Monday videos

Monday – summer seems to have left us quickly. It was 57 when I got up this morning – rather cool all weekend, with highs under 80 and rain on Friday. But it’s supposed to warm back up a little, and be up in the 90’s the end of the week and all weekend. At least we have the sunshine. I’ve been working on household projects all weekend, leaking pipes on Saturday – I just love plumbing, for some reason it tool a long time to master soldering copper, and I always dread turning the water back on and finding it still leaks.

Yesterday was spent on woodworking. Our house was build in the late 60’s, with some major construction work done around 1990. At that time the whole back of the house was pushed out fifteen feet, enlarging our bedroom and the family room and creating an additional bedroom/office. At the same time they put in the pool (at least we think that’s when it went in) and several built in oak bookcases in the family room and a whole wall of oak shelves and computer space in the new bedroom. Bad news, as B doesn’t particularly like oak. We have our TV in one of the deep cabinets built in next to the fireplace, which is nice in that we can close the cabinet doors and ignore the darn thing when we want to just sit. But B wanted the cabinets removed and a long mantle installed over the fireplace, and I have been delaying it because of the TV. Well, recently Costco had a pallet full of flat screen sets at a very good price and we succumbed. Now there is a big hi-def flat screen hanging above the fireplace and the oak cabinet is gone, replaced by some smooth front doors hiding the electronics and stuff behind awaiting painting.

It took a while to get the space framed and doors made, yesterday was spend on creating a mantle to fill in over the fireplace and extend all the way across the cabinets. That’s 10’3” long, which meant a lot of work to create something that size. Tired of the poor quality warped and bent wood at HD I finally hit a good wood store and tried some ‘Baltic Birch’ plywood. Very nice, but it’s only 5x5, which meant that it took three pieces to make ten feet three inches. So I now have a long box out in the garage, still needing to fill in the nail holes and sand it all pretty. We don’t want to have any visible supports, so it took a while to figure out how to mount the thing on the wall. I bolted wood strips across the fireplace and down across the cabinet, so will be installing the item later in the week. We watch lots of those home improvement shows, and get a lot of ideas from what we see. I’ll take some photos (if it comes out good).

But this morning it’s time for some old videos. I thought that I would continue on with my old songs. These are perhaps a little older than most of you remember. Marlene Dietrich – Lili Marleen, 1972 concert in London. I saw Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks recently, and nothing against Marlene, but there was a character in that movie which looked remarkably like her. (the Martian in costume in the white house).


I couldn’t find an original clip, but she still sounds pretty good after all those years. It definitly is a little different song style than Kylie.

One of my favorite old singers is Fred Astaire. Known more for his dancing, I still like the way he sings his way into his dances. Here is Cheek to Cheek from Top Hat.


Ginger always had such nice dresses. It would have been nice if these were color clips, so we could see what shades were chosen. As long as I’m talking of Ginger, she was a singer before she paired with Fred. I do like old movies – the old Fred & Ginger stuff with divorces in Venice and dancing along the canals, but my real favorites are the Busby Berkely grand ones from the early ‘30s, with the corny story lines and overacting. Here she is inway the oneymay.


As long as I’m doing Busby, no one puts on more expansive sets and elaborate choreography. Supposedly taking place on stage during the depression, with overhead camera shots to get all of the patterns in place. I couldn’t find the piano number, but here’s his famous violin one: