Spot-on stuff. Simple. Direct. Charming. Peppy. I wonder; would it be easier to find such a thing in the United States, or elsewhere? These people are from Hungary. Budapest is certainly “elsewhere.” The US has an enormous appetite for nostalgia, of course, but it’s usually heavily ladled with hipster sauce — a desire to resurrect it because it’s dreadful. I don’t see that here. They love it, so they copy it as best they can.
The Tom Stormy Trio is the band. Rhythm Sophie is the singer. The translation on her webpage is too charmingly off-kilter not to offer here:
Miss Rhythm Sophie, red hot rhythm and blues chirp of Budapest, Hungary, the most exciting young singer on the scene, singin’ the original 40’s – 50’s style rhythm and blues and rock and roll.
It didn’t take a long time for her to became well-known of her fantastic voice and style, now she’s touring in the country all the time, as well as all over Europe sometimes (she toured Croatia, Romania, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands successfully), making radio and TV appearences regularly, and recording excellent stuff from time to time.
She’s a very versatile person, she can get you in the mood of the smoky bars of the 1920’s when she sings the blues only with a guitarist or a piano player; or she can make you scream and shout and have a ball when she sings them jumpin’ rhythm and blues things with her combo. She even sings gospel, country and western or sometimes rock-a-billy as well.
People ask us why we homeschool our children. They are very blunt about worrying aloud that our children won’t be educated properly if we don’t send them to school. Yeah; about that.
Cute kids. It’s important to take into account that people asking questions that appear to be looking for a goofy response often get one regardless of whether a more serious inquiry might yield more serious results. Then again, there’s currently a girl on my son’s Facebook page informing the world that she’s been accepted to “four collages.” Any videographer should essentially be unable to find enough wrong answers to even make a lighthearted video of this nature at the high school level.
The American public educational system is the most expensive undertaking in the history of humanity. It costs $525,000,000,000 a year just for elementary and high school education, according to the Department of Education. Since they can’t add, and are prone to obfuscating and outright fibbing, I imagine it’s a lot higher than that. Hmm:
NOTE: Beginning in 1980-81, state administration expenditures are
excluded from “current” expenditures. Current expenditures include
instruction, student support services, food services and enterprise
operations. Beginning in 1988-89, extensive changes were made in
the data collection procedures.
So more is being spent and they don’t feel like counting it. You decide if that’s confusion, obfuscation, or fibbing. I’m still trying to figure out if riding the bus is included in the gargantuan number. 55 percent of students ride the bus, and it costs $854 per pupil per year to cart them around. That’s over 23 billion dollars a year just to run public school buses and buy tram tickets.
If you had to write one big check for the whole twelve years of public education of the 88 percent or so of the entire population of the United States that doesn’t (or didn’t) go to private schools, at 2011 rates of $10,441 per person per year, it would be a check for thirty-three trillion, eight hundred forty-eight billion, eight hundred eighty-six million dollars.
I used twelve years, as even though some people drop out early, they’re more than offset by the amount of years that are nailed on the front of an education now. “Pre-kindergarten” is mentioned in the figures. If they keep adding years of education, they’ll be screaming into your fontanel through your mom’s belly button. What they’ll be screaming will not be of a factual nature, apparently, though.
Are we getting our money’s worth? You tell me. I haven’t made many purchases of 33 trillion dollars lately to compare it to. You might be a rich swell that leaves Krugerrands in the leave a penny take a penny dish at the Kwik-E-Mart, but I don’t think I’d write that fourteen-figure check just to qualify my fellow citizens to struggle over the last unturned letter on Wheel of Fortune. Do you think one out of a hundred of those kids could even do the math from the last few paragraphs on a piece of paper? I was told there’d be no math on this exam. Until after collage, anyway.
I asked my teenager the questions. He got Biden’s first name wrong, and rattled off the rest, of course, while he looked at me funny. He never took his eyes off the video game he was playing while answering, but I swear that somehow he still managed to look at me funny. Does someone not know this stuff? I asked my eight-year-old the questions. He’s never heard of Joe Biden, which is no great loss, but he answered almost all the questions correctly. But then again, how many of those kids in the video can do President math?
In my opinion, public school is not a serious place, so we don’t send our children there. It just costs a lot of money, and so is made to seem more important than it is by its very size. But for all its faults, the public school system is at least producing kids that know how to make moderately amusing YouTube videos. That’s a growth industry, I hear. I sure hope it accounts for thirty-three trillion dollars of future tax receipts. I am plagued with doubts.
Back in the day, I always enjoyed Soul Train. It was dumb fun, the best kind, and it always had the musicians I wanted to see perform. Guys like Cornelius seem inconsequential when you see them for a few awkward moments worrying a tepid response from an entertainer with a vacuous question, but of course his job wasn’t to form penetrating questions and elicit deep responses. It was to be a tastemaker, a style setter, a host — an impresario.
An impresario (from Italian: impresa, meaning “an enterprise or undertaking”) is a person who organizes and often finances concerts, plays or operas; analogous to a film producer in filmmaking, television production and an angel investor in business. The origin of the term is to be found in the social and economic world of Italian opera, where from the mid-18th century to the 1830s, the impresario was the key figure in the organization of a lyric season. The owners of the theatre, usually noble amateurs, charged the impresario with hiring a composer, for until the 1850s operas on stage were expected to be new, as well as gathering the necessary costumes, sets, orchestra, and singers, all while assuming considerable financial risks. In 1786 Mozart satirized the stress and emotional mayhem in a single-act farce Der Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario). Antonio Vivaldi was unusual in acting as impresario as well as composer: in 1714 he managed seasons at Teatro Sant’Angelo in Venice, where his opera Orlando finto pazzo was followed by numerous others.
Many impresarios went bankrupt, some more than once; thus, a mercantile background and a gambler’s instincts were useful. Alessandro Lanari (1787–1852) began as the owner of a shop that produced costumes, eliminating the middleman in a series of successful seasons he produced for the Teatro La Pergola, Florence, which saw premieres of the first version of Verdi’s Macbeth, two of Bellini’s operas and five of Donizetti’s, including Lucia di Lammermoor. Domenico Barbaia (1778–1841) began as a café waiter and made a fortune at La Scala in Milan, where he was also in charge of the gambling operation and introduced roulette. Wikipedia
My readers might be amused to hear me compare him to Ed Sullivan, but they were very much alike. Someone had to get the Beatles’ manager on the phone. Someone had to put up the money to put the Beatles on TV. Someone had to know whether it’s worth it to put the Beatles on the TV instead of Gerry and the Pacemakers.
Don Cornelius did the same sort of thing; he got on the horn and got James Brown and The Staples Singers and Al Green and Honey Cone and, well, look at the list.
Goodbye, Don. It was a wonderful “enterprise or undertaking.”
Not going anywhere for a while?
Month: February 2012
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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