Author Archives: oook

links for 2009-03-07

Anniversary

Tomorrow is oook blog’s fifth anniversary, and what a long strange trip it’s been. Dunno how to assess the blog’s significance, since I have a constitutional aversion to conventional measures of “success” and I abhor counting hits or whatever. When you come right down to it, I’ve always thought of it primarily as a means to keep track of my changing attention (my magpie habits) for myself, and secondarily as a conduit for keeping informed of my doings the 20 or so people I think might be interested. Beyond that, I’m happy to occasionally discover that somebody has happened upon a posting via a search, or that some friend has pointed somebody to a posting.

I’m thinking about converting over to Word Press, but I don’t have sufficient faith in my own geek skills to start the process. I’ve also thought of making some sort of Fundamental Change in presentation style or content, but I don’t really have any positive reason to do that… so I think it’ll probably just limp along in its increasingly vieux jeu format.

links for 2009-02-26

  • from The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong. Aw, gwan… listen to it. A fine example of context-building in the writing: "…So let the jazz purists frown at what they perceive as the sad ending of Louis Armstrong, singing kids songs. He sure as hell doesn’t sound sad to me and that trumpet solo is the truth, my friends…"
    (tags: musics)
  • via Google Maps Mania, the sort of thing I've been imagining for years, and including layers like Murdock's [semi-bogus] map of ethnic entities. Geography reborn, just as I've been saying since…
  • from The Automata / Automaton Blog, via BoingBoing
    (tags: automata craft)

Katy Hill

It’s somehow not quite fair to rediffuse stuff that appears on BoingBoing (I mean, who doesn’t read BoingBoing?), but this one is just too wonderful to miss:

Kalamazoo

Over at dippermouth.blogspot.com there’s a discussion of Louis Armstrong’s take on “I’ve Got A Gal in Kalamazoo” that includes a wonderful video clip with an even more right-on intro:

…(Regarding the vocal by Tex and The Modernaires, I once showed this to an old friend from high school and all he could say was, “White people….ugh.”)

[but hang in there –after 4 minutes of whiteface bathos there’s a specTACular Nicholas Brothers dancing take on the tune]: