Over the holidays, alot of the Liberal Blogs I read have been involved in a sort of internet "chain letter" based on questions with four answers.
The way it works is that one blogger starts with the questionaire, fills in his or her answers, and then sends the challange to the next blogger on their list.
Ok, I can almost see the blank looks on your faces, so let me start.
Again, this is something I stole from the "Big Boy Blogs", but I thought we could have some fun with it on Blogstream...and you don't have to be a liberal to play along;
just put in the top four items under each category...use the first things that pop into your head. (in other words, don't over-think this too much!)
THE GANG OF FOUR (as pertaining to Gobshite)

List FOUR jobs you've had in your life----
Newspaper reporter, radio announcer, Jungle Cruise Captain, Civil Servant

FOUR movies you could watch over and over----
Blazing Saddles, Monty Python & The Holy Grail, Casablanca, Michael Collins

FOUR places you have lived------
Ukiah, California...Milford, Massachusetts...Columbus, Indiana...Liberty, New York

FOUR TV shows you love to watch------
House...Countdown with Keith Olberman...Jeopardy...anything with "Blackadder" in the title

FOUR places you've been on vacation----
Los Angeles, The Cayman Islands, Chicago, a cabin in rural Vermont

FOUR Web Sites you visit daily----
TBogg, Democratic Underground, Bats Left, Throws Right and (OK, all together, now) BLOGSTREAM

FOUR of your favorite foods------
Sushi, barbecue ribs, good pizza (from a family owned place and not a national chain), cold shrimp

FOUR places you'd rather be-----
Boston, San Francisco, Dublin, Philadelphia (no thanks to W.C. Fields)

FOUR albums/CD's you can't live without-----
Box sets by Cat Stevens and the Moody Blues, "It's Too Late To Stop Now" by Van Morrison, "Sandinista!" by the Clash

Ok, there's my gang of four...
I now challenge the man behind "Touchy Subjects"...
TAG, you're IT, Mokie Joe!

(By the way, we don't have to stand in line on this one. If you can put together your own "Gang of Four" send me a comment or a PM and I will be happy to link to your site in a future post. Naturally, if you do play the game, be sure to link to me. Thanks...G.)

Well, it appears Mokie Joe is up after midnight, and has offered his lists and passed the game to "She's Come Undone"! Give it a shot, Damenrouge!

A good friend is trying to teach me to sing.
I worked in radio for a number of years, before Clear Channel and its satellites pretty much destroyed local programming, and I was always the one who stood back and played the songs of others. I had a decent enough speaking voice, but never thought it was "musical" enough to display before other sentient beings.
I have acted on stage in New York, Orlando and Indiana (each a theatre Mecca, they tell me), so have no fear of being in front of an audience.
Yet, the thought of actually singing before that same audience was just short of terrifying.
A dubious talent for mimicry was how I got started.
Anyone who knows me will attest to my ability to imitate any number of famous people. To sing, I started taking the speaking voices of others, and tried turning them into their singing voices.
John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, Ian Anderson and Gordon Lightfoot all became part of my stable of "singing" voices that I am still using to try and find my own voice.
I am generally a tenor, but I began fooling around with the baritone voice of folksinger Theodore Bikel. The man has been performing for over 50 years, and I think I may have been drawn to him because of his long history of imitating those around him.
That, and the fact that I find I can do a reasonable imitation of him.
An Austrian Jew, who fled the Nazis in the 1930's, Bikel has done songs in English, French, Russian (all languages he speaks) and in Irish and Scottish dialects.
Lately, he has been concentrating on his own heritage, and performing folk songs in Hebrew and Yiddish.
Which is all the more surprising, when my voice teacher told me he has updated a traditional American folk song, called Mighty Day, a song about a hurricane and flood which destroyed Galveston, Texas in 1900. Bikel has updated it to comment on Hurricane Katrina.
~~~~~~~~~
"I remember one September,
When storm winds swept the town;
The high tide from the ocean, Lord,
Put water all around.

Chorus:
Wasn't that a mighty day,
A mighty day
A mighty day, Great God, that morning
When the storm winds swept the town!

There was a sea-wall there in New Orleans
To keep the waters down,
But the high tide from the ocean, Lord,
Put water in the town.

Chorus

The mayor warned the people,
"You'd better leave this place!"
But thousands could not leave their homes
Till death was in their face.

The cars they were all loaded
The rich were leaving town
But the poor were left for the ocean’s wrath
And the ocean took them down,

Chorus

The waters, like some river,
Came rushing to and fro;
I saw my father drowning, God,
And I watched my mother go!

Dear Lord, the poor kept prayin’
Please save us from this fate
When will the rescue come for us
But the rescue came too late.

Chorus

Now, the leaders of our nation
They tell us all is well
But we know that there’s a special place
Reserved for them in hell.

They’ll twist and turn forever
In the blinding wind and rain
And they’ll only stop for a photo op
When they hear this sad refrain:

Wasn't that a mighty day,
A mighty day
A mighty day, Great God, that morning
When the storm winds swept the town! "
~~~~~~~~~~
If you want to know how it sounds, you can go to the web site to play it. You will need a Quicktime player.
The "folk tradition" has always been to take older songs and update them to the present time. Bob Dylan, if you catch him in a moment of honesty, will tell you he took old Irish melodies and re-worked the words to make some of the songs he's known for today.
Very soon, my teacher and I will sing the new "Mighty Day" before an audience.
I'll let you know how it turns out.

