A mountain lion forced residents of Santa Monica and their tiny pets indoors as officials scoured the area for the apex predator.

The Santa Monica Police Department descended on the residential area of 14th and Montana Friday morning after someone allegedly saw the animal in the area. …

The mountain lion was first located sleeping in a residential backyard, and did not move from that location for several hours, a SMPD spokesperson told The California Post. …

After about six hours, the animal was reportedly hit with a tranquilizer, sending it running through the neighborhood. Officials were seen in a video chasing after the big cat in an attempt to wrangle and capture it. …

Finally, nine hours after it was first reported, the animal was successfully tranquilized and removed.

Just a few years ago I was staying with a friend in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It was April, and I went for a walk in a very built-up area of many homes. And yet I saw a mountain lion walking through a group of bushes not more than 50 yards away from me. I turned and slowly walked in another direction, heart pounding but trying not to transmit fear although I was quite frightened.

When that happened to me, it made me think of this old Kingston Trio song from my youth. It’s a California song:

And now of course we have to have the song “Wimoweh,” later called “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” I prefer this older Weavers version (1955) to the later pop version by the Tokens:

Here is the original South African group who created the song. You can see how closely the Weavers stuck to this version:

The post The mountain lion sleeps tonight appeared first on The New Neo.

The attacking Ottoman Army, significantly outnumbered Constantinople’s defenders …

The fall of Constantinople and of the Byzantine Empire was a watershed moment of the Late Middle Ages, marking the effective end of the Roman Empire, a state which began in roughly 27 BC and had lasted nearly 1,500 years. For many modern historians, the fall of Constantinople marks the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern period. The city’s fall also stood as a turning point in military history. Since ancient times, cities and castles had depended upon ramparts and walls to repel invaders. The walls of Constantinople, especially the Theodosian walls, protected Constantinople from attack for 800 years and were noted as some of the most advanced defensive systems in the world at the time. However, these fortifications were overcome by Ottoman infantry with the support of gunpowder, specifically from cannons and bombards, heralding a change in siege warfare.

But I first learned about this as a child through a rather silly song, popular in 1953. I was exceedingly young, but popular music nevertheless still seeped down to me, and the song was very catchy:

“Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” is a 1953 novelty song, with lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon. It was written on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. The lyrics humorously refer to the official renaming of the city of Constantinople to Istanbul. The song’s original release, performed by The Four Lads, was certified as a gold record.

The lyrics can be found here, and they treat the whole thing like a light joke. Back in 1953 it must have seemed that way to most of the Western world. But who’s laughing now? An excerpt:

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night
(Oh) every gal in Constantinople
(Oh) lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
(Oh) so if you’ve a date in Constantinople
(Oh) she’ll be waiting in Istanbul …

So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’

Actually, it’s everybody’s business these days – and by “it” we’re not talking about Constantinople/Istanbul per se. We’re talking about the Muslim world versus the Christian world (and the Jews, of course). We’re talking about various kinds of conquest and not just the military kind – perhaps not even primarily the military kind. The siege involves the human mind, and it’s been going on far longer than two months. The main fronts are academia, the press, and politics.

NOTE: Here’s the original song:

The post “You can’t go back” – the fall of Constantinopole appeared first on The New Neo.

Certainly not the waves:

“Currently the Royal Navy has 63 commissioned ships. But of this number only 25 are really fighting ships. That is submarines, aircraft carriers, destroyers and frigates. The balance are support patrol and survey vessels which, though armed, are not true fighting warships.”

“Britain is of course involved with a variety of defense tasks worldwide. But due to endless defense cuts, the Navy is hard-pressed to fulfill them. So of the fighting ships in 2026, Britain possesses ten submarines, two aircraft carriers, six destroyers, and seven frigates.”

“Such a small fleet might be sufficient for a small nation engaged only in self-defense. But Britain still has some 15 overseas territories, many of which, like the Falkland Islands, require naval protection.”

