ABC Wednesday Archives - Page 34 of 91

O is for Oscar the cat

Oscar the cat’s sense of smell may be just one explanation.

Oscar the cat lives in the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. He is, by all accounts, “notoriously anti-social.”

That is, until, he cuddles up with residents in their final dying days. “After about six months, the staff noticed that Oscar, just like the doctors and nurses, would make his own rounds. Oscar would sniff and observe patients, then curl up to sleep with certain ones. The patients he would sleep with often died within several hours of his arrival.”

The story was even written up in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine back in 2007, A Day in the Life of Oscar the Cat by David M. Dosa, M.D., M.P.H. Dr. Dosa believes that Oscar “might be picking up on specific odors surrounding death.”

Some animal behavior experts say the explanation about Oscar sensing a smell associated with dying is a plausible one. “I suspect he is smelling some chemical released just before dying,” says Margie Scherk, a veterinarian in Vancouver, British Columbia and president of the American Association of Feline Practitioners…

“And cats can certainly detect illness.” Dr. Jill Goldman, a certified applied animal behaviorist in Laguna Beach, California says that “Cats have a superb sense of smell,” adding that keeping a dying patient company may also be learned behavior. “There has been ample opportunity for him to make an association between ‘that’ smell [and death]”…

The sense of smell may, however, be just one explanation. Dr. Daniel Estep, a certified applied animal behaviorist in Littleton, Colorado suggests that “One of the things that happens with people who are dying is that they are not moving around much. Maybe the cat is picking up on the fact that the person on the bed is very quiet. It may not be smell or sounds, but just the lack of movement.”

The story of Oscar the cat was not without controversy, as in this review of Dr. Dosa’s 2010 book, Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat would indicate. “The NEJM piece was an essay and in no sense a scientific article, which raises questions about why it was published. If we expected the book to provide something resembling scientific evidence, we are again disappointed.”

In any case, Oscar was still at work, as of this March 2015 Redbook article. Here’s a short video, and Oscar’s Facebook page.

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

N is for New York State

Seneca Falls is the birthplace of the Women’s Rights Movement.

When people from far outside from here think of the state of New York, the idea of skyscrapers and concrete usually come to mind.

Surely, people all over tend to generalize a place by its most noted locale – it’s likely people from New York think that everyone in Iowa is a farmer. But I think New York suffers from it more. Not only is New York, New York the largest city in the country, the “it’s so nice they named it twice” phenomenon really locks it in.

Not only that, many of our favorite songs about New York from the ILoveNY website are about NYC, and they’re not even including songs from Frank Sinatra or Daryl Hall.

One expects “finance, insurance, and real estate” to “comprise New York’s most important service industry group and New York City is the prime driver in this area. New York City is the nation’s leading financial center, home to the New York Stock Exchange.”

One knows about the various art museums, the United Nations, the Empire State Building, Coney Island, and the like. (Here’s an NYC story about when pinball was illegal.)

However, New York has a lot of territory north of the Bronx. The Adirondack Mountains region, “encompassing one-third of the total land area of New York State,” has 46 rugged peaks, and is known for “extensive wild landscapes, which includes tracts of an old-growth forest; wildflowers abound, and hundreds of species of shrubs, herbs, and grasses may be encountered in a day’s outing.”

Letchworth State Park, “renowned as the ‘Grand Canyon of the East,’ is one of the most scenically magnificent areas in the eastern U.S.” I’m hoping to visit there this year for the very first time.

Seneca Falls is the birthplace of the Women’s Rights Movement.

Cooperstown not only has the Baseball Hall of Fame but two other museums, all of which I have visited more than once.

New York is also an agricultural state. Among the 50 states, our rankings:

* Apples – 2nd
* Wine and juice grapes – 3rd
* Fresh Market vegetables – 6th
* Processing vegetables -5th; leading crops are cabbage, sweet corn, and onions.
* Field Crops – “New York produces a variety of field crops largely in support of its dairy industry. Corn, oats, and wheat are most widely grown with soybeans steadily increasing importance. NY is 3rd in corn silage.
* Milk and dairy production – 4th. “Dairy Milk is New York’s leading agricultural product and is produced all across the state. Milk sales account for over one-half of total agricultural receipts.”
* Duck meat and duck – 5th
* Maple syrup – 2nd

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

M is for musical crossovers of the 1960s

Ode To Billie Joe did better on the soul charts than the country charts?

In the back of the book Across the Charts, Joel Whitburn lists the 48 songs that were musical crossovers, which charted in the Top 10 in three of the four Billboard music charts (US) between 1960 and 1969: Hot 100 (HT), rhythm & blues (RB), country (CW), and adult contemporary (AC).

