Beatles Archives - Page 16 of 35 - Ramblin' with Roger

Coverville: All-Beatles covers Thanksgiving show for the 12th year in a row! “Track by track tribute to Rubber Soul for the 50th anniversary of its release, as well as a tribute to Paris with a full set of French-spoken Beatles covers.”

Chuck Miller wants to be buried with Stevie Wonder’s “Hotter Than July”, which I consider his last great album.

Funnies

AV Club’s favorite graphic novels, one-shots, and archives of 2015.

Mark Evanier continues to list the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968, including Paul Winchell (Tigger) and Howard Morris (Atom Ant) and Stan Freberg (Junior Bear), and Paul Frees (Boris Badenov, Professor Ludwig Von Drake, Poppin Fresh the Pillsbury Doughboy) and June Foray (Rocky the Flying Squirrel, Natasha Fatale) and Daws Butler (Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Captain Crunch).

Buster Keaton – the Art of the Gag.

Smilin’ Ed Comics by Raoul Vezina & Tom Skulan. Hardcover on IndieGoGo.

GOOGLE alerts (me)

Time to Ask Arthur Anything. He answered mine about Prez and Veep candidates and Ranking the Republican candidates and The USA’s gun problem.

SamraiFrog’s 50 Greatest Prog Rock Albums.

Twing toustlers.

GOOGLE alerts (not me)

St Peter’s set for £1.2 million renovation. “Admitting to being “very nervous” about taking on the large-scale project, Friends chairman Roger Green, who this year won an award for his volunteering, has agreed to stay on and see through the changes, which are not likely to be complete until at least the end of 2019.”

November rambling 2: Walmart returnables, and Blotto musicology

A Writer Gets Grilled By His 18-Year-Old Self

Dan said: “Perhaps someone absquatulated with an important part.”

Meanwhile, in America…, the succinctly brilliant viral meme from Andy McClure.

Trying to follow what is going on in Syria and why? This comic will get you there in 5 minutes.

9 questions about Daesh you were too embarrassed to ask.

Jeff Sharlet: The Darkness Show: On Jokes and Terror in Paris.

Gate A-4.

Walmart employee fired for redeeming a few dollars of cans and bottles. Local story goes national. And international. And becomes a cause.

It’s a tawdry catfight… between bourgeois actors who desperately seek to inherit the imprimatur of the Civil Rights struggle.

Being frugal with outrage.

High Cheekbones and Straight Black Hair? “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro: Why most black people aren’t ‘part Indian,’ despite family lore.”

The Original Conscious Uncouplers.

Texas Women Are Inducing Their Own Abortions.

If you enjoyed a good book and you’re a woman, the critics think you’re wrong.

The Internet Is Freaking Out Over This ‘Jeopardy’ Contestant’s Voice. “It’s time to stop policing the way women sound.”

A Writer Gets Grilled By His 18-Year-Old Self In ‘Later That Same Life’.

Dustbury has a birthday.

the death of comedy.

The oldest known video footage of New York City.

Now I Know: Not Safe, But Fired and Prisoner of Honor and Comma Chameleon Law.

Explaining Einstein. We have a winner!

How to count coins.

Miss Rose Marie, The Longest Active Career In Entertainment, Honored with Shirley Temple Award.

Justin Bieber Just Beat The Beatles’ 51-Year-Old Billboard Record.

It’s time to have a Blotto musicology conference.

The New Yorker Editor Who Became a Comic Book Hero. (Françoise Mouly).

Smilin’ Ed Comics Kickstarter Only Hardcover Editions!

Muppets: From the mouth of frogs and Bert is sick and commercials and Little Muppet Monsters (1985) and miscellaneous stuff.

GOOGLE ALERT

Arthur’s Internet wading. And it’s all my fault!

SamuraiFrog: I Spend Thanksgiving Alone Every Year. I’ve done so, and at a very basic level, I understand his position.

November rambling #1: Rebecca Jade’s new video, and Confessions Of An Idiom

What happens if the Elephant in the Room decides to make the Skeleton in the Closet bring the truth to light?

What Evanier said about Paris. Ditto. This is the second time this year my cousin Anne, currently working there, has had to report that she is safe.

Samaritan Lives Matter.

Fall of the House of Bush.

Marilynne Robinson warns against utilitarian trends in higher education.

Middle-Aged White Americans Are Dying of Despair.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Prisoner Re-entry.

