Monthly Archives: March 2021

Back in this post, we linked you to a jazzy, relatively-recent interpretation of "The William Tell Overture" by the timeless composer, Gioachino Antonio Rossini.  Actually, as my pal Pat O'Neill reminds me because I didn't know this, the part we all know and love from the Lone Ranger shows is just the final fourth part of the Overture.

And as another pal, Bruce Reznick (who's been a pal since around tenth grade at University High School) reminds me, one of the places where folks today learned of the works of Mr. Rossini and many other great composers of classical music. That would be in cartoons…especially cartoons made for theatrical release in the thirties, forties and fifties.  Here, suggested to me by Bruce, is a page that will remind us of some of the places where we first heard these magnificent merrie melodies and long-lived looney tunes.

And e-mail pal George Haberberger told me about this rendition of Rossini's Greatest Hit. It's performed by Glen Campbell, who everyone remembers as a great singer…but we sometimes forget how for a long time, he was hired to play, not sing. The man could work magic with one of them geetar things…

As I celebrate my birthday and we seem to be creeping up on the one-year anniversary of me staying home most of the time…

Thanks to all for the nice notes and e-mails and shout-outs I'm getting for making it to 69 years old. I have to think about what I'm going to do a year from now when I hit the big Seven-Oh. Maybe I'll declare an end to my current second-childhood and start on my ninth or tenth second-childhood.

And maybe Facebook will be redesigned so that when I have a thousand public messages, I can navigate my way through all of them instead of only finding about a fourth of them. I can't be the only person who has this problem.

Not a lot to report here today except that I'm grateful for all the communications. Thanks, all!

Here's the Fifth Dimension (without Frank Sinatra) singing one of their biggest hits…

And I posted this before here long ago but I thought I should also show you Peter Lawford demonstrating the right way to sing this song…

To the surprise of…well, not you or me certainly…Comic-Con International has announced they will not be holding Comic-Con 2021 as planned in San Diego in July. You can read the entire statement here about why (which won't surprise you) or how it will be "virtual" like it was last year, so that won't surprise you either. The only news is that they will attempt to do some sort of in-person event in November, details to follow.

Actually, I'm a bit surprised that they announced this soon that Comic-Con won't be a live event in July. It takes a lot of work to not put on Comic-Con and I would have thought it would take longer for this announcement to be made. I'm glad it is so we all don't have to think about if it could maybe possibly happen.

And I've already received one e-mail from a guy who has always wrongly thought that I'm the Complaint Department for Comic-Con. He also apparently thought for a while that the Coronavirus was a hoax and then he thought it was no big deal and it would just kill a few old people who were going to die soon anyway and then go away in a matter of weeks. Now, he apparently thinks that because the infection and death rates are heading down — you know; like they did last April for a while — COVID-19 is history and we can all resume doing everything he's mad that he can't do because of it.

He wrote, "Don't these people realize that by July, nobody in this friggin' country will be dying of this supposed virus?" I would love to think he's right for once but the sheer fact that this guy believes this makes me skeptical.