A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who explains, “Australian comedian, Barry Humphries, is Dame Edna Everage.” This appearance was on the Michael Parkinson Show in Australian in 2004, and included actors Judi Dench and Sharon Osborne.
This is what great comedy is. Many of the lines really make no sense, or are dated about things you might not know anything about, but you laugh anyway because Humphries is just plain funny, and has magnificent timing.
An evening pause: A nice rendition of a song by Kate Wolf about crossing the divide between life and death, who herself died far too young.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: Watch those fingers dance. The instrument she’s playing is called a harp guitar.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
An evening pause: This group’s full name is “Ùr: The Future Of Our Past,” but that’s incredibly unwieldy. Their performance of this beautiful song, however, live in 2017, is superb.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: Performed live on television 1999. The strange blue instrument being played by Dennis James is called a glass harmonica (or armonica).
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: This is a set of two commercials. I have no idea what the product is that they are selling, nor do I care. They are hilarious, and speak well to the modern childish obsession of adopting hi-tech where no hi-tech is really needed.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An eveing pause: Sadly, I think these characters are maybe more connected to reality than many we presently have in office.
Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who said, “A song about longing and being incomplete.”
And seeing Willie Nelson without a beard in itself makes this worth watching.
An evening pause: A song that looks back at September, from the cold fading days of December.
From The Fantasticks.
An evening pause: I like the commentary about this song at the youtube webpage. “Although it has been described as a protest song, it poses a series of rhetorical questions about peace, war and freedom. The refrain “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind” [is] … impenetrably ambiguous: either the answer is so obvious it is right in your face, or the answer is as intangible as the wind.
In this sense, Bob Dylan’s song really does transcend the 1960s, as does much of his work.
Hat tip John Vernoski.
An evening pause: The original by Fred Astaire, with Ginger Rogers, is incomparable. This performance however is a superb.
Hat tip Danae.
An evening pause: From the Wikipedia page:
Havah Nagilah…was composed in 1915 in Ottoman Palestine, when Hebrew was being revived as a spoken language after falling into disuse in this form for approximately 1,700 years, following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–136 CE. For the first time, Jews were being encouraged to speak Hebrew as a common language, instead of Yiddish, Arabic, Ladino, or other regional Jewish languages.
The lyrics reflect these events:
Let’s rejoice
Let’s rejoice
Let’s rejoice and be happy
Let’s sing
Let’s sing
Let’s sing and be happy
Awake, awake, my brothers!
Awake my brothers with a happy heart
Awake, my brothers, awake, my brothers!
With a happy heart
May we all sing with as much joy.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: The future appears it will become a very lonely and isolated place, very divorced from reality.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: Listen to the words. They ask the most fundamental questions of existence.
Hat tip Tom Wright.
An evening pause: Stay with it. The title will become clear, and you will then want to stay with the end.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: This video is even more interesting than my title above, in that the guy making it used his electron microscope to make an animation showing what it looks like when a record needle is running through the tracks of a record. Most cool.
And since vinyl appears to actually be making a comeback, I think that even the younger members of my readership will know what a record is.
Hat tip Thomas Biggar.
An evening pause: Time for some technology. It is amazing the amount of really smart designs that are hidden in plain sight.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: From their Natural States music video album released 1985.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
A evening pause: Recorded live 1988. The song’s general hostility to war is an example of one of the greatest hallmarks of civilization. To make believe however that war is never necessary is to bow to those things that wish to destroy civilization, which is a most delicate thing.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
PINK FLOYD – us and them – live delicate sound of thunder 1988 – YouTube from STEVE MCLEAN on Vimeo.