The First County Clerk in the US to Approve a Same-Sex Marriage License. In 1975.

Egypt’s women-only taxi service promises protection from male drivers.

A New Alcott Emerges From The ‘Annotated Little Women’.

Now I Know: How Matthew Broderick Helped Shape American Computer Law and The World’s Most Prolific Author.

Berowne’s participation in the French Revolution. No, not that one.

A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.

Renaissance Geek: Eddie is 51, which is divisible by three.

Simply Red: The Con-Man Behind the Rightwing’s Starbucks Cup Freak-Out.

Wondermark: Throw Back the Dead Man’s Coin.

Binghamton, Now & Then.

Stop expecting artists to work for free — or worse, for “exposure”.

God, on Lawns.

Tosy has 10 opening sentences to short stories that do not exist, yet. But one of them could.

David Kalish: My imagined contract with cockroaches.

The new music video Weather the Storm by Rebecca Jade, the eldest niece.

Allen Toussaint – seven of his greatest songs. Plus Top 10 Allen Toussaint Classic Rock Covers, and finding a big hit in Toussaint’s trash can.

K-Chuck Radio: The WABC Sonic Experience!

Dustbury’s Feel Bad songs. Plus Connie Stevens (!) sang the original of a soul classic.

The Beatles: A 5 Minute Drum Chronology – Kye Smith.

“Love and Theft” – The Veiled but Tangled Roots of Jimmie Rodgers and Tommy Johnson.

Confessions Of An Idiom. What happens if the Elephant in the Room decides to make the Skeleton in the Closet bring the truth to light?

Mad magazine: Overheard at the New Amazon Bookstore.

The Absolute Best Way to Reheat Pizza.

Mark Evanier continues to list the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968, including Jackson Beck (Bluto, King Leonardo) and Dick Beals (Speedy Alka-Seltzer, Davey of Davey and Goliath) and Clarence Nash (Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) and Bill Scott (Bullwinkle J. Moose, Mr. Peabody).

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the first-ever Disney character and a long-eared precursor to Mickey Mouse, features in this long-lost animated film. Another, obscure, Disney film, John Henry.

The finale of a recent episode of Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris, a program I forget was even on the air.

GOOGLE ALERT (me)

What comics creator has most changed the way people think about comics?

John Lennon would have been 75

Both the first verse of the song The Word and the first verse of John, chapter 1, begin with the words, “in the beginning…”

My friend Dan sent me this article How did the Beatles Get Their Name? Any Beatles fan worth his or her salt has heard the Flaming Pie story:
Many people ask what are Beatles? Why Beatles? Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive? So we will tell you. It came in a vision–a man appeared in a flaming pie and said unto them “From this day on you are Beatles with an A.” “Thank you, Mister Man,” they said, thanking him.

Flaming Pie, not coincidentally, is the name of a 1997 Paul McCartney album.

In the book The Gospel according to the Beatles by Steven Turner, it’s clear that John, far more than any of his cohorts, grew up with religious training. He was living with his Aunt Mimi (Stanley) Smith, who grew up Anglican, though neither she nor her sisters attended church as adults.

Still, Mimi and her sisters made sure their children were sent to Sunday school. John was a chorister and member of a Bible class. “For a time, he was attending events at the church four days a week.”

It was that respectable, impersonal, “bourgeois” version of Christianity that John eventually rejected. Still, the lessons he heard seeped into his thinking. The structure of the flaming pie story, Turner opines, is based on Acts 10:11, and/or Genesis 17. John himself called the flaming pie story “imitation Biblical stuff.”

“Mimi’s religion could be summarized by a stanza she framed on her wall:
However black the clouds may be
In time they’ll pass away
Have faith and trust and you will see
God’s light make bright your day
Compare these to the lyrics from Tell Me What You See, from the UK version of the Help! album.

The first time I heard The Word, from Rubber Soul, it reminded me of the beginning verses of the Gospel according to John. Both the first verse of the song and the first verse of chapter 1 begin with the words, “in the beginning…” John acknowledged to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine that The Word was the first song he’d written to impart knowledge. (“This could be a Salvation Army song,” said Paul at the time.)

Girl, also from Rubber Soul, is a response to a book John read called Masochism in the Modern Man by Theodor Reil, who suggested that the command to love one’s enemies and pray for those who persecute us is masochistic. “In John’s hands, those ideas led him to question whether the ‘girl’ had been raised to believe ‘that pain would lead to pleasure…’ Did the girl believe those who told her “that a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure’?”

