Blog Heap o'Art of Links

Eric Blore & Edward Everett Horton from Shall We Dance

Eric Blore and Edward Everett Horton appeared in many of the early Astaire and Rogers films, but rarely had the limelight to themselves.

Mahler Symphony No 4 G major, Leonard Bernstein Wiener Philharmoniker

City of New Orleans" is a folk song written by Steve Goodman (and first recorded for Goodman's self-titled 1971 album), describing a train ride from Chicago to New Orleans via the Illinois Central Railroad in bittersweet and nostalgic terms. Goodman got the idea while traveling on the eponymous train for a visit to his wife's family. He performed the song for Arlo Guthrie in the Quiet Knight, a bar in Chicago, and Guthrie agreed to add it to his repertoire. The song was a hit for Guthrie on his 1972 album Hobo's Lullaby, and is now more closely associated with him, although Goodman performed it until his death in 1984. The song has also been covered by Willie Nelson, John Denver, Johnny Cash, The Country Gentlemen, Judy Collins, Jerry Reed, Chet Atkins, Sammi Smith, Hank Snow, Gerard Cox, Rudi Carell, Joe Dassin, Richard Clayderman and others.…

Saw the what I would say is the end of an era last night with my lovely bride.

Went to see Petula Clark. Petula is 86 and still has a pretty good voice. Little rough in the beginning but got stronger as she progressed. She did an almost ninety minute set.

Petula could just as easily sat there and told stories about people she'd met and worked with over the years of her life and done some singing as sort of an afterthought. She is a very engaging performer.

Anyway Miss Clark has quite the singing, stage and film resume and I believe she represents the last of a bygone era.

In fact, she closed with a song that gave me the impression she knows this is her last tour and that she went on tour to say good bye.

…The Bachelor… The Vietnamese version of the reality series went viral across the world when contestants Minh Thu and Truc Nhu found love with each other while competing for the affections of lead Nguyen Quoc Trung.…

…The Parthenon is the single most influential building in Western history, if not world history. As simple as it looks, it is a really complex piece of architecture. Just the art historical concepts alone could fill an entire class lecture. A great introductory video is NOVA's "Secrets of the Parthenon".

…Some of you may have seen that Gal Gidot (Wonder Woman) did a surprise visit to a hospital in NoVa this past week. It's been all over the news, Entertainment Tonight, ect. The baby with the ladybug sticker on her cheek that she's holding is my niece Karalyne, the one who is in the prayer list for her infant leukemia. The good news is she is also responding well to treatment, at the last report she is waiting for her neutrophil counts to come up so she can have her bone marrow transplant and finally be done with all of this.

Thank you one and all for the prayers.…

Steve Ditko, the Marvel Comics artist who gave the world the woven webs and soaring red-and-blue shape of Spider-Man and the other-worldly shimmer of Doctor Strange, has died, authorities said Friday. He was 90.

Ditko was found June 29 in his Manhattan apartment and was pronounced dead at the scene, police Lt. Paul Ng said. No further details were immediately available.…

…A soon-to-be eighth grader at Carver Middle School has done something not many 12-year-olds have. She’s written, illustrated and published a book that's now available on Amazon.

“I self-published it through Amazon,” Jada Monae Silvers said.

The “it” she’s referring to is her book Kayla and Her Friends.

Jada published her first book in April then celebrated her 13th birthday in May.

Like most authors, it wasn't an overnight process; she actually wrote the original story a couple of years ago and she's been writing and rewriting since, and working on the illustrations.

Rick: "Do you like writing or drawing better?"
Jada: "Drawing."…

…Henceforth, all practicing journalists in the United States must fill out a required Form for Transparent Journalism and file with the U.S. Office of Journalism that the Trump Administration has now established by executive order within the Department of Justice, retroactive to April 1, 2018. It is known informally as “The Hannity Rule.”…

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” co-host Mika Brzezinski stated President Trump is “using our country’s national security as a way to deflect from his personal problems, or his personal anger.”…

 
Help me! I am trapped
In a haiku factory
Save me - before they

CNN …gathered a panel of conservative Christian women who voted for President Donald Trump to watch porn star Stormy Daniels’ “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday night. …

“You can throw all that stuff up in our faces as many times as you want,” Dr. Lynette Bryant said, “but that means that we’ll work harder for Trump. Is that not so, ladies?”

