Saturday, December 3, 2011

MICHELLE OBAMA AND KERMIT’S VERSION OF “NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS”

 

 

 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

DORIS DAY’S FIRST NEW ALBUM IN 17 YEARS


MY HEART COVER

This is Grammy-winning singing legend Doris Day's first studio album with fresh material in 17 years; 13 songs of a timeless quality including 10 previously unreleased recordings produced by Day's late son, Terry Melcher, plus a trio of Day classics.

Doris Day has been fully involved with the musical selections for this special album, which hit the top ten with its advance release in England. Her son Terry Melcher -- who was known as a producer for folk-rock pioneers The Byrds and other artists -- co-wrote three of the new songs with the Beach Boys' Bruce Johnston: the emotional title track "My Heart", the romantic "The Way I Dreamed It" and the haunting "Happy Endings" sung by Melcher with a newly recorded spoken-word introduction by Day.

Also included is the rhythmic radio single "Heaven Tonight" plus three classic rock-era favourites: Joe Cocker's ballad "You Are So Beautiful", the Lovin' Spoonful's joyful 1966 hit "Daydream" and The Beach Boys' nostalgic "Disney Girls", the latter written by Bruce Johnston, who co-produced three of the recordings on the album.

Exclusive to the U.S. edition is the debut release of the traditional folk ballad "Stewball", which appropriately connects with Day's devotion to animals. The trio of vintage classics Day has selected for this album are "My One & Only Love" with the Andre Previn Trio, the biographical "Ohio" from the stage musical "Wonderful Town" and the standard "My Buddy" from Day's film "I'll See You In My Dreams". Rounding out the set is the bouncy show tune "Hurry It's Lovely Up Here" from "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever".

Track Listings
    • Hurry, It's Lovely Up Here
    • Daydream
    • The Way I Dreamed It
    • Heaven Tonight
    • My One and Only Love
    • My Heart
    • You Are So Beautiful
    • Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries
    • Disney Girls
    • Stewball
    • My Buddy
    • Happy Endings
    • Ohio

VALENTINO’S LAST MUSE – ANNE HATHAWAY

 

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When you say the name of Valentino, our imagination draws a beautiful woman, which proudly goes on the catwalk in the purple dress, which became the hallmark of the house “Valentino”. Every show of the great Couturier was ended with bright red dress.

Great women have inspired the creation of Valentino.  Almost half a century his clothes were: Grace Kelly, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn, Brooke Shields, Jessica Lange and Courtney Love. Valentino created white lace dress for a wedding Jacqueline Kennedy, who married Aristotle Onassis. It had conquered the whole world for its simplicity and at the same time refined. Nancy Reagan all the years of her husband in public appeared only in the clothes from Valentino. Only Garavani could advise the Elizabeth II: “Your Majesty, wear black. It sets off your skin.”

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The last Valentino muse was a young Hollywood actress, Anne Hathaway which invariably accompanied by Garavani at all fashion-events. Anne and Valentino have got acquainted on shootings of film “The Devil wears Prada”, in which Hathaway played a major role. Valentino was the only couturier, who agreed to take part, not fearing the wrath of the most influential women of the world of fashion – Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of American Vogue, which was the prototype of the “devil” in the film. The movie star and the great couturier quickly became friends. Anne is still the best friend of Valentino Garavani.

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Anne  Hathaway regularly appears in the creations of the fashion house at premieres, official events and parties. “Dress Valentino open in woman femininity”- in one voice say fans Garavani.

Hathaway said in an interview, that since the childhood considered herself the “Valentino muse”, answering all the requirements of the Italian couturier to female beauty. “He had an incredible impact on my life”, – actress confessed.

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Anne Hathaway in Valentino dresses

Valentino Garavani left the world of  fashion in 2008, Anne Hathaway became the last inspiration of the great maestro.

JUST FOR FUN

 

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FLOWER ARRANGEMENTS IN BASIC WHITE

 

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WHITE FLOWERS

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EVER SEE A CAMEL LAUGHING?

