Spitball Army

The first 45 minutes to an hour were nearly unendurable. Mamma Mia! follows the standard Hollywood musical formula, with characters singing a song where a mere sentence would suffice, in conveniently improbable settings.

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What an odd year for me and music. By that I don’t mean that it was an odd year for music (which it may have been), or an odd year for me, necessarily (though I might say that was true, as well). It was an odd year for me and music, together. For the first time in about twenty years, I wasn’t around the music “scene” every day, 24/7. All of the new music that I encountered, I had sought out, after reading about it online or in the news, or it was recommended to me by friends and former colleagues…you know, the way that music discovery is supposed to happen.

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A mainstay of Comedy Central since 1997, South Park began as an exercise in vulgarity, with an emphasis on the scatological. “The round-headed protagonists may look like cruder versions of the ‘Peanuts’ gang, but ‘crude’ is the operative word,” sniffed Gail Pennington in an August 13, 1997 review for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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Henrietta and Myrna wish you a flat affect Christmas.

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There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

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The eagerly-awaited season of lists is currently upon us. The list-generating machine at The New York Times is cranking ’em out like crazy, and their “best ofs” are typically far-ranging and unpredictable. The NYT classical CD list – compiled by four of the paper’s classical music writers – has no overlap with the NPR list previously mentioned here.

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Fred Child has posted his favorite classical CDs of the past year at the NPR website, but don’t expect a scroll filled with the latest, greatest recordings of Mozart, Beethoven or Bach. All right, there is a disc of Mozart and Beethoven violin concertos, but the majority of Child’s selections fill a niche where the boundaries between classically-trained virtuosity, international rhythms, jazz and pop music blur.

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People of a certain age will tell you that they remember exactly where they were when they heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot. I was only three years old then, but I do remember where I was when I heard about John Lennon.

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Yep, I’ve gone back to shcool to learn how to spel!

But, really…My nephew Nicholas’ 8th grade class in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, is fundraising this weekend by gift-wrapping at their local Barnes & Noble store.

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SEC. 7.5. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

la la la la la la!

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