Betelgeuse may explode soon

...according to a man named Eric Mack in this article on February 11th and also in this one on February 3rd.

So if you read at least one of the articles you'll know where to look.

Not here:

That's Beetlejuice, not Betelgeuse.

Here's Betelgeuse:

I do apologize to readers in the Southern Hemisphere who see a completely different night sky.

If Betelgeuse does explode into a supernova as astronomers are predicting, nothing will be left of it eventually but stardust.

Speaking of which, here's Nat King Cole singing that very song (3:21).

Betelgeuse may explode, but Nat King Cole's voice goes on forever.

Thank you, Nat, and thank you, Gordon Jenkins Orchestra, and thank you, Hoagy Carmichael.

That last guy? All he did was compose the song.

The third time is supposed to be the charm

So here goes, with my deepest apologies to composer Mel Torme:


A Chrimma Thong
by Mail Tore May

Jest knots roosting buy a no pan far,
Chuck froze Nippon nature knows,
You'll tight cure-alls bean sum buy acquire,
End foe stress top lack ask emotes --

Ovary buddy no zit turnkey end sum missal tow
Alp tomato* session bride;
Tinny tuts wither rise awe log low
Wool finite heart two slip tune height.

Juneau dads ant a sauna sway
His looted loss sub toes zing hoodies onus lay,
An debris mudder's childish gown twos pie
Two sea a friend dear rally no had deaf lye.

An sew eye muff ring dish ample frays
Took kiss firm wonder nightie too;
Awl doe wits bin shed mini dimes, mini weighs,
"Myrrh reek Chrimma stew ewe!"

*you have to pronounce it the American way, to-MAY-toh, because to-MAH-toh just doesn't work.

In closing, and with my deepest thanks to all of you for indulging my maddening seemingly unending occasional forays into this strange passion of mine to explore what it is possible to do with the English language, here's Nat King Cole's iconic version of the genuine article (3:15).

I can’t go traipsing off to Thailand

...like Yorkshire Pudding or create exquisite paintings of cherries like Katherine DeChevalle or cross dangerous gorges like Elizabeth Stanforth-Sharpe, but I can spend a quiet evening at home, sitting in front of the fireplace, listening to music from years gone by....

Care to join me?

1. “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” performed by Billy Butterfield with the Ray Coniff Orchestra (2:36)

2. Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” performed by Billy Butterfield with the Artie Shaw Orchestra (2:50)

3. Nat “King” Cole singing “When I Fall In Love” (2:56)

4. Andy Williams singing “Moon River” (2:45)

5. Roberta Flack singing “Killing Me Softly With His Song” (4:42)

There, now, wasn’t that relaxing?

Fascinating Friday

I am fascinated by many things.

Right now I am fascinated by all those little thingies on the right side of my blog.

The number of Followers creeps ever higher and although it moves slower than molasses it is all the way up to 79 at present. I think some followers have stopped dropping by but their little photos are still displayed and will continue to be until the followers become non-followers officially. As the Eagles once sang, you can check out any time, but you can never leave (7:15).

The Most Recent Visitors To My Blog list continues to amaze. I have now saved 136 of those little flag doohickies, the two latest ones being Tuvalu and Palestinian Territory.

The Feedjit Live Traffic Map is beginning to show more and more visitors from Asia. Only a few visitors arrive from South America, though, and little red dots on the African continent are rare indeed. Hawaii and New Zealand sometimes disappear altogether, dropping off the map entirely, as do the Philippines from time to time. Feedjit is fickle and marches to its own drummer.

I have kept a poem by Jinksy and a quotation from Carolina’s blog in place for over two years just because I enjoy reading them. Just so you won’t tire yourself out from all the scrolling up and down with your mouse, here are both of them:

1. Jinksy’s poem:

Retrospect

Dreams of youth
become faded with age
like bright flower petals
that dim as they dry
between interleaved paper
meant to preserve them.

And yet those pale petals
live on in the mind
to bloom again,
as memory recalls
the hour of their plucking.

