M Is FOR MASHUP - January 30th, 2019
Best Of DJ Useo Vol 7
By DJ Useo
…& so, it finally appears - "Best Of DJ Useo Vol 7"
( groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2019/01/best-of-dj-useo-vol-7.html )
2 more full discs worth of newer variety style mashups by me. An interesting side fact is this album is about a year late in release, due to so many distractions over the last twelve months. I actually have Vol 8 ready to post as well, but I'll wait a few months for that.
Sorry to report, there's no video versions this time, but I do believe the tracks are of the highest quality. DJ Petrushka went over them with me, & at her urging I replaced a few of the 'stranger' ones with tracks that contain more appeal. Try the preview track "DJ Useo vs Celebrity Murder Party - Love Rocket Reaper ( Blue Oyster Cult vs Donna Summer vs Suicide )". It's one of the most likeable mixes I've ever been involved with. Imho.
( sowndhaus.audio/track/7768/love-rocket-reaper-blue-oyster-cult-vs-donna-summer-vs-suicide- )
Theres lots of variety & genre-clash lurking on this 38-track release. For instance, you'll encounter The Doors vs The Prodigy, Marvin Gaye vs The Stranglers, Talking Heads vs Blancmange, & Simon & Garfunkel vs Kollektiv Turnstrasse vs Pig&Dan. I released a lot of tracks during this comp period, many that were "weird", so they don't appear in this series. The most popular track I posted lately was with They Might Be Giants vs White Zombie, but there's no tracks like that on this sucker. As far as I recall, there's also no language NSFW, so feel free to bug your co-workers with the kind of tunes one doesn't normally encounter.
All six past volumes are freshly-linked, & completely accessible right here
( djuseomashupalbums.blogspot.com/ )
along with many mashups albums by me, or related to me. None come with a charge, so feel free to share the links. Pals of mine all have new mashup albums released, or pending soon, so expect to hear about them here in the coming weeks. Have the day of good - K
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Paul Krugman: Elizabeth Warren Does Teddy Roosevelt (NY Times)
Taxing the superrich is an idea whose time has come - again.
Greg Sargent: As Trump slides in new poll, he retreats deeper into Fox News fantasyland (Washington Post)
A new Post-ABC News poll finds that most Americans believe President Trump is failing spectacularly by many different metrics. Large majorities say he doesn't have the temperament to be president; lack confidence that he'll make the right decisions for the country's future; and (this one will really sting) say he isn't good at making deals. At the same time, new reporting indicates that Trump's media and political allies are working overtime to erect a protective bubble around Trump, one designed to prevent him from grasping the most basic political realities of the moment.
Jonathan Chait: Howard Schultz Might Reelect Trump Because He Doesn't Understand How Politics Works (NY Mag)
Billionaire coffee-shop mogul Howard Schultz is seriously thinking of running for president as an independent. Schultz appears to be one of those rich people who has confused his success in one field with a general expertise in every other field that interests him. His apparently sincere belief that he can be elected president is the product of a sincere civic-minded commitment to the public good and an almost comic failure to grasp how he might accomplish this. That confusion is probably being spread by his hired staffers, whose financial incentive, conscious or otherwise, is to encourage him to embark on a costly political fiasco.
Jason Hickel: Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn't be more wrong (The Guardian)
There are a number of problems with this graph […]. First of all, real data on poverty has only been collected since 1981. Anything before that is extremely sketchy, and to go back as far as 1820 is meaningless. Roser draws on a dataset that was never intended to describe poverty, but rather inequality in the distribution of world GDP - and that for only a limited range of countries. There is no actual research to bolster the claims about long-term poverty. It's not science; it's social media.
Oliver Balch: "'No one likes being a tourist': the rise of the anti-tour" (The Guardian)
With the tourism explosion affecting even smaller cities such as Porto, visitors and locals alike are looking for more 'authentic' days out. But is that possible?
Ashley Boucher: Joshua Tree national park 'may take 300 years to recover' from shutdown (The Guardian)
National park saw 'irreparable' damage including vandalism, ruined trails and trees cut down, says former superintendent.