Much more at the link.

I used the song “Rule, Britannia!” in the title of this post. Then I became curious to see the rest of the words. First, the chorus, which is repeated many times:

Rule Britannia!
Britannia rule the waves
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves

Some of the verses minus the chorus:

… till more majestic shalt thou rise
More dreadful from each foreign stroke
More dreadful from each foreign stoke
As the loud blast that tears the skies
Serves but to root thy native oak …

Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame
All their attempts to bend thee down
All their, all their attempts to bend thee down
Will but arouse thy generous flame
To work their woe, and thy renown.

Well, what can you say? It was written in 1740.

The post Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the … appeared first on The New Neo.

A recent cleanup of LA’s horrific MacArthur Park — complete with cameras, city hall bigwigs and an Instagram victory lap — is already looking like a social media publicity stunt just one week after completion. …

Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez posted a video on Instagram touting what she described as a major cleanup effort at the troubled park Sunday March 1. The clip shows Hernandez, as well as Mayor Karen Bass and a lineup of what the councilwoman called the city’s “city family,” as officials celebrated the effort to spruce up the long-troubled space. …

But when The Post returned to MacArthur Park a week later to see how long the progress lasted, the reality on the ground told a very different story.

Trash was scattered across the park again. Encampment debris had crept back in. Drug waste littered the ground.

And all the sweet green icing flowing down.

Jimmy Webb wrote the lyrics to that song in 1967. Sounds like the park was in better shape back then. But someone really did leave a cake out in the rain:

When asked by interviewer Terry Gross what was going through his mind when he wrote the song’s lyrics, Webb replied that it was meant to be symbolic and referred to the end of a love affair. In an interview with Newsday in October 2014, Webb explained:

“Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. … Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.”

The words to the song always struck me as odd and just plain silly. But I guess you had to be there.

Jimmy Webb wrote the lyrics to a lot of other popular songs, among them “Up, Up and Away”, “By the Time I Get to Phoenix”, “Wichita Lineman”, “Worst That Could Happen”, “Galveston”, and “All I Know”. Note the prevalence of place names.

I find this moving:

Following the death of his mother, Sylvia, in 1964, his father made plans to return to Oklahoma. Webb decided to stay in California to continue his music studies and to pursue a career as a songwriter in Los Angeles. He would later recall his father warning him about his musical aspirations, saying that “This songwriting thing is going to break your heart.” Seeing that his son was determined, however, he gave him $40, saying “It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”

It turned out to have been a pretty good investment after all.

The post Someone left the cake out in the rain: MacArthur Park and Jimmy Webb appeared first on The New Neo.

I say I watched the show, but most of the time I was also reading and I would look up periodically when something interested me. So my attention was admittedly spotty. Nevertheless, I saw enough to take in the self-satisfied self-congratulatory virtue-signaling, the almost entirely unfunny jokes and bits, the “we women are soooo strong!” message, the occasional hackneyed leftist political remark, and of course the dresses.

Most of the political stuff was very well-covered in this post, if you care to read about it.

A guy named Javier Bardem caught my attention with “No to war – Free Palestine!” Quite the oxymoron. This mental and moral giant has been accusing Israel of genocide since at least 2014, according to his Wiki entry. He’s Spanish, by the way, and here’s another of his brilliant quotes from this year’s Oscar festivities:

“I’m wearing a pin that I used in 2003 with the Iraq war, which was an illegal war,” Bardem told reporters on the red carpet, “and we are here, 23 years after, with another illegal war, created by Trump and Netanyahu with another lie.”

The only film I’ve seen this year – other than a half-hour of the execrable aforementioned One Battle After Another – is the animated musical movie K-Pop Demon Hunters, which I saw twice because my grandchildren love it. It’s kind of cute and that made it tolerable, by the way, but maybe I’m biased because of them. They know all the songs by heart and periodically sing them, especially the one that was nominated for the Oscar, which it won. After a big production number, a group of people – most or all of whom were Korean, because the song is K-pop genre – came onstage for their thank-yous. The occasion was apparently “historic” because this is the very first K-pop song to win.

