↓
 
Home » Open thread 1/10/22

Open thread 1/10/22

The New Neo Posted on by

Yvonne Elliman and Tulsi Gabbard, separated at birth? And they both are from Hawaii:

By the way, it’s a Bee Gees’ song of course. It was given to Elliman to sing on the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, for variety. Here’s the Bee Gees’ version:

Comments

Open thread 1/10/22 — 62 Comments

  2. This is one case where the Bee Gees wrote a great song, and rightfully let Elliman do the song. Her version is much better in my view.

  4. If they were separated at birth, it would be because they’re mother and daughter. TG wasn’t born yet when this song hit the charts.

    Elliman is pleasant to listen too, but not handsome like Gabbard. It’s an agreeable song, but it needs editing. Cut down the number of refrains.

    The only version of the song I can recall ever hearing is Elliman’s. Sweet period piece.

  6. I, too, think both of these “If I can’t Have You” versions are about the same – probably skip to the next song.

    I prefer “The Air That I Breathe”; heard a good version from Simply Red. Then saw this one, interesting beginning story:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfbAKZTM3-A

    My favorite Hollies song is Long Cool Woman (in a Black Dress), but hadn’t heard this extended version with great vocal only pre-intro
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNXDlSt9nJ8&list=RDrFnwczuvb74&index=14
    A comment there claims that the Long Cool Woman is Cher. Makes sense.

    I listen to music more while on my computer than while reading (only) on my tablet.

    I hate the sound & feel of pencils, sharp or not. In 8th grade algebra, I got an A but also a stamp on all my pen-written homework: Use Soft Lead Pencil Only …
    Math teacher and I often played chess since he was the head of chess club; I usually but not always won. Interest in girls was totally “look, but don’t touch”.

    My first grandson, Ondrej, was born today (2am), to our daughter Bianca. She’s an American citizen, from me, but Ondrej isn’t because Bianca never lived in the USA, only a couple of visits.

    Hope the rest of 2022 is as happy for you all.

  8. Congrats!!
    (And look at the bright side! At least he won’t have to fill out US tax forms every year….)

  10. I’ve always liked Yvonne Ellimans voice and style. That said and I’m not sure but does anyone else suspect that Elliman, in that performance is lip syncing?

  11. YES, Art Deco at 12:29. The Mary Katherine Ham-face off with State Media denialism, to the point of rewriting their Head-in-sand history as virtuous non-hyopocrisy, has been making the rounds on the right.

    It’s in doing actual history that the Left does it’s secondary and ever lasting damage. Lying to your face is their first evil; lying to posterity is their ever lasting evil because, you know, uncle Joe Stalin and Karl Marx were good guys who never meant no harm to anybody….

    These sorts of reliable failures to both introspect honestly about the past and extrospect honestly as events happen, always stuns me.

    Honesty with one’s self is ever always the first obligation and fountainhead of any virtue — yet these arrogant cyphers fail in the most fundamental ways, and fail to see the obvious insidious evil of their ways. To top it off, they are offended to be held to account for their malice!

    Anyway, it’s all on display in this very recent contretemps, occasioned by the Jan6th Reichstag Fire sale by the FIB.

  12. Tom Grey,

    I like quite a few Simply Red songs quite a bit, however, that cover and video? Ouch! I guess that’s what happens when a performer tries to win an EGOT in 3 minutes and 30 seconds. 🙂

  13. Tom Grey,

    Congratulations on the grandson! What wonderful news! May Ondrej live a long, joyous life!!

  14. https://notthebee.com/article/matt-drudge-confirms-he-still-runs-drudge-report

    Not buying.

    Hardly ever looked at Drudge myself.

    Best I can tell, he was ca. 1998 a young man who liked gossip and would link to things indiscriminately rather than curate his sets of links so as to advance the worldview of the social nexus for which the Democratic Party is the electoral vehicle. He never had much of a political / social viewpoint of his own. So, he could be bought by someone looking to take a piece off the board; we just do not know who.

