Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Often on Tuesday I try to post something to show the wide variety of material available to encourage cutting expose to modern media. The beloved Editor of the Prophecy podcast blog, Pam Dewey, shared this YouTube video on a private forum. Here is her introduction to it: 

I don't care if you "normally" like bluegrass or country music or the like at all. It's impossible not to tap your toe at this amazing ensemble (linked below) playing the old classic, starting with Earl Scruggs and Steve Martin. (Yes, the comedian Steve Martin.) Scruggs died in 2012, and an online eulogy of him had the following to say, leading up to the video.

"The great bluegrass banjo player Earl Scruggs died Wednesday at the age of 88. Shortly afterward, Steve Martin sent out a tweet calling Scruggs the most important banjo player who ever lived. “Few players have changed the way we hear an instrument the way Earl has,” wrote Martin earlier this year in The New Yorker, “putting him in a category with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix.”

Be sure to read Earl Scruggs obituary in the NY Times if you have even the slightest interest in his interesting life. 

Another Popular Uprising

This Almost Makes Me Want to Watch the News Again! The various popular uprisings keep spreading--now it is the Ukraine. 

The issue is whether to develop economically with the EU or with the Russian equivalent. No doubt the "gut feeling" in the West is that they should go with the EU. I am not sure I agree. If the choice is some sort of trade agreement like Norway has with the EU through what is called EFTA, then this would be my obvious choice. But that does not seem to be the offer on the table. Russia may have offered a genuinely better deal centered around fuel subsidies.

The EU has many, many issues that I will talk about soon. While you wait for that I offer this, the winning song from the Ukraine in the Eurovision contest in 2004. The singer is prominent in the protest now occurring.  

(Full disclosure: my father-in-law is Ukrainian and my wife is Russian. Such ethnic combinations are common in Russia, and the large number of ethnic Russians orphaned by the end of the Soviet Union is a big part of the crisis.)

There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner

Violin, Yes A Violin

A Mellow Sarah Brighman

Even after watching this I still like Sarah Brightman.