Another favourite from my BBC radio listening days in the late 40s/early 50s was the larger than life American singer/comedian Jimmy Durante who also had the most famous nose in the world.
The Schnoz cut a lot of well known songs but this was always my favourite.Great drive, great spirit and really clever lyrics….

Jimmy was a big star on stage,screen, radio and TV from the 1920s until he retired in 1972. What is less well known was he entered the world of music playing the piano in the Original New Orleans Jazz Band, one of the first popular jazz bands in New York, mainly made up of musicians from New Orleans. Durante was the only New Yorker in the band but had been invited to join because of his expertise at ragtime piano.

Durante’s lost chord comedy number referenced a song originally written by the British composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame) in 1877. Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord” became one of the best known songs throughout the western world and was sung and recorded by Caruso as a benefit for the victims of The Titanic in 1912. As a musician not only Durante but also the general public would have been quite familiar with it – otherwise there would have been little purpose to the joke.

The sadness is that today most people’s knowledge of music outside the confines of media pap is so limited that few could make much sense of a phrase like “the Lost Chord”

A pity because the original Sullivan composition is deeply moving….

Rick Santelli for President? The man who played a major part in sparking off the Tea Party movement?

Santelli is a financial journalist who previously was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile exchange.

But he’s not a politician.

Surely the only sort of person who can unravel the mess that politicians have created is another politician – and anyway Colin Powell has decreed that nobody who identifies with the Tea Party could possibly win because compromise is the name of the game.

Powell’s sentiment has also been bolstered by the threat of the magisterial David Frum that he will leave the GOP if anyone but Romney or Huntsman is nominated

Still Santelli has one major ace in his hand should he actually make a play for 2012.

UK Guardian left wing AGW guru George Monbiot hates him

the most alarming example of cheap demagoguery you are likely to have seen.

Obviously the BBC has not made much of this story…..I wonder why?

Oxford educated left wing Guardian hackette Marina Hyde (“one of the funniest and most admired journalists in the UK”) might be getting the smallest Oxfam charity Christmas card this year from her editor Alan Rusbridger who had to endure the humiliation of seeing his face spread over The Sun as the tabloid helpfully pointed out

The much hyped Ms Hyde, the daughter of Sir Alastair Edgcumbe James Dudley-Williams, 2nd Baronet, blends in perfectly with the well born radical chic crowd at The Guardian burnishing their NW1 dinner party credentials by bashing the “rich” and the Tories. But it’s perfectly clear that this was a story that fitted so neatly into the Guardian’s Murdoch manic obsession she didn’t even bother to check it out.

Epic fail.

But her career will not suffer. Socialist hacks live in a risk free environment when it comes to peddling untruths because the golden rule of left wing journalism is that truth = what ought to be true rather than what is true. There will be no explosion of indignation from media colleagues for this shoddy piece of gimcrack “journalism”. No thundering broadsides from the BBC for it is now open season on Murdoch, not because of the hacking and blagging that anyway was probably par for the course for all tabloids, including the left wing Mirror – but because Murdoch and The Sun switched their support from Labour to the Conservatives in the final months of Gordon Brown’s tenure at No. 10 – and the many years of Murdoch supporting Labour were immediately conveniently airbrushed out of history.

Hence the lack of BBC interest in this story.

But imagine the outburst from the BBC if it had been a Sun reporter inventing stuff up about The Guardian. …..

Aaaaahhhhh….the sweet sense of liberal left hypocrisy in the morning…..

A beautiful song, beautifully sung – it’s good to hear, now and then, real singers within the idiom of pop…..they are good looking as well – or so my wife tells me…lol…

h/t GlobalSecurity Org

Always loved this 1947 Phil Harris record – when I was a kid it was regularly being played on BBC radio…the henpecked husband being chased by an angry wife wielding a rolling pin was a staple figure of comedy in the 30s, 40s and 50s…hence the plaintive plea to the woodman.

