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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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Archive for the 'Entertainment & Laughter' Category
Women are amazing in so many ways. Kerri Walsh Jennings was pregnant with her third child at the past London Olympics, but that didn’t stop her from winning the gold. Congratulations again on her gold medal and the coming of her new baby.
Kerri Walsh Jennings was alreadyone of theposter-women for being an Olympic mom during this summer’s London Games. (Her sons, Joey and Sundance, are 3 and 2 years old, respectively.) Little did we know that she was also an Olympic mom-to-be.
In a Today Show interview with Matt Lauer Monday morning, the sports star announced: “When I was throwing my body around fearlessly and going for gold for our country, I was pregnant. And today I’m 11 weeks pregnant and feeling pregnant.”
Discussing the timing of the pregnancy, Walsh Jennings — who appeared on the show with her beach volleyball player husband, Casey — said, “I just felt like it would take me a while this time to get pregnant,” explaining that the couple started trying for another baby in Switzerland a month before the Olympics kicked off. Soon after, she missed a period and was “unreasonably moody.”
“At some point, you’re late and then you start feeling something, and I definitely started feeling something in London,” she said.
The beach volleyball player’s longtime teammate, Misty May-Treanor, retired after their London win, telling the Associated Press, “I want to be a mom and share time with my family. All of us as athletes sacrifice more on the family end than people realize.” However, Walsh says she’s still hoping to compete in the Olympics again four years from now.
Archer Khatuna Lorig, another Olympic mom, was four months when she competed in Barcelona to win a bronze medal in 1992. Her son has followed in her footsteps to become an archer, too — so perhaps Walsh Jennings (who’s already talked about her sons’ athleticism and coordination) will be raising another generation of beach volleyball champions before long.
********
Readers: What’s up with you this weekend? Blog me.
Peace & Love…
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
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Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
Sarah Silverman isn’t taking the voter ID laws complicating the 2012 election lightly. After all, who’s going to look out for black people, poor people, old people and students if not America’s potty-mouthed comedic sweetheart?
Making it illegal to vote without a photo ID is supposed to prevent voter fraud, but as Sarah points out in this NSFW PSA, some politicians like Rep. Mike Turzai (R-PA) really want voter ID laws in place to prevent certain demographics from voting (for Barack Obama). Also, what exactly is all this “voter fraud” we’re supposed to be so afraid of?
“Oh yeah, all that crazy ‘voter fraud’ that’s going around. There’s so much ‘fraud’ around that free, anonymous civil right,” she jokes.
If that weren’t enough, Sarah points out that U.S. Veteran photo ID cards, social security cards and student IDs are not accepted under the laws, but you can use gun permit IDs. You just can’t make this stuff up.
Readers: I know…I know…it is frustrating to hear all that is going on with voting…all the disenfranchisement, and yet nothing is happening to prevent it and protect the voters from these “ballot bandits” ( no I didn’t coin that term – wish I did :) Why aren’t the Dems telling it like it is? Why is no one telling people that they have the right to vote and this is what you can do if you are harassed or suppressed. So I’m going to tell you. If you are harassed while voting or suppressed from voting by anyone. Make sure that you get their name first and then tell them that you are going to report them to the FBI. And then do it. We can’t let these LSOS “ballot bandits”, who are the only ones committing voter fraud, get away with stealing and preventing you and anyone else from voting.
PeaCE OUt
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
This video is such a cool, inspiring, fun, compilation of amazing dance scenes from various movies, music, plays, ballets, etc. I love to dance…dancing makes me so happy – so does this video. If you’re in a slump today , this video will make your hump day. :) ENJOY!!
*D*A*N*C*E*Y*O*U*R*A*S*S*O*F*F*
Readers: What’d ya think? Blog me.
Notes from the video:
A tribute to the joy of dance…it’s a wonderful thing. Song is “All These Things That I’ve Done” by The Killers. All rights are theirs. Images gathered from pubic domain resources, I claim no rights to images.