Turner said that The Beatles “were skeptical, even dismissive of the church, but yet many of the core beliefs… were secularized versions of Christian beliefs.” All You Need Is Love would be a prime example.

There’s a lot more in the book, both involving the Beatles’ philosophy as a group and individually, but this is enough for now.

John Lennon would have been 75 today. And his son Sean turns 40!

Tell Me What You See: Lyrics, and Song
The Word: Lyrics, and Song
Girl: Lyrics, and Song
All You Need Is Love: Lyrics, and Song

August rambling #2: artificial – flowers and televangelists

A Marvin Gaye/Ramones mashup.

How a ’50s-Era New York Knife Law Landed Thousands in Jail.

Jeff Sharlet interviews Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King.

No matter how sincerely we think we get it, we don’t really get it. “A personal epiphany about race and gender, to my fellow white males.” And Please Stop Being a Good White Person (TM).

Donald Trump Just Stopped Being Funny. “Win or lose, Trump’s campaign threatens to unleash the Great American Stupid.”

About Josh Duggar’s Ashley Madison Account. Am I the only person who had never HEARD of Ashley Madison until this summer?

USA network postpones ‘Mr. Robot’ finale due to parallels to Virginia murders, in which two people were murdered on live television, a reporter and cameraman. Postponed a whole week, to September 2!

Apocalypse Now – Washington state’s climate change.

How to Be Polite.

The difference between Latino and Hispanic, in one mini comic strip.

Dustbury notes men who are boobs.

Stop the Jared Fogle “footlong” jokes: Why do we still find prison rape acceptable, let alone funny?

John Oliver Exposes Shady Televangelists Fleecing Americans For Millions. Or watch here. And he sets up his OWN church Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption. So, will the IRS respond? Over 30 years ago, Frank Zappa sang about this.

Ken Burns, on the Civil War: It’s about ‘slavery slavery slavery’.

Julius Rosenwald is The Philanthropist Who Built Over 5,000 Schools for Black Students in the Jim Crow South.

Arthur wonders: expat or immigrant?

In Defense of Saggy Pants by Miriam Axel-Lute.

After first treatment, Jimmy Carter and family returned home to see the streets lined with support.

Chuck Miller’s son turns 30. Plus he links to some fine posts, plus one of mine.

The English language, we all know, is in decline. “‘The average schoolchild can hardly write’… said William Langland, author of ‘Piers Plowman’… who died in 1386.”

Banksy’s ‘Dismaland’ in England: It’s a Strange World, After All.

Amy Biancolli explains How to cross the street in Albany.

Jaquandor gets interviewed by Jon Stewart, kinda, sorta.

Rebecca Jade sings the National Anthem at Petco Park on August 8, 2015. Also featuring #1 niece: Under New Management from Tom Antl and Team Groovy, MATURE audience, Winner Best Film – San Diego 48 Hour Film Project 2015.

Born to Run and the Decline of the American Dream.

A Marvin Gaye/Ramones mashup.

Artificial Flowers by Bobby Darin, an unlikely hit, given its subject matter. An interpretation by New York stage performer Ciro Barbaro more in keeping with the lyrics.

The Rolling Stones for Rice Krispies.

This actually came up in conversation at church last week: I Love To Singa- Owl.

Dean Martin Knocks the Beatles out of the #1 Spot on the Charts.

One Toke Over The Line – The Lawrence Welk Show (1971).

Fillyjonk: Lorde have mercy.

Now I Know: Making Sense of Dollar Signs.

The Spiedie Is A Perfect And Important Sandwich: It is high time this nation recognized Binghamton, New York’s beloved culinary mascot as the God-Level Foodstuff that it truly is.

GOOGLE ALERT (me)

Chuck Miller and I had an idea for some Times Union bloggers to get together. I jokingly suggested having it at Ken Screven’s place. Chuck actually pursued it, and it was so.

Absurd Flag Flapping, New Zealand style, and When the ‘good guys’ are wrong.

TWCQT #4: The Nine-Panel Grid.

GOOGLE ALERT (not me)

Lubbock (TX) ISD baseball field home to district’s llamas. “Tina has been here the longest,” Monterey Agriculture teacher Roger Green said.