  15. Regarding the discussion of writing Hebrew and writing from right to left on the recent pencil sharpening thread:

    I can write cursive from right to left, what some people refer to as “mirror writing,” or “Da Vinci” cursive. I actually prefer it to writing “forward,” in typical left to right fashion. It is also much neater than my left to right cursive, although I can do it quickly.

    It comes in super handy in meetings. I can make all kinds of contemporaneous notes about others in the room, or helpful points I want to remember that I may not want others to read if looking over my shoulder. Some folks question whether it’s real, then I hold my writing up to a mirror and they are surprised by how neat and legible it is. When people ask me how to do it I insist that it’s really rather easy (or at least was for me) and insist they try it, but no one ever does, they just keep being amazed I do it. Since I picked it up almost immediately my guess is most others would also, if they gave it a go. Numbers sometimes slow me down, especially twos, fives and sixes, and for some reason I generally have to pause a nanosecond when remembering which side a backwards, cursive “x” is crossed on!

  17. I love baroque music, but I’ve burned through most of the well-known Bach, Vivaldi, Teleman, Handel, etc.

    However, I don’t know Domenico Scarlatti (not to be confused with his father, Alessandro) nearly so well, so I’ve been listening to him over the weekend. The good news is that there is a lot of D. Scarlatti keyboard music and it’s good stuff. There’s not any bad news. I prefer to hear his work played on the piano, not harpsichord.

    Give Scarlatti a try, if you haven’t. He also has a special sound — he’s not a me-too baroque composer. According to the Britannica, there is much influence of Spanish culture in his later works.

    https://www.britannica.com/biography/Domenico-Scarlatti

  18. Geoffrey, oh, she is definitely lip syncing that performance- it is literally the recorded version of the song on that video.

  20. Hi, Tom Grey. Splendid about your grandson! Since you mentioned your math teacher and chess, I’ll mention here, just to get it out of my mental queue, that there is one small plastic travel chess set that I bought one time in Karlovy Vary, which I still have.

    huxley, one of my music professors was a bit of a Scarlatti buff – he taught piano. It was thanks to him that I knew of D. Scarlatti at all (he would play his works for us on pianoforte sometimes).

  22. huxley,

    I also really enjoy Baroque and also feel there should be more of it. It’s such great music. Why wasn’t more of it composed?

  24. Zaphod,

    I just read the diplomad post. I agree with him regarding Singapore Airlines.

  28. Thanks for good thoughts to all the good thinking people!
    Tho Karlovy Vary is a lovely place in Czechia,
    https://www.karlovyvary.cz/en
    we live in the OK suburb of Bratislava, Karlova Ves in Slovakia.
    Ondrej won’t have to file US income tax forms, and Slovakia’s 19% flat tax was modified to have a 25% rate on income over about $40k.

    My wife was wondering what to call me – I like “Daddy”, which is also close to the Slovak “Dedko”, quite different from “Otec” (father). Now I’m also thinking “Granddad”, since I called mine “Grandpa”.

    I used to like the DiploMad, here he’s complaining of dates:
    ” For some reason it wanted the dates year/month/day without explaining that. ”
    Slovakia and lots of the EU uses dd.mm.yy, so 11.01.22 for my 3am note. US military would be 11 Jan 22, also pretty clear.

    I wish the UN & EU & USA would standardize on a “digital date form” of
    yyyy-mm-dd for 2022-01-11, so as to automatically sort in chron order. Also use “/” for m/d/y, “.” for d.m.y, and “-” for y-m-d.

    Will the truth really set us free? what if it’s depressing? Some truth is. One the most important essays of last year: https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal

    We need more conservative elites – hard to get there when anti-conservative elites are the “gatekeepers to elitism”.

  30. Congratulations TG!

    Re ‘/’ for m/d/y: You have just made an enemy of every Unix-like OS user on the planet. Amazon drones are searching for you as we speak.

    ‘/’ is the directory separator in the One True OS and having it show up in a file name un-escaped by a preceding backslash is a TEOTWAWKI.

    I do agree that yyyymmdd with or without some separator which is not a special character in any common OS is very handy for file sort order.

