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Things that
come up
when you
type in
on Google and You Tube -- are sometimes the thing you typed in, and sometimes not.
You know? You end up going like, "OK, I know what I typed in, and this is not it"...
--------------------------
(Type in
"dog" --
get
)
We discover, with practice, that the Joy Of You Tube is not undiluted -- sometimes Joy is interrupted by Frustration, or by -- "What??!!"
I was saying here yesterday that you can type in and hear --
Jackie Kennedy speaking French
Jackie Kennedy speaking Spanish
Jackie Kennedy speaking Italian
and
Jackie Kennedy speaking Polish.
Well -- you can type them in, anyway -- the French and Spanish you will hear, and see, her speaking them.
But if you type in Jackie Kennedy speaking Italian, there is a video of Mrs. Kennedy walking in Italy.
And when you type in Jackie Kennedy speaking Polish, you get Jack Kennedy speaking to a Polish-American audience -- in English.
(Not the same thing as "Jacqueline Kennedy speaking Polish," You Tube...?!!
____________________
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On Google, type in
I Know A Little, Lynyrd Skynyrd
and listen.
(However, if you get a video of President Kennedy speaking Hungarian, or Jackie Kennedy walking someplace, try again...)
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Today I read that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a graduate of Boston University,
which is also my alma mater.
"Small world."
On Tuesday, she tweeted:
Today I saw people voting that are almost never seen in an off-year midterm primary.
Just now, as I'm typing this with 8 minutes left, two young men of color, 20 years old, just walked up to me and said they just voted.
2 yrs ago, the "experts" told me not to bother with them.
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In another primary this week, a former head of the N-Double-A C-P, Ben Jealous,
"pulled out a stronger-than-expected victory...on a night in which progressive candidates in several states edged out more conservative or establishment challengers," according to The Atlantic. Jealous won the Democrats' nomination for Governor of Maryland.
Annapolis Maryland Paintings
Fine Art America
On policy, Jealous ran to the left of his leading competitor, campaigning on single-payer health insurance, free in-state tuition, marijuana legalization, raising taxes on the wealthy, and shrinking the prison system.
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In the Bronx-Queens NYC district where Ocasio-Cortez won, her opponent outspent her by more than 10-1, while the average contribution to her campaign was $17 per person.
She told CBS News, "There's no way you can write policy without thinking of your donors, if you're taking an insane amount of money (from) special interest lobbies. So by not taking money from lobbyists, by taking money from working-class people, we can legislate for working-class people."
According to the CBSN story, President Trump weighed in via Twitter, calling incumbent Joe Crowley a "big Trump hater" and then writing that the Democrats are in "turmoil."
U.S. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi commented, "Let's not get carried away."
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Recently, I went on You Tube and typed in,
jackie kennedy speaking
and when you do that, you get several results opening up below, ending the phrase, alternately, with one of these:
French
Spanish
Italian
Polish
...and we can click on each of these and listen.
-30-
|| Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
|| won a New York Democratic primary race in a surprise upset
|| her campaign money -- three hundred thousand dollars;
Congressman Crowley's campaign money -- over three million dollars
|| she is 28 years old (if elected in November, she will be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress)
|| her Twitter, today: "I completely agree with @SenSanders. Interpretations of 'us vs them' are unproductive in our discourse and, in my opinion, misguided. This is about fierce advocacy for working class Americans."
____________________________
I listened to this candidate today on You Tube -- the conversation can be viewed by typing in:
Political Newcomer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez On Her Upset and the Road Ahead, Morning Joe
She is very articulate.
Her defeated opponent, incumbent Democratic Representative Joe Crowley, pledged his support to her campaign, and then apparently picked up his acoustic guitar, and, dedicating the performance to Ms. Ocasio, sang "Born To Run."
----------------------------------
_______________________________
-30-
(top 2 pictures: Sid Caesar;
3rd picture: the writers for Your Show of Shows)
"Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end."
~ Sid Caesar
_______________________________________
(Note to self:
Heathcliff Huxtable, I know.
I do not know Bill Cosby, and never did.)
_______________________________________
There's an episode of "The Cosby Show" in the second or third season where Clair wants her husband to learn to eat lighter. She makes dinner -- chicken and potatoes for the children, and salad for Cliff and herself.
