Cheerful Note: This is the closest I’ve ever come to a “Merry Christmas!” gift post.
Note on links: For this post, in my mellow mundane life, I surely have plenty of time to place super-quick (for you) colored links, but no-o-o-o. I have NO desire to offer links on a silver platter, and no felt need to encourage search engines (SEO) to find me.
(As explained in No Links is Good Links archived July 2012)
Hello Reader,
Got gay links?
I once did an essay on bringing “brights” into work and play, such as sneaking a rubber fish into the water cooler, called Brights in a Grey Life, archived December 2013.
Similarly, sometimes I like to brighten my posts at the end by footnoting a link. Most of my foot-links are gay, some are grey.
In order to easily find my links again, I have slowly gathered most of them to this one blog page, trying to group similar links together. I thought you might like this post, so I have added some partial explanations.
(Complete explanations would be found in the original essays)
Of course, the comforting moon has a dark side, and some of the links are darkly sad. An example would be this top link,
(I assume you know to copy and paste into your search or website header)
a lengthy news article, complete with photographs, about an award-winning teen hero, who is bullied
Homeland Songs
Charlotte Church sings I Vow to Thee My Country
The Pogues sing Dirty Old Town
Billy Bragg sings Jerusalem
Billy Bragg sings A Full English Brexit song (a pun on ‘full English breakfast,’ as distinguished from a ‘small continental breakfast’)
At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival,
Pictures of Road Signs, hacked by an artist
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-46139025
Doctor Who, three songs without a chorus
In a tune, the purpose for having a chorus is like why the 6 o’clock TV news has an anchor: For the comfort of returning to something known. Mornings while shaving, I like to hear three lyrical videos in succession. Because these songs don’t have a “proper” chorus, and are repetitive too, they might seem boring to you.
But not to me, not when I am deeply moved by the episodes the songs are from.
- Abigail’s Song, a live stage version by an opera singer
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGilpd0e4s
(… And for my preferred version of Abigail’s Song that does show the plot
(2) in Latin, here’s the song the gentle Ood sing for the tenth doctor to “sing him to sleep” at the end of his story.
(3) “The Long Song” with still photos from the episode where religious people sing. Their song had been constantly sung for generations…
The sad, defiant words on screen at the end were by the doctor, “nothing left, only me,” as the last of his kind. He’s “the last” because he killed his entire home planet—men, women and children—to save the universe from the Daleks. Hence he is not quite sane. He often tries to have human companions with him so he doesn’t go totally mad… and also to make sure he doesn’t become emotionally closed off and dead to the universe. Song link:
Songs On Stage
On stage, a seasoned Jonie Mitchel (Companion of the Order of Canada) sings Both Sides Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQSlH-LLTQ
At the proms, Dame Judy Dench sings Send in the Clowns
At the proms, from War of the Worlds, two very powerful songs, with some narration by Sir Richard Burton
*** *** Start Doctor Who *** ***
Context for award-worthy Speech clip:
War is grim: Earlier in space and time is the War Doctor, played by John Hurt. In his life where he destroys his home planet, he is never given a number because his later incarnations want to forget they were ever him. He once met Doctors 10 and 11 together: “the one who regrets and the one who forgets” (the number of children present on that final day)
Speech clip, four minutes, (filmed in one take)
With his war doctor background, one of the most powerful speeches is by the 12th doctor, the “Zygon Inversion speech,” where the Zygon in human guise, Bonnie, symbolizes all sorts of violent revolutionaries… including Quebec FLQ “pure wool” separatists who won’t admit (according to former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau)
that other Quebecers, not “pure wool,” would some day want to separate from Quebec in turn.
I grew up hearing periodic tests of atomic air raid sirens: During the speech clip, two horrible opposing boxes, set up by the doctor, symbolize the “The Button” of the cold war, as well as symbolizing every “go/no go” point of “peace/or war.”
Regarding the episode and the speech:
Giovanni Magnus
I think this episode was broadcast at just the right time; following the Paris Attacks and on the day before Remembrance Sunday. With so much talk of revolution and vengeance, something like this hits home.
*** *** End Doctor Who *** ***
Youtube songs
England swings. The song that starts, “Pendulum swings like a pendulum do, bobbies on bicycles two by two,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip6pHbAmjiU
Music Video by Winnipeg’s Crash Test Dummies
Mmm mmm mmm mmm
Music video, Superman’s Song
For isolation, a Simon and Garfunkel song
One-page funeral article on a very small service for a writer once very well known, Eric Nicol
https://bcbooklook.com/2012/09/16/authors-remembering-eric-nicol/
Speech, impromptu, with music, by Robert (Bobby) Kennedy, on the night Martin Luther King was murdered.