“That’s correct,” replied Sylvia Guzman. “This is the media defining the narrative. The people — we, the people — are ready to define the narrative. And it’s not about tawdry sexual peccadilloes.”…

Check How CNN Tries To Spin Hillary Insulting Most Of America…

The man who could do everything… Well, maybe not everything. But an extraordinary number of things. And boy, could he do them well.…

Last week, forty years to the day after their journey began, the husband-wife creative team of Wendy and Richard Pini attended a signing at Things From Another World in Portland, to say goodbye to Elfquest.…

Thank you God for giving me food to sustain my body,
Tide Pods to clean my clothes,
And the wisdom to know the difference.

…Fans in the audience at the 10:15 showing of Black Panther were treated to an unexpected romantic gesture. A man dressed in a Black Panther costume came into the theater before the movie started. He found his girlfriend and proposed to her.

The proposal was accepted.…

It was 3 a.m. on Saturday, and I was seething. Staring at my phone, I saw that my company, Newsweek Media Group, had put out yet another story that would require a correction if not a retraction. This time it was a story ripped from The Onion.……

…science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula K Le Guin has passed away at the age of 88.…

A Very Fancy Grasshopper Was Found in the Paint of a Van Gogh Masterpiece
The discovery of the critter is a by-product of significant research underway at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.…

…This sparked a lively discussion on Twitter, with over two thousand commenters asking where they could buy a chainsaw bayonet, or proposing other useful attachments, such as, a pencil sharpener, a pizzawheel, a banana named "apple," and Kevin Spacey's head for converting your firearm into a sexual assault rifle.…

…Brazilian animator Ivanildo Soares decided this cartoon should be remade. The soundtrack remained exactly the same but he handed its scenes out to a bevy of South American animators…

COMIC LEGEND:
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby both appeared as models on comic books.

STATUS:
True…

When “Riverdale” arrives on The CW next month, K.J. Apa’s Archie Andrews and his friends will bring life to the beloved cast of Archie Comics characters.…

Monday on CNN’s “New Day,” Randall Stephenson, the chairman and CEO of AT&T made an appearance with current Time Warner chairman and CEO Jeff Bewkes to promote the merger of AT&T and Time Warner.

Stephenson pledged an “independent” CNN, one of Time Warner’s properties, should the merger proceed.…

…This dance sequence from the 1943 film Stormy Weather has Fayard and Harold doing their unique amalgam of tap, gymnastics, and acrobatics to “Jumpin’ Jive” by Cab Calloway. No less an authority than Fred Astaire called this the greatest movie musical number he had ever seen.…

…There are a number of things that annoy me about the proliferation of tattoos.…

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
That is what I’d truly like to be
’Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
Everyone would be in love with me.…

…join Jo Nova and William Briggs in humiliating the author of this utterly misleading cartoon so as to prick his bubble of pompous, ignorant, self-regarding, passive-aggressive, pontificating greenery.…

To the 29 people of New York City that were injured in the Islamic terror blast: You were very lucky it was a bomb and not guns, says MSNBC’s Chris Hayes.…

Charmian Carr will always be 16 going on 17 for fans of "The Sound of Music." In the movie… she played the rebellious Liesl von Trapp… Carr died Saturday in Woodland Hills of complications from a rare form of dementia, according to a statement from her family. She was 73.…

It was 50 years ago, on 5 September 1966, that the cameras rolled for the first time in the Italianate village of Portmeirion as filming got under way for the cult 1960s adventure TV show The Prisoner.…

I wanted to try cleaning an LP with wood glue. It made for quite an improvement - and I've read that multiple cleanings continue to clean up the snaps crackles and pops.…

Former Muslim and Muhammad cartoon art contest winner Bosch Fawstin spoke at the AFA conference I spoke at last weekend.

