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CRIME NOTES - here in New Hampshire, we present Paul Baldwin - no, not the guy that "Coffee Talk" host Linda I'm a little verklempt Richman replaced, who was suffering from "spilgus in his gezook-ticus" ....
... no, the Granite State's Paul Baldwin is in jail after his 154th arrest - this time, trying to pilfer 48 cans of beer from a store in Kittery, Maine. Hey, now wait a sec .....
DIRECT DESCENDANTS? .... doesn't it look like our local criminal (left) ...is descended from the late Merlin Olsen the NFL Hall-of-Famer? Wotta shame ...
Help keep this crazy train rolling: stop in for a look at news items outside the headlines, in the arts and sciences; foreign news that generates little notice in the US media and ....well, just plain whimsy.....
ART NOTES - an exhbit entitled Underground Pop is at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York through October 3rd.
MUSIC NOTES - a legendary (yet seldom heard) collection of 1930's jazz concerts recorded by audio engineer William Savory has been acquired by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem - who have begun digitizing them.
LAST WEEK an essayist wrote, "I've come to the conclusion that a majority of us are rich, 50-year-old stalks of celery". But that wasn't new: as the "Lost in Space" character Dr. Smith was turned into a stalk of celery .....
.... well, at least for one episode.
LEGAL NOTES - the hockey Hall of Fame standout for the Montreal Canadiens Guy Lafleur has been acquitted by the Québec Court of Appeal of giving false testimony at the criminal trial of his son Mark.
TUESDAY's CHILD wants to remind you it's "Take Your Cat to the Vet Week".
A RECENT CARTOON by Tom Tomorrow explores the "Serious Democrat" theme.
LANGUAGE NOTES - Swedish has long been a second language in Finland - yet declining numbers of speakers leave it under pressure like never before.
FATHER-SON? - Libya's Moammar Gadhafi .....
.... and The Princess Bride'sInigo Montoya (as portrayed by Mandy Patinkin).
POOTIE NOTES - a shopkeeper in Manchester, England foiled a robbery attempt by three masked men (with a handgun) by shouting, telephoning ...... throwing cans of cat food at them.
ART NOTES - a collection of Illuminated Manuscripts from Belgium and the Netherlands are on display at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California through February 6th.
MUSIC NOTES - an essayist for The Guardian considers the 1962 bossa-nova recording by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd entitled Jazz Samba to be one of the last hurrahs before the rock and roll era took hold in 1964.
WEDNESDAY's CHILD is Jack Daniels the Cat - a blind San Francisco pootie located (via his microchip) in Oakland, Fresno ..... Harlem.
POLITICAL NOTES - the new administration of David Cameron has scrapped Britain's annual assessment of human rights abuses across the world.
HAIL and FAREWELL to former Ohio GOP senator William Saxbe who has died at the age of 94. For someone who later served as President Nixon's attorney general, he is known for this one quote about Nixon's claim that he knew nothing about Watergate:
That sounds like the guy at the bawdy house who says, "Hey, I just play the piano here; I don't know what's going on upstairs!"
SEPARATED at BIRTH - film star Uma Thurman and UK supermodel Lily Donaldson.
CRIME NOTES - the theft of a Vincent Van Gogh painting - worth about $50m - from a Cairo, Egypt museum was made possible because none of the alarms (and only seven out of 43 security cameras) had worked for some time.
ART NOTES - a printmaking exhibit of Painting in 17th Century China is at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri through February 6th.
SPURNING the EASY LIFE the Oscar-winning French actor Juliette Binoche is putting the spotlight on human rights injustices in Iran.
HISTORY NOTES - in Bulgaria a recently excavated box of ancient bone fragments is said to contain partial remains of St John the Baptist.
THURSDAY's CHILD is Lola the Cat - an English pootie about to be placed in a dumpster by this woman (caught on a security camera) who has received threats over what she admits was a lack of judgment.
BUSINESS NOTES - accounting regulators have proposed that businesses must list operating leases - not just capital leases - on their balance sheets.
POLITICAL NOTES - an official for the conservative Partido Popular in Spain has come under fire for his criticism of Trinidad Jiménez (the Minister for Health) for her politics, experience .... accent.
ELECTION NOTES - with President Lula unable to seek another re-election: the candidate of his party (Dilma Rousseff) is poised to win October's presidential election in Brazil in the first round of voting, according to opinion polls.