Because so many people have asked, here is the lineup of clips:
1) Svetlana Zakharova – Swan Lake
2) Riverdance – Reel of the Sun
3) Michael Flatley – Lord of the Dance
4) Michael Jackson – Beat It
5) Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse – Singing in the Rain
6) Elvis – Jailhouse Rock
7) Charlie Chaplin – Modern Times
8) John Travolta/Olivia Newton John – Grease
9) Jimmy Cagney – Yankee Doodle Dandy
10) Debbie Reynolds – Singing in the Rain
11) A Chorus Line
12) Patrick Swayze – Dirty Dancing
13) Natalie Wood/Richard Beymar – West Side Story
14) Al Nims & Leon James doing the Charleston
15) Maxim & Mel B – Dancing with the Stars
16) Elvis and Ann Margret – Viva Las Vegas
17) Michael Jackson from TV Special
18) Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers – Swing Time
19) Gene Kelly – Singing in the Rain
20) All That Jazz
21) Three Stooges get a dance lesson
22) Flashdance
23) Shirley Temple & Bill “Bojangles” Robinson – Just Around the Corner
24) Anne Reinking – All That Jazz
25) Nicholas Brothers – Stormy Weather
26) Wizard of Oz
Brenda: Not sure how I skipped over your comment describing the “regulars”, but you too brought a smile to my face.
Zen Lill: Amazing isn’t it? Love the article – thanks for posting. Palin’s still sucking on her 15 minutes. Fruit doesn’t fall too far from the tree. I’ve got my money on the brown girl in the White House too.
Boys Town: I know nothing about your community, but I HOPE you have many more successful stories. Thanks for sharing.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
I want to let you all know that starting today and for the next 9 days, I am going to take some time off to soak in the sun and get plenty of much needed relaxing time. Well…I won’t be all the way gone. I will be posting everyday of course, as I usually do, but depending upon my internet availability, I cannot say how often or easily I will be able to connect with you.
Where I will be staying, I am told getting on the internet will not be a problem, but I always like to have a Plan B just in case, as I would not want my readers to be without a day of “A day in the life of…” So…although I am HOPEing and planning that I can still stay in touch daily, I am pre-posting 10 days worth of writes that will post automatically, just in case technology fails me.
Oh and by the way, I re-read my post from yesterday and I just want to say that I am no longer feeling desperate…thank God that feeling left. Not sure where that came from but I am back to my same same HOPEful self. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe this election is in our hands…and no doubt, we still have our work cut out for us. However, I think it’s good to be a bit scared, and we should be with all that is at stake. But I have faith, and my faith and HOPE go hand in hand in motivating me to move forward, and do all that I can do. Are you with me?
Okay, good. :)
Anywho…With our little chitchat awhile ago about Steve Harvey’s book, “Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man”, I just couldn’t resist posting this one. This just cracks me up. Enjoy.
“Magen, tell me something you put in your mouth but don’t swallow.” Before the question left “Family Feud” host Steve Harvey’s lips, he knew he had stumbled into sticky territory.
After innocuously getting the answer “gum” during the initial round, Harvey walked over to the Forsythe team and posed the same question. But Magen, the girl he asked (and a pastor’s wife to boot), gave him an incredulous look that summed up what most viewers were likely thinking (assuming that, like us, most viewers have the sense of humor of a 12-year-old boy).
Harvey immediately spirals into a half tirade/half lecture about how such a question — and such an answer — could potentially harm the squeaky-clean legacy that “Family Feud” has enjoyed for decades.
How does Magen eventually answer? Does she tiptoe around the question? Is “Family Feud” off the air after an advertiser revolt against swallowing? You may be surprised.
********
Readers: So…tell me something else you put in your mouth but don’t swallow. Blog me.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
Or if you would like to send a check via snail mail, please make checks payable to “Michelle Moquin”, and send to:
Michelle Moquin PO Box 29235 San Francisco, Ca. 94129
I watched 60 Minutes last night as I do most Sundays. The Romney/Ryan interview was first up and in my opinion was a waste of primetime TV time – a lot of feel good fluff, empty promises, and no substance. I didn’t watch the entire interview – perhaps it got better?
However I did pop back in and watch what I thought was simply wonderful. I have written and posted quite a few articles on the Congo, and none of them have been good news especially when it comes to the lives of women and girls.