 

YOU KNOW YOU ARE AT UNIVERSITY WHEN ...

 

  • You are no longer thankful that fire alarms are here to protect you.
  • You’ve bought Christmas presents from the book store and charged it to your student account so your parents pay for the gifts because you’re too broke.
  • You begin to include ketchup on your list of acceptable vegetables.
  • You stay on campus for hours in between classes when it’s too cold to walk home.
  • People have to help you kick the vending machine just so you can get your 50 cent bag of chips.
  • There’s always a “question kid” in at least one of your classes, and you really wish someone would just tell him/her to shut the hell up.
  • You steal dishes from the cafeteria so you don’t have to wash your own.
  • Laundry is an all-day event.
  • You no longer find it uncool to take naps. In fact, you quite enjoy them.
  • It’s illegal to drink in the dorms yet they sell an assortment of shot glasses, beer mugs, tankards, etc. in the bookstore.

LOOK UP! THERE MAY BE A BEAUTIFUL CEILING.

 

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AUDREY HEPBURN’S “LUCKY DRESS” DOES NOT SELL

 

 

audrey-hepburn-oscarThe dress Audrey Hepburn wore to collect her first Oscar has failed to sell at auction.

The iconic ivory-coloured lace gown was expected to raise between $60,000 and $90,000 at the Kerry-Anne auction house in London on Tuesday, but despite the high estimate, there were no bidders for the dress when it went under the hammer.

Hepburn wore the frock while filming her role in 1953 movie "Roman Holiday" and she had the gown adapted so she could wear it to the Academy Awards following her Best Actress nomination for the film. She won the award and subsequently labelled the ensemble her "lucky dress."

The chiffon gown Amy Winehouse wore on the cover of her Grammy-winning 2006 album "Back to Black" sold for $57,600 at the same auction, while a replica of Princess Diana's wedding dress went for $76,800.

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COOL IMAGES

 

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A BRIDGE TOO FAR

 

Time lapse cinema-photography can be really interesting to watch. This one I found fascinating to see the complete removal of a bridge in less than 24 hours.

The planning and the coordination of all resources to achieve this feat would have been months in the planning down to the smallest detail.

A Bridge Too Far from James Miller on Vimeo.

TRIVIA BITS

 

  • 'I am a Walrus', by John Lennon, was inspired by a police two tone siren.
  • IBM started as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Corporation.
  • Iceland is the world's oldest functioning democracy.
  • Icelandic phone books are listed by the given name not the surname.
  • Idi Amin, one of the most ruthless tyrants in the world, before coming to power, served in the British Army.
  • If 80% of the human liver was removed, it could still function and would eventually restore itself to its original size.
  • If a surgeon in Ancient Egypt lost a patient while performing an operation, his hands were cut off.
  • If any of the heads on Mt. Rushmore had a body, it would be nearly 500 feet tall.
  • If it were removed from the body, the small intestine would stretch to a length of 22 feet.
  • If Monaco's ruling house of Grimaldi should ever be without an heir (male or female), the country will cease to be a sovereign state.

LESSONS IN TRANSPORTATION

 

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THE CP RAIL HOLIDAY TRAIN TRAVELS ACROSS CANADA.

 

 

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As we approach the festive season, it is inspiring to hear of the many ways that communities reach out to those who are less fortunate than themselves.

The annual Holiday Train has been a coast to coast tradition since 1999 and has now raised 5.6 million dollars and over 2.4 million pounds of food for community food banks and charities. All money and food donated stays in each community.

The goal of the Holiday Train is to collect food and money for local food banks and to raise awareness in the fight against hunger. At each event, the Holiday Train provides a box car stage, a line up of great musical talents and a corporate contribution to the local food bank. The community, in turn, is encouraged to donate food and funds, all of which stays in the community.

