rostasi

The Associated Press Tuesday, January 2, 2007 NASHVILLE, Tennessee Del Reeves, a country music star who sprinkled his performances with humor and hit No. 1 on the country charts in 1965 with the song "Girl on the Billboard," has died. He was 74. Reeves died Monday, New Year's Day, after an extended illness, Grand Ole Opry theater spokeswoman Jessie Schmidt said Tuesday. During his 40 years at the Grand Old Opry, he was hailed as one of its best entertainers because of his comic timing. Along with his music, he did impressions of stars such as Jimmy Stewart, Johnny Cash and Walter Brennan. The Grand Old Opry is a long-running Nashville country music show that evolved from a vaudeville type format to radio broadcast and television, though it still is based on a stage show. Music performances are interspersed with jokes, storytelling, and a cast of recurring archetypal country and western characters. His "Girl on the Billboard" sold a million copies and earned him the nickname of the Doodle-Oo-Doo-Doo Kid for the nonsense syllables that he sang with the song's guitar intro. His other hits included "The Belles of Southern Bell," "Women Do Funny Things to Me," "Looking at the World Through a Windshield," "Good Time Charlie's," "Be Glad" and "The Philadelphia Fillies." "I want to be remembered as a great showman and a nice guy," he told The Associated Press in 1988. "That's all I could hope for." Reeves became a regular performer on the Opry in 1966, and performed for up to 1 million people a year on the long-running country show. "I listened on the radio on Saturday nights and it was the ultimate," he said in 1988. "As a child, I told my daddy I was going to sing on the Opry one day. He said, 'Yeah, sure you are.' I kept my goal in mind and in '66 we achieved it." "He was one of the best entertainers that ever came through the Opry, I think," said Kelso Herston, who signed Reeves to the United Artists label in the 1960s and produced some of his early records, including "Girl on the Billboard." "He was happy-go-lucky. He had a positive attitude and was a great person. A great friend." Reeves turned to impressions and light material early in his career when he found those more to his liking than ballads. "I couldn't really sell a ballad," he said. "It had to be material on the lighter side. Under this clown's face, there's a serious guy. But I never got to show it because I got tagged as that clown. I've been clowning as long as I can remember." In the late 1960s, Reeves had his own syndicated TV show, "The Del Reeves Country Carnival." He also appeared in several movies, including "Sam Whiskey," starring Burt Reynolds and Clint Walker. He said he was born July 14, 1932, in Sparta, North Carolina, the youngest of 11 children, and was named Franklin Delano Reeves for then-presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt. He learned to play guitar with his mother's help and was playing a regular gig on a local radio show by age 12. He attended Appalachian State College in Boone, North Carolina, and served in the Air Force, performing and writing songs while stationed at Travis Air Force Base in California. He was regarded as a rising singer-songwriter by the time he moved from California to Nashville in 1962. In the early 1990s, he promoted the emerging career of singer Billy Ray Cyrus. The arrangement ended up in court with Reeves suing for damages. The matter was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

CBS News report video is here

It can be a long read, but there are some well-known names there. I think the first that I noticed was Roy Haynes.

they bought a 4th iPod.

Yup, March 31...just doesn't seem that long ago...

December: • Mariska Veres (singer, "Shocking Blue") • Dave Mount (drummer, "Mud") • Darren "Wiz" Brown (singer, "Mega City Four") • Jay McShann • Jeane Kirkpatrick • Desmond Briscoe (sound engineer and founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) • Martha Tilton (singer with Benny Goodman) • Fred Marsden (drummer, "Gerry & the Pacemakers") • Georgia Gibbs (singer, Kiss of Fire) • Walter Ward (singer, "The Olympics") • Homer Ledford (bluegrass legend) • Alan Shugart (pioneer of the disk drive, co-founder of Seagate Technology) • Oscar Klein (trumpeter, Lionel Hampton, and others) • Kenny Davern • Peter Boyle • Sivuca • Mike Evans (actor who played Lionel on The Jeffersons, also co-created Good Times) • Ahmet Ertegun • Tom McManamon (banjo player, "Shane MacGowan and The Popes") • Pnina Salzman (Israeli pianist, known as the "First Lady of Piano") • Goce Nikolovski [Macedonian singer, known for his hit Biser Balkanski ("Pearl Of The Balkans")] • Denis Payton (sax player, "The Dave Clark Five") • Daniel Pinkham (composer, organist, harpsichordist) • Joseph Barbera (cartoonist and co-founder of Hanna-Barbera Productions) • Mary Bates Burns (Canadian swing singer) • Neville Willoughby (Jamaican radio broadcaster) • Galina Ustvolskaya • Dennis Linde (songwriter, wrote the 1972 Elvis hit Burning Love) • Norman "Dutch" Mason (Canadian blues musician) • James Brown • Gerald Ford made a few additions to the other months as well... also: I didn't include Pluto because I feel that it didn't "leave" us - it just got demoted. Rod

Many possibilities abound - not just 128.