    Fortunately there are a bunch of very comprehensive libraries and APIs for dealing with dates and formats so interoperability in the invisible world of machines talking to machines isn’t a huge problem most of the time.

    Humans talking to Humans… that’s another story 🙂

  31. Art Deco,

    Love the commenter who replied to French: “You should step down then, no?” 🙂

    A lot of people seem very confused by French and Jonah Goldberg over the past 5 – 6 years. Me? Not at all. This is who they’ve always been.

  32. What Art Deco said about David French. He got a drubbing on Gab for that yesterday and I somehow resisted the temptation to post a link here to the festivities there.

    French really is the Lowest of the Low. Although there’s always Frum. Hard to pick.

  33. Forget dates,

    Why does every digital form ask for zip code (then “country” if an option) last?! Then the form does an edit check!

    First address question: “country.”
    Second question: “zip code” if required in that country.
    Then a list of valid cities with that zip code in that country.

  34. @Rufus:

    HK has no postal codes. It’s super annoying dealing with websites which don’t believe this.

    Popular culture has its uses. When absolutely forced to enter one and 0000 and na don’t work, then I type in 90210.

  35. I also really enjoy Baroque and also feel there should be more of it. It’s such great music. Why wasn’t more of it composed?

    Rufus T. Firefly:

    I’ve thought that about every kind of art I’ve loved. It sounds so simple, so straightforward. Just create more of it!

    If the Beatles were going to be so foolish as to break up, why wouldn’t some other group step in and write more Beatles music?

    The answer is … it was tried. A ton of people, before and after the Beatles breakujp, tried to write Beatles music — hence the adjective, Beatlesque — but no one could hit that mark beyond reminding listeners of the Beatles.

    The Beatles were as good as a rock group gets and IMO they couldn’t write more Beatles music either, which is the ultimate reason I think they broke up.

    Bob Dylan was asked about the “thin, wild, mercury sound” he heard in his mind while he wrote that epic streak of albums from “Bringing It All Back Home” to “Blonde on Blonde.” He said, yes, he remembered that sound and agreed those were great songs, but he couldn’t get back to who he was then to write more of them.

    I’ve come to doubt there is a huge amount of high-quality whatever accessible to artists. I suspect Bach and the boys covered baroque pretty well. Composers who came later tried their luck with newer forms.

    Then there’s this quote:
    _________________________

    All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

    – Frank Zappa

  36. For the contemporary-music-philes. Not so much baroque as broke.
    https://spectatorworld.com/topic/antony-blinkens-soundtrack-to-failure/

    AD- thanks for the Wm Boyce Symphony.
    I like that YouTube site because of the superimposed scores.

    Baroque is my first love in “classical” music; I like the regularity of the melodies.
    It appeals to the computer programmer side of my psyche.

    More Boyce, from the YT sidebar (so useful, but sometimes I go down way to many rabbit holes).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbdfshaaCzY

  39. huxley:

    In the 60s, the Bee Gees were writing and singing music that a lot of people not only thought sounded like the Beatles, but that they thought WAS the Beatles writing it and singing it. I’m referring to Bee Gees songs such as “Spicks and Specks,” “NY Mining Disaster,” “I’ve Got to Get a Message to You,” and “Holiday,” and lot of others from their non-disco early era, when they were very young (they were younger than the Beatles).

    Please read this for an explanation of what I mean.

    I never thought they sounded like the Beatles at the time, but I liked those songs as much as I liked the Beatles songs. I didn’t know at the time who sang them, but I didn’t think it was the Beatles.

  40. The song was one hell of a gift, even if the Bee Gees had no idea the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack would sell the way it did. She’s probably still getting nice checks every few months from the publishing agency.

  41. https://althouse.blogspot.com/2022/01/question-when-will-we-put-dr-seuss-on.html

    This is obscene.

    An appreciation of Maya Angelou from John Derbyshire:

    And then, Maya Angelou. I first heard that name in 1993, when she read one of her “poems” at the Clinton inauguration.