Three of them hit #1 on three charts:
I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You by Ray Charles (RB for 10 weeks, HT for 5 weeks, AC for 5 weeks in 1962)
Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean (AC for 9 weeks, HT for 5 weeks, CW for 2 weeks in 1961)
*the treacly Honey by Bobby Goldsboro (HT for 5 weeks, CW for 3 weeks, AC for 2 weeks in 1968).

Only one song made the Top 10 in all FOUR charts, The End of the World by Skeeter Davis, which was #1 AC for 4 weeks, #2 CW for 3 weeks, #2 HT, and #4 RB in early 1963.

Of the four dozen songs that made it on three charts, three each are by Ray Charles, Roger Miller, and Dionne Warwick; two each by Jimmy Dean, Glen Campbell, and Stevie Wonder.

LISTEN to a sampling:

The End of the World by Skeeter Davis HERE or HERE

I Can’t Stop Loving You by Ray Charles HERE or HERE

Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean HERE or HERE

A Boy Named Sue by Johnny Cash (#1 CW for 5 weeks, #1 AC for 2 weeks, #2 HT for 3 weeks in 1969) HERE or HERE

Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell (#1 AC for 6 weeks, #1 CW for 2 weeks, #3 HT in 1968/9) HERE or HERE

Walk Right In by the Rooftop Singers (#1 AC for 5 weeks, #1 HT for 2 weeks, #4 RB in 1963; also #23 CW) HERE or HERE

Harper Valley P.T.A. by Jeannie C. Riley (#1 CW for 3 weeks, #1 HT, #4 AC in 1968) HERE or HERE

Roses Are Red by Bobby Vinton (#1 HT for 4 weeks, #1 AC for 4 weeks, #5 RB in 1962) HERE or HERE

Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In by the 5th Dimension (#1 HT for 6 weeks, #1 AC for 2 weeks, #6 RB in 1969) HERE or HERE

Make the World Go Away by Eddy Arnold (#1 AC for 4 weeks, #1 CW for 2 weeks, #6 HT in 1965) HERE or HERE

I’m Leaving It Up To You by Dale & Grace (#1 HT for 2 weeks, #1 AC for 2 weeks, #5 RB in 1963) HERE or HERE

Ramblin’ Rose by Nat King Cole (#1 AC for 5 weeks, #2 HT for 2 weeks, #7 RB in 1962) HERE or HERE

Can’t Get Used to Losing You by Andy Williams (#1 AC for 4 weeks, #2 HT for 4 weeks, #7 RB in 1963) HERE or HERE

Puff (the Magic Dragon) by Peter, Paul, and Mary (#1 AC for 2 weeks, #2 HT, #10 RB in 1963) HERE or HERE

England Swings by Roger Miller (#1 AC, #3 CW, #8 HT in 1965/6) HERE or HERE

Walk On By by Dionne Warwick (#1 RB for 3 weeks, 6 HT, #7 AC in 1964) HERE or HERE

Ode To Billie Joe by Bobbie Gentry (#1 HT for 4 weeks, #7 AC, #8 RB in 1967; also #17 CW) HERE or HERE (This did better on the soul charts than the country charts?)

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

L is for Andrew Lloyd Webber

Andrew Lloyd Webber received seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, and an Academy Award.

Like many people of a certain age, I first became aware of the name Andrew Lloyd Webber when Jesus Christ Superstar, the 1970 “rock opera” with music by Lloyd Webber and lyrics by Tim Rice was released. The two-LP package stoked a great deal of theological discussion at a point in my life when I had begun questioning my religious upbringing.

The story is “loosely based on the Gospels’ accounts of the last week of Jesus’s life, beginning with the preparation for the arrival of Jesus and his disciples in Jerusalem and ending with the crucifixion. It highlights political and interpersonal struggles between Judas Iscariot and Jesus that are not in the Bible narratives.” I played it incessantly, and know much of it by heart to this day.

Moreover, it generated two Top 100 singles for Yvonne Elliman, who played Mary Magdalene. I Don’t Know How To Love Him went to #28 and Everything’s Alright reached #92, both in 1971. Helen Reddy’s version of the former went to #13 that same year.

Superstar, essentially the title track, got only to #74 in early 1970, but was rereleased and eventually reached #14 in 1971. It was sung by Murray Head, the Judas Iscariot performer, with the Trinidad Singers.

Though written before JCSS, I next became aware of the single album Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which, in the US, was a reissue of the 1969 Decca UK album. This music has been greatly expanded since then, with some song titles I do not recognize.

