Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio.
Tonight, for your delectation, here is the inimitable Mr. Steven Wright
performing my favourite version of his classic Comedy Shtick ¤ (6:24).
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 Billy Stewart and
the boys performing Summertime in 1966 (4:51).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the third (Part I, II) and final special edition of SDA Late Nite Radio pursuant to that singular time in history forty years ago: Apollo 11. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Back to Earth ¤ (6:48), footage of Mission Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin, supported by a cast of 400,000, sailing back from the Sea of Tranquility, Moon, to the Pacific Ocean, Earth, splashdown at 09:50 PDT on July 24, 1969. A Dream; Hard Work; Success. People can, and many do, miss the simple majestic beauty of the Apollo 11 mission, always finding something to complain about, and that’s sad, really, for them. Fortunately, to the benefit of our species, this singular accomplishment now forever stands as a beacon in the navigation charts for the pursuits of the human spirit.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Good evening, welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight we present a song from The Producers, the Mel Brooks musical in which a Broadway producer named Max Bialystock and his accountant Leo Bloom come to the excited, if nervous, realization that they could – theoretically – reap a one-time financial windfall by staging a lavish, guaranteed flop, and then, after the enterprise has collapsed on opening night, pocketing all the money raised for its production.
The two men find what they believe to be the most unimaginably bad play extant — “Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden” — but their carefully chosen worst-ever director, Roger Elizabeth De Bris, considers the play’s ending to be not quite cheerful enough for his tastes, and initially refuses to direct the production even when promised complete artistic freedom to do whatever he wishes with the script and the staging. Eventually his susceptibility to flattery and his desire for a Tony Award gets the better of him and he relents, breaking into song at the very prospect of a Broadway juggernaut in bright lights having his name on the side. When he decides to rewrite the ending so that the Germans win in the end, no moral judgement whatsoever is involved: in De Bris’ happy mind, snappy production values — form, line, and gaiety — will trump the unappetizing facticity of war, destruction and dysentery. And it will work.
In tonight’s selection we see the very moment where the eager yet uncontrollably self-equivocating De Bris is finally convinced to direct the play. Here it is then, without further ado, the cast members of the Broadway production of The Producers — including Gary Beach as Roger De Bris, and Nathan Lane and Mathew Broderick as Bialystock and Bloom respectively — performing the nimble and humorous Keep It Gay.
Your Reader Tips — keep it light, keep it bright — are welcome, as always, in the comments.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is Mr. Jose Carreras singing Some Enchanted Evening ¤ ¶, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 musical South Pacific, pursuant to the London production in 1986, Jonathan Tunick conducting (3:31).
| Some enchanted evening, Someone may be laughin’. You may hear her laughin’, Across a crowded room. And night after night, |
Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons… Wise men never try. Once you have found her, |
For some value of her.
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 is Mr. Roy Clark
performing some version of Malaguena (5:06).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our second of three special
Apollo 11
editions of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to that singular time in history forty years ago, here is some
documentary coverage, The Eagle Has Landed, and here is the original Man On The Moon, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, & VIII broadcast coverage, as you would have seen it, live, on television, landing on the moon at 20:17 GMT on July 20, 1969, with twenty-five seconds of fuel left, and then setting foot on the surface of the moon, at 02:56 GMT on July 21 1969. And lastly, here is some documentary coverage from the Lunar Ascent at 17:54 GMT later that day.
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 is Mr. Fats Domino performing Blueberry Hill, in 1956 (1:36). This up-tempo version of Bobby Cerdeira, Al Lewis & Larry Stock’s 1940 song reached #2 in the Top 40, and was #1 on the R&B charts for 11 weeks. It was Domino’s biggest hit, selling more than 5 million copies worldwide in 1956-57.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Sweet performing Love Is Like Oxygen from their Level Headed album, in 1978 (7:14).
