M Is FOR MASHUP - July 7th, 2021
Swimming In Zappa Albums
By DJ Useo
I had a good job once, so I decided to buy one Frank Zappa cd every payday, until I had them all. This made me so very happy. Amazingly, since I got all his official releases, his estate has been releasing tons of great stuff from his leftovers. I never miss any of the new releases, & the quality is very high.
So, what could be even rarer for a thirsting Zappa fan, than a mashup tribute album? It’s what I wanted, so I made my own. First there was
“I Love Frank - A Tribute In Mashups ( Zappa )”
( groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2016/01/frank-zappa-mashup-tribute-album.html ) , & then a few years after that I released
“The Mashups Of Invention”
( groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2020/06/tribute-album-mashups-of-invention.html ) .
Now, you get the last volume in this trilogy. “Let’s Be Frank-a mashup tribute” is hopefully in your hands & ears right now. I was very influenced on this new collection by the awesome recent ZAPPA movie. Thus, the tracks on this sucker are even more geared toward the Frank fans than the first two volumes. There’s stuff for everyone on this, with some mainstream-ish blends, & some totally far-out ones.
Please to be listening with an open mind, & the material will stimulate your brain, & heart, just like Frank’s music always did. The wide variety keeps the material fresh, even in 2021, which I believe it is now. ;) Check the Preview track
"Orange County Believer" ( The Monkees vs Frank Zappa )
( sowndhaus.audio/track/22041/dj-useo-orange-county-believer-the-monkees-vs-frank-zappa- ) to see if this album is for you.
Grab the zip file of “Lets Be Frank a mashup tribute” here
( groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2021/07/lets-be-frank-mashup-tribute.html )
If you’re looking for a non-Zappa mashup sound, I can help you there, as well. Here’s
“Useo Friendly”, my album which has wide variety, but in a very mainstream-y manner. -
( groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2021/05/useo-friendly-mashup-album.html )
More DJ Useo albums coming one a month every month in 2021.
Check here for updates
( groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/ )
Have the day of good - DJ Konrad Useo
from Bruce
Anecdotes
Scripture
• Retired teacher Laytham Fitch remembers a time when a schoolboy asked him if animals went to Heaven. Mr. Fitch didn’t know the answer, but the schoolboy felt strongly that animals do go to Heaven. When asked why he believed that, the schoolboy quoted Scripture: “Jesus said, ‘Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.’”
• A woman mailed a package containing a Bible to her son at college. When the postal employee asked if the package contained anything breakable, she replied, “Only the Ten Commandments.”
Sermons
• William Douglas was a Presbyterian preacher. Ordained on May 6, 1898, he spent time preaching to people in Minnesota, California, and Washington. While in Dot, Washington, he was prepared to give a sermon, but only one person, a cowboy, was in attendance. He offered not to give the sermon, but the cowboy said, “Well, if I had 40 horses to feed and went out looking for them with a load of hay and could find only one horse, I don’t think I’d let that one horse go hungry.” Rev. Douglas then gave the sermon, which lasted over one hour. At the end of the sermon, Rev. Douglas shook hands with the cowboy and asked what he had thought of the sermon. The cowboy replied, “Well, if I had 40 horses to feed and went out looking for them with a load of hay and could find only one horse, I don’t think I’d give the whole load to that one horse.”
• A traveling preacher in pioneer days was about to mount the pulpit in a new town when the town’s leading citizens warned him not to preach against the liquor trade, since a businessman in the liquor trade — a man who contributed liberally to the church — was going to be present. Next they warned the preacher not to preach against adultery, as an adulterer — who contributed liberally to the church — was going to be present. Then they warned the preacher not to preach against cursing, as a man who used swear words — and who contributed liberally to the church — was going to be present. The preacher asked, “Well, what can I preach against?” The town’s leading citizens advised, “Preach against the Jews — they haven’t got a friend in this town.”