So what did the “diversity is our strength – and our requirement” Oscars do? Cut them off prematurely, after having let others drone on and on, and after some seemingly endless “comedy” bits such as a tribute to the 15-year anniversary of the movie Bridesmaids. They had time for all of that, but cut off the Korean guy who stepped up with a little piece of paper after the comely female singer-songwriter had said her not-so-very-long acceptance speech. The group was left standing there, confused, while the orchestral bye-bye music played and the mic power dimmed.

I guess Koreans don’t stand very high in the intersectional hierarchy.

As for fashion, I’ll just comment on Demi Moore’s get-up, shown here:

I am puzzled by the fact that many people are saying this was a peacock dress. Are they at all familiar with peacocks? Different color, different feather type as well. No, this was a rooster dress:

And lest you think I’m picking on Demi Moore, I’m not. I suppose over the years I may have seen a few of her movies, but the only one I remember is Ghost. It’s one of my favorite films, and although Moore’s role was less attention-getting than that or Swayze or of Whoopi – she was basically the grieving woman who lost her man and was being stalked by a killer – Moore did a remarkable job. Dewy-eyed and vulnerable, she was impressive in scenes like this one. If you haven’t seen the movie, it may look over-the-top, but in context it’s extremely moving, and a goodly part of that emotional wallop is due to Demi:

The post I actually watched the Oscars last night appeared first on The New Neo.

Sedaka originally was inspired by Frederic Chopin (his favorite classical composer) for the chorus and by Roberta Flack in the verses. When he presented the tune to Cody, he came up with the words based on his recent divorce; Cody had been playing solitaire frequently as a coping mechanism. Both Sedaka and Cody considered the composition to be a spiritual experience.

Sedaka was a Julliard-trained classical pianist.

Here Sedaka is singing the song himself, live, and playing the piano. He could do both very very well.

The post Solitaire appeared first on The New Neo.

Four sterling singers.

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

The post Happy Funny Valentine’s Day appeared first on The New Neo.

I also watched some of the halftime “entertainment,” curious about Bad Bunny. I didn’t expect to like it, and I didn’t – it’s very rare for me to like current popular (?) music. But the degree of tuneless awfulness of this particular selection was nevertheless surprising.

As for the Spanish – I can understand a fair amount of Spanish, but this sounded garbled. Turns out that was a plus, because apparently the lyrics often went like this (a sample) when translated:

Hell, what safaera
You have a f**king amazing a*s
Anything that gets you breaking the highway
Move it, move it, move it, move it

More translations can be found here, if you care to see them. Let’s just say that the one I offered above is the mildest by far. I didn’t check to see if they’re authentic – but if they are, ugh.

Bad Bunny is from Puerto Rico and his other theme is that “America” means not the US but the two continents, north and south. Apparently the NFL is trying to reach out to Latin American audiences, and Bad Bunny is very popular in that neck of the woods, whereas football (American style) is not. Thus, the Bad Bunny halftime.

The post The not-so-Super-bowl appeared first on The New Neo.

Pop star Billie Eilish has been hit with calls to either return her $3 million Los Angeles mansion to a Native American tribe or welcome migrants inside following her controversial Grammys declaration.

The 24-year-old singer won a Grammy for her hit song Wildflower on Sunday, but it was her acceptance speech that got the country talking.

‘As grateful as I feel, I honestly don’t feel like I need to say anything but that no one is illegal on stolen land,’ Eilish said, referencing the colonization of the Americas by Europeans.

As she stood alongside her brother Finneas, who co-wrote and produced the song, Eilish continued to address the ongoing immigration raids going on across the US.

‘It’s just really hard to know what to say and what to do right now, and I just feel really hopeful in this room, and I feel like we just need to keep fighting and speaking up and protesting, and our voices really do matter, and the people matter,’ she said.