FRIDAY's CHILD is a resident at a new shelter in Indiana, nicknamed Cat Central Station by its staff.
......and finally, for a song of the week ............... when Tim Meadows was a cast member on "Saturday Night Live", I always got a chuckle out of his recurring skit as a DJ on a show called The Quiet Storm - who would then press a 'thunder' sound effects button - all the while, unaware it was a trademarked radio format featuring mellow, late-night R&B. Had I known, I would have immediately associated this with the sound of Anita Baker whose career has been on-again-off-again (often by choice due to family reasons) and in recent years has had some turmoil. Still, she practically defines the genre and whose voice still enchants whenever I hear it.
The native of Toledo, Ohio came of age in Detroit and listened to jazz singers such as Sarah Vaughn and Nancy Wilson.In her teens she sang in a Gospel choir and local bands before winning an audition to join the Detroit band Chapter 8 at age seventeen. They released an album in 1979 but when their label was acquired by Arista Records they were dropped.
She worked as a legal secretary before being contacted by a Chapter 8 manager about joining his new label. After the debacle with Arista she was hesitant to give up a steady job but relented. The result was The Songstress which - while not a hit - got enough airplay and word-of-mouth to interest Elektra into signing her in 1985.
With producer Michael Powell (an old Chapter 8 bandmate) she released the 1986 Grammy-winning album Rapture with hits such as the title track and the song she co-wrote Sweet Love reaching #8 on the US charts (and #13 in Britain). I recall seeing her perform on "Saturday Night Live" and it launched a world-wide tour (with a DVD release) leading to another Grammy the following year for her back-up singing on "Ain't Got No Need to Worry" by The Winans. This was such a great start, her minor-label debut album was subsequently acquired (and re-released) by Elektra.
She broke the sophomore jinx by following-up in 1988 with the album Giving You the Best That I Got - with tunes like "Just Because" and the title track (her highest-charting hit reaching #3) leading to two more Grammys. While she had a hand in writing some of her songs up to this point, she pursued this even more in 1990 with the aptly-named Compositions that included singles such as "Talk to Me" and "Whatever it Takes". While not as big a seller, after awhile she had earned her seventh Grammy, performed to sold-out audiences near and wide and was on a fast highway.
And then, she took the off-ramp to start a family. She participated in Frank Sinatra's 1993 Duets album, co-singing the standard Witchcraft - and after the birth of her first child self-produced her 1994 release Rhythm of Love (recorded at her home) and with hits such as "I Apologize" which earned her the eighth Grammy of her career.
But she then went on a extended hiatus, to raise her family and also to resolve disputes with Elektra. This led her to sign with Atlantic Records in 200, but had to scrap a project due to defective recording equipment.
Finally in 2004 she sought out Bruce Lundvall, the new president of the venerable jazz label Blue Note who was seeking to branch the label out into related fields. And for someone who obviously had jazz influences, this move seemed like a match-made-in-heaven. Thus in 2004 she released My Everything which featured "You're My Everything" and signified her return to the music scene. The next year she followed-up with Christmas Fantasy - a mix of traditional and non-traditional Yuletide songs.
The past few years have been most eventful for her. On the down-side, she went through an acrimonious divorce in which she was threatened with jail time over the split of royalties, had to settle with the state of Michigan over tax disputes - and joined the club of singers having a rough go over singing the national anthem at the NBA Finals just a few weeks ago.
But she has her first new album in years due out this November called 21st Century Love and appears in concert twice in the next few days: Virginia's Wolf Trap this evening (Thursday) and then in suburban Detroit this Saturday. With eight Grammys and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame .... she seems to have reached the heights on her own terms.
Of all of her songs, it's a 1986 tune called "Same Ole Love" (fair-use extract below) that is my favorite. And below you can listen to it.
Flashbacks of the times we've had
Some made us laugh, some made us sad
We used to break up to make up
All the fun that came from those love games
I think I need someone new
Oh, it just won't do,
because I think about you baby
There's a reason I feel this way
All the things you do
Well, it might be the things that you say
Your love never changes
It's like a picture in a frame
and it remains the same
From beginning to end
365 days of the year
I want your same ole love
All I want to do
is keep on loving you
I want your same ole love