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
David Bruce's Smashwords Page
David Bruce's Blog #1
David Bruce's Blog #2
David Bruce's Blog #3
David Bruce's Lulu Storefront
David Bruce's Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
from Bruce
Anecdotes - Dance
• At Westside High School in Houston, Texas, educator Sharon Roberts uses hip-hop dance to keep students in school. This can be difficult. She says, "Working with the boys is like trying to put puppies in a box. You get four in, then one jumps out." Ms. Roberts' Inertia Dance Company wins - a lot - both in dance competitions and in life. In 2004, the Inertia Dance Company won the prestigious M.A. Dance Company's National High School Dance Championships - and no student flunked out and all of the seniors graduated. Kirk Beecher, who was 18 years old in 2004, says, "The only reason I passed classes is because of dance. If I didn't do it, I wouldn't be happy - and I'd be on the street." According to Ms. Roberts, "People see the dancing, but to me this is all life lessons. It's about being successful when you leave." Andres Flores, 23, who was in the first group of boys whom Roberts invited into her studio, gives this testimonial: "I grew up in Houston's Third Ward, in the bad side of the neighborhood. People were always breaking into your house. My friends were in gangs. At Lamar High School, one of my friends was going to her dance studio, so I started going there. I started liking it. So every single day I started going to the after-school practices. Sharon's no-pass, no-play policy motivated me to always pass. I was almost kicked out for smoking in the parking lot. But Sharon went and stood up for me and really helped me out. I'd always hung around with a bad crowd. Dancing got me away from that. Because of dance, my grades improved. Now I am actually the advanced hip-hop teacher at Lamar. That's one of my biggest accomplishments. Dancing got me a long way in life. A long, long way."
• British dancer Sally Marie had to dance naked in Dear Body, a satire by Luca Silvestrini of people obsessed with working out to make their body beautiful. Intellectually, she had no problem with this. She said, "I'd been arguing for ages that we needed a greater variety of bodies and ages in dance. It felt like an important statement to be on stage showing my tits." In practice, she was terrified. She explained, "When you're in a sauna, it feels completely natural. But on stage, you're really exposed." Also, in practice, she was many pounds lighter when she stripped off on stage. Why? She said, "I'd been too frightened to eat." Ms. Marie does have good advice for anyone who will be dancing naked: "Try to avoid being naked in a photocall. Otherwise you will find pictures of yourself all over the national press and the internet. And they never go away. At run-throughs, keep your T-shirt on. It's amazing how many extra 'techs' show up when they think there may be some tits on show." When London-based choreographer Arthur Pita had to dance naked in his choreography of Camp after a cast member was injured, he immediately started doing squats and press-ups for a very good reason: vanity. He explained, "I really didn't want anything to be wobbling for the audience."
• Balletomanes sometimes think that the life of ballet dancers and choreographers is glamorous, but it often isn't. Early in ballerina Maria Tallchief's career, she and other lowly paid ballet dancers often played "Ghosting," aka "That Old Army Game." One dancer would rent a room, then two other dancers would sneak in and stay there, too. One dancer would sleep on the bed, another on the box springs, and a third on the floor. Because of wartime conditions, however, rooms were not always available, and Ms. Tallchief once saw famed choreographer Agnes de Mille sleeping on a table in a hotel hallway.
• Following a performance of Scotch Symphony, in which Maria Tallchief was tossed in the air and then caught by André Eglevsky, two great ballerinas-Alicia Markova and Alexandra "Choura" Danilova-visited her and complimented her backstage. However, Ms. Danilova had a piece of advice: "But, you know, dear, when you're thrown in the air, back must be arched, head must be up high. Must be unconcerned." Ms. Tallchief explained, "Well, yes, Choura, I know. I'm trying to be serene, but I'm scared to death André's not going to catch me. Four of those boys are tossing me, and he's got to catch me all by himself."
• One must suffer to have the experience to create a credible work of art about suffering. When Gus Solomons, Jr., was a young man, he choreographed his first dance and he put a lot of pain in it. The piece used percussive music, and Mr. Solomons pounded his bare-chested body, exhausting himself in the first three minutes of the dance. When he showed the dance to Murray Louis, Mr. Louis asked, "Gus, what was all that suffering about? What do you know about suffering?"
• Creative people suffer ups and downs in their work, but sometimes a creation that at first is rejected is later recognized as a classic-and, of course, sometimes a creator will rework and improve an earlier creation. Someone said to choreographer George Balanchine, "Your last two or three ballets have not been very successful. What do you have to say about that?" Mr. Balanchine replied, "Give me some time, and maybe they'll be masterpieces."
