CBS2’s Christine Sloan reports on ten-year-old blind twin sisters Tianna and Gianna Johnson who had their one Christmas wish granted this year — to give a special dog with disabilities a loving home.
Enter Carmella, who suffers from limb abnormalities due to abuse. The sisters understand what it’s like to be different from others, and how to not just survive, but thrive in a situation like this.
You’ve got a good 5 or 6 months until most of you hear the welcome sound of crickets at night on a regular basis. But thanks to Jim Wilson, you can hear them over and over again, whenever you want. Below a regular recording of chirping crickets, and the other is that same chirping slowed down. Beware of the second batch. Seriously.
“Pump It Up”, the 1978 song by Elvis Costello, originally appeared on Costello’s second album This Year’s Model, which was the first he recorded with the backing group the Attractions. The song was written in reaction to the excesses of the Stiffs Live Tour.
https://youtu.be/08ksGMy4hLo
Steve Martin does his famous Balloon Animals skit on The Muppet Show, a veritable landmark in comedy and television. He’ll make the animals, but won’t blow them up, ha!
https://youtu.be/HaMTXCHkZb0
Here’s a vintage 1983 clip of Mark Hamill talking about the future of Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars saga. Spilers, maybe.
For many music fans, our first experiences with debt entrapment were with Columbia House, the mail-order service that, once upon a time, would sell us 12 CDs for a penny and then force us to buy more at a crazy mark-up. Improbably, Columbia House only just shut down this past August. And now, it looks like it might already be coming back again, this time to capitalize on the vinyl boom. The Wall Street Journal reports that John Lippman, the man who bought the company out of bankruptcy this month, is hoping to relaunch it. “You can see a yearning and an interest to try a new format,” he says, and that new format he’s talking about is really an old one. Lippman, a former Lehman Brothers exec, bought the company at auction for about $1.5 million. He’s hoping to use social media to get millennials interested in buying big stacks of vinyl via mail.
Va Stereogum
Sesame Street’s return to television starts January 16 at new home HBO, and they’ve released a new trailer for the classic children’s series, which features famous faces who have appeared on the program in the past, including Jon Hamm, Pharrell Williams, Tina Fey, Usher, and Gwen Stefani.
In addition to the next five seasons of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop will produce a Sesame Street Muppet spinoff series, as well as develop a new original educational series for children. HBO has also licensed over 150 library episodes of Sesame Street. The all new series will also be made available to PBS and its member stations after the first window. Episodes of Sesame Street will continue to be made available, uninterrupted, as part of the PBS KIDS service on PBS member stations.
This week saw LCD Soundsystem release a Christmas song with no advance notice. Radiohead also released a storming song, an epic track that was written and produced as the title track of the new James Bond film, Spectre. That opportunity eventually went to Sam Smith, but Thom Yorke and company released the song as a free download on their Soundcloud account. Nice Star Wars reference, too.
Last year we were asked to write a theme tune for the Bond movie Spectre.
Yes we were. It didn’t work out, but became something of our own, which we love very much.
As the year closes we thought you might like to hear it.
Merry Christmas. May the force be with you.
Willie Dynamite is a 1974 American blaxploitation film, starring Roscoe Orman, Diana Sands, Thalmus Rasulala, Joyce Walker, and was released by Universal Pictures. The eponymous Willie Dynamite is a pimp in New York City, who strives to be number one in the city. As he is trying to do so, a social worker named Cora, is trying to change his ways – as well as those of the women who work for him – for the better. It was the first film produced by the Zanuck-Brown Company.
Sony Pictures has released the international trailer for I Saw the Light the upcoming Hank Williams biography that stars Tom Hiddleston as the country star and Elizabeth Olsen as his wife. The film is based on “Hank Williams: The Biography” by music journalist Colin Escott and was adapted for film by Marc Abraham.
The film tells the story of Williams, the iconic, influential country singer and songwriter of the 1940’s and early 50’s whose meteoric rise and fall, including his death at age 29, has become part of American folklore. Writer-director Marc Abraham has created a compelling, historically accurate narrative of Hank’s career that examines his tormented creative genius and the turbulent domestic life that inspired him to write some of his best-known songs. By literally going back in time, you see Hank as he was, living his life on his terms, battling his demons and ultimately creating music for the ages.
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Eric Alper is a 6-time nominee for Publicist of the Year during Canadian Music Week and has overseen the publicity campaigns for over 183 JUNO Award-nominated albums (and 16 in 2025), 45 Grammy-nominated albums, including 47 JUNO Award, 58 Canadian Folk Music Award, 126 Maple Blues Award-winning albums and is also truly honoured to work with some of the biggest and most important artists of our time.
Contact me: eric@thatericalper.com
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