• Village idiots, before jokes about them became politically incorrect, were often characters in stories, where they more than held their own against their supposedly more intelligent neighbors. In “Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character,” Dean Ramsey writes of Jamie Fraser, a village idiot in the parish of Lunan, in Forfarshire. Mr. Fraser stayed awake during a sermon, although many people around him fell asleep. The minister noticed this and chastised the congregation, saying, “You see, even Jamie Fraser, the idiot, doesn’t fall asleep, as so many of you are doing.” Mr. Fraser had pride, and he disliked being called an idiot, so he told the minister, “Aye, but if I hadn’t been an idiot, I might have been sleeping, too.”
• Many candidates applied for the position of rabbi at a synagogue, and one candidate announced that he was ready to demonstrate his fitness for the position by preaching a sermon on any topic the congregation chose. On the day of the demonstration, this candidate was handed a blank piece of paper. Turning to the congregation, he said, “Friends, this blank piece of paper was supposed to contain my subject. However, I look at the first side and see nothing. I look at the second side and see nothing. This reminds me that God created the world out of nothing. I shall therefore preach on the subject of divine creativeness.”
• George Whitefield preached almost to the end of his life. He died on Sept. 30, 1770, after having preached an open-air sermon the day before. A friend told him that he should be in bed instead of preaching, but Mr. Whitefield looked toward the heavens and prayed, “Lord Jesus, I am weary in thy work, but not of thy work.
• The Rev. Tatham was a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. He also was known for preaching very long sermons. At the end of one of his three-hour sermons, only one other person was left in the church. During the sermon, this person had died.
***
© Copyright Bruce D. Bruce; All Rights Reserved
***
250 Anecdotes About Religion, Volume 2 — Buy
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Presenting
Michael Egan
U.S.A. replied:
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION
BANDCAMP MUSIC
BRUCE'S RECOMMENDATION OF BANDCAMP MUSIC
Music: "The Uncanny Valley"
Album: SONOS DELIRIUM
Artist: The Mystery Men?
Artist Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Info:
“The enigmatic figures of instrumental surf. Frenetic at times, dark and moody at others, the 5-piece conundrum takes you on a heavily reverbed journey through the shadows. With their 3-guitar attack straddling the threshold of old and new, The Mystery Men? take elements of spy music, spaghetti western, a small hint of metal and blend them with the sensibilities of the traditional surf genre.”
“The Mystery Men? bring you their brand of surf music on their first full-length release, SONOS DELIRIUM, melding a traditional sound with a modern approach, ranging from aggressive to western to the dreamy and ethereal.”
Price: $1 (USD) for track; $10 (USD) for 12-track album
Genre: Instrumental Surf
Links:
SONOS DELIRIUM
Mystery Men? on Bandcamp
Mystery Men? on YouTube
Other Links:
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 Apple iBookstore
David Bruce has over 140 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
Reader Suggestion
Michelle in AZ
Stephen Suggests
"Nice Things"
New Venture
Michael Egan
Bonus Links
Jeannie the Teed-Off Temp
Reader Comment
Current Events
Linda >^..^<
We are all only temporarily able bodied.
Thanks, Linda!
that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still hearing the occasional firework.
Rupert's New Channel
Weather TV
Later this year, Rupert Murdoch is set to debut Fox Weather, a 24-hour streaming channel that promises to do for seven-day forecasts what Fox has done for American politics, financial news and sports. Not to be outdone, The Weather Channel — granddaddy of television meteorology — announced the creation of a new streaming service, Weather Channel Plus, that the company believes could reach 30 million subscribers by 2026.
Amid a waning appetite for political news in the post-Trump era, media executives are realizing that demand for weather updates is ubiquitous and, for an increasing swath of the country, a matter of urgent concern. In the past week alone, temperatures in the Pacific Northwest broke records, wildfires burned in Colorado, and Tropical Storm Elsa strengthened into a hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean.
At CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, average viewership for the first half of 2021 fell 38% from a year prior. The audience for The Weather Channel was up 7%.