    It was a quite sensationally bad poem. I remember being shocked by how bad it was. With the whole world watching, this is how the U.S.A. presents itself to the world? With this semi-literate gibberish?

    Perhaps I was still somewhat naïve about American public life.

    Across the wall of the world, A River sings a beautiful song,

    What does that mean? What is this wall? The Great Wall of China, or what? And wouldn’t the river sing over the wall, not across it?

    The horizon leans forward, Offering you space to place new steps of change.

    Isn’t the horizon, like, horizontal? So how can it lean? Don’t you need to be somewhat vertical before you can lean?

    It goes without saying that none of the formal devices of English verse, developed and refined across centuries, were employed by Ms. Angelou. She probably thought them unacceptably white. Her contribution to the 1993 Inauguration was formless, meaningless babble.

    I have never read her autobiographical bestseller “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”. From what I can find out about it on the Internet it seems to be another exercise in white-hating sex-obsessed black solipsism … but possibly the references I found were all biased.

    A friend contributes the following observations:

    “I’ve always suspected she’s a fraud, and the Wikipedia entry rather proves it, admitting that she manufactured material for her autobiography: “The details of Angelou’s life described in her seven autobiographies and in numerous interviews, speeches, and articles tended to be inconsistent … “Angelou wrote a total of seven autobiographies. According to scholar Mary Jane Lupton, Angelou’s third autobiography Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas marked the first time a well-known African American autobiographer had written a third volume about her life. Her books “stretch over time and place,” from Arkansas to Africa and back to the U.S., and take place from the beginnings of World War II to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. … “Angelou’s use of fiction-writing techniques such as dialogue, characterization, and development of theme, setting, plot, and language has often resulted in the placement of her books into the genre of autobiographical fiction. As feminist scholar Maria Lauret state, Angelou made a deliberate attempt in her books to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Scholar Mary Jane Lupton argues that all of Angelou’s autobiographies conform to the genre’s standard structure: they are written by a single author, they are chronological, and they contain elements of character, technique, and theme. Angelou recognizes that there are fictional aspects to her books; Lupton agrees, stating that Angelou tended to ‘diverge from the conventional notion of autobiography as truth.’” Who knew that autobiographies were supposed to be true? This is Wikipedia, mind you, a friendly leftist source.”

  42. Lots of interesting digressions in this thread, but a troubling avoidance of the central question: Which of them is more physically attractive from a male point of view?
    Inarguably, Tulsi. And the woman surfs.

  44. neo:

    I never mistook a Bee Gees song for the Beatles. For one thing the vocals are too different. I grant they can be Beatlesque and like the Beatles they had a great pop touch.

    Did the brothers mention the Beatles as a big conscious influence? (Obviously it was hard not to be influenced by the Beatles in the 60s.)

    Billy Joel is quite specific that he imprinted the Beatles and decided to make music his life when he saw them on the Ed Sullivan. My ears pricked up in the 80s when I heard Joel’s “Scandinavian Skies” off “Nylon Curtain.” So Beatlesque! Out of the “Strawberry Fields Forever” period.

    –Billy Joel, “Scandinavian Skies”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5g75rHKecM

    Looking the song up on wiki, I see I was hardly alone in the perception. Listeners heard Paul McCartney and John Lennon strongly. The producer told Joel his vocal was too much like Lennon, but Joel couldn’t make it work better otherwise.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Skies

  45. huxley:

    If you read the link I gave in the comment, they mention being influenced by the Beatles. And it was a Beatle himself who also thought NY Mining Disaster sounded like the Beatles. But in other interviews the Bee Gee have said they admired the Beatles but recognized that they already were trying to do the same thing but from before they ever heard the Beatles. And of course the entire British invasion of the times was also inspired by the Beatles. A lot of Bee Gees songs even from that time were in a different mold, and certainly later they diverged greatly from the Beatles.

    I agree that their voices were different. However, Mo Gibb – who was a vocal chameleon – could sound exactly like John if he wanted to. It was uncanny.

