Category: The Evening Pause
A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.
Goose house – Country Roads
An evening pause: I guarantee that every one of these performers has seen Hiyao Miyazaki’s magnificent film, Whisper of the Heart, from whence this instrumentation and its Japanese translation is taken.
You should too.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Andreas Hellkvist – B3 Boogie
An evening pause: It appears this song “materialized” while Hellkvist was simply trying out this Hammond organ.
Hat tip Cotour.
Bell Telephone: Explaining mobile phone technology, c1946
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who notes that he watched this video on his modern mobile phone.
What strikes me is how much we take this capability for granted, especially when you watch and see how “compact” the car units were. Yet, in the 1940s when this technology was first being developed the use of telephones themselves was only a few decades old. The very idea of being able to communicate instantly with anyone over long distances was still relatively new. Now it included talking to people at random locations. For the people of that time, this was exciting news harboring a bright future.
Dire Straits – Industrial Disease
Stockholm 1913
An evening pause: The footage is gently colorized but with little else changed. Like previous such pauses showing film footage from the past, it gives us a glimpse into a different world that appears more dignified and civilized.
Hat tip Björn “Local Fluff” Larsson, who notes, “All men wear suits and hats. All ladies are dressed up. All buildings are beautiful. Then socialism happened.”
Bob Dylan – Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man
Apollo 16 Lunar Rover “Grand Prix”
An evening pause: This seems especially appropriate with the arrival of another rover on Mars last week.
On their first day of three on the lunar surface, John Young and Charles Duke deployed their rover and took it for a test drive before heading out to nearby Plum Crater for two hours of sample gathering and exploration.
This footage shows Young driving with Duke filming and reporting what he sees. The goal was to gather engineering data on how the rover’s wheels functioned in the very dusty lunar soil.
This short clip nicely illustrates the ambitious achievement of the American Apollo missions that should give pause to any arrogant modern young engineer. This was before home computers and CAD-CAM. It was designed by hand and slide-rule, using inches, pounds, and feet. And it worked, and worked magnificently. Oh if we today could only do as well.
Hat tip Björn “Local Fluff” Larsson.
Glenn Miller Orchestra Scandinavia – American Patrol
An evening pause: Americans once had brass, and Glenn Miller’s music captured it, both in instruments and in sound. This has a happy defiant exuberance that now seems lost.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Carol Burnett Show – Rancid Harvest
An evening pause: This will be especially funny to those who are familiar with John Hilton’s Random Harvest.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
George Washington – “I did!”
An evening pause: On this, the birthday of George Washington, let us hear from the man himself. The speaker is an actor, but the words are Washington’s late in his life, reflecting on his life as well as on the future of the nation he more than anyone else helped create.
Optical Illusion Dance
An evening pause: It is almost impossible to see this as it really is.
The song, Tanz, was written by a German named Hiss. Though the music sounds Cajun, its roots are German.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Iron Butterfly – In a Gadda Da Vida
An evening pause: Hat tip Mike Nelson, who adds this tidbit of the song’s history:
The lyrics are about Adam and Eve living “In the Garden of Eden” but Doug Ingles, the composer, consumed an entire gallon of wine the night he wrote it, and when he sang it to a bandmate to transcribe the lyrics he slurred words so badly it got transcribed as In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida instead, which in the end stuck.
Bluegrass Large Family Band – Foggy Mtn. Rock
An evening pause: Hat tip Tom Biggar, who notes pointedly, “Must be something wrong with this – it looks like a bunch of deplorables having a good time.”
Notched sticks: Recording your taxes in medieval England
Funny Ballerina
An evening pause: Time for some silliness, brought to us by three dancers with six dolls.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Abraham Lincoln – an annual tribute
An evening pause: On this, the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, I must once again honor his memory, most especially because the Marxist, anti-American bigots who are now running roughshod across our once free nation wish to cancel him by actually accusing the man who freed the slaves of being a racist.
And though he freed the slaves, I think Lincoln’s most enduring contribution to American history, a contribution that now has sadly been lost, was his limitless good will for everyone, even to those who hated him and wished to kill him. Had he not been assassinated, American history might have been far better because Lincoln would have had the clout to ease the worst elements of Reconstruction, while forcing through reforms in the former southern slave states.
The modern Democrats in Congress — and their supporters nationwide — might benefit by reading some history about Lincoln. Alas, I have no hope of this.
As I wrote for last year’s tribute,
Lincoln stood for freedom for all humans, the central heart of the American experiment. He was willing and did die for that stance. We should all be willing to do no less.
The video below shows probably every photograph ever taken of Lincoln, in chronological order. You can see him age and mature. You can also see a gaunt and serious man who appears to care deeply about whatever he does.
The Hindley Street Country Club – More than a feeling
Josh Tanner – Decommissioned
Wild Cherry – Play that funky music
An evening pause: Recorded live in 1976.
Hat tip Mike Nelson, who has found a nice alternative video site to Youtube by using the Wayback machine archive to find this video.
Steve ‘n Seagulls – Nothing else matters
FlippinDingDong – Trailer Annie
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who rightly added, “No clue what this means, but I’m certain the student animators had fun making it.”
Fun to watch too. They might have done it on a computer, but it sure has the feel of hand-drawn animation.
Evanescence – Bring Me To Life
The Muppets – Bohemian Rhapsody
An evening pause: I know I’ve posted this song more than a few times previously, but this version is truly unique. I had even posted it previously, back in 2012. More than enough time however has passed, so I think it okay to show it again. As I noted then, “A very talented actor once told me that a great deal of all comedy is based on contrast, on juxtaposing extreme opposites in unexpected ways.”
This does that quite well I think.
Hat tip Frank Kelly.
Bell Labs – The Transistor
An evening pause: This 9-minute documentary, made in 1952 by Bell Labs, provides a short and clear history of the transistor as well as its predecessor, the vacuum tube. It also tries to imagine the future that such a new invention might bring. As the youtube page notes,
While The Transistor’s vision of the future seems somewhat quaint in retrospect, it captures a moment in time before the transistor became ubiquitous; a time when Bell Labs wanted the world to know that something important had occurred, something that was about to bring tremendous change to everyone’s daily lives.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Nathan Evans – The Wellerman
An evening pause: It seems a lot of people took Evans singing in the center and did their own piece, singing along with him. This video puts many of them together. You can see the full list on the youtube page.
Hat tip Tom Donahue.