She concluded her brief but impassioned speech by shouting, ‘And f*** ICE, that’s all I’m gonna say. Sorry!’

Charming.

And I would have thought that, if the land is stolen, then everyone would be illegal except the original owners. But I also thought that native tribes didn’t have a concept of land ownership back then. This says as much:

The Native American concept of land ownership differs significantly from that of the European settlers who colonized the Americas or their descendants in that land could not be owned, only stewarded and lived with. The Earth is understood by Native Americans as a living, sentient being, and, therefore, no one can claim ownership.

To Native Americans, the Earth is one’s relative, requiring respect and care, as are all the animals and plant life the land supports. The definition of one’s ‘relatives’ encompasses all living things, not just the members of one’s family, and so, just as one would not claim to ‘own’ a relative, one cannot own the land; one can only act as a steward in caring for it. The European settlers’ understanding of the land was quite different …

The Tongva tribe had this to say to Eilish, however:

‘As the First People of the greater Los Angeles basin, we do understand that her home is situated in our ancestral land,’ they stated, adding that the A-lister has not reached out to the tribe herself.

‘Eilish has not contacted our tribe directly regarding her property, we do value the instance when Public Figures provide visibility to the true history of this country,’ the spokesperson continued.

Well, Eilish already stated that no one is illegal on stolen land, so that would include her as not being illegal. However, she seems to think this guy is illegal:

… [T]he Birds of a Feather performer obtained a restraining order against a man who she said was stalking her and threatening her family and friends in 2023.

A man named Shawn Christopher McIntyre was ordered by a court to keep a distance of a minimum of 100 yards from Eilish, 21, her family and her friend Zoe Donahoe, TMZ reported, citing court docs. obtained a restraining order against a man who she said was stalking her and threatening her family and friends in 2023.

I wouldn’t ordinarily pay attention to the words of Eilish at the Grammys (or anywhere, really). But this was too ironic – and too typical of leftist celebrities – to ignore.

The post Billie Eilish: “no one is illegal on stolen land” appeared first on The New Neo.

Composer Philip Glass announced Tuesday that he is withdrawing his symphony from the Kennedy Center, pointing to the arts center’s values and leadership.

“After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” Glass announced in a statement posted to X.

“Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” he continued. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”

Really? I was unaware of Trump’s support for slavery, or his advocacy of the South’s defiance of the federal government (seems the opposite, actually).

And I wonder whether Glass is aware that Lincoln met with many accusations similar to those against Trump: that he was a tyrant who didn’t respect the law. For example:

“What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?”

So wrote Virginia’s Richmond Enquirer of the President of the U.S. in 1862. It was not unusual. Caught up in the passions of the era, the Northern Copperhead papers no less than the Southern press called Abraham Lincoln names that for venomous variety have been unsurpassed before or since in editorial tirades against a President—”The Ape,” “Simple Susan,” “Kentucky Mule,” “Illinois Beast,” “traitor,” “lowborn, despicable tyrant,” “cringing, crawling creature.” …

Thus the Illinois State Register (Springfield), taking Lincoln to task for his “assumed clownishness,” charged that his “buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience.” The Chicago Times, one of his angriest foes, sneered that “he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession.” One of Lincoln’s greatest speeches, the second inaugural (“with malice toward none”) was dismissed by the Times as “slipshod” and “puerile.” …

Of his assassination, the Dallas Herald wrote: “God almighty ordered this event.” Houston’s Tri-Weekly Telegraph crowed: “From now until God’s judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln.”

Then again, Philip Glass actually is a loaf of bread. If you’re unfamiliar with Glass’s work, the following parody may not make sense. It’s from a favorite play (or rather, series of short plays) of mine by David Ives, called All In the Timing:

The post Philip Glass pulls out of Kennedy Center – and buys a loaf of bread appeared first on The New Neo.