I don't usually do this, but I am lifting a passage directly from another blog, this early Christmas Morning. It is from a site called Best of the Blogs and it goes something like this:
*****
For Christmas, 1971, John Lennon and Yoko Ono released "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)," whose last verse is:

A very Merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear
War is over, if you want it
War is over now.

Christmas, 1971, we had 157,000 troops in Vietnam. Eight months later we had none, and seven months after that, we stopped fighting that war.

Currently, we've got just under 160,000 troops in Iraq.

Sooo. I know what my Christmas wish is; what's yours?

*****
In their Christmas album released a couple of years ago, the Moody Blues covered Happy Christmas, but left out the "war is over, if you want it" lyric.
It's a very fine album, by a band I've loved for 30 years, but that omission really ticks me off somehow.
I guess because I'm afraid we'll finally bring our men and women home from Iraq the day Cat Stevens releases HIS Christmas Album.

May the traditional peace of the season be within you, my Blogstream friends...even as the fighting goes on outside.

It's been just 24 days since I got my key to the gated community that is Blogstream, and this is my 20th post.
I told a friend it was a "gated community", because you have to live here to post a comment...not just any layabout with a keyboard and a modem can do a drive-by comment like "you suk, LIEbral!", and then slink off into some back alley of the internets. If I want to, I can follow him to his virtual home and do virtual doughnuts in his virtual front yard.
Sometimes I wish it were more like the "big-boy" blogs on places like Blogger or Blogsome or (I kid you not) BlogOmania, where anybody can post any comment at any time. OK, maybe not Blogsome, since their main site seems to hate Firefox, and BlogOmania is not free!
Other times, I'm glad it's set up the way it is.
I have a tendancy to take negative or nasty comments (especially ignorant nasty comments) too much to heart, and like the idea that this is pretty much a community of friends.
I would have to quickly develop a thicker skin if I want to walk the mean streets of Blogistan.
Yet, for now, I am building up my "writing muscles" with every post. Admittedly, some are better than others, but I am exercising that part of my brain that likes to put words together in a pleasing way. Usually I just shoot for coherrency, and hope to hit "pleasing"...or at least wing it from time to time.
Writing in general, and blogging in particular, is an on-going learning process that demands constant practice to "stay in shape". It also requires watching the people who are really good at it.
There are two bloggers I try to read every day.
First is a guy out of San Diego who writes under the name of TBogg. I admire the way he writes in a deftly "snarky" way...I also greatly admire his courage. I think I would like to write as well someday.
The other guy lives in Indianapolis, and I don't know if anybody writes as well as Doghouse Riley at Bats Left Throws Right. His stuff is consistantly good, and occasionly rises to the artful.
As far as I know, neither of these guys is affiliated with a newspaper, magazine or cable network. The don't get paid for writing, but I think they're as good as any of the "professional" bloggers out there.
They do it because they like to write, and they like the idea that anybody in the world can read what they have written.
In that way, they're just like you and me and the 5,000 other writers on Blogstream, only better at what they do...
...for now.

I have a family Christmas Party to go to Saturday night, at my cousins house. She lives in a very large, almost castle-like home, in an older part of the outskirts of Orlando.
You can tell it's an old established part of town by the size of the trees.
Through the brick framed entry is a standard hallway, that empties into a large cavernous central room with a fireplace. The upstars bedrooms run along a balcony overlooking the full sized pool table. Through the glass doors, in the adjoining great room, is the swimming pool, jacuzzi and back yard, nicely lit for the holidays. I've often wondered if there's a "batcave" in the basement. But then, few people in Central Florida have basements.
After parking my car in the circular drive, you can best believe I'm not walking up to the front door with a pack of Zima in my hand.
But what do you bring to a Holiday party?
Certainly a bottle of some kind, but exactly what kind often depends on who they are...and who you are.
I think I've found a solution, that calls for a minimum of stress, and not a lot of out-of-pocket expense.
Saturday night, I will have a bottle of Georges Duboeuf's Beaujolais Nouveau in my hand.
It's a French wine that comes attached to a good story at no extra charge.
Every year, on the third Thursday of November, about a million cases of the newly bottled wine are shipped out of the Burgundy region of France, on to Paris and eventually to the entire world. When they're gone, there won't be any more for another year.
You don't need to know that it is made with a Gamay grape, produced by carbonic maceration, or that the real Georges Deboeuf is a well known negociant, who almost single-handedly began the whole Beaujolais Nouveau craze back in the mid 80's.
Just tell your friends that the bottle you are giving them is a "limited edition" of this year only, and that it must be enjoyed within a few weeks time.
It is definitely not a wine for snobby connisseurs, who can talk about the "nose", "mouth feel" or "chewiness" of a wine, without a hint of embarrassment.
Although, they might find it less than sophisticated, you and I (and, I suspect, most of your hosts or hostesses at those parties) will find it light and a bit fruity, especially when chilled. (Stick it in the fridge for about an hour, if you can, then let it sit for about 15-20 minutes once you've opened it.) One reviewer called it a red wine that is about as close to a white wine as you can get. In addition, the label itself is nice and festive.
You can probably find a bottle for between $7 and $10 at most liquor stores (although I bought a couple of bottles at my local Costco for around $8).
A couple of years ago, I brought a bottle to a real "Hollywood Party" in Los Angeles, at the $10 million home of a script writer and his producer wife.
They seemed very pleased.
Since I found them to be a tremendously nice, genuine couple, I never got the feeling they were "just being polite".
So give this little French wine, with the interesting story, a try... I guarantee it will go over better than the Zima.