Ahoy, me Beauties! Avast and arrrrrr and all that. Today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day! And remember, they make clear rum. Verrrrrry hard to detect. I'm just sayin', is all.
Lots of important musicians to remember today. On this day in 1981, Simon and Garfunkel reunited for a free concert in Central Park. And it was sooooo good! Why is this important? Because they're my favorite, secular group. Why are they my favorite, secular group? Because I'm a geek.
Paul Simon is brilliant in his own right, but the two of them together are sublime. Who else could take composition by the medieval composer Orlando di Lassi and make it even more awesome (Benedictus)? Probably, their most well known song is Sound of Silence. Here's a couple of other good ones:
He's not a singer, but Adam West was born in 1928. You know ... Batman? Bam, biff, pock, zam? Holy campy cheesfest? Have you ever seen the Batman movie, the original one? You need to, if you haven't.
Back to music, Cass Elliot, of the Mamas and the Papas, was born in 1941. She wasn't always a singer, you know. She was at a party the rest of the members of the band were attending and was ... how shall I say ... in an expanded state of mind. Then, a piece of bronze pipe fell and hit her in the head. After waking up from the concussion, she found herself in an expanded state of voice. When the group heard her, they signed her up! She died nine years later. Their two most famous songs are Monday, Monday (also known as "The Anthem for Public School") California Dreamin'.
My favorite singer of all time is Rich Mullins. He died on this day in 1997, and it was a sad day. There are few like him in the CCM scene. Most just ape popular secular music or churn out vapid, bland tapioca. But there was real heart and soul and ... reality, in Rich's songs. And he lived what he sang. For instance, when he heard that the average income of an American is $25,000; he told the elders of his church to manage his funds. They paid him a $25,000 stipend, and the rest went to charities. He didn't even know how much he made. If you want to be inspired, find a video called Homeless Man: The Life of Rich Mullins.
I wish I could have found some of his best songs, like Calling Out Your Name or Hard to Get, but these are good, too.
And, finally, Happy Birthday to the Emoticon! :-) It has a longer history than you'd expect. The National Telegraphic Review and Operators Guide in April 1857 documented the use of the number 73 in Morse code to express "love and kisses" (later reduced to the more formal "best regards"):
--... ...--Typographical emoticons were published in 1881 by the U.S. satirical magazine Puck.
Later, in 1912 Ambrose Bierce (who wrote the hilarious Devil's Dictionary) proposed...
... an improvement in punctuation - the snigger point, or note of cachinnation: it is written thus \___/! and presents a smiling mouth. It is to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence.But the official birthday is today, based on this proto-e-mail sent in 1982:
19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :)
From: Scott E Fahlman
I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
:-)
Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes - given current trends. For this, use
:-(
No comments:
Post a Comment