Fox Weather’s impending debut opens a new front in the media wars, but Byron Allen, comedian-turned-media baron whose Allen Media Group bought The Weather Channel for $300 million in 2018, insists that he welcomes the competition.
Weather TV
'Predators' List
Reporters Without Borders
Press watchdog Reporters Without Borders has put Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on its list of “predators,” the first time a Western European leader has been placed in the line-up of heads of state or government who “crack down massively” on press freedom.
The list published Monday includes 37 leaders.
Two women, the prime minister of Bangladesh and the Hong Kong’s administrative chief, also were added to the list, as well as Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. This was the first time in five years that the watchdog, known by its French initials RSF, has published its press freedom predator's list.
The report said Orban “has steadily and effectively undermined media pluralism and independence since being returned to power in 2010” by using “varied predatory techniques.”
“The methods may be subtle or brazen, but they are always efficient,” the report said, citing control over 80% of the media via purchases by oligarchs close to Hungary's ruling Fidesz party. Private media in Hungary are discriminated against in access to information and government advertising and denigrated as purveyors of “fake news,” the report said.
Reporters Without Borders
Olympic Equestrian Team
Jessica Springsteen
The daughter of rock icon Bruce Springsteen and singer-songwriter Patti Scialfa has been selected as one of four riders on the U.S. jumping team that will compete at the Tokyo Olympics.
U.S. Equestrian announced Monday that Jessica Springsteen would be making her Olympic debut. The 29-year-old has said being selected would fulfill a lifelong dream.
Springsteen will team with Kent Farrington, Laura Kraut and McLain Ward when the equestrian competition begins Aug. 3. The team will be led by chef d’equipe Robert Ridland and Lizzy Chesson.
Springsteen, ranked third behind Kraut and Ward, will be riding 12-year-old stallion Don Juan van de Donkhoeve.
Jessica Springsteen
Bizarre Conspiracy
Exact Date
The "reinstatement" theory that Donald Trump (R-Lock Him Up) will return to the White House now has an exact date, thanks to the man who says he inceptioned the idea into the former president’s mind.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell claims that by the morning of Friday, 13 August, Mr Trump will be president again and it "will be the talk of the world".
"Going, ‘Hurry up! Let’s get this election pulled down, let’s right the right. Let’s get these communists out’, you know that have taken over,” he told Brannon Howse of Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network, as flagged by the left-wing activist group Patriot Takes.
The specificity is in stark contrast to Mr Lindell’s comments to The Daily Beast in June that the August date was "subjective", but that he hoped the proof would come out by the end of the month.
Exact Date
Four-day Week 'An Overwhelming Success'
Iceland
Trials of a four-day week in Iceland were an "overwhelming success" and led to many workers moving to shorter hours, researchers have said.
The trials, in which workers were paid the same amount for shorter hours, took place between 2015 and 2019.
Productivity remained the same or improved in the majority of workplaces, researchers said.
A number of other trials are now being run across the world, including in Spain and by Unilever in New Zealand.
Workers reported feeling less stressed and at risk of burnout, and said their health and work-life balance had improved.
Iceland
Shrinking
Voter Bloc
A new deep dive into the 2020 electorate by Pew Research contains mostly bad news for Republicans, whose approaching demographic doom is less racial than it is generational. While it shouldn't be news to anyone at this point that young voters are a solidly blue voting bloc, the more worrisome developments for the GOP are the unexpectedly elderly nature of the party's coalition and the unyielding Democratic lean of younger voters as they age. If Pew's numbers are to be believed, the only solidly Republican age demographic last year was 75 and over, meaning that every time the sun comes up, the GOP's struggle to win a majority of American voters gets harder.
Pew's in-depth study uses validated voter files – matching panelists to a registration database confirming whether or not they turned out – to offer a different, and possibly more accurate, view of the electorate than the exit polls taken on Election Day. Often this new data can challenge narratives that set in stubbornly and immediately after the votes are counted – in 2016, for example, Pew's research found that Donald Trump won white women by a considerably smaller margin than Election Day surveys indicated, upending one prevailing story about who was most responsible for Hillary Clinton's stunning loss.