Special note: Even in our 21st century, I can still feel sad from knowing that if Senator Robert Kennedy had lived, and become president, then he would have got us out of Vietnam. Swiftly. Without any patience for stupid well-meaning excuses about how hard and lengthy it would be to extricate such a mass of men and material.
Note: a John Denver song includes the lines, “and your mother called last Friday, Sunshine made her cry;” the music from the movie Sunshine is used under the above speech. I think the film was first shown on TV, but I forget, it was all so long ago. I read the book, back in the day.
Song, of Abraham, Martin and John
Lengthy blog page about a lonely “digital nomad” world traveler, to which I linked for the sake of a small quote about belonging, near the end.
https://www.fluentin3months.com/vagabond/
Anya, with no last name:
The four video links here are in my essay, Anya, Friend of Buffy
(But I should have called it Death of Anya to get hits and match my Death of Buffy piece)
where I explain WHY Anya fears bunnies, and why that fear leads to her friend Buffy fighting her with a sword.
Note: Anya was born human, and is finally human again, but after being a vengeance demon for about a millennium, she has forgotten mortality, hence her monologue:
Anya, ‘death of Joyce’ monologue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ96c7IOIPQ
Very short light Song, of Anya’s paranoia of bunnies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLMaSII_URU
Light Duet, by Anya and her live-in fiance “I’ll never tell”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooD4mmmYrTg
Anya’s cheery upbeat death song, from living with her fiancé, reminding us that after many horrible centuries, she finally had a happy life, with dreams.
Drama clip,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from just outside the doorway, overhears the two grown men in her life, her librarian father-figure and her vampire boyfriend-figure, state the grim, iron prophecy that she is to be killed. So she goes into shock, laughing an unnatural laugh.
(Incidentally, my most popular essay, by hit count, is Death of Buffy from January 2012
Youtube
Bonnie Rae, with Bruce Hornsby
I can’t make you love me, if you don’t
Sting, from a few years before the Berlin Wall ‘came a-tumbling down’:
Russians (“What can I do to save my boy, from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”)
(Note for nonChristian readers: The “tumbling down” phrase comes from a rousing spiritual song, which I memorized as a boy, where “fought” is pronounced as “fit”: Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the wall came a-tumbling down.)
Lengthy essay with photographs. A writer who has been to Dachau takes his daughter to see an empty old missile silo and talks to her on the drive back, without meaning to scare her.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/12/21/a-month-of-writers-day-seventeen-jay-lake/
News Story, interview on television
London Marathon staff being abusive to slower runners
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-48130690/london-marathon-pacesetter-says-slower-runners-abused-on-course
Trailhead for news stories, where a pretty young actress, who has lived all her life in her dear mother country of Taiwan, on the island of Formosa, hopes her country would never be annexed by big China, not like how big Germany did an Anschluss of Austria.
(The annex was during the Third Reich; Austria, with its German-speaking culture, regained independence after WWII)
The link was made regarding ideology in an essay on how to hack together a speech.
Prose, read aloud
British Actor David Tennant, in his own voice, reads his forward to the autobiography of actress Elizabeth Sladen, better known worldwide as Sarah Jane Smith. Takes six minutes and has lots of stills. “She inspired absolute devotion from everyone who worked with her.”
Lengthy Open Letter to Brazil, calling on Brazilians to reform because of shortcomings including
(—but my lawyer insists I add ‘but not limited to’ because he says you might not know what the word “including” means—)
the sort of “amoral familism” we see (or once saw) in southern Italy, but not in northern Italy.
Youtube of a lengthy memorial at my club for Michael Cody DTM
For ease of download by dial-up, my blog has no bells or whistles, no photographs of me. But as for what I look like: Near the end that’s me on camera asking about Michael’s belt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLC5VizmSk&feature=em-upload_owner
Sean Crawford
Calgary,
Merry Christmas readers,
2019
Footnotes:
~Today’s blog has a lighter page of URL’s. You may have seen the “heavier, darker” sequel to this post which was archived back in September 2019.
~How queer, to think the “new, exciting” World Wide Web is no longer “new.” In fact, social media-wise, I have heard that Facebook is now only for the “older generation.” (People over 30)
Back when the web was exotic, newspapers would feature reviews of URLs.
(And I suppose even the folks with computers would have FOMO)
It’s been years since they reviewed Internet sites. Now they only review video games.
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