What is less well known was that the song had originally been a massive hit in the early 1900s for Bert Williams, long forgotten now but a hundred years ago one of the most popular vaudeville stars in America. Williams was the first black artist to break out of the “coon” stereotype and appeal to all audiences and “Woodman” was one of his most popular songs, sung in a “talking blues” style that Harris also copied. It proved to be the big hit of the Ziegfeld Follies Of 1911.

Yet the distinction of the song’s pedigree is not limited to Williams – for it was composed by Vincent Bryan and the former singing waiter Irving Berlin in the same year that “Alexanders Ragtime Band” became a smash hit not just in America but throughout the world and propelled the previously unknown Berlin overnight from obscurity to international fame.

But it’s roots go even deeper for Berlin adapted the lyrics from a poem, “The Oak”, written by the American poet George Pope Morris in 1837. The English musician Henry Russell wrote a score for it later that year and, under the more familiar title, the sentimental ballad became a staple of concerts and musical evenings for the rest of the 19th century. In 1911 Berlin introduced the comedic elements to the story and altered Russell’s score. So, what initially appears to be a classic 1940’s piece of Phil Harris musical humour has a very distinguished provenance.

Sadly both Harris and Williams and that whole genre of comedy songs are rarely heard today – mores the pity…

The man supected of shooting at the White House last Friday had become obsessed with President Barack Obama, officials have told US media.
It is thought Oscar Ortega-Hernandez, 21, believed God had given him a personal mission to attack the White House, said law enforcement sources.
A US Park Police bulletin said he was “unstable with violent tendencies”.

You would have thought that someone bringing a rifle with him and shooting at the White House would have been on the BBC website’s loop for several days accompanied by a lorry load of speculative think pieces on the dangers of political violence in the US from an assortment of pundits and experts.

Not one mention of the dangers of violent rhetoric.

Could it have been because of the suggestion that this man had been hanging around the Occupy DC gathering? There is no evidence that he was a “member” of that “movement”…..but he might have listened to some of the rhetoric which could have echoed fiery outbursts in New York

Naturally the BBC goes for the safe option and doesn’t even wonder if there is any connection between the endemic violence in so many of the Occupy encampments and an “Obama obsessed” gunman firing a rifle at the Presidential residence.

I wonder why?

At least in the BBC website report of Rep. Giffords interview with the ABC’s Diane Sawyer they had the good grace not mention Sawyer’s sly and serpentine attempt to rehash the lies and innuendo pumped out by a complicit US/UK media associating the Tucson shooting with Governor Palin and the Tea Party….

Murphy lives here.

He is 13 years old, was a rescue cat whose first home was obviously a living hell so he never has been particularly cuddly. Our grandson Oliver once summed him up perfectly as “the grumpiest cat in town.”

He has been hit by a lorry, fallen out of trees and accidentally clunked by a brick. In his younger days he saw off legions of other cats who dared to trespass into his territory plus one or two dogs. Now, however, apart from catching the odd rabbit just to prove he can still do it when push comes to shove, he prefers to take it easy, especially in front of a new log burner that, in the nature of cats, he assumes has been provided purely for his own comfort.

So, with all those crises ripping across the globe, Murphy just switches them out of his mind….maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here…..

Lady Trumpington was born in 1922 and as Miss Jean Barker was one of the young women who worked at Bletchley Park helping to break the German codes during WW2. Many years later she was one of Margaret Thatcher’s ministers. She’s a tough lady, used to smoke 70 cigarettes a day, has a very broad sense of humour and was once described as a “battleaxe”…there’s not many of her sort left anymore but when a colleague in the House of Lords rather patronisingly referred to her elderly years her reaction appeared to be very brief and quite explicit…

OK they want you to buy stuff from their shops but set that aside for one moment.

John Lewis is one of the most profitable retailers in the UK with branches in every big city, renowned for quality, value and good service. It rarely advertises on television since it’s reputation in itself is sufficient to generate footfall but for Christmas a TV commercial is regularly screened. As always the production values reflect the public’s perception of the store.

In 90 seconds this advertisement says more about love and family than a regiment of pundits could ponticate about in a thousand books….