Here is a link to the schedule as it continues its way across Canada, if you get a chance take some food donations listen to the entertainment and enjoy the festive season.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

QUOTABLES

 

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Friday, December 2, 2011

JUDY LEWIS PASSES


judy lewisHer mother was Loretta Young. Her father was Clark Gable.
Yet Judy Lewis spent her first 19 months in hideaways and orphanages, and the rest of her early life untangling a web of lies spun by a young mother hungry for stardom but unwilling to end her unwed pregnancy.

Loretta Young’s deception was contrived to protect her budding movie career and the box-office power of the matinee idol Gable, who was married to someone else when they conceived their child in snowed-in Washington State. They were on location, shooting the 1935 film “The Call of the Wild,” fictional lovers in front of the camera and actual lovers outside its range.

Ms. Lewis, a former actress who died on Friday at the age of 76, was 31 before she discerned the scope of the falsehoods that cast her, a daughter of Hollywood royalty, into what she later described as a Cinderella-like childhood. Confronted by Ms. Lewis, Young finally made a tearful confession in 1966 at her sprawling home in Palm Springs, California.

Young was 22 and unmarried when she and Gable, 34 and married to Maria Langham, had their brief affair. She spent most of her pregnancy in Europe to avoid Hollywood gossip. Ms. Lewis was born on Nov. 6, 1935, in a rented house in Venice, Calif. Soon she was turned over to a series of caretakers, including St. Elizabeth’s Infants Hospital in San Francisco, so that Young could return to stardom.

When Ms. Lewis was 19 months old, her mother brought her back home and announced through the gossip columnist Louella Parsons that she had adopted the child.

Ms. Lewis grew up in Los Angeles, cushioned in the luxury of her mother’s movie-star lifestyle even as she endured what she later described as an outsider’s isolation within her family and the teasing of children at school.

They teased her about her ears: they stuck out like Dumbo’s. Or, as Hollywood rumours had it, they stuck out like Clark Gable’s. Ms. Lewis’s mother dressed her in bonnets to hide them. When Ms. Lewis was 7 her ears were surgically altered to make them less prominent.

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Judy Lewis 1977

Until Ms. Lewis, as an adult, confronted her years later, Young did not acknowledge that Ms. Lewis was her biological daughter, or that Gable was Ms. Lewis’s father. When Young married and had two children with Tom Lewis, a radio producer, Judy took his name but remained the family’s “adopted” daughter.

And though conceding the story privately to her daughter — and later to the rest of her family — Young remained mum publicly all her life, agreeing to acknowledge the facts only in her authorized biography, “Forever Young,” and only on the condition that it be published after her death. She died in 2000.

But Ms. Lewis revealed the story of her parentage in her own memoir, “Uncommon Knowledge,” in 1994. She described feeling a powerful sense of alienation as a child. “It was very difficult for me as a little girl not to be accepted or acknowledged by my mother, who, to this day, will not publicly acknowledge that I am her biological child,” she said in an interview that year.

After Ms. Lewis released the memoir, her mother refused to speak to her for three years.
The lightning bolt that gave Ms. Lewis the first hint about her parentage came during an identity crisis before her wedding day. Two weeks before her marriage in 1958, Ms. Lewis told her fiancé, Tom Tinney, that she did not understand her confusing relationship with her mother and that she did not know who her father was. “I can’t marry you,” she said she told him. “I don’t know anything about myself.”

Mr. Tinney could offer little guidance about her mother, she wrote, but about her father’s identity he was clear.

“It’s common knowledge, Judy,” he said. “Your father is Clark Gable.”

She had no inkling, she wrote.

In interviews after her book was published, Ms. Lewis was philosophical about the secrecy in which she grew up. If Young and Gable had acknowledged her in 1935, she said, “both of them would have lost their careers.”

Much of Ms. Lewis’s account was painful to recall, she said. She quoted Young as saying, “And why shouldn’t I be unhappy?,” explaining her decision to give birth. “Wouldn’t you be if you were a movie star and the father of your child was a movie star and you couldn’t have an abortion because it was a mortal sin?”

Young was a Roman Catholic.

