Tag Archives: Something For Thursday

Here’s something cool: Franz von Suppe’s overture Poet and Peasant, played by the MGM Symphony Orchestra in a film made in 1955. My understanding is that films like these used to be part of the pre-feature entertainment in movie theaters. … Continue reading →

Something a bit different for this week — an entire episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. This is one of my favorite episodes. It’s not one of the “famous” episodes, like “The Trouble with Tribbles” or “The Menagerie” or … Continue reading →

OK, a bit different, inspired a bit by my Wednesday Dichotomy post from yesterday. I’ve always loved the movie A Fish Called Wanda, the raunchy and hilarious diamond heist caper flick that starred John Cleese, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis, … Continue reading →

Whoa! It’s Thursday. Oops. As a tonic for the latest crime against music perpetrated on American Idol by the inexplicably beloved crappy singer Lee DeWyze, here’s Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” the way the thing is supposed to sound: Lee turned it … Continue reading →

For his PBS show Cosmos, Carl Sagan did a brilliant bit on evolution, with some then-amazing computer animation: Here’s the same animation, without voiceover and with a different piece of music that was also used in the series, called “Alpha” … Continue reading →

Here’s a favorite song of mine, sung by Tony Bennett: “Stranger in Paradise”. The song is from the musical Kismet, but the melody actually goes back farther than that, being actually taken from the Polovtsian Dances by Alexander Borodin. How … Continue reading →

I’ve never been the biggest fan of Wynton Marsalis, but my favorite album of his is definitely the recording he did with the Eastman Wind Ensemble of solo pieces for cornet, light virtuoso pieces which date back to the era … Continue reading →

It’s Earth Day. Here’s Vangelis’s “Heaven and Hell”, the part used for the main titles of Carl Sagan’s great series Cosmos: Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, … Continue reading →

I discovered the music of Percy Grainger in college. Grainger was a pretty odd fellow, and his music could be very odd as well. He was keenly interested in folk song, and composed treatments of folk songs that tried to … Continue reading →