Thursday, November 10, 2011

More tropical vacation music....


Edmundo Ros - "Tico Tico"

Why am I thinking 'Carmen Miranda'?
The gal with the 200 MPH mouth...
 

Wednesday, November 9, 2011


Roberto's version of The Carioca,
which got its start in the 1933 movie
'Flying Down to Rio', Fred and Ginger's
very first musical.
In that, The Carioca goes on and on,
for nearly 15 minutes, with everybody
except the cameraman taking a turn at it.
But it's a great old tune, and I love it!

Coconut Woman is a busy one!
 

Will the real Roberto Delgado please say hello?


"Bahia Blanca"
Please see the ending credits 
for the real "Roberto"...
and enjoy the music!

Notes:-
Bahia Blanca means White Bay,
and Delgado is Spanish for "thin".
So Roberto Delgado might translate
to "Thin Bob" or "Skinny Robert".
But it has a nice sound to it.

Roberto Delgado does it better.....


Sounds like 'Carnaval' already...

And who is Roberto Delgado, you ask?
And the answer is:-
Click this link, please.

Nice 'wake-up' music -

"The Peanut Vendor" - Lester Lanin Orchestra
Why am I thinking 'Brazil' ?
The beaches at Rio...
Those Brazilian-cut bikinis...
Carnival in Rio...

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Connecting the dots.....


In 1983, Cyndi Lauper hit the charts with an album from CBS Records titled 'She's So Unusual' and one of its cuts was this one, 'He's So Unusual' which comes originally from the 1929 movie 'Sweetie' starring Helen Kane and Jack Oakie. I have the Cyndi Lauper LP, but let's listen to Helen Kane doing the original, shall we?

The Sexy Sixties Revisited with Lester Lanin Twistin'


Remember 'The Twist'? Sure you do!
Too Young?
Too Bad !!
"Shake it but don't break it, Baby!"

They came back ..................


I guess they like it here!
 

Monday, November 7, 2011

Let's go backward when forward fails !




I've always loved the Poo-Poo-Pee-Doo Girl,
Miss Helen Kane, the inspiration for
Betty Boop.
Another of her hits,
Get Out and Get Under The Moon.


And let's not forget this one!
"I Want To Be Bad"

You ain't heard nothin' yet.....


Is this a toe-tapper, or what?


This is nice too....


Last but not least, this one!
Lester, you did nice work!
 

The world population and other rantable topics....

There's a website if you click here, with a population clock ticking away toward our seven billion mark, which we apparently haven't quite reached yet.

There's also another little program, into which you can type your birth date and it will show you how many people were alive on earth the day you arrived here among us unwashed and unfriendly masses. To those of you who consider yourselves both washed and friendly, I just want to say "Don't get too smug about that, because you're vastly outnumbered by those who aren't washed, friendly, literate, or unarmed." And an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure.

But I digress again - sorry about that. Today's rant concerns itself with the idea that there's too much automation in a world which has too many people. Too few of those people are actually literate and gainfully employed in a role which allows them to be self-supporting, or supporting others as well.

I went to the hospital the other evening, to deliver a little card to a friend, and upon turning into their pay-parking lot, I got an unpleasant surprise. Ever since they did a major renovation to that hospital in the very early 1980s there has been a little booth at the mouth of the driveway separating the entrance and exit lanes, and containing a nice friendly East Indian chap collecting the parking fees and dispensing your change. He's now GONE! Automated right out of there, booth and all, to be replaced by individually numbered parking spaces and two robotic ticket-dispensing machines which take various coins, dispense parking tickets for your dashboard, and are said to be solar powered. They don't even use the grid's electricity, which I spent a semi-profitable career helping to produce. And all this at a time when we're rapidly approaching seven billions of humans on this overpopulated little planet designed for maybe half this many. So today's "Question Everything" is: "What the hell are we thinking?"

If science could save our asses or save us from ourselves, it would likely have already found a way to keep us from screwing ourselves out of a place at the table, a parking spot at the mall, and a place to stand in line. And Old Uncle Albert was absolutely right when he said, "The commonest element in the universe is not hydrogen, but rather stupidity, and the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits!"
 

Sunday, November 6, 2011

A vertical panorama by Microsoft's I.C.E.



This is a B-I-G image - made from 8 separate images at about 14x optical on a Pentax X70 compact digital. It is 13,517 pixels high by 3610 wide and Google's image-handling setup here simply can't do it justice. But I'm showing it anyway, to give you an idea of what Microsoft Research's I.C.E (Image Composite Editor) can do if you drop a series of images into it. There's no manual positioning or anything like that - the program does all that automatically and very quickly, and voila! a picture like the above.

Saturday, November 5, 2011

Live Better Electrically.....


But not too electrically!
Trees too close to the hot stuff
aren't the only problem to watch.


Here he is, brushing a top away between
the Hydro line and the underbuilt telephone
and cable distribution cables.
Local squirrels use those larger telephone
cables like a 'sidewalk' to move along from
tree to tree or block to block, so you might
say we have squirrels also living better electrically.
 

Winter returns to the high country

And now, a little old-time rock....


Ah, those were the days....


And then came Boogie! 
How's that grab you?

Friday, November 4, 2011

Mannheim Steamroller - nobody does it better!

Their Christmas albums and discs are
the absolute best beyond which you can't get!
You must have at least a couple already.
If not, I can only ask "Why not?"

It's 1984 all over again!


Or maybe it's 2004...
  

Attention Shoppers!!!

It's C-C-C-Cold outside!

Cold, but quite a nice day!
Checked your antifreeze lately?
Got your thermal snuggies handy?
Going to California for the winter?
You'll miss the best skiing in the West!

A little 'catch-up' from yesterday...
These guys were raising hell here
yesterday morning, removing a
'danger tree' that's obviously been
one for decades!
They must have been saving it 
for a 'slow day'...

  And this little Maple at the mouth of that
driveway across the street looks lovely!

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Around here today.....

If flowers could talk...
No tank top and shorts today!