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Showing posts from April, 2019

"Sundays"

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Here's a memorable video recorded and posted as part of a "Music in the Streets of New Orleans" series I was working on that got zapped by the google+ blue meanies: A Second Line jazz funeral dancer somberly leads an imaginary procession march in the foreground as, "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" is sung at a St. Louis Cathedral Elementary School fund-raising in the French Quarter. The local singer & trumpet player dedicated his last song "to the memory of Whitney" Houston who had died from an accidental drowning the Saturday night-before. My "Music on Frenchmen Street" series was also exterminated by G+ Daleks but I'll be resurrecting it here best I can, beginning with things like this cool version of "House of the Rising Sun" I recorded at an iconic local music club on a late-Sunday night in New Orleans, enjoy (:  Andre' Bouvier & The Royal Bohemians, with George Deane, Sr. (electric bass), Suzi Leg

"Dancing Girls"

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     But, forget about "the Report" for a moment.  I'm here to complain -- again -- about Google-Plus deleting all my original content from cyberspace, how dare he, they, it, w/e Alphabet truly is [insert scary emoticon]....        For instance, my series on "Dancing Girls" showed great videos of people dancing to live music at the many local clubs I haunt just outside the walls of my "slave-quarters" that sits behind a grand Creole cottage in New Orleans' French Quarter tourist district (originally called La Vieux Carré or  the old square , in French).  I'll re-post those here from time to time, let's begin with this gem (: Here's some tourists & locals having fun dancing to the vocals & trumpet of the great Charlie Fardella and "The New Orleans Cottonmouth Kings" (John Rodli, jazz guitar; Robert Snow upright bass; violinist Matt Rhody; (will ID later the band's fill-ins tonight for Tom Saunders (bass sa

"The Mueller Report" ~postscript

      The "wait" finally ends at 11:30 a.m. on April 18, 2019, and a million trees are quickly harvested for paper that's fed into the printing presses running wild, through the nights, spitting out copies of the " Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election."    Already, masses of citizens are parsing paragraphs and speculating over the legal brief detailing "Findings of Facts and Law," as if it were a Shakespeare play....       I haven't read it yet (and when I do it will be online: save the trees!) although I worked in law many years (including summarizing federal court decisions for a major law-book publisher).       At first glance, however, I'd advise this pretender-POTUS "clown in the 'House" to pack-up and get out ... before his ass is put in stirrups. As predicted from the beginning some two years ago, fake- @POTUS @realDonaldTrump has copped the exact-same def

Testing the Waters....

Most mornings I watch C-Span's "Washington Journal" and, often, comment on issues via Twitter.  Here's what I mean: The bigger "story" is that hospitals are systematically "dumping" many of the 100,000 patients annually who acquire deadly infections while being treated or examined; to other hospitals, nursing homes, home-care, etc., to avoid the cost & responsibility of fixing what they broke. pic.twitter.com/cr2L6g0khR — La Vieux Carré Times (@thomas70116) April 18, 2019 Here's a related discussion from a year or more ago: Are doctors so "distracted" they forget to wash their hands, causing a hundred-thousand deaths from hospital-acquired infections every year? pic.twitter.com/yojfmlhW35 — La Vieux Carré Times (@thomas70116) August 13, 2017 =================================

"Slewfoot"

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     " Slewfoot " is one of hundreds of my series of stories that the google+ demons zapped.  It begins something like this: ~ There's always music in the streets of New Orleans at "Second Line" funeral marches, such as this one for local musician Mick "Slewfoot" McLaughlin:        Here's one of the many songs Mickey wrote and sang to tourists for 30 years.  It's a "love song" but not to his true love (named "Blue Eyes" in another song I'll post later).  ~ "It's a song 'for everybody who walks past me!'" Slewfoot excitedly once told me on one visit to his busker's "spot" at the Mississippi River, which flows just over the batture bordering the French Quarter tourist district, or Vieux Carre' ("old square')....

"canGogh"

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    "canGogh"  ~Here's something that's lost forever in the google+-sphere, a cool story I wrote about a New Orleans spray-paint artist who began on the sidewalks selling to tourists....  ~ It begins: " Album - google+  Photo: New Orleans' "Can Gogh" ~art by Hugo Montero  Here's one...."         That's it, the other words and photos are lost to google+ eternity.  Thanks, good going; will you google code monkeys jump into my grave just as fast-as you deleted my original content? (which you once gladly fed into your crawler).... And, folks, don't even think about clicking that Album - google+" link, it's a waste of your time anyway, goes to a dead link, to the google+ grave yard.  What insensitive blue meanies.... ~thomas balzac www.vieuxcarretimes.com

"Trixzey"

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" Trixzey " Perhaps having being evicted from a Google platform I finally was getting the hang of is causing this creative malaise; I'm not sure.  But -- in attempting to recreate my hundreds of "stories" posted on G+ (which, if you don't know, the google-gawds preemptively decided to take-down) -- I've found myself in a kind of funk, posting the vids I had recorded of local musician greats who are no longer with us.  This seems appropriate since, in essence, google-Daleks killed them a second time,  R.I.P. my friends.... Let's get this dirge going with  a few re-posts from links still lurking on google's search engine, but when clicked goes to their "ain't der no mo'" page (damn code rats, grr) Ah, Clarence! What an extraordinary reed-man! Here he is in early-2000 improvising, almost twisting his silver saxophone to shape notes around an original song by "Nervous Duane" Larson, on electric guitar. T

"F' U, G+!"

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Well, I reckon you have to "be there" to understand, but the mass-eviction of the Google-Plus community is enraging in many ways, sad in others; but mostly, criminal! G'damn'ed thieving Google-"god" nay, Judas!...  Who in hell "owns" G+, anyway, what's Alphabet's f'kin' Stock Market ticker symbol; I've got your number  GOOG/GOOGL and I'm gonna tank you, damn right! one day, just wait, you'll see, you'll be sorry ... damn right! Meanwhile, 'reckon I'll just have to learn another platform (Hello, Bloggers!) on which to post and link the  "News & Views" section of a personal online newspaper I'm developing, called La Vieux  Carré Times  I call it a " 'net-paper" and the prototype is located at www.vieuxcarretimes.com although -- presently -- the "News & Views" section is "under re-construction" (thanks to the Google+ blue meanies).   La  Vieux Carre