“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.” — George Bernard Shaw

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) Late Nite Radio. In honour of the fact that yesterday was St. Paddy’s day, aka the day on which sensible people go straight home after work in order to avoid encounters with drunken revelers of every ethnic background wearing “Kiss me, I’m Irish” t-shirts, tonight we feature the walking distilleries known as The Pogues performing a song written by their — highly flammable — lead singer Shane MacGowan called If I Should Fall From Grace With God.
Please move small pets and elderly family members to a safe area, and refrain from throwing beer bottles.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Woody Herman and his orchestra, The Swinging Herd, featuring Bill Chase, Dave Gale, Billy Hunt, Phil Wilson, Henry Southall, Bob Rudolph, Sal Nistico, Jackie Stevens, Bobby Jones, Frank Hittner, Nat Pierce, Chuck Andrus, and Jake Hanna performing Molasses ¤ on Jazz Casual in 1963 (6:30).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

“Certitude is not the test of certainty.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

“An attitude of permanent indignation signifies great mental poverty. Politics compels its votaries to take that line and you can see their minds growing more impoverished every day, from one burst of righteous indignation to the next.” — Valery

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s featured song is a long-overdue response to a request from SDA commenter batb. I’ve hesitated because, while I love the song, the video itself, like a lot of videos produced by record labels (as opposed to some of the better fan-made ones) tends to distract more than it serves the song; I strongly suggest minimizing the screen while it plays, and just listening.
Here it is: Montreal homeboy Leonard Cohen’s paean to the eternal hope that is America, Democracy.
In a perhaps fruitless attempt to preempt inevitable criticisms from those who don’t like Leonard, I’d like to point out there is in fact a rather elegant, easy to use and one-hundred-percent effective technical solution to the problem: on the lower left side, just below the video image, there’s a little button that looks kinda like a little triangle tipped on its side; if you click on that while the video is playing, the video, and the sound, will stop!
Your are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite
Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Erroll Garner and
the band performing Erroll Garner’s Misty ¤ § in 1969 (4:34).
For fans of Mr. Garner’s work, our previous SDA LNR shows
thereto are here and here.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and for Yukon Gold, here are Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra with soloists Gwyneth Jones, Shirley Verrett, Plácido Domingo, and Martti Talvela, performing the fourth and final movement of Ludwig van Beethoven‘s Symphony N° 9 in D minor, Op.125: Ode to Joy, II & III, in 1989 (25:38).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

I should also like to note that Erik Verlinde, from the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam, has an interesting new paper available On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton (PDF), in which as he has said he argues that “Gravity exists because of a difference in the concentration of information in the empty space between two masses and its surroundings […] On the smallest level Newton’s laws don’t apply, but they do for apples and planets. You can compare this to the pressure of a gas. Molecules themselves don’t have any pressure, but a barrel of gas does” ~ because as Abraham Lincoln said, “For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like”. From the abstract:

Starting from first principles and general assumptions Newton’s law of gravitation is shown to arise naturally and unavoidably in a theory in which space is emergent through a holographic scenario. Gravity is explained as an entropic force caused by changes in the information associated with the positions of material bodies. A relativistic generalization of the presented arguments directly leads to the Einstein equations. When space is emergent even Newton’s law of inertia needs to be explained. The equivalence principle leads us to conclude that it is actually this law of inertia whose origin is entropic.

In section 6.1 of Verlinde’s paper, he writes, “Gravity has given many hints of being an emergent phenomenon, yet up to this day it is still seen as a fundamental force. The similarities with other known emergent phenomenon, such as thermodynamics and hydrodynamics, have been mostly regarded as just suggestive analogies. It is time we not only notice the analogy, and talk about the similarity, but finally do away with gravity as a fundamental force”. If Verlinde’s conjecture is true, and if his particular derivation of equation 5.34 in his paper

is valid, then it’s hugely significant. On the other hand, if not, then as Aristotle said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Roy Thinnes, starring as architect David Vincent, with Richard Anderson and Barbara Barrie, in The Enemy, II, III, IV & V episode of The Invaders (a Quinn Martin production) in 1967 (Σt=54:48). My apologies for the little recorder message that appears from time to time (I found it less troublesome after the first minute), and for the unrelated material in the last half of the last part, yet of the half-dozen episodes of The Invaders I’ve watched over the past few weeks while working toward tonight’s show, I think that The Enemy has the best moral story, and that it has the best overall audio and visual tone or tenor as well.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of SDA Late Nite Radio.
In 1911, a fourteen-year-old Mississippian named Jimmie Rodgers began working as a railroad brakeman, which in those days involved running along atop the train and cranking the brake wheel on each car. When he was twenty-eight, serious health problems resulting from tuberculosis drove him to try his hand at being a professional musician. After two years of performing in vaudeville shows and traveling shows, he began a six-year recording career that would forever change the face of popular music and earn him the title The Father of Country Music. Like the Carter Family, who began their recording career within two days of Rodgers, and also under the guidance of Ralph Peer of the Victor Talking Machine Company, the influence of Rodgers’ music on future generations of artists such as Hank Williams, and on American popular music in general, cannot be overstated.
During his last recording session, in New York City in 1933, Rodgers rose from the cot he rested on on between takes to sing a song about his beloved southern states called Somewhere Down Below the Dixon Line. He died the following night.
You are invited, as always, to provide your Reader Tips in the comments.

And with a tip ‘o the hat to Me No Dhimmi from yesterday’s Reader Tips, here is I think an excellent new essay by the always interesting Mr. Theodore Dalyrmple: Thank You For Not Expressing Yourself, in which I think it can be reasonably postulated that he is arguing that just getting angry is a romantic thing to do, not a classical (or, I would argue, conservative) thing to do. And I think that 孫子 would agree. From time to time it can be, I think, the case that it is indeed appropriate to recall Benjamin Franklin’s sage advice: He that would live in peace and at ease must not speak all he knows or all he sees.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and related to an outstanding note I made in regard to Ken (Kulak)’s comments here Last October, here is the great Mr. Red Skelton hosting The Red Skelton Show, II, III, IV, V & VI, with special guest star Martha Raye, and David Rose & his Orchestra, in early January, 1954 (Σt=58:30). The first & last sketches are, in my opinion, classic, brilliant Skelton, and the ad-libs in the main sketch, Of Mouth and Men, are just what we’ve come to expect from The Red Skelton Show.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.