3 posts tagged “anne murray”
Random Observations:
Time Marches On: You know you're not in a major metropolitan city when the big local news of the day is: our Government Leaders have found a home for Rochester's "Clock of the Nations." I blogged about it in October, when the city first unveiled plans to flatten dowdy old Midtown Plaza to put up a new office building. Now, before the wrecking ball turns the metro mall into a masonry memory, they're going to dismantle ye olde Clock of Nations and reassemble
It's nice to see them preserving this anachronistic attempt to replicate early-'60s Disneyana. I just hope it gets a thorough cleaning. Nothing like seeing Latvian puppet goatherds swirl about in a tiny cloud of dust.
Have Gun, Will Unravel: at the office yesterday, the College Student called to tell me that her college, Alfred University, was under lockdown. Someone had spotted a student wandering the campus with a weapon. She lives off-campus now, but wanted to keep us from worrying.
The lockdown was lifted a few hours later, when someone realized the firearm in question was a Nerf gun. Yep, it's easy to mistake a neon orange and lime green sponge launcher for a Glock-9. Happens all the time.
Turns out the "gunman" in question was a participant in Alfred's favorite pastime, "Zombies vs. Humans." A game in which our very same College Student is a frequent zombie. Or human. Hard to tell, sometimes. Nonetheless, the dean has halted this campus-wide game. Which I guess is a perfect excuse to drag out the old "Dungeons & Dragons" paraphernalia. BANG!
My Town's Other Name: If your city was the setting for a popular TV series, what would it's name be?
This came up today when a colleague kept referring to Rochester -- a high-tech, university-laden community with several Fortune 500 companies (and a big honking clock, don't forget!) -- as "Mayberry."
What? I could've been getting my haircuts at Floyd's? Why didn't anyone tell me?
Okay, I get it. Rochester is not Chicago, New York, or Bradford, PA. (Where someone once shot at me. Another story for another night.) But it's not exactly a one squad car hamlet, either.
So, what TV city could your town double as? The Simpsons' Springfield? Gotham City, where the Batman parks his cowl? The nameless southern California town where "Scrubs" is set? I want to know.
Says me: The best female pop singer on the planet did not win a Juno award this week. But Anne Murray got a little revenge, after the Juno Awards people first "accidentally" left her off the list of nominees this year. She got a trio going at the Juno telecast. I haven't been able to get this sucker to play correctly on my computer, but visit this Juno website, click under "Performances," and see if you can get the Anne Murray/Sarah Brightman/Jann Arden cut to play correctly.
You know you're getting, ah, mature when the performers
We had to travel to Verona, NY to see Anne Murray, one of my favorite singers.
They have a casino at Turning Stone. It's easy to find. Just look for the people attached to their own oxygen tanks as they crank away at the video slot machines.
I don't get gambling. Not one bit. You're paying someone to take your money away. And, in this particular case, you're doing it in a smoky, noisy electronic arcade that makes Chuck E. Cheese seem like a monastery. Look around, and it quickly becomes evident that many customers around you shouldn't be placing bets when there's rent to be paid.
So, you're not seeing any photos of the casino floor. There are a couple of TV shows that will give you all those scenes.
I went looking for the aesthetic side of Turning Stone. So you're seeing high-priced Southwestern art and so on.
Oh, and Anne Murray did a wonderful show. But you know you're getting a little old when your favorite singer brings her grown-up daughter onstage for a couple of numbers -- and she's very good,
There's some odd reasoning in the Canadian music industry that compels them to release certain albums in Canada before they're released in the States. (I guess there's precedent for this, as the Beatles' earliest albums were introduced in England before I found them in Sam Goody stores on Long Island.)
We will not debate my musical tastes. I listen to everything from Springsteen to Sinatra to Sugarland. It makes me a little hard to follow. (That's par for the course.) But you should be glad you didn't know me when I thought Neil Diamond was god. Or when I traveled to three different cities -- Binghamton, New York City, and Rochester -- to
Jimmy Buffett's got his Parrotheads. I must be, what -- a Snowbird?
Anyway, the unreleased album at hand is Anne Murray's reportedly final album -- "Friends and Legends," a collection of duets, ranging from Nelly Furtado to Emmylou Harris to Dusty Springfield. And it won't be released in the U.S. 'til January.
So...
For now, you can listen to the album (no downloads) on this website.
