Blackmore’s Night is one of my favorite bands, with their oddly endearing blend of Renaissance faire, folk, Celtic, and rock music. They came out with a Christmas album a few years back, and this is the first track.
Ayup.
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A random opinion
I have to admit, folks, that I am entirely simpatico with the things that motivate the “Occupy” folks. I loathe the corporatization of America, the concentration of wealth at the very top of society, the notion that this concentration is a good thing that will one day lead to prosperity for everybody, the notion that increasing taxes on this crowd one penny in the hopes of making certain aspects of life easier for the rest of us somehow represents a deeply immoral encroachment upon some perverted definition of ‘freedom’, and all the Ayn Rand bullshit that has led to this.
What I simply don’t understand is how spending week upon week camping in the middle of a city is going to somehow translate into any kind of societal change or shift in public policy. Can someone connect these dots for me, please?
(And lest anyone misread this, I’m questioning the Occupy movement’s goals and strategies here, and not endorsing the rather terrifying police actions against them. I’m very much disturbed by the idea that municipal police forces are morphing into municipal armed forces.)
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
So yesterday, I received an e-mail from my mother, in which she simply told me what her favorite Christmas song is. I puzzled for some moments as to why she felt the need to tell me this.
Yes, folks, sometimes I can be just that dense.
Here is “Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabella”, sing by Diane Taraz.
Somehow, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard this song before…or at least, if I did, I may not have noticed it. Now I have, though. Thanks, Mom!
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Presenting: The Greatest Thing On The Internet, EVER.
I have just found a thing so awesome on the Internet that…I can’t even begin to describe this thing. If Shakespeare at the height of his powers had encountered this, the only soliloquy he could write singing its praises would boil down to “Yea verily, that is awesome. I beseech thee check it out, dude!”
That is all.
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Sentential Links
Yeah, I’ve stopped numbering these. No real reason why, I just got tired of having to go back and look it up each time out. Anyway, the linkage:
:: Good evening… come on in. Why don’t you get yourself some popcorn and a Coke from our stunning black-on-silver art-deco refreshment stand? (Be nice to the charming and vivacious young lady manning the counter; you’ll find her attitude very different from the sullen mouth-breathers at the multiplex. She actually likes her job.) Yes, I know our modestly sized bags of corn look puny compared to those MegaTubs you’re accustomed to getting at the other places, but trust me: this is all you need. (Errr…no. I mean, I’m with him all the way, except for the giant megatub of popcorn. When it comes in tubs, anyway. Nowadays, most times you get a bag.)
:: Really? Dreaming of overalls is good luck?? Dreaming of presents means you will always be showered with gifts?!? Is this pop psychology or pop mysticism?? (Yeesh, that’s weird, is what that is. I don’t dream of overalls, to my knowledge…hmmm….)
:: In spite of the extreme importance that Dickens places on Marley’s death right away in his story, all the film versions so far have left Marley out of the earliest scenes. Alastair Sim’s is the first to introduce him this soon. (Michael May is surveying all the various versions of A Christmas Carol that are out there. Good stuff, as always!)
:: Okay, this is all going to be heavily theoretical, possibly annoying, and maybe even misguided, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I need to try and verbalize this. And just to get the trigger out of the way, this is going to be some thoughts about racism, intentional and unintentional, in pop culture. (This is a fascinating post about race in Sesame Street and Star Trek. Check it out.)
More next week!
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
I think that my college choir performed this one year at our annual Big Christmas Music Hoopla, otherwise known as Christmas With Wartburg. Those programs were quite the undertaking, and they consumed four nights of our lives at the time: a performance on campus on Thursday night; a performance twenty miles down the road at a really big Lutheran church in Cedar Falls, IA, on Friday night; a performance at the Civic Center in downtown Des Moines on Saturday night; and a performance back at campus on Sunday afternoon. (The poor Choir, at the time, then had to do a performance of its own right after that fourth performance, during some kind of coffee hour, if I remember right.)
It was a lot of work and, coming as it did at the end of the fall semester, it put a lot of pressure on us students who also had to worry about finals and such. But those were some deeply special concerts, and I was more than a little bit ‘at sea’ in my senior year, when I was no longer in the band and thus was not involved in any way with the program. Those were wonderful times. In my sophomore year, I decompressed after the Sunday performance by watching Casablanca (this was the period when I discovered the film and watched it six Sundays in a row). The next year, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country opened on Friday, so right after the Cedar Falls performance, The Girlfriend (now The Wife) and I quickly changed and bopped over to the theater to see it. Good times. I miss those programs.
This is “Salvation is Created”, by Pavel Tchesnokov. It’s a live performance, so there’s audience noise, and ignore the graphic…the music is the thing here.
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Sunday Burst of Weird and Awesome
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Via Michael Dean Jackson, I see that the newest meme-thing to be sweeping the Interweb is “Unimpressed Astronaut”. I, of course, had to make a few of my own:
On that last: it always amuses me when people complain about a NASA mission that fails, such as lost probes to Mars. One of our standard cliches for indicating that a given task isn’t as hard as someone is making it out to be is, “Hey, this ain’t rocket science!” And yet, we get mad when people fail, even though they are actually doing rocket science. Anyhoo….
:: Hate Actually: the romances of Love, Actually tallied out and scored by pros and cons. I’m due for my annual viewing of Love, Actually soon….
More next week!