-- Penelope Smith in napple notes, 5/13/2009. Used by permission.


2. Carolina’s quotation:

"I find it fascinating to see how the flowers of Nectaroscordum siculum bulgaricum unfold."

-- Carolina in Nederland in Brinkbeest In English, 6/10/2009.


Today, I am adding another quotation under the heading Words to Live By (Or Something) just because I can and also because I am fascinated by it and here it is:

3. “In the latest taxonomy the Patellogastropoda have become an unranked taxon as a separate clade.” --from an early version of the article “Limpet” in Wikipedia.

There. I did it and I’m glad. And although the statement is scientifically accurate it strikes me as very funny. If it doesn’t strike you as very funny there is probably something wrong with you.

Patellograstropoda are limpets. More specifically, the limpets shown below are Patella vulgata on a rock surface in Wales.

(Photo from Wikipedia Commons used by permission under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

The fact that patella also is how your doctor refers to your kneecap is interesting, but not fascinating enough to explore further.

However, if I may quote from Wikipedia again, “A clade is a group consisting of a species (extinct or extant) and all its descendants. In the terms of biological systematics, a clade is a single branch on the tree of life. The idea that such a natural group of organisms should be grouped together and given a taxonomic name is central to biological classification. In cladistics (which takes its name from the term), clades are the only acceptable units. The term was coined in 1958 by English biologist Julian Huxley.”

I end this post with what you’ve all been waiting for.

Ladies and gentlemen, a clade diagram (or cladogram):

Oh, and this (2:46). Can you identify the lovely ladies?

[Three of the lovely ladies are Greta Garbo, Lana Turner, and Grace Kelly. But who is (or are) the other one (or two)? I really want to know; I don’t have a clue. --RWP]

From the archives: After experiencing both Darlene Edwards and Anna Russell...

...one is well-advised to return to sanity and the normal world gradually to prevent damage to one’s cerebral cortex. Therefore, since today is New Year’s Eve and 2008 will soon be replaced by 2009, we have just the thing. We shall accomplish our return, our decompression, as it were, by way of our very own A Festival Of Auld Lang Syne Performances.

The first performance will be on the musical saw with accordion accompaniment (I said we must do this gradually), plus there is a bit of the human voice. Experiencing this particular performance is eerily reminiscent of listening to Darlene Edwards herself, but it will begin to accomplish our ends. When the voice enters (which I believe is female, but I may be wrong), we are actually able to forget Darlene for a time by concentrating instead on what seems to be a very poor imitation of the young Bob Dylan from a time when Bob’s lyrics were still comprehensible. Here, then, from 2006, is the androgynous Nicki Jaine on both the saw and the vocal, accompanied by Roy Ashley on accordion, with Auld Lang Syne #1.

Next, class, we travel through both time and space to Detroit in the year 1987 to hear the young Aretha Franklin and Billy Preston sing a Motown version of our festival theme, Auld Lang Syne #2. Inexplicably, there is a brief appearance by comedian David Brenner at the end of the performance.

As we continue to mellow and chill and let the old year slip away, who better than saxophonist Kenny G to put us in the proper mood? Here is the third rung on our decompression ladder, Auld Lang Syne #3. You may skip this step only if you majored in jazz saxophone in college and consider Kenny G as having sold out for commercial success.

Last year, I searched for a fitting Auld Lang Syne #4 with which to close the Festival. After listening to dozens of possibilities, I decided against subjecting you to Barbra Streisand’s turn-of-the-millenium Las Vegas concert rendition and settled instead upon the Alexandria Harmonizers, the 2003 medal winners of the International Chorus Singing Contest at the SPEBSQSA Convention in Montreal, Canada (SPEBSQSA is the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America), singing one of the best renditions of Auld Lang Syne I have ever encountered. This year, unfortunately, that video is no longer posted in cyberspace because of some squabbling over copyright issues, so I am forced to take a different tack. This year, instead of listening to a fourth version of Auld Lang Syne, let us take a little stroll down memory lane and enter the land of Auld Lang Syne itself.

