Alan Silvestri - Suite from Grumpy Old Men

Tomorrow is my 65th birthday.  This is somewhat surprising, even if not unexpected - I like to say that 30 was the best 30 years of my life.  But I'm officially an Old Fart now.  At least I'm not (usually) grumpy.

And so to today's film music.  Alan Silvestri wrote what could have been a mid-19th Century overture for the 1993 film.  He was director Robert Zemeckis' go-to composer, writing the music for (among others) Back To The Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Forrest Gump (for which he scored an Oscar), Night At The Museum, and The Avengers.  Pretty good for a guy who showed up in Hollywood with $50 in his pocket, and who when he was offered to compose the music for his first film (some long-forgotten B-list flick) went out to the bookstore and got a book on how to compose.

I'd say he learned pretty darn well.

A musical interlude

It seems that today is my birthday.

They also had another song about this:

But that's clearly wrong.  Why, I'm in my prime ...

Happy Birthday to The Queen Of The World!

If you want to celebrate with some fireworks she won't mind at all.

Happy Birthday, Libertyman!

Many happy returns of the day to Friend-of-the-blog and friend in real life Libertyman.  An occasion like this calls for a classical music rendition of Happy Birthday.  Nicole Pesce does not disappoint.

The Queen Of The World has a more modern musical suggestion:

Happy Birthday, buddy!

 

Happy Birthday to me (and Dad Joke CX)

It's always nice to be 39 again.

And so to the Dad Joke: What does a turtle do on his birthday?

He shell-a-brates! 

Jimmy Buffett and Martina McBride - Trip Around The Sun

Today is The Queen Of The World's birthday.  Her best friend from High School is visiting, which is nice.  Feel welcome to celebrate with some fireworks if you'd like.

Birthdays are not just a time for celebration, however - they're also time for reflection on where you've been and where you're going.  While our move to Florida has been a smashing success, The Queen Of The World has had a few health challenges these last 12 months.  Not just the three surgeries, but a month on crutches as well.  And I'm probably leaving something out.

I must confess that she's kind of fun on the knee scooter.  Dangerous, but fun.

Of course there's a country music song about this.  Happy birthday, sweetheart.

Trip Around The Sun (Songwriters: Stephen Bruton, Al Anderson, Sharon Vaughn)

Hear 'em singing happy birthday
Better think about the wish I make
This year gone by
Ain't been a piece of cake.

Every day's a revolution
Pull it together and it comes undone
Just one more candle and a trip around the sun.

I'm just hanging on while this old world keeps spinning
And it's good to know it's out of my control.
If there's one thing that I've learned from all this living
Is that it wouldn't change a thing if I let go.

No you never see it coming,
Always wind up wondering where it went.

Only time will tell
If it was time well spent.
It's another revelation,

Celebrating what I should have done
With these souvenirs of my trip around the sun.

I'm just hanging on while this old world keeps spinning
And it's good to know it's out of my control.
If there's one thing I have learned from all this living
Is that it wouldn't change a thing if I let go.

Yes I'll make a resolution

That I'll never make another one.

Just enjoy this ride on my
Trip around the sun.
Just enjoy this ride
On my trip around the sun...
Trip around the sun.

 

Happy Birthday, Wolfgang

 That deer is out there ...

Musical birthdays

Today is the birthday of two great composers, Johann Sebastian Bach and Modest Mussorgsky.  They had very different styles but one thing they had in common is their influence on 1960s and 1970s rock. First Bach, where Procol Harum basically ripped off Air on the G String for Whiter Shade of Pale:

Next Mussorgsky, where Emerson Lake and Palmer did an excellent reprieve of Pictures At The Exhibition:

Happy Birthday, J. R. R. Tolkien

The Queen Of The World points out that today is the great man's birthday, born on this date in 1892.  I've said before (and unsurprisingly, at some length) that I think that The Lord Of The Rings is the greatest novel of the 20th century (I'm not the only one; see #5 below).   It was certainly commercially successful, becoming the second best selling novel of all time (behind Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities).

There are some odd occurrences in his life:

1. Tolkien received a letter in March 1956 from a Mr. Sam Gamgee of Brixton Rd, London, asking how he came up with the name for the character. Tolkien sent him a letter that began and ended:

Dear Mr. Gamgee,

It was very kind of you to write. You can imagine my astonishment when I saw your signature! I can only say, for your comfort I hope, that the 'Sam Gamgee' of my story is a most heroic character, now widely beloved by many readers, even though his origins are rustic.

...

I do not suppose you could be bothered to read so long and fantastic a work, especially if you do not care for stories about a mythical world, but if you could be bothered, I know that the work (which has been astonishingly successful) is in most public libraries. It is alas! very expensive to buy - £3/3/0. But if you or any of your family try it, and find it interesting enough, I can only say that I shall be happy and proud to send you a signed copy of all 3 volumes, as a tribute from the author to the distinguished family of Gamgee.

Yrs sincerely
J.R.R. Tolkien

It turned out that Mr. Gamgee had not read the books, and so Tolkien sent him a signed set of volumes. I wonder how much they'd sell for at auction.

2. In 1965, Tolkien received a letter from a certain Zillah Sherring, who had bought a copy of The Fifth Book of Thucydides in a second hand bookstore in Salisbury (Wiltshire). In it, she found an inscription in a strange script that someone had written there. The book also had Tolkien's name, and so she wrote to him, sending a transcript of the characters and asking him if he knew what it said. He replied that that had in fact been his book during the first decade of the century, and that the writing was ancient Gothic. He had made some translation mistakes in the transcription, which he kindly corrected for her.