Last night however, I was delightfully surprised by a segment that was originally aired back in April, but I never saw it until now…a segment about the Congo that for once put a smile on my face:
(CBS News) “Joy in the Congo” seems an unlikely — even impossible — title for a story from the Congo, considering the searing poverty and brutal civil war that have decimated that country. Yet in Kinshasa, the capital city, we found an unforgettable symphony orchestra — 200 singers and instrumentalists defying the poverty, hardship, and struggles of life in the world’s poorest country…and creating some of the most moving music we have ever heard. Follow Bob Simon to the Congo to hear the sounds and stories of the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra.
To learn more about the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra — including how you can help – click here.
The following script is from “Joy in the Congo” which originally aired on April 8, 2012, and was rebroadcast on August 12, 2012. Bob Simon is the correspondent. Clem Taylor and Magalie Laguerre, producers.
Beauty has a way of turning up in places where you’d least expect it. We went to the Congo earlier this year, the poorest country in the world. Kinshasa, the capital, has a population of 10 million and almost nothing in the way of hope or peace. But there’s a well-kept secret down there. Kinshasa has a symphony orchestra, the only one in Central Africa, the only all-black one in the world.
It’s called the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra. We’d never heard of it. No one we called had ever heard of it. But when we got there we were surprised to find 200 musicians and vocalists, who’ve never played outside Kinshasa, or have been outside Kinshasa. We were even more surprised to find joy in the Congo. When we told the musicians they would be on “60 Minutes,” they didn’t know what we were talking about but, still, they invited us to a performance.
We caught up with them as they were preparing outside their concert hall, a rented warehouse. As curtain time neared, we had no idea what to expect. But maestro Armand Diangienda seemed confident and began the evening with bang.
The music, Carmina Burana, was written by German composer Carl Orff 75 years ago. Did he ever dream that it would be played in the Congo? It wouldn’t have been if it hadn’t been for Armand and a strange twist of fate. Armand was a commercial pilot until 20 years ago when his airline went bust. So, like ex-pilots often do, he decided to put together an orchestra. He was missing a few things.
Bob Simon: You had no musicians, you had no teachers, you had no instruments.
Armand Diangienda: Yes.
Bob Simon: And you had no one who knew how to read music?
Armand Diangienda: No, nobody. Nobody.
Armand’s English is limited. He preferred speaking French, Congo’s official language.
Bob Simon: When you started asking people if they wanted to be members of this orchestra, did they have any idea what you were talking about?
Translation for Armand Diangienda: In the beginning, he said, people made fun of us, saying here in the Congo classical music puts people to sleep.
But Armand pressed on. He taught himself how to read music and play the piano, play the trombone, the guitar and the cello. He talked a few members of his church into joining him. They brought their friends which brought more problems.
Translation for Armand Diangienda: We only had five or six violins, he said, for the 12 people who wanted to learn how to play the violin.
Translation for Armand Diangienda: So they took turns, he said. One would play for 15 or 20 minutes at a time. That was very difficult.
But more instruments started coming in. Some were donated; others rescued from local thrift shops — in various states of disrepair. Then it was up to Albert — the orchestra’s surgeon — to heal them. He wasn’t always gentle with his patients, but they survived. Armand told us that when a violin string broke in those early days, they used whatever they had at hand to fix it.
Bob Simon: You took the wire from a bicycle?
Armand Diangienda: Bicycle, yes.
Bob Simon: The brake of a bicycle, and turned it into a string for a violin?
Armand Diangienda: Yes.
Bob Simon: And it played music?
Armand Diangienda: Oui.
And with every functioning instrument, more would-be musicians poured in. Before long, Armand’s house became a makeshift conservatory. Armand was the dean. Every room, every corridor, no matter how small or dark or stifling was teeming with sound. Outdoors, the parking lot was a quiet spot to practice the viola.
But even this was an oasis compared to what was on the other side of the walls. The Congo is, after all, a war-torn country — has been for 60 years. This is where most of the musicians live, on unpaved streets with little in the way of running water, electricity or sanitation. The musicians don’t get paid for playing in the orchestra. Some work in the market, selling whatever they can. Very few people in Kinshasa make more than $50 a month or live past 50.
