day on FR's Finest Thread!
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Coffee's on
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Thank you, Pippin, for your indomitable spiit and steady contributions for maintaining conservative ideals.
Congratulations, Pippin!!! (I think you were officially Dork Servant #2, weren't you? : ) Great letters to the Monster and the liberal idiots, btw. I couldn't agree with you more. Enjoy your Finest Day, Pippin.
43 degrees in Big D ! Gettin' cooler. A few hours ago, it was 45 ...
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Enjoy your day in the Spotlight !!
Pippin, previously a.k.a. "ClaraSuzanne" ...
'Tis a great day to Support our Troops and our nation's leaders with prayers and words of encouragement. May God bless and protect each one.
Pipster, great letters today. Thank You for your never-ending support. Now it's time to step forward and take a bow...
Hank Ballard, singer and writer of 'The Twist,' diesExcerpt:
LOS ANGELES - Singer and songwriter Hank Ballard, whose hit "The Twist" ushered a nationwide 1960s dance craze, has died.
Ballard, who was suffering from throat cancer, died Sunday at his home, friends said.
Friend and caretaker Anna L. Ayala remembers him for his spirit. "He was just a very good man and loved by so many people," she said.
Ayala said Ballard's birth records indicate he was born in 1927, but biographical information on the Internet and Rock and Roll encyclopedias lists his birth date as 1936.
Ballard was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990. He was discovered in the early 1950s by writer-producer Johnny Otis. He was lead singer for the Royals, which changed its name to the Midnighters and was signed by Federal Records.
In 1958, Ballard wrote and recorded "The Twist," but it was released on the "B" side of a record.
One year later, Chubby Checker debuted his own version of "The Twist" on Dick Clark's Philadelphia television show. It soon topped the charts, eventually selling over a million copies.
The song launched a dance craze that prompted the creation of other Twist songs, including "Twist and Shout" by the Isley Brothers and "Twistin' the Night Away" by Sam Cooke.
Peppermint Lounge, a defunct club in New York, became the center of the Twist dance craze in the early 1960s.
Ballard's songs were sometimes banned from 1950s radio for their sexually suggestive lyrics.
By the early 1960s, he'd charted 22 singles on the rhythm and blues charts, including "Work with Me Annie" - the biggest R&B hit of 1954, selling more than 1 million copies. The song was part of a well-known trilogy of risque rhythm and blues numbers that included "Annie Had a Baby" and "Annie's Aunt Fannie."
Ballard and the Midnighters didn't suffer from Checker's version of "The Twist." By the mid 1960s, the group had three simultaneous hits in the pop top 40: "Finger Poppin' Time," "Let's Go, Let's Go, Let's Go," and their original version of "The Twist."
"He was an all-around entertainer. He was dynamite on stage," said friend and business associate Chuck Rubin.
Click here for the entire article.
Rest in peace, Hank Ballard ...
Hank Ballard & The Midnighters
Just don't see how anyone could argue with those words, but the world has never been short on foolish people.
Thank you, Mama_Bear...thank you, Pippin...)
Very nice Pip post. Excellent, in fact. : )
A wolfie rose for you. : )
I look forward to hopefully being back here full time in the very near future.
Here's an email I got today....Some of us remember Alistair Cooke as the Host on the PBS Masterpiece Theatre. He's about 95 now and he remembers the 30s & a 'peace movement' that trusted another evil monster!
PEACE FOR OUR TIME
by Alistair Cooke, BBC Broadcaster
About the author: In 1936, the NBC network invited Alistair Cooke to do a weekly broadcast of reflections on British life called London Letter. Cooke then emigrated to the United States in 1937, and asked the BBC to let him do the same thing in reverse. Eventually he succeeded, and 'Letter from America' is now the longest running radio broadcast in human history. In the process it has won a faithful worldwide audience of several million and many friends in high places. When Cooke was awarded an honorary knighthood in 1973, the Queen is reputed to have expressed bewildered admiration at his ability to sit down, week after week, and communicate so directly with his audience.
http://www.wbur.org/inside/personality/detail6870.asp
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/letter_from_america/
What Cooke said:
...I promised to lay off topic A - Iraq - until the Security Council makes a judgment on the inspectors' report and I shall keep that promise.
But I must tell you that throughout the past fortnight I've listened to everybody involved in or looking on to a monotonous din of words, like a tide crashing and receding on a beach - making a great noise and saying the same thing over and over. And this ordeal triggered a nightmare - a day-mare, if you like.