Cliff's first idea is that he will enjoy eating the nice salad and then have some chicken and potatoes. Clair tells him, Well, no, the children are having the chicken and potatoes, "...you and I are having salad." She pauses, observes his slightly distressed look. She adds cheerfully, gently: "Just for tonight."
Cliff says reluctantly but cooperatively, "Yeah, ok, just for tonight -- little salad." And he smiles, to try to make himself feel happy about the salad. Picking up a fork, he looks into the bowl of salad and requests dressing.
Clair: "It's on there."
He looks more closely at the salad, searching.
She tells him it's (I think) olive oil and -- "a splash of lemon." (She's being a little over-cheerful, now, trying to sell the salad-as-dinner idea....)
Cliff then bursts forth in anguished, hungry tones: "That's not dressing! I want salad dressing, something that's creamy, and cheesy, and I can SEE it! I can't see splashes!"
_________________________________
While the family eats their dinner, Theo comes home from his friend's house where they had pulpeta. (When I watched this Huxtable episode in the '80s, I had never heard of pulpeta.) Theo says it's a Caribbean dish, and describes it in enthusiastic, delicious detail. Listening to this good food that isn't salad, Cliff gets this very longing look on his face.
After dinner, he speaks to his son quietly in the living room, asking him to go back over to his friend's house and see if there's a plate of pulpeta that he can bring back, and then enter through the office door and meet him downstairs with it.
(Theo: "Dad, you had a big salad."
Cliff: "I want some food!!")
Later, as Cliff surreptitiously begins to take a bite of pulpeta, behind the locked door of his office, the door is abruptly knocked on, and comes Claire's voice through it -- "Theo, are you in there?"
Theo: "Sort of."
___________________________________
If a person is going to eat differently, it needs to be their own idea. If wives or husbands try to "police" each other's food choices or calories, it only leads to people huddling in a basement office over exotic Cuban lunchtime fare....
-30-
Book review by Orville Prescott
New York Times, August 19, 1946
----------------- [the review, reprinted] ------------ The summer fiction doldrums are over. An exciting new novel is published today. It isn't a great novel or a completely finished work of art. It is as bumpy and uneven as a corduroy road, somewhat irresolute and confused in its approach to vital problems and not always convincing.
Nevertheless, Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" is magnificently vital reading, a book so charged with dramatic tension it almost crackles with blue sparks, a book so drenched with fierce emotion, narrative pace and poetic imagery that its stature as a "readin' book," as some of its characters would call it, dwarfs that of most current publications. Here, my lords and ladies,
is no book to curl up with in a hammock, but a book to read until 3 o'clock in the morning, a book to read on trains and subways, while waiting for street cars and appointments, while riding elevators or elephants.
Robert Penn Warren, Kentucky born and Tennessee educated, poet, professor, critic and novelist, is a Southerner who hates the shortcomings of the South, as do so many Southern writers. But he writes about such shortcomings with an eloquence and an elemental rage worlds apart from the sordid bitterness of some of his literary colleagues.
In an earlier novel, "At Heaven's Gate," he wrote a terrible and engrossing story of moral decadence, business fraud and social degeneration, which somehow lost effectiveness because it seemed grossly exaggerated.
But "All the King's Men," although it may stumble occasionally because of unconvincing motivation or characterization, cannot seem exaggerated, for it is still another novel about Huey Long and the looting of Louisiana.
Huey Enigmatic but Fascinating
John Dos Passos, Hamilton Basso and Adria Locke Langley have already written novels about the cracker dictator. There is something about Huey, his combination of magnificent abilities and a genuine if primitive idealism with bottomless corruption and lust for power, which fascinates the literary as well as the political mind.
Here was a man who destroyed the democratic structure of an American State while shouting his championship of the common man.
How significant and how representative was he? How serious is the threat of his kind?
Mr. Warren toys with the questions, but does not answer them. Through the eyes of his narrator, a corrupt and cynical newspaper man enrolled in the dictator's service, he sees Huey's career without illusions as to his personal faults, his "tomcatting all over the State," his use of bribery, blackmail and force, his contemptuous destruction of freedom and decency.
But he magnifies the roads, schools, income taxes, etc., introduced in Huey's regime. "At least the Boss does something," says one of Mr. Warren's characters. He might have said, "The trains run on time." Mr. Warren has not chosen to recognize Huey as the personification of an American variety of fascism.