Evita, a musical based on the life of Eva Perón, turned out to be the last Lloyd Webber/Rice collaboration. It was first released as a concept album in 1976, then was performed in the West End in 1978, where it ran for ten years. Patti LuPone created the role of Eva on Broadway in 1979, for which she won a Tony.

Don’t Cry for Me Argentina is the best-known song, performed by a group called Festival in 1980 (#72 US), and Madonna (#8 US in 1997, from the 1996 movie starring her and Antonio Banderas).

“Lloyd Webber embarked on his next project without a lyricist, turning instead to the poetry of T. S. Eliot. Cats (1981) was to become the longest-running musical in London, where it ran for 21 years before closing. On Broadway, Cats ran for 18 years, a record which would ultimately be broken by another Lloyd Webber musical, The Phantom of the Opera.”

Memory is the big hit from Cats, which I heard LONG before I ever saw the show only a few years ago. “Elaine Paige, who originated the role of Grizabella in the West End production, released a version of the song that… peaked at No. 6 on the UK Singles Chart in July 1981… Barbra Streisand’s cover reached #52 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and #9 on the Billboard adult contemporary chart in 1982. In the UK this version peaked at #34 the same year. Barry Manilow released a cover as a single in late 1982; this became the highest-charting version on the Billboard Hot 100 when it reached #39 in January 1983. Manilow’s recording also made the Billboard adult contemporary chart, reaching #8.”

This could go on – the most recent production of Andrew Lloyd Webber is School of Rock, based on the movie – but I did want to cite some of his awards. He was knighted in 1992, and “received seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award… a Golden Globe Award, a Brit Award, the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, and the 2008 Classic Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.”

LISTEN TO the music of Andrew Lloyd Webber

I Don’t Know How To Love Him- Helen Reddy

Everything’s Alright – Yvonne Elliman & Ian Gillan (from JCSS)

Superstar – Murray Head With The Trinidad Singers (from JCSS)

Close every door – Donny Osmond (Joseph – 1999, a straight-to-video film)

Don’t Cry For Me Argentina – Madonna

Memory – Barbra Streisand

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

K is for Kermit the Frog

The great thing about Kermit is his every-man (every-amphibian?) quality.

I have been a big fan of the Muppet known as Kermit the Frog, at least since his first appearances on Sesame Street in 1969. But the character has a much longer history.

The earliest iteration of Kermit was on local television in the Washington, DC area, on WRC-TV’s Sam and Friends beginning in 1955. Here’s Kermit with Harry the Hipster from 1959, e.g. SamuraiFrog has clips of many appearances of Kermit, and the other Muppets in his blog Electronic Cerebrectomy, many of them quite early in the frog’s career, such as this video from 1966.

The Muppets Character Encyclopedia – yes, I own the book- establishes that Kermit was born in Leland, Mississippi alongside approximately 2,353 siblings.

The great thing about Kermit is his every-man (every-amphibian?) quality, where he fit in quite well in Sesame Street, which I watched, even though I was in high school and then college at the time.

But he also fit well on The Muppet Show, which aired 120 episodes between 1976 and 1981. From the Wikia: “Kermit the Frog and the Muppets put on a weekly musical/comedy revue at the Muppet Theater. Unfortunately for them, things never quite go according to plan, for the Muppets or their weekly guest stars.”

Kermit has appeared in a number of Muppets movies over the years, a few of which I have seen. He’s also been a guest or guest host on a number of talk shows over the years.

As of September 2015, there’s a new Muppets TV show, done in a “mockumentary-style series that follows their personal and professional lives,” including the romantic breakup, after a number of years together, of Kermit and the porcine diva Miss Piggy.

Kermit was voiced by Muppets creator Jim Henson, from the beginning of the frog’s career until Henson’s untimely death in 1990. Since then, Steve Whitmire has done the job.

Kermit is particularly known for two songs. Bein’ Green, a/k/a It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green, a/k/a my theme song, was written by Joe Raposo, was originally performed on Sesame Street and subsequently on The Muppet Show. It was later covered by Frank Sinatra, Van Morrison, Tony Bennett, and many other performers.

I so relate:

Having to spend each day the color of the leaves.
When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow or gold-
or something much more colorful like that.

It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things.
And people tend to pass you over ’cause you’re not standing out like flashy sparkles in the water-
or stars in the sky.

Listen

The Rainbow Connection was written for the 1979 Muppet movie The Muppet Movie. Music and lyrics were written by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher. The song reached #25 on the US Billboard Hot 100 in November 1979, with the song remaining in the Top 40 for seven weeks total. Williams and Ascher received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song at the 52nd Academy Awards.

Listen

ABC Wednesday – Round 18