Help yourself to one or more of the following musical stars of yesteryear:

Doris Day,

Vic Damone,

Lena Horne,

Perry Como and Eddie Fisher,

or the great Nat King Cole!

In Gloria Swanson’s role as silent-film star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, she had one of the great lines of all time: “They didn’t need dialogue. They had faces then!” When I listen to these singers, I feel like saying, “They had voices then!” I shudder to think what fans of today’s music will be thinking are “golden oldies” thirty or forty years
from now.

Our Festival has now come to an end. It has done its work and our decompression is complete. You may now return to your normal lives, where you are free to choose any kind of music that helps you get through your day.

[A slightly different version of this post was first published on December 30, 2007. --RWP]

The Most Romantic LP Ever Made

First of all, if you’re asking “What’s an LP?” you need to go find another blog to read.

This is just one person’s opinion, of course, and there’s no accounting for taste. De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that. I get it. For example, Mrs. RWP always used to enjoy listening to Johnny Mathis. But my vote for the most romantic 33-1/3 revolutions-per-minute long-playing (LP) vinyl record album ever made goes to one recorded in December 1956 and released in 1957. I got mine through the Columbia Record Club. With the Gorden Jenkins Orchestra doing the accompaniment honors, it was -- drum roll, please! -- Love Is the Thing by Nat King Cole. Back in those days, there were no videos to watch when you listened to music, and no CDs or DVDs or iPods or iPhones, either -- nothing, nada, zilch. You had to make up your own mental videos as you listened.

There was just something about the husky, grainy voice of the REAL king (Elvis, eat your heart out) coupled with those banks of cascading strings that got me every time. Wikipedia puts it this way: The singer’s “restrained vocal approach” and the arranger’s “unhurried string charts” combined to produce a romantic album of enduring popularity. You can say that again.

But don’t just take my word for it. Listen to these songs (they were all on that album):

“Love Is The Thing”

“When I Fall In Love”

“Star Dust”

Someone has put together a video of literal star dust with the last one, along with photos of the song’s composer. Can you name him? The composer, I mean, not the video maker.

You’re free to disagree, of course. De gustibus non est disputandum. But as a former pastor of ours used to say, “Can I help it if you’re wrong?”

Here’s further evidence that 1957 was a very good year:
Nat King Cole music, a brand-new turquoise ’57 Chevy, and the girl of my dreams in my arms. At the time, one out of three wasn't bad. Not bad at all.

Somehow my copy of the most romantic LP ever made, the one I purchased from the Columbia Record Club in 1957, took up residence at my son’s house several years ago as part of his extensive record collection.

[Addendum: Just for the record (no pun intended), I wasn’t personally in love with Nat King Cole. Just his voice. Somehow, when he sang, it was me singing. And he wasn’t singing to me. He, er, I was singing to my idealized, perfect, absent, non-existent girlfriend. I just wanted to make that perfectly clear! Oh, and one other thing: I would not want to go back and re-live my teenage years for all the tea in China.]

[Addendum #2: I tried to find a YouTube clip of the most romantic song on the most romantic LP ever made, but I couldn’t. I did find the lyrics, however. Here they are:

That’s All
by Alan Brandt and Bob Haymes

I can only give you love that lasts forever
And a promise to be near each time you call,
And the only heart I own
For you and you alone,
That’s all, that’s all.

I can only give you country walks in springtime
And a hand to hold when leaves begin to fall,
And a love whose burning light
Will warm the winter night,
That’s all, that’s all.

There are those, I am sure, that have told you
They would give you the world for a toy.
All I have are these arms to enfold you
And a love time can never destroy.

If you’re wondering what I'm asking in return, dear,
You’ll be glad to know that my demands are small.
Say it’s me that you’ll adore
For now and ever more,
That’s all, that’s all.]

[Addendum #3: As for my fantasy girl fantasizing about me, Peggy Lee singing “And Then My Heart Stood Still” tops the list.]