Through the ceaseless tide I heard a voice, a very English voice of an old man - Prime Minister Chamberlain saying: "I believe it is peace for our time" - a sentence that prompted a huge cheer, first from a listening street crowd and then from the House of Commons and next day from every newspaper in the land.
There was a move to urge that Mr Chamberlain should receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
In Parliament there was one unfamiliar old grumbler to growl out: "I believe we have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat." He was, in view of the general sentiment, very properly booed down.
This scene concluded in the autumn of 1938 the British prime minister's effectual signing away of most of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. The rest of it, within months, Hitler walked in and conquered. "Oh dear," said Mr Chamberlain, thunderstruck. "He has betrayed my trust."
During the last fortnight a simple but startling thought occurred to me --every single official, diplomat, president, prime minister involved in the Iraq debate was in 1938 a toddler, most of them unborn. So the dreadful scene I've just drawn will not have been remembered by most listeners.
Hitler had started betraying our trust not 12 years but only two years before, when he broke the First World War peace treaty by occupying the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland. Only half his troops carried one reload of ammunition because Hitler knew that French morale was too low to confront any war just then and 10 million of 11 million British voters had signed a so-called peace ballot. It stated no conditions, elaborated no terms, it simply counted the numbers of Britons who were "for peace".
The slogan of this movement was "Against war and fascism" - chanted at the time by every Labour man and Liberal and many moderate Conservatives - a slogan that now sounds as imbecilic as "against hospitals and disease". In blunter words a majority of Britons would do anything, absolutely anything, to get rid of Hitler except fight him.
At that time the word pre-emptive had not been invented, though today it's a catchword. After all the Rhineland was what it said it was - part of Germany. So to march in and throw Hitler out would have been pre-emptive - wouldn't it?
Nobody did anything and Hitler looked forward with confidence to gobbling up the rest of Western Europe country by country - "course by course", as growler Churchill put it.
I bring up Munich and the mid-30s because I was fully grown, on the verge of 30, and knew we were indeed living in the age of anxiety. And so many of the arguments mounted against each other today, in the last fortnight, are exactly what we heard in the House of Commons debates and read in the French press.
The French especially urged, after every Hitler invasion, "negotiation, negotiation". They negotiated so successfully as to have their whole country defeated and occupied. But as one famous French leftist said: "We did anyway manage to make them declare Paris an open city - no bombs on us!"
In Britain the general response to every Hitler advance was disarmament and collective security. Collective security meant to leave every crisis to the League of Nations. It would put down aggressors, even though, like the United Nations, it had no army, navy or air force.
The League of Nations had its chance to prove itself when Mussolini invaded and conquered Ethiopia (Abyssinia). The League didn't have any shot to fire. But still the cry was chanted in the House of Commons - the League and collective security is the only true guarantee of peace.
But after the Rhineland the maverick Churchill decided there was no collectivity in collective security and started a highly unpopular campaign for rearmament by Britain, warning against the general belief that Hitler had already built an enormous mechanised army and superior air force.
But he's not used them, he's not used them - people protested.
Still for two years before the outbreak of the Second War you could read the debates in the House of Commons and now shiver at the famous Labour men - Major Attlee was one of them - who voted against rearmament and still went on pointing to the League of Nations as the saviour.
Now, this memory of mine may be totally irrelevant to the present crisis. It haunts me.
I have to say I have written elsewhere with much conviction that most historical analogies are false because, however strikingly similar a new situation may be to an old one, there's usually one element that is different and it turns out to be the crucial one. It may well be so here.
All I know is that all the voices of the 30s are echoing through 2003
Alistair.....Thanks for reminding everyone! 
{{{{{{{{{{Pippin}}}}}}}}}}}} - great show from our very own "Warrior Hobbitt" - you ROCK!! Also, thank-you for your support of our troops this past weekend. .45MAN and I plan to attend a rally in GA this Saturday.
{{{{{{{{Mama_Bear}}}}}}}} - wonderful presentation. Love the byline and news-journal style! Hugs to you, JK and GrammyBear.
{{{{{{{{{Sistahs}}}}}}}}}}} and {{{{{{{{{Fuzzy_Brothah}}}}}}}}}}}}}} - being in exile stinks. I miss you all. :-(
I'm off to go pout....tomorrow's another day!