• Classical dancer Erik Bruhn used to hire a cleaner to come and do his housekeeping, but things did not always work out as planned. For one thing, he would pile his dirty dishes in the sink, but after a while, and before the cleaner came to wash the dishes, he would wash them himself. Why? Mr. Bruhn explains, "Because I can't stand to see dirty dishes."
• When Anton Dolin first choreographed his "Doll Ballet," lots of people came to him, requesting something special, such as a solo for a friend. He listened to them - as he says, "like a fool" - with the result that the ballet was very bad, and he had to re-choreograph it, with no special bits, but instead with all the dancers used en masse.
• All women were very popular out west during pioneer days. When the first dance was held in Nevada City, California, 300 men showed up - and 12 women.
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Hate to make you look at his ugly face, but the first file has him with an appropriate hat. The rest for giggles.
Cave joke: "I don't wanna say Trump caved, but on summer evenings at sunset, thousands and thousands of bats fly out of his ass."
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
JD is on vacation.
Visit JD's site - Kitty Litter Music
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Weather's changing - rain ahead.
'Merci Suárez'
Newbery Medal
Sure, we may be mired in the dark days of winter, but you wouldn't know it by the splash of color that saturated the American Library Association's annual award presentation Monday - from the pastels on the pages of the picture books, to the two bronze medals that represent some of the highest honors in children's literature.
Meg Medina's Merci Suárez Changes Gears won this year's Newbery Medal, awarded for the "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children." Meanwhile, Sophie Blackall's Hello Lighthouse won the Caldecott Medal, which goes to the artist behind the "most distinguished American picture book for children."
It is the second Caldecott Medal for Blackall in just four years, as the illustrator also won in 2016 for her work on Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear.
The two medals headlined the ALA's Youth Media Awards, the ceremony that regularly crowns the association's midwinter meeting in Seattle, but these awards were by no means the only ones handed out.
That includes the Michael L. Printz Award, which went to Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X for young adult literature; the Theodor Seuss Geisel Award for work geared toward beginning readers, which was awarded to Corey R. Tabor's Fox the Tiger; and the Coretta Scott King Awards, which celebrate the best works by African-American authors and illustrators celebrating the black experience.
Newbery Medal
Hollywood Walk O'Fame
Taraji P. Henson
"Empire" star Taraji P. Henson was awarded one of Hollywood's top honors Monday receiving a star on the Walk of Fame.
The Oscar-nominated actress became emotional during the ceremony, crediting her grandmother as an inspiration for her throughout her career.
Henson's latest film, "What Men Want," is scheduled for release on Feb.8.
Her next project, another movie with "Baby Boy" director John Singleton, is about the brutal 1955 lynching of Emmet Till. She told ET, while she's looking forward to it, "It's going to be bittersweet because yes, it's a story that absolutely needs to be told," she said, but she revealed it's sometimes hard for her to go to such a dark place, because she said "I'm such a bright person."
Taraji P. Henson
Share a Beer
The Dude and Carrie Bradshaw
Now here's a mashup we would've never expected. Jeff Bridges reprised his character from "The Big Lebowski" as The Dude to share a drink with Sarah Jessica Parker, reprising her own iconic role as Carrie Bradshaw from "Sex and the City."
And yes, it's for a Super Bowl ad. A few of us got a bit too excited after Bridges teased a brief video of himself as The Dude, guessing there might be news of a new "Big Lebowski" reboot or sequel.
In the commercial, both Carrie and El Duderino find their way into a bar, but instead of ordering their signature drinks, namely a Cosmo and a White Russian, they instead decide to share a Stella Artois, much to the surprise of everyone.
"Changing can do a little good. The Dude abides," Bridges says to Carrie before Stella's slogan appears on screen, "Change up the usual."
Bridges is also joining Stella as part of their Pour It Forward campaign in partnership with Water.org, in which every bottle or pour of Stella in a bar contributes to one month of clean drinking water for someone in the developing world, with a purchase of a six-pack at a store translating to six months of clean water.
The Dude and Carrie Bradshaw
1972 Ziggy Stardust TV Debut Footage Unearthed
David Bowie
In June 1972, David Bowie made his debut as Ziggy Stardust on British TV show Lift Off with Ayshea, but years later a technician accidentally wiped the only known footage of the performance instead of converting it to digital. Audio of the show is available online, but a video archive of the iconic moment was seemingly lost in time. On Tuesday, however, it was revealed that a fan had recorded Bowie's appearance with a home video recorder. And if we're lucky, it may even appear in a BBC documentary next month.