  46. I’m glad for this open thread, it’s nice to decompress a bit. I hadn’t remembered Scandinavian Skies so much before, but BJ sure does sound like Lennon, ’65-66. Minus harmony.

    Neo has already said she doesn’t like the Beatles as much as the Bee Gees, so I’m not waiting for her comments on their non-brother fantastic harmonies. I actually like Mo Gibb’s voice quite a lot, and wish he had sung more lead.

    Lennon did like a lot of Harry Nilsson, tho Harry’s still mostly a solo singer:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh8lGRZRMOE&list=RDrFnwczuvb74&index=24

    The Scarlatti piano is nice – my 16 yo is starting to sound more musical on the piano after many years of classes.

    MyMix, including lots of blues and alternative (old 80s & some new). The The are underplayed and underappreciated even more than Nilsson.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bErFXjUGvQ&list=RDGMEM6ijAnFTG9nX1G-kbWBUCJA&index=3
    Great keyboards starting around 3:30, among my favs of all time.

    Just finished enjoying book #1 of a murder mystery series (after previously reading #2 first) The Cuckoo’s Calling by “Robert Galbraith” (aka JK Rowling) – since I gobble every Jack Reacher book when they come out. While these Galbraith books have many nice turns of phrases, and are 4 stars, they’re not quite the 4.5-5 star Lee Child (& brother Andrew on the last two) books.

    Now ready for more Intellectual essays. Like this one about broken institutions:
    https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/everything-is-broken

  47. Severely Ltd:

    I think it’s not “inargurable.” Elliman was thought highly attractive in her day.

    I’m a woman, so perhaps I judge differently, but to me they both look equally attractive and are both clearly attractive women.

  48. Tom Grey:

    I like the Bee Gees better than the Beatles now. Much much better, actually. But if you had asked me even two years ago, I would have said I preferred the Beatles, of course. And that’s not because I like the Beatles less now than I did then, it’s because I like the Bee Gees far more now than I did then.

    Simply put, I always followed the Beatles and knew most of their non-solo work quite well. I never followed the Bee Gees and knew little about them except the disco years. In fact, they had done many of my favorite 60s songs and I didn’t even know it was them! That is a rather common thing about the Bee Gees – people think they know them but they don’t.

    I have always like the Beatles’ harmonies. Really liked that best of all about them. They have great harmony, often 3-part harmony. They are not brothers but – as the Bee Gees have often pointed out in interviews – the Beatles all grew up close to each other and have the same accents as each other and the same nasality, which makes them sound more like brothers than most non-brothers do.

  49. Neo, this is from Wikipedia on Yvonne Elliman. If you haven’t seen it I thought you’d find it interesting.

    “A first album for the RSO label … produced no hit singles, but her next album, Love Me … gave her two top-20 hits, “Love Me” (written by Barry and Robin Gibb), … “Love Me” was a No. 14 pop hit in late 1976/early 1977.

    Also in 1977, the Bee Gees were working on Saturday Night Fever and wrote “How Deep Is Your Love” for her, but Stigwood wanted the Bee Gees to perform it. Instead, she sang “If I Can’t Have You”.

  50. neo on January 11, 2022 at 2:46 pm said:

    Severely Ltd:

    I think it’s not “inargurable.” Elliman was thought highly attractive in her day.

    I’m a woman, so perhaps I judge differently, but to me they both look equally attractive and are both clearly attractive women.”

    What you think “attractive” means as a woman evaluating another woman, is not what men, or most men I know, mean by it when applying it to a woman.

    Unless of course they are talking for the record in front of females to whom they expect to be held accountable, and are worried about never hearing the end of it … or something.

    Then the core idea of actually being “attracted to” as sex worthy evaporates and the guy nods, that, “Yeah, she is well-coifed and does not look obviously diseased … very nice … very stylish …”

  52. DNW:

    You missed my other point. So I’ll repeat what I wrote: “Elliman was thought highly attractive in her day.”

    When I say that, I’m not talking about my opinion, or about the opnion of other women. I’m talking about men.

