the first five, left to right, are: Bob Dole, Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller
There's a video on You Tube titled:
Jon Meacham: Carter was a complicated man driven by ambition and service
uploader / channel: MSNBC
That title is kind of "click-bait." I don't see Jimmy Carter as all that "complicated."
But it's a good video. Very informative. 12 minutes.
One of the commentators says Carter lived "an epic American life."
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Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter passing away this week - 100 years young....
He was the first president I got to vote for: I turned 18 a month before the election, Whew!
He came to the state where I lived, to campaign: he was set to appear and speak in the biggest city down in the southeast corner. I and two friends from school asked my dad to drive us down there to hear him.
After he talked about issues that were current at the time, he said, "We haven't had a farmer in the White House since Thomas Jefferson; I think it's about time we had another one."
And the crowd roared.
He reached out from the stage as if to shake hands with everyone. At the front, we reached our hands up, and he swept his hand in an arc, touching as many fingertips as possible.
Years later, I read something where he quoted a line from a Bob Dylan song.
He spent the years after his presidency working for projects such as Habitat For Humanity - (doing things to help; not boasting about himself).
He was a good person.
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Tina Turner wrote a second autobiography which was published in 2018, titled My Love Story.
I read it on Sunday.
On You Tube, there's a channel called "TINA Turner Blog." It has some good content: in a video, "5 Life Tips Learned From Tina Turner (Vlog) - 2020," at about the four-minute mark, they added an interview of Tina, done by a French presenter. He speaks in French and you see subtitles in English.
(And then when she answers in English, you hear a lady repeating what she says in French.)
It's funny, for some reason - in a nice way - this happy chaos of languages, and besides this, the man doing the interview is curiously - aggressive, sort of - ! I mean, not in a scary way. It's humorous. It must be his style....
"Tina Turner! Indestructible Tina Turner! 'When The Heartache Is Over.' And Tina, who is joining us for a few minutes"...
She walks up, he kisses her on one cheek, then the other.
"Merci...thank you for being with us tonight"
"My pleasure."
"Now honestly, you have to tell me, You must have a secret. It's incredible. I observed you during the song. An incredible energy, a jaw dropping tonus. So now you won't leave this studio, without telling me how you do it!"
OK, did he just threaten to - kidnap her and hold her prisoner in the studio? - LOL.
And it's all said in French, so it sounds even more sinister, albeit more stylish, at the same time.
I had to look up the word tonus.
It is a word.
-- "the constant low-level activity of a body tissue, especially muscle tone"
Everything sounds more glamorous in French, even a weird word like tonus.
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--------------------- [excerpt from Apropos of Nothing, by Woody Allen - Copyright 2020, Arcade Publishing] -----------------
It [the film Annie Hall] got nominated for a number of Oscars. The night of the ceremony I was playing jazz in New York. I remember playing "Jackass Blues," a tune made famous by King Oliver.
I used my gig as an excuse, but I wouldn't have gone if I was free. I don't like the idea of awards for artistic things. They're not created for the purpose of competition; they're made to fulfill an artistic itch and hopefully entertain.
I'm not interested in any group's pronunciamento as to which film is the best film of the year, or the best book, or the Most Valuable Player.
I don't want to get into this and waste my typewriter ribbon, because then I'll have to get that guy over who changes it and feed him. Suffice it to say, Oscar night, I played the blues best I could, went home, went to sleep, and the next morning on page one of the Times noticed down below we had won four Oscars including Best Picture....
I was in the midst of writing Interiors, and that's what held my attention. Not a movie I'd done a year ago. Don't look back, Satchel Paige said, something may be gaining on you. I heed that great man's advice. I try never to look back, I don't like living in the past.
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You Tube has videos of TV Christmas specials from the past - Cher, in the mid-1970s; Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra from the late Sixties....
Cher had one with Redd Foxx in it - he was hilarious.
Cher's special was her alone, not the Sonny-and-Cher team to which we were accustomed - they had separated and were getting a divorce. I remember, I was shocked by that.
Sonny - got too bossy, or something....
Dean Martin shows up in several episodes of The Sopranos - not the actual person, he had passed on by the time they were making the saga of Tony Soprano - but references to Dean Martin and some of his music, and to Steubenville.
In an episode titled "White Caps" Tony is having conflict with a lawyer over a real estate deal, and he takes his boat out near the lawyer's beach side cottage and plays a Dean Martin nightclub act (some talking - "How long I been on?" - and some singing), from a CD-player with a big sound system.
The lawyer gets mad - his wife points out, 'if you call the authorities on him, Tony Soprano can just keep paying those two-hundred-dollar fines.'
It always amazes me how mad people get if they hear music being played by someone else. Like - music is only OK if they themselves put on the record, or CD or whatever.
Weird.
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