There were some important differences between exit polls and the new study. For example, Pew found that Trump did better with Latino voters, and worse with Black voters, than exit polls indicated. Still, both sets of numbers showed Trump making modest inroads with these groups, easily the most concerning development for Democrats because of their centrality to the party's coalition. Exit polls had Trump winning married men by 11 points, while Pew gave this group to Biden by 5. Trump, seemingly paradoxically, lost ground with men and gained some with women, narrowing the overall gender gap. It's pretty difficult to discern a pattern in these differences, and the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
But Pew also broke the survey down into not just age groups but generational cohorts. And it's here where you'll find the most terrifying information for the GOP. According to Pew, Trump won a decisive majority only with members of the "Silent Generation," those born between 1928 and 1945 (and the extremely tiny number of living people older than that). Trump dominated that cohort by 16 points, 58-42. That means that the only reliably Republican voter bloc will shrink considerably between now and 2024, and that 65- to 74-year-olds must have been a much more blue-leaning group in 2020 to produce Trump's comparatively narrow 4-point margin with all over-65s.
Voter Bloc
Group Surveilled
Capitol
A Virginia man charged with joining the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol told an undercover FBI agent that he belonged to a militia-style group and coordinated "surveillance efforts" on the same building more than a month after the riot, according to a court filing unsealed on Tuesday.
The filing, which accompanied a criminal complaint against Fi Duong, doesn't specify why he and an associate wanted to surveil the Capitol for weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection. But it says an undercover agent attended meetings of Duong's group and that investigators intercepted encrypted communications about post-riot surveillance work.
Duong is one of more than 520 federal defendants charged in the Capitol riot so far. The FBI has linked dozens of them to far-right extremist groups, including several members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who are charged with conspiring to mount a coordinated attack on Jan. 6.
The unsealed court filing says Duong's first contact with undercover investigators occurred on the morning of Jan. 6, when he and the associate introduced themselves to an undercover police officer near Freedom Plaza in Washington. Duong asked if the officer was a “patriot” and called himself an “operator.”
The group called themselves “a Bible study” but also talked about firearms training events, the FBI said. During a Feb. 12 meeting, Duong discussed a Virginia secession movement that he said would be peaceful, according to the affidavit.
Capitol
DNA Mystery
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci — the great Renaissance artist, inventor and anatomist — has 14 living male relatives, a new analysis of his family tree reveals. The new family tree could one day help researchers determine if bones interred in a French chapel belong to the Italian genius.
Historians Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato have spent more than a decade tracing the genealogy of the famed "Mona Lisa" painter. Their map stretches across 690 years, 21 generations and five family branches, and will be vital in helping anthropologists sequence the DNA of da Vinci by sequencing the DNA of his descendants, the researchers say.
Beyond establishing the identity of his possible remains, sequencing the artist's DNA could also give scientists a better understanding of "his extraordinary talents — notably, his visual acuity, through genetic associations," claim representatives from the Leonardo Da Vinci DNA Project, an initiative that aims to use the genetic information to create 3D images of da Vinci through a process called DNA phenotyping.
Researching da Vinci’s family history is difficult because only one of his parents can be properly traced. Born out of wedlock in the Tuscan town of Anchiano, Leonardo da Vinci was the son of Florentine lawyer Ser Piero da Vinci and a peasant woman named Caterina. Research by Martin Kemp, an art historian at Oxford University, suggests that Caterina was a 15-year-old orphan at the time of da Vinci's birth, Live Science previously reported. At age 5, the young da Vinci was taken to his family estate in the town of Vinci (from which his family took their surname ) to live with his grandparents.
When da Vinci died on May 2, 1519, at age 67, he had no known children, and his remains were lost, meaning there was no reliable DNA to analyze. As a result, parts of his ancestry have become shrouded in mystery.
Leonardo da Vinci
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