Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Frustration

Monday, January 17th, 2022

I was wandering around the internet this evening, and ran across this post at The Other McCain.

I had worked up a reasonably-sized post with various music-related reminiscences that were brought up by the post, including links to various YouTube videos and more. Unfortunately, trying to include a link to Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great?” playlist caused the WordPress editor (which I hate) to chew up the post, taking everything within and following the link, and making each word into a separately-quoted part of the link, after removing capitalization and punctuation. Having almost my entire post disappear into an href tag is incredibly frustrating, because for one thing, the editor doesn’t give me a simple way to highlight text and add a link (or, if it does, I haven’t been able to find it yet), and for another, when I hand-enter the html tags for links, I don’t expect the editor to decide it doesn’t like them, and to rewrite them and suck almost the entirety of the damned post into the tag! It’s been several years since I was hand-coding a lot of html, but just making a hyperlink is pretty damned straightforward!

It’s like WordPress only wants me to write things down as though they were diary entries, and doesn’t want my to link to anything. Given that this blog has always been more of a “here’s something shiny that caught my attention” than “here are my deep (or not-so-deep) thoughts about /some subject/,” that is a major drawback of the new editor that WordPress has forced on me sometime in the past year or so.

I know other people have expressed disgust with the WordPress editor; I’ll have to see what solutions they’ve come up with.

Some Halloween Music

Sunday, October 31st, 2021

It’s a cold night here, with rain and a chance of snow in the forecast. Here’s a little music for the holiday.

First, a Jonathan Coulton classic.

Next, a Tom Waits song that I was not familiar with.

Here’s the Kingston Trio from 1958 with Zombie Jamboree.

And here’s a version of the same song by Rockapella.

Here’s a song about vampires that I really like. This version is by the composer, but I prefer the version by Small Potatoes. Unfortunately, that one doesn’t appear to be on YouTube.

Of course, we can’t forget werewolves.

I have an old cassette that has a song on it called The Mummy Shuffle, which is all about the love a woman has for Kharis, the mummy played by Boris Karloff. Unfortunately, it only appears on YouTube as the entire tape. This is cueued up to the start of the song.

Tunesday

Tuesday, November 27th, 2018

Time for some music-related stuff. Thanksgiving was last week, and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant” is almost obligatory in some circles. Here’s something I ran across, but was unable to spend time on prior to the holiday. Perhaps for next year …

Here’s a nice rendition of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.” I listened to it because the name of the group attracted my attention.

Finally, here are two videos that are sequential selections from the same presentation on the Circle of Fifths. I knew parts of this before, but these are very clear and informative.

It’s Thanksgiving

Thursday, November 22nd, 2018

Since it was only my girlfriend and myself today (my daughter and her friends had other plans), I did not cook a Thanksgiving dinner. I did make a couple of desserts: a bourbon chocolate pecan pie and some chocolate rum balls. Instead, we went out. It was fine, and I don’t have the room in my fridge for leftovers from cooking a big meal, anyway.

One thing I meant to do, but never got around to, was to learn this so that I could play it today. Maybe next year.

Tunesday

Tuesday, September 25th, 2018

Been just over a month since I’ve posted anything. I’m not wanting to comment on the Kavanaugh hearings or anything else political, because I’m just disgusted by the behavior of the Democrats and the rest of the Left. So, I’ll post some music that I ran across recently and enjoyed.

It’s Memorial Day

Monday, May 28th, 2018

There are other bloggers who have moving posts, and I’ve done some in the past. Today, I’ll just link to this story in the Daily Mail, and note that patriotism, despite the efforts of some, is not dead.

Tuesday

Tuesday, February 6th, 2018

A couple weeks ago, I posted a video of ‘Tico, Tico’ that I liked. Since then, I’ve run across some more performances of it that I like. The first one is by Paco de Lucia. He gets pretty fast with his fingers on this. I used to have an LP or two of his. I’m not sure what the short bits that follow his performance are.

Here’s another version that’s pretty fun – it’s by Liberace. He gets some incredible speed in his performance.

Liberace was one of the more flamboyant performers I remember from my youth. I remember Bugs Bunny did a Liberace impression once or twice. Given his over-the-top wardrobe, I wonder if he had the same problem with the IRS that Diana Ross had – they were going to disallow the deductions she took for her stage outfits, but she demonstrated that most of them she couldn’t wear offstage – they wouldn’t allow her to sit down. He couldn’t make the same argument, since he performed sitting down.

Here he is performing ‘Malaguena’ and mugging with Sammy Davis, Jr.

And here’s another version of Malaguena, this time from Chet Atkins.

Tunesday

Tuesday, January 16th, 2018

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. Actually, it’s been a while since I’ve done anything on my website. In any case, I ran across the first video here, and decided it was time for a music post.

This is pretty funny.

I’ve long liked “Tico Tico,” and this is a very nice version of it.

Kimo Hussey is an incredible ukulele player. It takes a little time before he starts playing in this video, but it’s worth it.

I like this guy’s videos, and I’ve been working on figuring out how to play this arrangement. I’ve got the bare bones of it, at least for the verses. Still have to figure out what he’s doing for the solo, and pull out some of the melody he puts in that I don’t yet.

Marble Madness

Tuesday, January 24th, 2017

I heard on the radio news that a truck driver lost 38000 pounds of marbles on the highway near Indianapolis the other day.

I called in and requested this song. The DJ said he’d try to find it, but I wasn’t able to listen long enough to see if he actually did. It’s not quite identical with the news story, but … enjoy.

Tunesday

Tuesday, December 20th, 2016

I haven’t done any posting in almost a month, and I haven’t done one of these in a long while. We’ll do Christmas music, because it is the season.