M Is FOR MASHUP - December 18th, 2013
Merry Christmash X 8 !
By DJ Useo
In another fantastic reprise of DJ BC's annual Christmas mashup collection, I am pleased to present to you "SANTASTIC 8: Christmas Mashups And Remixes"
( www.christmash.com/ ). The tunes mixed on this awesome assortment are blended by the best in the field, and use the finest Yuletide artists available. In a refined combination of bootleg concepts, you'll experience the pleasure of the past volumes, but with present successes that'll lead to much future fun.
After the smiles I got from the cover art subsided, I was hit by the triumph of the assembled bootleg crew. The bootleg talent doesn't get better than the experienced producers BC has coaxed into providing Christmas hits. Just to drop a few names, I now mention DJ John, DJ Schmolli, ATOM, DJ Tripp, and PimpDaddySupreme. ( Who always wanted to be a dentist. ) The tunes employed are the typical tracks one hears from Halloween on, but each is superbly re-created by the addition of each mixers vast skills.
Frankly, I expect y'all to be so pleased with this new SANTASTIC volume, that in combination with the previous seven still-available, I won't see any of you till the new year. There's excellent new videos from DJ Schmolli, Mojochronic, Instamatic ,DJ BC, plus all the past videos are still hosted, and each is a hoot and a holler. As a mashup album of highest quality, this release is a perfect Christmas gift, especially since it's completely free of charge. I was hoping for more single Christmas mashups, but they didn't manifest as they have in past seasons. However, this new DJ BC SANTASTIC volume is completely satisfying, and I've been playing it tons. I reckon you will, too.
Christmas Long Mixes - The long-established long mix site
B00MB0X
( www.bmbx.org/ ) has a long history of providing wonderful Christmas mixes each December. The tradition continues this year in finest kind fashion. The incredible assortment contains Bongs' "Never Mind The Baubles" , S*A*T's "Santa-light Of Love - ", DJ Riko's "Merry Mixmas 2013", and Shining Steves "Winter Mix". Each is chock full of the best Christmas music all mixed the best they can be mixed. No slight intended to any of the other superb Yuletide pieces, but DJ Riko, especially, is noteworthy for his many years of annual Christmas mixes. When it comes to Christmas mixes, he's the guy to beat, if you can. :)
Stream, or download all four long mixes here
( www.bmbx.org/ )
Mashup Tip
Add a sprig of mistletoe to your Christmas mashups. It doesn't make it sound any better, but you get more kisses than if you leave it out.
Useo's Latest Post
'The Christmas Engine Repair Song' ( Erasure vs Lilith vs Oliver Klein vs Stan Freburg ) is perfect for stuffing stockings with. Stream, or download from links here-
( www.groovytimewithdjuseo.blogspot.com/2013/12/erasure-vs-lilith-vs-oliver-klein-vs.html )
Podgornio, The Mashup Psychic Predicts
By January 22 2014, the NSA will become the owners of the largest mashup collection on Earth.
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Aditya Chakrabortty: For a real-life Hunger Games, look no further than your local bank (Guardian)
The dystopian fantasy starring Jennifer Lawrence is a lot like real life - if you're a high-street bank employee.
Amelia Gentleman: "What the welfare cuts mean for us: 'The feeling of dread never goes away'" (Guardian)
The government is three years into a savage programmme of welfare cuts. Coalition ministers say they aim to save billions on benefits and help 'hard-working people' while ending a culture of dependency. But what does this mean for people who need support?
Paul Krugman: The Big Money Bets on Obamacare (NY Times)
… one group has a strong incentive to be objective - and also has a much better perspective on what's really going on than any lay observer. Namely, the insurance industry. So the shoe we've all been waiting to see drop - or not - was the surge of advertising urging people buying insurance through the exchanges to buy from me, me, me. That shoe has just dropped, with $500 million of advertising spending now in the pipeline. Insurers think this is going to work.
