Craptastic!
 There
are very few tunes embraced by popular culture that
extol life free from the bonds of religion. John Lennon's
"Imagine" is one of those and it is a beautiful, touching
song that has achieved anthemic status across many
cultures.
Cee Lo Green had his pick of zillions of half-assed
paeans to Jeeeesus to warble Saturday night but
there's little doubt that the producers of ABC's "Rockin'
New Year's Eve"
knew it would cause grievous jolt to their ratings
if "How Great Thou Art" filtered out through the 6-channel
THX stereo at 11:45 PM. So they nixed anything from
that particular genre.
And yet, Cee Lo managed to cram religion down our throats
by altering Mr. Lennon's lyrics from "And no religion,
too" to "And all religions true." Mr. Green's purpose,
in his own meager defense, was to show that all religion's
are equal. But if they're all equal then they're all
false.
He
might as well have said "All imaginary friends are
real".
It's every artist's right to take existing material
and make it their own but in this case Mr. Green's
bastardization of Mr. Lennon's was a gross miscalculation. Shame
upon him.
------------
Once again Beloved Girlfriend and
I brought in the New Year stomping our tootsies to
the scrumptious polka
beats of Grammy Award-winning Brave
Combo. This year
it was at Dallas' newly renovated Kessler Theatre,
a 1930s-era art deco moving-picture house reinvented
as performance space. It held about 500 enthusiastic
revelers and our only complaint was that the dance
floor was about the size of a spaniel's forehead.
There was also a surprisingly entertaining
opening act called the Singapore
Slingers. It's
a 17-piece "Fox Trot orchestra" that plays music from
the 30s,
and it
was a HOOT!
To our surprise the band was led by Matt Tolentino,
an accordion player who used to show up on weekends
at a local Italian restaurant which BG
and I frequented in the early 2000-sies. Matt couldn't sing for beans
back then, though he's now much improved, but his accordion playing was
excellent. (We always dropped $5 in
the
tip jar on the way out.) I was delighted to see that he'd followed his
weird passion for 30s music and
made a
success
of it.
=Lefty=
------------
And now our "Chart of the Day":
Is it me or is it getting harder and harder to pay
the bills? (It ain't just me.)
=Lefty=
------------
Republican Job Creation Update
 1-2-2012:
Congress will return to session on January 17th. They
will work for six whole days this month. Must be nice.
Don't expect much Federal job creation during this
period.
------------
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