The home video recorder was a precursor to VHS, though the latter ultimately won out for being cheaper, easier, and capable of storing more content. The footage from the June 1972 Ziggy performance was only recently unearthed, and it still remains to be seen whether it will be viewable by the time the documentary debuts next month-or viewable at all.
The tape has degraded over the years and is currently being "baked" with restoration expected to continue until just before the documentary airs, the BBC reported. Tapes from the early 1970s are at risk of what's called Sticky Shed Syndrome, in which the tape film's binder is worn down, but possibly recoverable, according to the University of Illinois' Preservation Self-Assessment Program (PSAP). Baking is routinely used to remedy this issue, which involves baking a tape at a low temperature (from 130 °F 140 °F) for one to eight hours or more, depending on the tape format. Though it's not a permanent solution-the tape may only last up to a few months before it will absorb moisture.
The original tapes from the TV show were sent by Granada Television to a technician to be digitized. Of the 144, "a handful" had an "X" on them to signify that they were safe to delete since they were duplicates, according to the Telegraph. The technician believed that those marked with an "X" were the ones to be converted to digital, and instead deleted all of the remaining tapes, including the one with Bowie's first Ziggy debut.
David Bowie
"Empire" Actor Assaulted
Jussie Smollett
Chicago police have opened a hate crime investigation after a cast member of the television show "Empire" alleged he was attacked by men who shouted racial and homophobic slurs at him and physically attacked him.
Police haven't released the name of the 36-year-old cast member but say he reported being attacked while walking downtown around 2 a.m. Tuesday. Chicago Police said state law prohibits them from naming victims, but 20th Century Fox Television and Fox Entertainment confirmed the alleged victim is Jussie Smollett, who identifies as gay.
In a follow-up interview with police, Smollett said his attackers yelled "MAGA country" during the assault, Chicago police confirmed to CBS News. TMZ first reported details of the attack.
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the victim reported two men approached him and began shouting the racial and homophobic slurs at him. He said they then struck him in the face and poured an unknown chemical substance on him before one of them wrapped a rope around his neck. They then fled, police said.
FBI data released last year showed a 17 percent increase in hate crimes between 2016 and 2017. Hate crimes based on race, ethnicity or ancestry were the most common, making up about 60 percent of the total. The FBI's latest report also found 15.8 percent of hate crime offenses in 2017 stemmed from sexual orientation bias. Between 2016 and 2017, hate crimes motivated by racial bias rose about 18 percent and attacks on LGBTQ individuals rose 5 percent, according to the FBI.
Jussie Smollett
Becoming More Corrupt
America
Under President-for-now Donald Trump (R-Grifter), the United States has received its worst score on a global corruption index in seven years, according to a new report.
The United States scored 71 on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018, a fall of four points since 2017 and the nation's lowest score since 2011. Transparency International is an anti-corruption watchdog that tracks interactions between money and politics worldwide and ranks countries based on perceived corruption in the public sector.
Ranked 22nd in the world, the United States is no longer within the top 20 countries deemed the least corrupt.
"This decline comes at a time when the U.S. is experiencing threats to its system of checks and balances as well as an erosion of ethical norms at the highest levels of power," the report states, listing the United States as a country to watch.
The less corrupt a country's public sector is, the closer its index figure is to 100. The index uses a number of surveys and assessments of corruption by other reputable researchers to reach its figures.
America
All-Surveilling "VPN" App
Project Atlas
The "Facebook Research" VPN is an app that circumvents Apple's ban on certain kinds of surveillance by cloaking itself as a beta app and distributing through the Applause, Betabound and Utest services, rather than Apple's App Store: users get up to $20/month, plus referral fees, to run the app, which comes with a man-in-the-middle certificate that lets Facebook intercept "private messages in social media apps, chats from in instant messaging apps - including photos/videos sent to others, emails, web searches, web browsing activity, and even ongoing location information by tapping into the feeds of any location tracking apps you may have installed."
It's not clear which of these data-types Facebook is harvesting from users of the app, which is codenamed "Project Atlas."
The program recruits users aged 13 to 35, and has been running since 2016. Facebook confirmed that it uses the app to "gather data on usage habits."
