Clips I Love

U2-Window In the Skies
Not my favorite U2 song, but a fun video. Musta been great fun to cut.

A special gift from SNL

Counting Crows - Anna Begins


John Mayer - Bold As Love

Christmas Soul

My wife bought this CD home from Kohl's yesterday. It seems they've teamed up with good ol' Rhino Records and put out this Ray Charles Christmas CD. It's a part of the Kohl's Cares For Kids program, and "100% of the net profit from the sale of these items will support health and educational opportunities for children nationwide." It's waiting in the impulse purchase section of their stores and online, and can be yours for just five bucks.
I'm not usually big on department store music releases, but there's not a bad track on this CD. I did a quick google search and couldn't find an original release of Ray Charles Christmas, so I'm assuming this is some kind of compilation made to look like a re-release. The 24 hour Christmas radio station is in heavy rotation in my house all through December, and this will be an excellent addition.
The big three classics "Little Drummer Boy"; "Santa Claus is Coming to Town"; and "Winter Wonderland" are here and Ray makes each of them his own. In addition there are some other songs that I've never heard before, from what sounds like a bunch of different eras. They're all original sounding and full of jazz, soul, and some gospel.
You can't go wrong here. Good music, good cause, good price.

Other Jimmyhead Christmas Faves:

• Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band: Santa Claus is Coming to Town (Live)
• James Taylor: Winter Wonderland, and anything else from his xmas CD
• Dave Matthews: Christmas Song
• Anything with Bing Crosby singing

And as a Jew I'm sad to say that for me, aside from Adam Sandler's Hannukah Song, we have nothing that can compete with the classics. It's a shame considering all the great songwriters we've got in the tribe. I mean with Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Bob Dylan, Burt Bachrach, Billy Joel and all on the team you'd think we'd have one decent song. No such luck. Just the friggin' Dreidel Song.

Unhealthy In New Orleans

CNN is reporting a study that ranks New Orleans as the least healthy city in America. This may upset nutritionists down there, but it's relieving to know that I am not the only one guilty of unhealthy food and lifestyle choices during my visits to the Crescent City. Surely some of my least healthy weeks were happily spent there.
(Not a healthy Fat Tuesday.)
I can sort of remember a rainy mid nineties Mardi Gras that I spent eating Popeye's, drinking Jack and Cokes and barely sleeping for a week. And I'm just the tip of the iceberg. My pals who lived down there screwed with their bodies in ways that most of us can only imagine.

The Man in the Yellow Hat: Neglectful Parent

The man in the yellow hat is a bad parental role model.

As parents, my wife and I work hard to avoid potentially messy, dangerous and unpleasant situations with our kids. If we'll be out late, we have our children nap during the day so they won't melt down before bedtime. We keep a change of clothes for each of them in the car in case of a mess. And of course, we try not to leave the children alone long enough to get involved with any mischief. If they are in a different room from us we listen and check in on them regularly.

Not so for the Man in the Yellow Hat, primary caregiver to Curios George. He makes absolutely no effort to keep his monkey in line. George releases animals from an animal shelter, dangerously operates a parked dump truck, makes a mess of an ice cream parlor and lots more. In many episodes of his new PBS series, George is left to wander around his apartment building and an entire city by himself. All unmonitored by any kind of adult human supervision.

So what's the deal with Yellow Hat? To start, he never changes his clothes (except for the beach). His fashion sense is not a monkey care issue, but does indicate some sort of larger problem. He keeps a troublesome monkey as a pet in what looks to be a fairly large city. He uses no leash, no cage, no discipline at all. In the real world he would long ago have been evicted from his apartment and poor George would be doing time at the Zoo or some awful cosmetic research facility.

But perhaps Curious George author H.A. Rey had an allegory in mind. Maybe Yellow Hat is God and George is humanity. Left to our own free will, we are slowly destroying the world with our insatiable curiousity. We reek havoc on our environment every day, just like George in the ice cream parlor. We mean well, but without proper guidance from The Man we are lost in the big city.

Heavy stuff for a series of children's books? Maybe, but after the fiftieth time reading them to the kids, my mind tends to wander.