After graduating from Marymount, a girls’ Catholic school, Ms. Lewis left Los Angeles to pursue acting in New York. She was a regular on one soap opera, “The Secret Storm,” from 1964 to 1971, and had featured parts on numerous others. She appeared in several Broadway plays, produced television shows, and in her mid-40s decided to return to school. She earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University in Los Angeles, and became a licensed family and child counsellor in 1992.

Ms. Lewis, who was a clinical psychologist specializing in foster care and marriage therapy, died of lymphoma at her home in Gladwyne, Pa., her daughter, Maria Tinney Dagit, said.

Besides her daughter, Ms. Lewis is survived by two grandsons and her half-brothers, Christopher and Peter Lewis. Her marriage to Mr. Tinney ended in divorce.

In a 2001 interview on CNN with Larry King, Ms. Lewis recalled speaking to her mother about her early life.

“I was also asking her about being adopted,” she said, “as adopted children do. They say, ‘Where are my ... ‘’ ”

Mr. King interjected, “ ‘Who’s my mother?’ ”

“Yes,” Ms. Lewis said. “ ‘Who’s my mother? Who’s my father?’ And she would answer it very easily by saying, ‘I couldn’t love you any more than if you were my own child,’ which, of course, didn’t answer the question, but it said, ‘Don’t ask the question.’ ”

Mr. King asked if she ever fantasized about the life she might have had if her parents had married and brought her up.

But at that point Ms. Lewis was wistful about her past. “Call of the Wild,” she said, was one of her favourite movies. The love scenes between her parents, she said, “show the love they feel for each other.”

“I would have liked them to have,” she replied. “But that is just my dream, you know. Life is very strange. Doesn’t give us what we want.”

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Gable and Young in "Call of the Wild"

THIS WORLD … RAILWAY LINES

 

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JUST FOR FUN

 

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MORE NEW RELEASE CHRISTMAS MUSIC


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Track Listing:
 1. Go Tell It On The Mountain
2. The Christmas Song
3. White Christmas
4. I’ll Be Home For Christmas
5. Merry Christmas Baby
6. The Bells Of St. Mary’s
7. Blue Christmas
8. O Holy Night
9. There Is A Star That Shines Tonight
10. Hello My Friend, Hello
11. All Through The Night
12. Long Road Home

