I post a weekly diary of historical notes, arts & science items, foreign news (often receiving little notice in the US) and whimsical pieces from the outside world that I often feature in "Cheers & Jeers".
OK, you've been warned - here is this week's tomfoolery material that I posted.
CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.
ART NOTES #1 — a career retrospective (of a Miami-born daughter of Cuban exiles) entitled Teresita Fernández: Elemental will be at the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, Florida through February 9th.
CHEERS to spending a wonderful Thanksgiving visiting family and friends (including two hiking adventures).
EVEN MORE CHEERS to our fabulous lunctime Cheers & Jeers meet-up yesterday in Kittery Maine … led by the nonpareil BiPM and the intrepid Common Sense Mainer. (Certainly Bill will have more photos in C&J tomorrow).
SUPERMARKET NOTES #1 — a recent Sunday essay noted that North Tulsa, Oklahoma had nine dollar stores but not a single grocery store — “The Dollar General customer is in a permanent recession, and we want to help them,” the company’s chief executive said last year — until a recent ordinance required any new stores to be built at least a mile apart, “unless they carry at least 500 square feet of fresh fruits, vegetables & meats" (which many dollar stores have little of).
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Palmerston the Cat— the chief mouser at Britain’s Foreign Office, who is back-on-duty after a six-month sabbatical due to stress (as evidenced by his over-grooming on his front legs).
SUPERMARKET NOTES #2 — the town of Baldwin, Florida saw its IGA supermarket close yet — rather than become a ‘food desert’ of dollar stores, as the site was too small for a major supermarket and too large for a mom-and-pop store — decided to re-open the market as a town-owned venture, with all municipal employees on the payroll (yet rejecting the label of “socialism”).
ART NOTES #2 — The Louvre in Paris will celebrate the French painter Pierre Soulages’s 100th birthday. The only other artists given shows there during their lifetimes ….. were Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall.
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Ashes the Cat— who broke the heart of a Georgia trucker when he jumped out of his cab at an Ohio truck stop in July … where he was later was found (hungry and cold) by a woman moving to Rochester, NY … and when she brought him to that city’s Humane Society …. his microchip led to his return.
BRAIN TEASER - try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC.
LAST NIGHT yours truly hosted the Top Comments diary with a look at the Rise & Fall of my favorite specialty foods store, Dean & DeLuca— and how when it was sold by its foodee owners to a revolving-door of investors …. its eventual fall became inevitable.
SEPARATED at BIRTH —
xAndrew Giuliani and Eric Trump look like they probably had the same Milkman pic.twitter.com/yR1KuI4AHk
— Justin Horwitz (@JustinAHorwitz) November 24, 2019
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… although it was written by Joni Mitchell …. each year at this time, I feature the man who popularized it and — according to Rolling Stone — ushered in the singer/songwriter era. “I wasn’t sure if they were crediting me or accusing me,” he remarked.
Say what you will, Tom Rush gets around. He was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, came-of-age in Massachusetts, made his mark at the Boston/Cambridge coffeehouses of the early 1960's, has lived in the Rockies and the West Coast, then Vermont, now back in Massachusetts and who-knows-where tomorrow.
As Steve Leggett of the All-Music Guide puts it, “Rush's warm and slightly world-weary baritone” has a way of growing on you, and he was one of the first performers to feature works by Jackson Browne and others when they were just beginning. Garth Brooks has cited him as an influence, with James Taylor going so far as to say, "I took as much from Tom Rush as possible and unwittingly modeled myself on him. Like a lot of people who do what I do, I owe my career to him".
For a few years, Tom Rush has had an album of humorous tunes Trolling for Owls - which he notes is "not available in stores!" And one of them - The Remember Song - has received in excess of 7.3 million hits on YouTube. After being told it had gone viral he wrote, "I thought I was being accused of being a musical equivalent of Ebola ......... but my children explained to me that this was a good thing".
And for several years, The Very Best of Tom Rush has provided listeners with his classic songs. But it wasn't until 2009 that he released What I Know— which was his first new studio recording in 35 years— because as he explained, "I don't like to rush headlong into these things".
Last year he released the album Voices— with some traditional tunes as well as several new songs— of which he says, “There are very few labels that are just content to put out good music and make a reasonable profit at it. Appleseed Recordings, the label I’m on, is one of them, and I’m very thankful to be working with them.”
This marks the 57th anniversary of the career of Tom Rush and — at age 78 — is still quite active. In 2012 he recorded What's Wrong with America?— a spoof of Mitt Romney's notorious 47% comments. He performs in a lot of college towns and — without mentioning you-know-who by name — said a few years ago:
In terms of the politics, I try to create kind of a little oasis from the problems of the world. So I don’t tend to get political, because I really don’t want to remind people of how much things suck. I’d rather give them a little holiday from all the turmoil.
On the other hand, there are times when I just can’t help myself and have to comment on something. I’ve been saying lately there are aspects of the recent election cycle that make you realize we really have to spend more on education. You can make of that what you will.
For many years he performed an annual show in Boston's Symphony Hall in December, with his current tour bringing him around New England for the next few weeks (along with shows in the Southeast beginning in March).
That Joni Mitchell song that Tom Rush helped to popularize: is her 1966 tune Urge for Going - about the oncoming Canadian winter (which she did not release on an album until 1972). Below you can hear Tom Rush sing it (with the accent guitar of the late Bruce Langhorne that, to me, truly makes his version special).
I awoke today and found the frost perched on the town It hovered in a frozen sky then it gobbled summer down When the sun turns traitor cold and all the trees are shivering in a naked row I get the urge for going ... but I never seem to gox YouTube VideoNow the warriors of winter give a cold triumphant shout And all that stays is dying and all that lives is getting out See the geese in chevron flight flapping and racing on before the snow They got the urge for going and they've got the wings to go
And they get the urge for going when the meadow grass is turning brown Summertime is falling down Winter's closing in