And arenât they space lasers? Â Or are the space lasers we have Jewish? Iâm unclear on her accusations. Couldnât they just have been aimed at the balloon – if this particular fantasy of the RWNJ contingent of Congress is right, and if the Jews who control them or the folks who control the Jewish lasers donât like the Chinese ? Just riffing here.
lol all valid questions based on contemporary standards of the chattering class
NEW THREAD