I wonder how much that book would be worth at auction?

3.  This is so bad that it's awesome.  Leonard Nimoy sings the Ballad of Bilbo Baggins:

You've been warned.

4.  Tolkien was famous as an author, but his day job was as a professor at Oxford.  He was one of the world experts on the epic poem Beowulf, and W. H. Auden wrote him a letter later in life saying how thrilling his Beowulf recitation and lectures were.

Tolkien firmly believed that Beowulf had been written by a single person, but this was controversial at the time.  Now a new study has backed the old Oxford Don up on that:

The epic poem Beowulf is the most famous surviving work of Old English literature. For decades, scholars have hotly debated both when the poem was composed and whether it was the work of a single anonymous author ("the Beowulf poet"). Lord of the Rings' scribe J.R.R. Tolkien was among those who famously championed the single-author stance. Now researchers at Harvard University have conducted a statistical analysis and concluded that there was very likely just one author, further bolstering Tolkien's case. They published their findings in a recent paper in Nature Human Behavior.

Statistical analysis of meter, punctuation, word choice, and letter combinations suggest a single author.  Tolkien for the win!

5.  Christopher Lee - total badass and Heavy Metal singer - was the only cast member of the films to have actually met Tolkien:

“[I met him] quite by chance, really,” he recalled in the interview. “I met him with a group of other people in a pub in Oxford he used to go to, The Eagle and Child. I was very much in awe of him, as you can imagine, so I just said, ‘How do you do?’” Lee was the only LOTR cast member to actually meet

Tolkien, who passed away in 1973, before several of the film’s stars had been born. Lee read the books when they originally were printed in the ‘50s, and instantly became a devoted fan.

“I still think The Lord of the Rings is the greatest literary achievement in my lifetime,” he said. “Like so many other people, I couldn’t wait for the second, and then the third book. Nothing like it had ever been written.”

6. A devout Roman Catholic, it appears that people have begun the process of canonization.

7. While Tolkien is one of the most famous of Oxford's professors, he never got a doctorate until the university gave him an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1972.

Lastly, his impact on the world of nerds has been immense and long lasting, not to mention funny as heck.

Happy Birthday to me

You reach an age where you have collected enough stuff, and so I confess that I'm not very easy to shop for.  This has posed a conundrum for The Queen Of The World who has raised the birthday party to a high art.  But this year she's come up with something that I'm really looking forward to: she's taking me to shoot a Sten Gun today.

And since it's been eight years since I'm posted a Range Report, I'll do so tomorrow.

Happy Birthday to LindaG

This is the birthday of frequent commenter LindaG.  I don't think she has a blog, so please leave her a comment wishing her many happy remains of the day!

Happy Birthday to the Queen Of The World!

In every sense of the term, my better half.  Feel free to celebrate with fireworks, everybody ...

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Gone Gone Gone

Today is Robert Plant's 70th birthday.  This song won a Grammy in 2008 and the album won five Grammys in 2009, including album of the year.  It's been a long way from Led Zeppelin.

You may not be interested in birthdays

But birthdays are interested in you.  Well, me at least.

Bah.  As Doc Holiday once said, I'm in my prime.



The post title, of course paraphrases Leon Trotsky's rather blood-soaked saying that while you might not be interested in war, war is interested in you.  I wonder what old Leon thought of birthdays?  I'm sort of okay with someone redistributing mine to someone who needs them more ...

Happy Birthday to the Queen Of The World

My lovely bride is celebrating a birthday today.  If all y'all want to shoot off some fireworks to celebrate, that would be fine.

Happy Birthday, Tommy Smothers

81 years old today.  He and his brother were simply hilarious:



He was hilarious on his own, too.  He did a simply outstanding impersonation of Johnny Carson:



And oh by the way, it was a pseudo-holiday today, I'm told.

Hat tip: Queen Of The World, who is giving me all my blogfodder lately.

Other Birthday news

Some people are not as sentimental as you'd think they should be.

That's a conversation piece, right there.

Happy Birthday, Queen Of The World!

If all y'all feel like it, go light off some fireworks to celebrate!

Happy 90th birthday to the original Gerber Baby

Happy birthday to Anne Turner Cooke who turned 90 today.  She was 4 months old when her portrait was made.

Happy birthday Lee-Enfield rifle

On this day in 1907 the Lee-Enfield rifle was accepted into service in the army of His Majesty King Edward VII.  It's still in use today in Commonwealth nations India and Bangladesh, making this the longest serving military rifle in world history.

I can personally attest that it is a sweet shooter and entirely bad ass.  As I wrote in my Range Report:

It was the rifle of Empire, from the days when the sun literally never set on the British Empire.  The Empire's day has passed, and this rifle has passed with it, but for those who appreciate the poetry of rifles (as opposed to the stark utilitarian prose of modern designs), this rifle brings it in imperial gallons.

But since it has a ten round magazine (removable, although that's more in theory than in practice, being loaded via stripper clips) and a bayonet lug, Diane Feinstein wants to ban it.  Because 100 year old rifles totally are used to shoot up schools, or something.  And while it doesn't do so well "spraying bullets from the hip", the action is smooth as silk and very fast:



Oh, and the sights are designed to let you shoot accurately at 1300 yards (!) - if you can.  But why, we hear Senator Feinstein ask, do you need a rifle that will shoot accurately to 1300 yards?  The answer: Senator, why do you want to win re-election?

UPDATE 26 January 2013 22:53: Jon W. emails to point out that Feinstein's bill explicitly excludes bolt action rifles from the ban.