Sylvie Mbela’s life has gotten even more demanding since she started in the orchestra 17 years ago. She’s got three kids now. There are no daycare centers in the neighborhood, so the kids are always with her, never far from her fiddle.
But when she turns from mother to musician, she says she has left this planet. She is not in the Congo anymore.
For years, Sylvie and the orchestra played on but only in Kinshasa — no one outside the Congo knew anything about them until 2010. That’s when two German filmmakers made a documentary which was shown in Germany. It so inspired musicians in Germany, they sent down instruments and then themselves to give master classes.
Opera vocalists Rolf Schmitz-Malburg and Sabine Kallhammer came to teach technique and diction. And if you ever questioned that music is the universal language, watch this a German-speaking teacher tutoring a French-speaking African how to sing an aria in Italian. But when Rolf and Sabine moved onto the full choir it wasn’t so easy.
Bob Simon: Were they pleased to see you? Do you think that they said, “Oh, how wonderful we have two white people here to teach us how to play music”?
Sabine Kallhammer: They had experiences with other white people, so I can really understand that they were careful, and a little shy. But they really were open to learn.
At times they weren’t sure what they were learning or why. What was this all about? The exercises are designed to loosen you up, the Germans explained and, after a while, they did.
Sabine Kallhammer: And then they started to sing for us, and then we were, like, ah–
Sabine Kallhammer: Their faces change when they do their music.
Sabine Kallhammer: I mean if you live in Kinshasa there is no culture life here, so these people have to find a way to go to some other places. Making music is one way to go on a trip, a cheap trip because you can just close your eyes, they do that very often and they are somewhere else.
Rolf moved onto the next class. That’s where we met two tenors, brothers Carrime and Valvi Bilolo. They live in the countryside, 10 miles from Armand’s place. They took us there. The boys’ parents, two brothers and a sister share a three-room blockhouse. Carrime and Valvi certainly had to learn the importance of harmony growing up here, so by the time they met Armand, harmony was second nature.
Bob Simon: When did you join the orchestra?
Bob Simon: The 8th of November in 2003.
Carrime Bilolo: Yes.
Bob Simon: Why do you think you remember the exact date?
Carrime Bilolo: Bon c’est la naissance pour nous -[Well, he said, it's like a birth for us in this symphony orchestra, so it's a date we can't forget.]
And this is how they get to rehearsal. Six days a week, 90 minutes each way. Some would call it a trek. For them, it’s a commute. When they get downtown, the last stretch is on a bus. What keeps them going? The music, always the music.
Sabine Kallhammer: They come here every day. They sing, and they go home. It’s really amazing.
Bob Simon: It’s pretty difficult to relate to that, isn’t it?
Sabine Kallhammer: Yeah. Yeah. I don’t think that anybody would do that with this conditions, in our country, no.
The boys and the choir have quite a repertoire now: Bach, Mendelssohn, Handel and, of course, Beethoven. The week we were there, the orchestra was rehearsing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Not exactly starter music, but Armand was determined to take it on and, like a good general, he reviewed all his troops.
The choir, OK. The strings? Not bad. But the full orchestra? Not quite.
French horns, he said, “You’re hitting it too hard…”
“Be mindful of the echo”, he told the string section.
Finally, it all came together and on the night of the performance, in this rented warehouse, Beethoven came alive. It’s called the Ode to Joy, the last movement of Beethoven’s last symphony. It has been played with more expertise before…but with more joy? Hard to imagine.
*******
Readers: Talk about a man who had nothing but a vision, and didn’t let anything stop him from achieving it. I find that so inspiring.
To my readers in Iran: I read about the quake, I HOPE you and yours are safe. My condolences to the friends and families who lost their loved ones.
Peace & Love.
Lastly, greed over a great story is surfacing from my “loyal”(?) readers. With all this back and forth about who owns what, that appears on my blog, let me reiterate that all material posted on my blog becomes the sole property of my blog.If you want to reserve any proprietary rights don’t post it to my blog. I will prominently display this caveat on my blog from now on to remind those who may have forgotten this notice.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: We all know what this means by now :)
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the “Donate” button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my “Donate” page)