Andrew Tobias: "Get Fast or Die: Investing in Kids"
A friend gave this speech about kids. They happen to be New Mexico kids, but his speech applies to kids in a great many places here and abroad. Whether it be modernizing our schools or getting the lead out of homes or funding pre-K programs and after-school programs - or just making sure poor families have the food stamps they need to feed their innocent children and the health-care coverage they need t0 get them proper care - how can we fail to do these things?
Phil Daoust, "Peter O'Toole: 10 remarkable things about the self-styled 'slum Mick'" (Guardian)
Actor, terrible driver, parkour pioneer . . . there was a lot more to O'Toole than his 'hellraising' image allows.
Peter Bradshaw: "Peter O'Toole: 'A star who sprang from nowhere'" (Guardian)
In Lawrence of Arabia he was insouciant, elegant and outrageously sexy. It was one of the most brilliant debuts in Hollywood history.
Interview by Kate Abbott: How we made Love Actually (Guardian)
Richard Curtis and Bill Nighy on kissing lessons for the cast, the plots that didn't make the cut - and the crowds of blokes who suddenly turned up to see Billy Mack's girl band.
David Bruce: Wise Up! Children (Athens News)
"Never kiss in front of other people. It's a big embarrassing thing if anybody sees you. But if nobody sees you, I might be willing to try it with a handsome boy, but just for a few hours." - Kally, age 9
David Bruce's Amazon Author Page
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David Bruce has approximately 50 Kindle books on Amazon.com.
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If They Melded: Mark Zuckerberg + Bert Edition
Elton john + Putin | John Kerry + Bashar al-Assad | Mark Zuckerberg + Bert on Sesame Street | Larry King + the E-Trade Baby
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Still sunny and still warmer than seasonal.
2014 Inductees
Rock Hall
Nirvana, Kiss and Peter Gabriel will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame next year.
The Rock Hall announced Tuesday that Hall and Oates, Linda Ronstadt and Cat Stevens also will be inducted April 10 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
Artists are eligible for induction 25 years after their first release. Nirvana won a nomination in its first year of eligibility and next year the band will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its debut, "Bleach." The induction comes 20 years after frontman Kurt Cobain committed suicide at age 27.
This year also marked first-time nominations for Hall and Oates, Gabriel and Ronstadt. Kiss and Stevens, who have been nominated in the past, made the cut after being absent from the list for several years.
The Rolling Stones managers, Andrew Loog Oldham and Brian Epstein, will earn Ahmet Ertegun awards, a non-performing honour. Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band will earn the award for musical excellence.
Rock Hall
Cold Reception
Pamela Anderson
It was a cold reception on the Rock for actress Pamela Anderson, who arrived bare-legged in high heels Tuesday for a freezing outdoor news conference aimed at ending the commercial seal hunt.
Anderson accompanied dying Hollywood philanthropist Sam Simon, co-creator of "The Simpsons," as he offered a $1 million incentive to help buy out sealing licences.
"It's barbaric," Anderson said of the seal industry. "It's only a seasonal hunt. He has offered such an amazing, generous offer to the community."
Simon, who walked with a cane, was diagnosed with terminal cancer through much of his body last year. He spoke over camera shutters and bursts of yelling, presenting a giant $1 million cheque to the sealers association.
Simon said he hopes the group will urge governments to legislate an end to commercial seal licences while protecting aboriginal and personal hunts. He described his contribution as a bonus to be paid to about 6,000 association members, almost $167 each, if licences are revoked by the end of 2015.
Pamela Anderson
Gets Modern-Day Revamp
Stonehenge
After thousands of years, Stonehenge has had a makeover. But visitors may initially feel something is missing: the prehistoric monument itself.
Tourists now arrive at a gleaming new timber-and-glass visitor center some 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) from Stonehenge. The famous stone circle tucked into the rolling green landscape is nowhere to be seen.
It's a teasing introduction to the site, where new facilities and landscaping are designed to "restore the dignity" of Stonehenge, and transform the way more than 1 million visitors a year see it.