Listen to his powerful presentation. He discusses something few know about: how mainstream, comic books, in particular Marvel and DC Comics, have become propaganda tools for Islam.…

A rare copy of Superman's 1938 comic-book debut sold at auction for almost $1 million.…

Revered cartoonist Jack Davis died today at the age of 91. Davis’s art career spanned several mediums, from comics, to movie posters, to advertising. One of his first jobs was drawing a Coco-Cola training manual in 1949.… one of the founding artists of Harvey Kurtzman’s Mad Magazine…

…The singer appeared, uncredited, on many of the biggest movie musicals of all time - dubbing the voices for Deborah Kerr in The King and I, and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.

She also sang the high notes for Marilyn Monroe in Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend; and "ghosted" Natalie Wood's vocals on West Side Story.…

Legendary folk-rock singer Paul Simon says, after making music for more than 60 years, he’s ready to “let go” of the limelight and “see what happens.”

“Showbiz doesn’t hold any interest for me,” Simon told the New York Times in a recent interview.…

Mack Rice, the composer of '60s hit "Mustang Sally" and co-writer of the Staple Singers' landmark "Respect Yourself" has died in Detroit. He was 82.

Laura Rice told The Associated Press that her husband died at their home Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease.…

The New York Times’ sloppiness when reporting on Christianity is proverbial, but perhaps none of its prior errors equals its claim this week that the apostle Saint Paul commanded Christians to kill the homosexuals among them.…

Religious illiteracy among journalists is reaching crisis levels.…

Janet Waldo, whose career in entertainment stretched from motion pictures to radio to television to the world of cartoons, died this morning. The cause was a brain tumor and her age… well, no one's quite sure how old Janet was but she sure never looked or sounded it. … She appeared in more than two dozen movies but established herself in radio, mostly notably as the star of Meet Corliss Archer. Her most memorable role in television was probably the episode of I Love Lucy in which she played Peggy, a teenager with a crush on Ricky Ricardo.

In 1962, she spoke for Judy Jetson in the animated series, The Jetsons. It was her first cartoon but it launched an entire new career in that area, mainly working for Hanna-Barbera. She was Josie in Josie and the Pussycats, Penelope Pitstop in Wacky Races and The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Granny Sweet in the Precious Pup cartoons and was heard in hundreds of other roles.… And as I said, I don't know how old she was. But I can tell you that well into her nineties, she could still sound like the teenage Judy Jetson. I think I'll just assume she was always that age.

…The album is a Frankenstein's monster of sorts, stitched together from material originally written decades ago as well as new songs… And it's good!… Why are The Monkees, on the road in support of their signature show's 50th anniversary, suddenly hitmakers when they should be cashing their Social Security checks?…

Days after Katie Couric apologetically admitted misrepresenting pro-gun voices via the insertion of a pause in Under the Gun, director Stephanie Soechtig took a different tack and said she stands by the pause.

In fact, Soechtig suggested the pause is only getting coverage because the NRA fixated on it.…

Several visitors to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art this week were fooled into thinking a pair of glasses set on the floor by a 17-year-old prankster was a postmodern masterpiece.…

Katie Couric Responds to Deceptive Editing Charges in Gun Documentary

Earlier this morning, I reported on the bloody rampage at a railway station in Munich by a Muslim screaming “Allahu akbar.” This is undeniably an Islamic attack. Well, not for CNN.