Facebook previously faced disgrace and crisis when it was revealed that Onavo, a so-called VPN app that was actually grabbing a huge tranche of data from users; Apple subsequently removed Onavo from its app store. Facebook does not distribute the "Research" app through Apple's own beta-test program, choosing instead to launder it through third parties. Facebook is pretty clearly violating Apple's policies in doing this.
Once installed, users just had to keep the VPN running and sending data to Facebook to get paid. The Applause-administered program requested that users screenshot their Amazon orders page. This data could potentially help Facebook tie browsing habits and usage of other apps with purchase preferences and behavior. That information could be harnessed to pinpoint ad targeting and understand which types of users buy what.
Project Atlas
A Flying Army
Schrödinger's Cats
A laser pulse bounced off a rubidium atom and entered the quantum world - taking on the weird physics of "Schrödinger's cat." Then another one did the same thing. Then another.
The laser pulses didn't grow whiskers or paws. But they became like the famous quantum-physics thought experiment Schrödinger's cat in an important way: They were large objects that acted like the simultaneously dead-and-alive creatures of subatomic physics - existing in a limbo between two simultaneous, contradictory states. And the lab in Finland where they were born had no limit on how many they could make. Pulse after pulse turned into a creature of the quantum world. And those "quantum cats," though they existed for only a fraction of a second inside the experimental machine, had the potential to be immortal.
"In our experiment, the [laser cat] was sent to the detector immediately, so it was destroyed right after its creation," said Bastian Hacker, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany, who worked on the experiment.
So what does it mean to make a laser pulse like Schrödinger's cat? First of all, the cat wasn't a pet. It was a thought experiment that physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed in 1935 to point out the sheer unreasonableness of the quantum physics he and his colleagues were then only just discovering.
Here's how it goes: Quantum physics dictates that, under particular conditions, a particle can have two contradictory traits at the same time. A particle's spin (a quantum measurement that doesn't quite look like the spinning we see at the macro scale) might be "up" while also being "down." Only when its spin is measured does the particle collapse one way or the other.
Schrödinger's Cats
Prime-Time Nielsens
Ratings
Prime-time viewership numbers compiled by Nielsen for Jan. 21-27. Listings include the week's ranking and viewership.
1. "60 Minutes," CBS, 11.24 million.
2. "America's Got Talent Champions," NBC, 9.71 million.
3. "Chicago Med," NBC, 9.42 million.
4. "Chicago Fire," NBC, 8.43 million.
5. "The Big Bang Theory," CBS, 8.33 million.
6. "This is Us," NBC, 8.23 million.
7. "The Conners," ABC, 7.74 million.
8. "Ellen's Game of Games," NBC, 7.47 million.
9. "FBI," CBS, 7.4 million.
10. "Chicago PD," NBC, 7.23 million.
11. "The Masked Singer," Fox, 7.15 million.
12. "Grey's Anatomy," ABC, 6.99 million.
13. "NCIS: Los Angeles," CBS, 6.75 million.
14. "Bull," CBS, 6.71 million.
15. "NCIS: New Orleans," CBS, 6.7 million.
16. "America's Funniest Home Videos" (Sunday, 8 p.m.), ABC, 6.56 million.
17. "Fam," CBS, 6.35 million.
18. "The Good Doctor," ABC, 6.28 million.
19. "The Big Bang Theory" (Thursday, 9 p.m.), CBS, 6.16 million.
20. "The Bachelor," ABC, 5.98 million.
Ratings
In Memory
James Ingram
James Ingram, the soulful, smooth voice behind R&B hits like "Just Once" and "I Don't Have The Heart," has died at the age of 66.
Ingram, an Ohio native, got his start as a musician with the band Revelation Funk and later played keyboards for Ray Charles. He was nominated for 14 Grammy Awards, winning for best male R&B performance for his song "One Hundred Ways" in 1981 and best R&B performance for a duo or group in 1984 for "Yah Mo B There."
His duet with Patti Austin, "How Do You Keep the Music Playing," earned an Oscar nomination for best original song in 1983.
Over the course of his career, Ingram also had successful collaborations with Linda Rondstadt, Quincy Jones, Barry White and Dolly Parton.
He co-wrote Michael Jackson's hit song "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" with Jones.
Ingram was also nominated for two Golden Globe Awards -- one in 1994 for best original song for "The Day I Fall in Love" and again in the same category the following year for "Look What Love Has Done."
James Ingram
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