When the building opens to the public on Wednesday, workers will dismantle the old ticket office and other nondescript buildings clustered beside the monument. A busy road that ferried thousands of cars a day past the stones is being closed and grassed over.
The idea is to return Stonehenge, 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of London, to its rural landscape. Visitors will be bussed to the stones on a special shuttle. Or they can walk, exploring paths and an ancient processional approach route that for years has been cut in half by asphalt.
Stonehenge
Long-Lost Nazi Diary
Holocaust Museum
Missing for decades, the rediscovered diary of Alfred Rosenberg - a chief Nazi ideologue and one of Adolf Hitler's closest confidants - was officially turned over to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Tuesday (Dec. 17). And with its new acquisition, the museum has made the German-language diary available online for the first time.
Under Hitler, Rosenberg led the Nazi party's foreign affairs department and served as the Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Historians had long known that Rosenberg's diary existed; it was used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials - in which major political and military leaders in Nazi Germany were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity - some of the papers were published and parts of the diary are even in the collection of the U.S. National Archives.
But the bulk of manuscript, which is more than 400 pages and covers 1936 through 1944, only resurfaced earlier this year. The papers have been authenticated by the museum, and historians hope that the papers might provide new insights on the politics of the Nazi leaders and the mass murder of the Jewish people.
The Holocaust Memorial Museum has posted scans of the newly acquired diary pages on its website, with accompanying German transcripts. There is not yet an English translation available, but the museum's catalogue says the diary recounts Rosenberg's meetings with Hitler, political infighting within the Nazi party and bombing raids on Germany, among other topics.
Holocaust Museum
Calls For Academic Boycott
American Studies Association
An association of American scholars has voted for an academic boycott of Israeli colleges and universities in protest against Israeli policies towards the Palestinians, the group said on Monday.
Members of the American Studies Association voted by a 2-to-1 margin to endorse a boycott resolution, which stems from a broader campaign to isolate Israel that has made little headway in the United States but has gained some traction in Europe.
The group, which is devoted to the study of American culture and history and has about 5,000 members, put the controversial issue to an online vote that concluded on Sunday.
It became the largest U.S. academic group to back an anti-Israel boycott, a movement that Israel and its supporters say unfairly singles out the Jewish state. The vote, however, is mostly symbolic since the group has no power to compel members or any U.S. institution to abide by it.
American Studies Association
Dealer's 'Fine Wine' Fake
Rudy Kurniawan
Almost all the wines found in the home of renowned dealer Rudy Kurniawan were fakes passed off as expensive rare vintages, an expert witness told his New York fraud trial.
The 37-year-old Kurniawan, once considered one of the top-five wine collectors in the exclusive world of fine vintage wine, faces up to 40 years in jail if convicted of wire and postal fraud.
It is unclear how many bottles of fake blended wine the Indonesian-born dealer allegedly put on the market during his 10-year career until his arrest in California in 2012.
But Michael Egan, a wine expert who worked more than 20 years for auction house Sotheby's in London, was clear about one thing.
"The vast majority I found to be counterfeit," he told the 12-member jury on day six of the trial at a US federal court in Manhattan.
He said he examined "very carefully" the 267 bottles allegedly credited to Kurniawan's kitchen laboratory.
Rudy Kurniawan
Near 1 Percent In U.S.
Virgin Births
Nearly 1 percent of young women in a U.S. study who have become pregnant claim to have done so as virgins, according to a report in the Christmas edition of Britain's BMJ medical journal.
The authors of "Like a virgin (mother)" - whose prose is devoid of irony - say such scientifically impossible claims show researchers must use care in interpreting self-reported behavior. Fallible memory, beliefs and wishes can cause people to err in what they tell scientists.
Based on interviews with 7,870 women and girls ages 15 to 28, 45 of the 5,340 pregnancies in this group through the years - 0.8 percent - occurred in women who reported that they conceived independent of men. The figure does not include pregnancies that result from in vitro fertilization or other assisted reproductive technology.