    I am well aware that men and women often find different things attractive. Duuuh.

  53. “DNW:

    You missed my other point. So I’ll repeat what I wrote: “Elliman was thought highly attractive in her day.”

    When I say that, I’m not talking about my opinion, or about the opnion of other women. I’m talking about men.”

    Well … I might have been a young teen when that Superstar business came out, came out, but I never then, nor at any time after, heard any male at any time make any reference to Elliman for any reason, much less some purported sexual attraction value.

    So far it is three men to zero rating her inferior to Gabbard. Unless you count the terrier’s opinion.

  54. Ok. So, the Newneo security cert cannot be trusted by my OS, I have to go to “advanced” bypass, and no corrections take, and the icon just rotates ineffectually.

    Too much work.

    Over to you Zaphod.

  55. DNW:

    Oh, so your world is THE world? If DNW didn’t hear anyone say it, it didn’t exist?

    And certainly 3 guys who comment here are the world, as well.

    I never said that Elliman was more attractive to men than Tulsi Gabbard. I said that it was not inarguable that Gabbard was more attractive than Elliman. Some men commenting at YouTube seem to find that clip of Elliman very attractive indeed.

    Personally, who is more attractive isn’t something I’m all that interested in (I already said I think they’re both attractive). What I do find odd is people who think their point of view is the only worthwhile or even possible point of view on these things.

  56. @DNW:

    That’s weird.

    I had a look at the certificate info for thenewneo.com — all looking good and nothing has expired.

    So the problem is at your end. Are you running an old version of Windows or one which hasn’t been updated in a while?

  57. Maybe there should soon be a dedicated Beatles thread, where we “commenters of Neo” (we CON) can discuss our various current or past favorites & overrated underrated evaluations. Hint Hint.

    I read some comments about Mo and The Fut Have You Heard the Word
    “the wikipedia account of this song is hilarious, apparently Maurice was high on pain pills from a broken arm and started drinking from an open bar they had at the studio, everyone else left and a high and drunk Maurice Gibb put this together lol. This is one of the best stories I’ve heard of any member of the Bee Gees.”

    At the very end of the song are words sounding quite like the animated Beatles cartoons of the 60s.

  59. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf1QLjXmoHk

    So I’ll repeat what I wrote: “Elliman was thought highly attractive in her day.”

    I don’t recall that. It was the voice; also, a singer’s choreo is part of the performance. The video above was shot when she was 27. She’s alright. Maybe easy on the eyes. A girl singer doesn’t have to be ‘highly attractive’. Just presentable will do, with perhaps a tincture of the voluptuous.

  60. David, great post. (If high on the angst scale, though justifiably.)
    Superb comments, too.
    Thanks…

  61. A terrier can have it uses; a fowl fecal philosopher? Well that’s a matter of opinion.

    Cheers to Z and his fan boy.
    🙂

  62. Zaphod on January 12, 2022 at 2:04 am said:

    @DNW:

    That’s weird.

    I had a look at the certificate info for thenewneo.com — all looking good and nothing has expired.

    So the problem is at your end. Are you running an old version of Windows or one which hasn’t been updated in a while?”

    You are correct.

    That is undoubtedly it. I developed a bad habit of using a hand-held device to look at Neo’s site. I don’t value them as I probably should – or as others do theirs – and never up-date.

    I comment too much on subjects that mean too little anyway, to be bothering if I am not at the office. It is a good reminder.

    Was at the post office yesterday, and because the usual clueless customers had to be carried across the finish line in every instance, quite a line built up behind me. Out of six or seven, four were constantly fiddling with their iphones. Couldn’t leave them alone for a minute.

    I do not have the slightest doubt that the moment microchip implantation becomes really capable of turning people into zombie elements of the swarm, that most folks will not be lining up and even fighting to be among the first to have it done.

    The following YouTube channel has been referenced here several times. Don’t know if this upload has been linked to here or featured, but it certainly systematically treats the old Government as God issue and the psychological impulses behind it which we have been discussing here for umpteen years now.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNJJmmCkqY

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

↑