(Huey Long)
This does not mean that "All the King's Men" does not consider issues. But Jack Burden, the reporter turned official blackmailer for the Boss, is an inadequate medium for their consideration. Although learned in history, Jack is so cheaply cynical that he is entirely bogged down in a morass of relativity where ends justify means and good and bad are meaningless words.
In the end, after contemplating the superior behavior of several others, Jack concludes that loyalty and courage really are virtues, after all. But the reform comes too late and is not persuasive.
An Exuberant Skill With Words
Thus it is quite possible to argue with Mr. Warren about the meaning of his book and to hold reservations about several of his characters (Anne Stanton, the aristocrat whom Jack loves in his fashion and who becomes the Boss's mistress, is hard to imagine and harder to understand).
But such matters in no way impair the superb effectiveness of Mr. Warren's story telling. Jack may be morally as blind as Willie Stark, the Boss, but Mr. Warren has endowed him with his own exuberant skill with words.
(the actor Broderick Crawford playing the part of Willie Stark in the 1949 film version of All The King's Men [the "Willie Stark" character is stand-in for real-life governor Huey Long])
"All the King's Men" is really a double story, that of Willie, the hick from the red-neck country who rose to power through eloquence, leadership and ruthless mastery of dirty politics, and that of three aristocrats drawn into Willie's orbit. Jack was one of them, and he betrayed everything he should have stood for.
Anne's brother, Adam, was another, a distinguished surgeon whose conception of honor and whose desire to do good could not be adjusted to the filthy world where men like Willie got results. And Anne was the third, a well-intentioned waverer between opposing systems.
The two themes are woven together adroitly so that they cross, and recross, with flashbacks in time, with interpolated stories almost completely independent in themselves, with episodes of thundering melodrama. Willie Stark as a man and a politician is superbly well realized. Jack tells his story with a cynical humor, a raw vitality and an awed wonder that are immense.
He is equally skillful in suggesting the futility of the old tradition when confronted with men like Willie, and, in poetic passages of pure atmosphere, rushing highways at night, old towns on the Gulf, the noisome aggregate of crawling, subhuman life around the great man. Mr. Warren has obviously studied Thomas Wolfe, but he knows how to keep a story moving and independent of himself as Wolfe never did.
"All the King's Men," in spite of the faults which will make it bitterly discussed, is a richly rewarding reading experience.
-30-
one headline:
TRUMP ORDERS END TO HIS FAMILY-SEPARATION POLICY AMID NATIONAL FUROR
| | Los Angeles Times
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I watched (actually listened to, mostly) a documentary about Beyonce on You Tube -- it said she has "three octaves" when she sings ... a Viewer Comment corrected that to four.
During the past weekend, Beyonce and Jay-Z's new album was "dropped" according to news articles on the Internet. So then I was remembering how much I loved some of her songs...
Ladies on the floor, all my ladies on the floor
If you ready get it ready let's get it and drop it
Drop down low and sweep the floor wit it
Drop drop down low and sweep the floor wit it...
I don't think they can handle this! -- Whoooooooh!
Barely move, we've arrived
Lookin' sexy, lookin' fly
Baddest chick, chick inside
DJ, jam tonight...
...I'm not gon' stop (what?)
I'm gon' work harder (what?)
I'm a survivor (what?)
I'm gonna make it (what?)
I will survive (what?)
Keep on survivin' (what?)...
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(I like the fast ones!)
I haven't yet had time to be a student of Beyonce's more recent music. I read about the Lemonade album in 2016, and heard Michelle Obama say that she asked her daughters in dinner-table conversation which song on that album they liked best.
Music video from the new album, where Beyonce and Jay-Z sing and dance in the Louvre Museum in France, is on You Tube. I watched it. I didn't know if that song and that type of performance was my cup of tea or not. Maybe I didn't understand it. I loved the idea of recording the music video in the Louvre, however.
Those earlier songs -- "Survivor," "Get Me Bodied," and "Bootylicious" -- just reached out and grabbed me the first time I heard them, like -- "Wow!" Spoke right to me.
Maybe I understand the light-pop / R & B songs ("fast ones"), but don't get the deeper-meaning stuff in the art museum. Does this make me a shallow person? I don't know, but -- I do know -- that
A little sweat ain't never hurt nobody
While y'all standin' on the wall
I'm the one tonight...
...Stop now cool off cool off, cool off cool off...
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