Each year, the BMJ Christmas edition publishes untraditional science papers. In addition to the report on virgin pregnancies, the latest BMJ includes papers on whether there is a local baby boom nine months after home sports teams triumph (only a small one, but statistically significant) and whether an apple a day would keep the British doctor away (yes, saving about 8,500 lives in the United Kingdom each year, about as many as would expanding the use of cholesterol-lowering drugs to everyone over 50).
Virgin Births
Mysterious Deaths In Utah
Bald Eagles
A number of unexplained bald eagle deaths in Utah when hundreds of the government-protected birds have migrated to wintering grounds in the central Rocky Mountains has wildlife officials worried.
The officials said on Tuesday at least four bald eagles have died and another is close to death. Wildlife specialists said the deaths began December 1 and point to either an outbreak of disease or exposure to some unknown toxin among the raptors in Utah.
The ailing eagles, which have been reported everywhere from front yards to river banks, have died within days of being grounded by such symptoms as leg paralysis and tremors.
Leslie McFarlane, Utah wildlife disease coordinator, said the state has never before tracked the deaths of so many bald eagles in rapid succession over a wide geographic area, and that she is not aware of a similar event elsewhere.
Bald Eagles
Ancient Bones Found In China
Cats
Five-thousand-year-old cat bones found in a Chinese farming village have raised new questions about man's complex rapport with domestic felines through history, said a study out Monday.
Cats are widely thought to have been domesticated in ancient Egypt and the Middle East some 4,000 years ago, and the oldest evidence of a wild cat buried with a human on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus dates back even further, to about 10,000 years ago.
So to find evidence of a rapport between cats and humans in between those time periods, and in faraway China, came as a surprise, said lead researcher Fiona Marshall of Washington University.
"First of all, they are in the wrong place in terms of our old ways of thinking," she told AFP.
Working with colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the team performed radiocarbon dating and isotope analysis on the bones, found in the village of Quanhucun.
Cats
'Family Guy' Revives Dog In Christmas 'Miracle'
Brian
"Family Guy" fans celebrated Monday after the hit US television show resurrected Brian the dog, a main character since the series' 1999 launch who was apparently killed off last month.
The show's creator Seth MacFarlane joked about the plot twist on Twitter, after Brian Griffin returned in an episode aired Sunday night in the United States.
"And thus endeth our warm, fuzzy holiday lesson: Never take those you love for granted, for they can be gone in a flash," he wrote.
"I mean, you didn't really think we'd kill off Brian, did you? Jesus, we'd have to be fucking high," he added.
Brian
Prime-Time Nielsens
Ratings
Nielsen's top programs for Dec. 9-15
1. "NCIS," CBS, 19.3 million.
2. "The Big Bang Theory," CBS, 17.7 million.
3. "NBC Sunday Night Football," NBC, 16.4 million.
4. "NFL Regular Season: Chicago at Dallas," ESPN, 16.2 million
5. "The OT," Fox, 15.8 million.
6. "NCIS: Los Angeles," CBS, 15.2 million.
7. "Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick," NBC, 13.3 million.
8. "The Voice (Monday)," NBC, 13.2 million.
9. "The Voice (Tuesday)," NBC, 11.5 million.
10. "Criminal Minds," CBS, 11.2 million.
11. "Blue Bloods," CBS, 10.94 million.
12. "The Millers," CBS, 10.93 million.
13. "Football Night in America," NBC, 10.8 million
14. "Modern Family," ABC, 10.6 million.
15. "60 Minutes," CBS, 10.4 million.
16. "Survivor Finale," CBS, 10.2 million.
17. "CSI," CBS, 10.18 million.
18. "Survivor," CBS, 9.9 million.
19. "Victoria's Secret Fashion Show," CBS, 9.7 million.
20. "Scandal," ABC, 9.4 million.
Ratings
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