Thanks for the "More Science High" reminder. Fantastic stuff!

She can?

Just a reminder... ...and a question: Will this be the first time that the US will go 3 days straight without mail delivery (in modern times or otherwise)?

Bottled Music

December 18, 2006 Please Let It Be Whale Vomit, Not Just Sea Junk By COREY KILGANNON MONTAUK, N.Y. — In this season of strange presents from relatives, Dorothy Ferreira got a doozy the other day from her 82-year-old sister in Waterloo, Iowa. It was ugly. It weighed four pounds. There was no receipt in the box. Inside she found what looked like a gnarled, funky candle but could actually be a huge hunk of petrified whale vomit worth as much as $18,000. “I called my sister and asked her, ‘What the heck did you send me?’ ” recalled Ms. Ferreira, 67, who has lived here on the eastern tip of Long Island since 1982. “She said: ‘I don’t know, but I found it on the beach in Montauk 50 years ago and just kept it around. You’re the one who lives by the ocean; ask someone out there what it is.’ ” So Ms. Ferreira called the Town of East Hampton’s department of natural resources, which dispatched an old salt from Montauk named Walter Galcik. Mr. Galcik, 80, concluded that the mysterious gift might be ambergris, the storied substance created in the intestines of a sperm whale and spewed into the ocean. Also called “whale’s pearl” or “floating gold,” ambergris is a rare and often valuable ingredient in fine perfumes. “He told me, ‘Don’t let this out of your sight,’ ” Ms. Ferreira said. She was soon summoned to show the thing at a town board meeting, after which a story in The Independent, a local newspaper, declared Ms. Ferreira the proud new owner of “heirloom whale barf.” Friends and neighbors flocked to her tchotchke-filled cottage overlooking Fort Pond Bay, the very shores where her sister, Ruth Carpenter, said she found the object in the mid-1950s. Childless and never married, Ms. Ferreira bounced from job to job, most recently as a short-order cook at a local deli, and now lives on her Social Security income. “If it really does have value, I’m not silly, of course I’d want to sell it,” Ms. Ferreira said as she looked out past her lace curtains and picket fence at the whitecaps on the bay. “This could be my retirement.” After researching ambergris on the Internet, Ms. Ferreira’s neighbor, Joe Luiksic, advised, “Put it on eBay.” But endangered species legislation has made buying or selling the stuff illegal since the 1970s; a couple who found a large lump of ambergris valued at almost $300,000 on an Australian beach in January has had legal problems selling it. “If I get locked up, will you bail me out?” Ms. Ferreira asked her friends. Ambergris begins as a waxlike substance secreted in the intestines of some sperm whales, perhaps to protect the whale from the hard, indigestible “beaks” of giant squid it feeds upon. The whales expel the blobs, dark and foul-smelling, to float the ocean. After much seasoning by waves, wind, salt and sun, they may wash up as solid, fragrant chunks. Because ambergris varies widely in color, shape and texture, identification falls to those who have handled it before, a group that in a post-whaling age is very small. Ms. Ferreira says she has yet to find an ambergris expert. “A hundred years ago, you would have no problem finding someone who could identify this,” said James G. Mead, curator of marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institution, who said he hears of new ambergris surfacing somewhere in the world maybe once every five or six years. “More often, you have people who think they’ve found it and they can retire, only to find out it’s a big hunk of floor wax.” Adrienne Beuse, an ambergris dealer in New Zealand, said in a telephone interview that good-quality ambergris can be sold for up to $10 per gram, adding that for the finest grades, “the sky’s the limit.” At $10 per gram, Ms. Ferreira’s chunk, according to a neighbor’s kitchen scale, would have a value of $18,000. “The only way to positively identify ambergris is to have experience handling and smelling it, and very few people in the world have that,” Ms. Beuse said. “Certainly, if she has it, it’s like winning a mini-lottery.” Larry Penny, 71, director of East Hampton’s natural resources department, said he had no way of making a definite determination, because “we don’t keep a certified whale-vomit expert on staff.” Mr. Penny, whose great-great-uncle was skipper of a whaling ship out of Sag Harbor, said he grew up searching the beach for ambergris. “The older folks would always tell us, ‘Keep your eyes open for that whale vomit because it’ll pay your way through college,’ ” he recalled. “We used to bring home anything that we thought looked like it, but it never turned out to be ambergris. The average person today could trip over it on the beach and never know what it was.” Ambergris has been a valued commodity for centuries, used in perfume because of its strangely alluring aroma as well as its ability to retain other fine-fragrance ingredients and “fix” a scent so it does not evaporate quickly. Its name is derived from the French “ambre gris,” or gray amber. During the Renaissance, ambergris was molded, dried, decorated and worn as jewelry. It has been an aphrodisiac, a restorative balm, and a spice for food and wine. Arabs used it as heart and brain medicine. The Chinese called it lung sien hiang, or “dragon’s spittle fragrance.” It has been the object of high-seas treachery and caused countries to enact maritime possession laws and laws banning whale hunting. Madame du Barry supposedly washed herself with it to make herself irresistible to Louis XV. In “Paradise Regained,” Milton describes Satan tempting Christ with meat pastries steamed in ambergris. In “Moby-Dick,” Melville called it the “essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale.” Old newspapers show clippings every few years describing some whaling crew coming upon a hunk, or some vacationing family finding it on the beach and either cashing in — or discovering it was just ocean detritus. “We always heard about it, but I don’t remember finding any,” recalled Encie Babcock, 95, of Sag Harbor, whose great-uncle Henry Babcock was captain of a whaling ship in the 1800s. Mrs. Carpenter, Ms. Ferreira’s sister, said she was about 30 years old, beachcombing with her dog in front of the family house, when she spied the object and “and just liked the way it looked, so I kept it.” After moving with her husband to Iowa, Mrs. Carpenter kept the waxy hunk in a box in her bedroom closet. “Anytime we had houseguests, I’d take it out and ask them if they knew what it was,” she said. “Of course they didn’t. This is Iowa.” She sent it to her sister, Mrs. Carpenter said, because “I’m not feeling too good, and I don’t have much time left.”