They have scrubbed all reference to the jihad murderers motive and mission. Despite the lack of evidence, CNN speculates that the murderer might have mental problems.…

… speaking of idiot judges a judge has allowed a civil suit between the heirs of a Spirit band member and Led Zepplin over the opening notes to Stairway To Heaven has been allowed to procede. Any idiot with half a brain recognizes those notes as being from Beathovin's Moonlight Sonata.

http://tinyurl.com/nzj6ae3

…The chair that Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling sat in while writing the first two books of the wizardry series was sold at a New York City auction on Wednesday for $394,000…

"He was my brother, my friend. I will miss him," writes Willie Nelson in a tweet, accompanied by a photo of himself sharing a laugh with the late Merle Haggard and a link to view their iconic "Pancho and Lefty" video. Nelson and Haggard were indeed as close as family, with their musical and personal bonds dating back to long before that first collaboration, and spanning through Haggard's death today at the age of 79.…

The ancient al-Qarawiyyin Library in Fez isn’t just the oldest library in Africa. Founded in 859, it’s the oldest working library in the world, holding ancient manuscripts that date as far back as 12 centuries. But modern life had taken a toll on the library, with its buildings falling into disrepair. That’s why in 2012, the Moroccan Ministry of Culture asked TED Fellow and architect Aziza Chaouni to rehabilitate the library…

The Tick might be on his way back to television if new reports are to be believed. Amazon has ordered a pilot for the new series, with Ben Edlund back in the fold as writer and producer and Barry Josephson as executive producer.

Unfortunately actor Patrick Warburton, who played the big blue lug in the previous live action series is not going to be reprising his role, as he has a new series, Crowded, on NBC. He will be included as an executive producer, and hopefully, they can find someone to fill his big blue shoes.…

Two previously unseen poems by The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien have been discovered in a school magazine in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. …Tolkien is believed to have written the poems while he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon as Oxford University. Published in the 1936 annual of Our Lady’s School in Oxfordshire… first poem…is an early version of a poem Tolkien would late publish as part of the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil. …second poem, “Noel,” is a Christmas poem full of fantasy imagery.…

You just have to love the Duke of Wellington… "so that I may better understand why I am dragging an army over these barren plains…"

The Independent newspaper, a standard bearer for Britain’s left-wing media establishment for 29 years, has announced that it will close its print section and go “online only” from March 2016.…

On Wednesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling that Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel transferred the rights to the character to Warner Bros. in 2001.…

Dan Hicks, a longtime Bay Area music figure and the lead singer of Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, passed away Saturday following a two-year battle with cancer. He was 74. Hicks' wife CT confirmed the singer-songwriter's death on his official website. "He was true blue, one of a kind, and did it all his own way always," she wrote. "To all who loved him, know that he will live forever in the words, songs, and art that he spent his life creating. He worked so hard on each and every detail – they are all pure Dan."…

Jack Elrod Jr., a Gainesville native who spent 64 years working on the nationally syndicated outdoor comic “Mark Trail,” died Wednesday. He was 91.

Elrod began his time with the comic strip alongside its creator, fellow Gainesville native Ed Dodd, in 1950 and took over the strip in 1978 before retiring in 2014. He also won numerous conservation awards from agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Forest Service. Dodd began the comic in 1946.…

Signe Toly Anderson, a vocalist and original member of the Jefferson Airplane who left the band after its first record and was replaced by Grace Slick, has died. …Thursday at her home in Beaverton, Oregon… was 74 and had been suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Anderson, who survived cancer in her 30s, died on the same day that another Airplane member, Paul Kantner, died.…

Paul Kantner, founding member, guitarist and singer for Jefferson Airplane and Starship, died Thursday of multiple organ failure and septic shock. He had suffered a heart attack earlier in the week,… Kantner is survived by three children: Gareth, Alexander and China.…

I just heard a Bowie story that no one knows because it happened to someone I know who just recounted it to me personally. …

Sheet music written by Ludwig van Beethoven and found in a Connecticut home has fetched $100,000 at auction. appraiser Brendan Ryan… recognized Beethoven's handwriting in the German words, directions and symbols on the page… Research authenticated the music and determined it was from a sketchbook dating to 1810 and used by the composer for brainstorming. …

Music is mourning the death of esteemed singer-songwriter P.F. Sloan (Phil), who passed away on Sunday night (Nov. 15) at his Los Angeles home after fighting pancreatic cancer for several weeks, according to a release. He was 70 years old.…