Nota bene: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the daily SDA Reader Tips entry. It is a place that is provided for you, dear reader, to alert other SDA readers to various level-headed tips you might have, in order to alleviate the shame and embarrassment that would arise from being off-topic in other SDA entries. How to remove wax from a carpet is a tip, SDA is like oxygen is a tip, that Mark Steyn has a great new article here is a tip, if the Large Hadron Collider sees a Higgs Boson that will be a tip, I could go on and on: tips is a pretty broad category. And, the daily Reader Tips entry is a place to make occasional comments about said posted Reader Tips, including the opening LNR tip, comments on those comments, and so on, to a degree.
That all makes sense: not enough and you’re gonna’ die. Nevertheless, you get too much you get too high: Reader Tips is not a place for copying and pasting vast tracts of text from other publications. That’s not only illegal, it’s actually rude. Use a link. It is not a place for you to go on and on and on and on trying to convince all SDA readers that you are righteously correct about some pet peeve of yours. Get your own blog for that, then post an excerpt from and link to your essay here. It is not a place for posting ill-formatted run-on comments. Be considerate of your readers. It is not a debating society. I wish it was, but Kate says it isn’t. And it is not a place for school-yard name-calling of those you don’t agree with.
There is a reason for my saying all this, and that is that to the degree that Reader Tips becomes overrun by excessive commentitis from a small number of activist commenters, signals from otherwise legitimate and possibly interesting SDA Readers’ Tips become lost in the noise of the verbodiarrheic, thus lowering the overall Shannon information value of the exercise for all of us. Remember, my job here (in Reader Tips) is to be like a host to the guests of Reader Tips, and that means I have to know when to (and be willing to) invoke the bouncers (and I am).
Therefore, in order to be reasonable to all the guests of Small Dead Animals who might like to post occasional Reader Tips and occasional comments thereupon, I say to those of you who have recently been trying to use these Reader Tips entries as if they were your personal blog: don’t do that any more. I’m not asking anyone to go away or to not talk about something, it’s just that this is the world-famous Small Dead Animals, so try to be reasonable, please.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first of three special Apollo 11 editions of SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to that singular time in history forty years ago, here is the original Launch Sequence ¤ video (9:55), as you would have seen it, live, on television, starting at T minus six minutes and counting, on July 16, 1969, at 09:26 EDT. Over three hundred and sixty feet tall ~ a thirty story building. Almost eight million pounds of thrust. Mere words are inadequate.
And here are some things you might not have seen before: here is live footage from a number of the high-speed cameras ¤ involved in the Apollo 11 launch (3:16), and footage from the high-speed engine cameras ¤ of Apollo 8, 11, and 12 (3:48, no audio).
If everything works out as planned, knock on wood, we have some, I think, fine shows in the can for next Sunday night, when we’re on the moon, over two hundred thousand miles away, and a week Thursday night, when we return to Earth. We went a long way from home, folks, in space, in time, in technology, and in the history of our species.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Welcome to the day-early Wednesday (EBD) edition of Late Nite Radio. Tonight’s featured song is from Tom Lehrer, a math professor and part-time musical satirist whose musical success happened almost by accident: while attending Harvard, where he first arrived to study math at age 15, Lehrer wrote “Fight Fiercely Harvard” — “hurl that spheroid down the field” — and put it, along with eleven other original songs, on a record he recorded in one hour for $15. His intention had been simply to sell a few records on campus, but the word of mouth on Songs by Tom Lehrer soon led to mail-order requests from across the country, and within a few years he became a — somewhat reluctant — international success.
For a year or so after Lehrer stopped touring in the early 1960’s he performed satiric, topical songs like Werner Von Braun and National Brotherhood Week on the American version of the (originally) British TV program That Was The Week That Was. Tonight’s musical selection, from an album of his songs from the show called That Was the Year That Was, was written about the then-topical subject matter of the forward-looking Second Vatican Council. Lehrer: “There’s been a great deal of ferment in the Roman Catholic Church lately, involving certain reforms which are taking place. For one thing, they are allowing the use of native languages to replace Latin in portions of the mass…also, they are permitting the use of secular music in portions of the liturgy; I thought it would be a nice idea to redo some of the liturgical music in popular song forms. I have chosen the ragtime form….”
Here then, without further ado, part-time humorist and piano player Tom Lehrer sings The Vatican Rag.