It works especially well with classical recordings. I get a bit irked when I put a, for example, Xenakis disc in the player and it shows up in iTunes under the performer(s) name in "artist", so a good place to have this is in the "Album Artist" section. Actually, I think all of the labels need some rethinking, but that might screw with other software that's used with iTunes - maybe... EX: Name: Psappha Artist: Iannis Xenakis Album Artist: Red Fish Blue Fish/Steven Schick Album: Percussion Works

I'm no expert, I just use these things a lot. Please, no disrespect intended, but are you sure that you don't have it on automatic sync? At this moment, I have nothing on my iTunes - no music - but I can plug my iPod in to the computer and play 5185 songs that I had taken previously off of my iTunes library (when it had them, of course).

Just came across this. The deadline passed two weeks ago, but it still could be helpful. It seems that you'll have to do a Google news search for the newspaper article that's mentioned, but the main article is still interesting and self-explanatory. You'll come across some surprising names here: A Last Minute Appeal

I used to have the opposite problem that you're having. iTunes would organize everything into artist and album folders while naming the files with disc and track numbers at the beginning, so when I would drag songs off of my iTunes to somewhere else, they always were preceded by it's track number. Frustrating...until I discovered how to stop it in the Advanced/General pane. As for playlists, There's no "need" to create them at all. You can have a huge mish-mash of stuff in your central library and play the whole thing randomly if you like, but there are, literally, millions - actually billions - of ways to sort your tunes if you ever choose to, so I don't understand what the problem is. If you want to sort by track number, that's possible too. If you want to hear track 1 of every disc you have loaded, it's easy to do so, and so on... That stuff that kinda slows things down a bit - gapless playback and cover art detection - can be turned off easily if it really is a prob. My iPod does show up as an external drive that's removable at any time. Personally, instead of drag and drop onto the external drive, I like the idea of D 'n' D onto iTunes, so I can actually put the tunes just where I want them. If I've got some holiday tunes that I want to keep separate from the others, I just make a "Holidays" playlist and D 'n' D onto it - works great! If I want to send you guys a particular song, I just drag it off of my iTunes, plop it on my desktop and FTP it to a site...so it works in both directions with incredible ease. I think that it's one of the most user-friendly and intuitive bits of software of the past 6 years.

Been running iTunes on an external (I have to!) for years now. In '07 the external will be larger. No probs at all. Never had an iTunes freeze up either.

I think it's all straightened out now.

This is so sad. He gave us a lot. He gave up a lot. James sings that we should unite at Christmas. A great heartfelt song that brings tears today.

MG, I'll help you spend more money next year! Happy Holidays to all!!

Rick Grech was in the band too - I think he was the first to leave tho, but we later had him in Blind Faith and Traffic, so that was probably a good thing for us. Maybe not so good for him - short career paths for both bands and then he died in '90 due to excessive drinking - ahhhh, the sometimes life of the R 'n' Roller.

David, are you getting along OK in light of your recent health probs?

That was Young Tiger (or George Browne if you prefer). You were close on the date - 1953. Sam Walker was the tenor player. You may notice the irony of his presence on that tune - considering he became well-known in the modern jazz scene in your country. Of course, there were other calypso kings who thought bebop was great: Lord Kitchener with Freddy Grant's Caribbean Rhythm Rod --- Now playing: Gwigwi Mrwebi - Nyusamkhaya

This damn modern music!

There's no way that I could reasonably list all of the holiday tunes that I've been playing. I had thought of a weeklong rodcast, but decided to keep at least some of my sanity and just devote the 24th and 25th to it.