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NOW THATS WHAT I CALL XMAS

Disc 1/3
———
1. John & Yoko And The Plastic Ono Band With The Harlem 3:33
2. Band Aid – Do They Know It’s Christmas? 3:41
3. The Pogues Feat. Kirsty MacColl – Fairytale Of New York 4:30
4. Greg Lake – I Believe In Father Christmas 3:30
5. Elton John – Step Into Christmas 4:09
6. Wizazrd – I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday 4:39
7. Slade – Merry Xmas Everybody 3:42
8. Mike Oldfield – In Dulci Jubilo 2:49
9. Paul McCartney – Wonderful Christmas Time 3:45
10. The Beach Boys – Little Saint Nick 1:58
11. The Waitresses – Christmas Wrapping 5:23
12. Girls Aloud – Not Tonight Santa 2:42
13. Gabriella Cilmi – Warm This Winter 2:35
14. Samantha Mumba – All I Want For Christmas Is You 4:03
15. The Puppini Sisters – Jingle Bells 2:35
16. Kylie Minogue – Santa Baby 3:21
17. Jona Lewie – Stop The Cavalry 2:54
18. The Wombats – Is This Christmas? 3:35
19. The Darkness – Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End) 3:31
20. Status Quo – It’s Christmas Time 4:10
21. Band Aid 20 – Do They Know It’s Christmas? 5:06
Disc 2/3
———
1. Bing Crosby – White Christmas 3:06
2. Nat King Cole Trio – The Christmas Song 3:09
3. Dean Martin – Let It Snow 1:54
4. Cliff Richard – Mistletoe & Wine 3:52
5. Matt Monro – Mary Boys Child 3:18
6. Adam Faith – Lonely Pup 1:46
7. Brenda Lee – Rockin Around The Christmas Tree 2:04
8. Bobby Helms – Jingle Bell Rock 2:01
9. Alma Cogan – Never Do A Tango With An Eskimo 2:10
10. Big Dee Irwin – Swinging On A Star 2:37
11. Kay Star – Man With The Bag 2:41
12. Cliff Richard – Little Town 3:58
13. The Spinners – The Twelve Days Of Christmas 3:52
14. Burl Ives – Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer 2:09
15. The Kings Singers – While Shephards Watched 2:20
16. Sinead O’Connor – Silent Night 3:42
17. Steeleye Span – Gaudette 2:23
18. Bert Jansch – In The Bleak Midwinter 2:21
19. The Weavers – We Wish You a Merry Christmas 2:27
20. Jethro Tull – Ring Out Solstice Bells 3:34
21. Donna Summer – Winter Melody 6:31
22. Stevie Wonder – What Christmas Means To Me 2:28
23. The Jackson 5 – Frosty The Snowman 2:37
24. The Supremes – Santa Claus Is Coming To Town 2:41
Disc 3/3
———
1. Frankie Goes To Hollywood – The Power Of Love 5:28
2. Pretenders – 2000 Miles 3:39
3. East 17 – Stay Another Day 4:26
4. Aled Jones – Walking In The Air 3:23
5. Chris De Burgh – A Spaceman Came Travelling 4:02
6. David Essex – A Winter’s Tale 4:11
7. Mud – Lonely This Christmas 3:33
8. Cliff Richard – Saviour’s Day 4:52
9. Chris Rea – Driving Home For Christmas 4:00
10. Patrizio Buanne – Winter Wonderland 2:15
11. Tom Jones& Cerys Matthews – Baby It’s Cold Outside 3:40
12. Love Unlimited Orchestra – It May Be Winter Outside 3:06
13. State If The Heart – Last Christmas 3:43
14. Squeeze – Christmas Day 3:44
15. Dina Carroll – The Perfect Year 3:45
16. Vanessa Williams – Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas 4:33
17. Stacie Orrico – O Come, All Ye Faithful 3:58
18. Norah Jones – Peace 3:48
19. Abba – Happy New Year 4:25

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nadjanoel2011

Track Listing: 
01. It’s The Most Wonderful Time of The Year
02. Noel Sans Vous
03. Jingle Bells
04. C’est Noel Mamie
05. Glory Alleluia
06. Winter Wonderland
07. Joyeux Noel
08. Petite Etoile de Noel
09. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
10. Sainte Nuit
11. Ave Maria
12. Ma Liste de Noel
13. Minuit Chretiens


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JOEL MCELDERRY

Former X Factor winner Joe McElderry has avoided going head-to-head with the champion of this year's contest – by releasing his Christmas album today.

The singer's LP, entitled Classic Christmas, comes just a few months after he won ITV's Popstar To Opera Star.

The win has revived his career, which had stalled after being dropped by Simon Cowell's Syco label.

It also comes two weeks before the X Factor final, the winner of which will attempt to secure the coveted Christmas Number 1.

1. 'Mary's Boy Child'
2. 'White Christmas'
3. 'When A Child Is Born'
4. 'In The Bleak Midwinter' featuring Kathryn Tickell
5. 'O Holy Night' featuring Rolando Villazon
6. 'I Believe In Father Christmas'
7. 'Silent Night'
8. 'Adeste Fideles (O Come All Ye Faithful)'
9. 'Santo Natale'
10. 'Last Christmas'
11. 'The Little Drummer Boy' featuring Kathryn Tickell
12. 'Driving Home For Christmas'

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EMMY THE GREAT

Track Listing: 
1. This Is Christmas Intro 0:19
2. Marshmallow World 2:14
3. Snowflakes 4:09
4. Christmas Moon 3:22
5. Christmas Day (I Wish I Was Su 2:26
6. (Dont Call Me) Mrs Christmas 3:10
7. Home For The Holidays 3:27
8. Zombie Christmas 3:45
9. Sleigh Me 3:22
10. Jesus The Reindeer 1:46
11. See You Next Year 3:13
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