The comments are open for your Reader Tips.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is the great John Scott Whiteley performing Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Wedge Fugue in E minor, BWV 548 (8:24), on the Zacharias Hildebrandt organ in the Wenzelskirche in Naumburg, Germany (which Bach played and probably helped design).
The Wenzelskirche organ was Hildebrandt’s largest, featuring three manuals and pedal, fifty-three stops, and a thirty-two foot Posaunenbass pipe with a principal harmonic frequency of sixteen hertz. It was built in 1746 and restored from 1993 to 2000.
There a multiple cameras located inside the organ in this performance, some good shots of the thousands of pipes hidden inside the organ, and some, how shall we say, interesting visual wedge effects. Mmm, mmm; thanks, John.
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 pursuant to our Take Five show yesterday, here are Al Jarreau, Tom Canning, Jerome Rimson, and Nigel Wilkinson, performing Take Five ¤, in Germany, in 1976 (8:03). By the way, tonight’s SDA LNR cheese selection is Hawes’ Wensleydale. There’s something about this cheese, like the Lancashire that we previously featured, that just says, never mind the bubbles or the blue veins: this is cheese.
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 George Benson
et al performing Take Five ¤, live, in Montreux (8:50).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
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Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our occasional flights of fantasy show, here is episode seventeen from the second year of the classic Hogan’s Heroes series: The General Swap ¤, II ¤, & III ¤, from 1967 (½ hour).
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.
Good evening ladies, and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, well, you know, we have to, at some point, or other, in the history of SDA LNR, do this, so, tonight, here, for your delectation, and without further ado, are Mr. Lester Flatt, and Mr. Earl Scruggs, and the Foggy Mountain Boys, performing Foggy Mountain Breakdown ¤, at the Grand Ole Opry, in 1965 (1:47). By the way, shouldn’t I get some kind of award, or other, for run-on comma-phrases, yet, already?
I mean seriously: there were 25 commas in that paragraph!
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome, in the comments, eh, what?
Good evening, welcome to EBD’s Wednesday edition of Late Nite Radio. Several weeks ago at SDA, Paul linked to his Cjunk post, “ Gaze In Wonder at Your Frigidaire.” The title is a line from the song “Auschwitz to Ipswich” by Jarvis Cocker, who is perhaps best known as the frontman for the British band Pulp.
One might expect any song about the West’s passivity and unwillingness to defend itself culturally at home to take an anthemic, “we must fight this” tack, but Cocker takes the opposite approach: his first-person narrator is a faithless, dissipated, sadly self-pleasuring Western everyman who has given up the ghost on the matter of his culture. He recognizes a cultural sunset, but since he uses his own life as a reference point, he sees nothing of real value being lost; since society is just himself writ large, it is no more worthy of being saved than he is. Cocker’s apt use in this case of the small, first-person ironic voice serves to limn the inexorable connectedness between citizens’ seemingly inconsequential personal attributes and civilizational changes of historic consequence.
It’s just a song we’re talking about, of course, one mostly notable for its subject matter. Before we get to it, I have a quick question for SDA readers: are there any other popular songs extant that either mention, refer to, defend, or acknowledge the value of western culture — even if only metaphorically — vis a vis others? I can’t think of any; if you can, please elaborate in the comments.
Anyway, here it is, without further ado: Jarvis Cocker sings From Auschwitz to Ipswich.
The comments are open, as always, for your Reader Tips.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is the Royal Hawaiian Band, the oldest municipal band in the United States of America (they’re out of Honolulu, and have been together since their inception, in 1836, by decree of King Kamehameha III), performing Aloha ‘Oe ¤, in 1928 (3:21).
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 Mr. Chet Atkins and Mr. George Benson performing Help Me Make it Through The Night ¤ (4:10). Very nicely done, gentlemen. For those of you who like tonight’s artists: our previous Chet Atkins shows were 2008-08-08, 2008-10-10, and 2008-11-14, and, of course, we covered George Benson’s Breezin’ on 2008-03-07.
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 is The Pink Panther performing Dial ‘P’ for Pink ¤, in 1965 (6:06). The characters. The plot. The animation. The music. Outstanding. Tour de force. And the sound effect right at 5:00 is brilliant.
Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.