SATURDAY NIGHT THE LEVELLERS, JOHN MURPHY, GUSTAV MAHLER.

I'm sorry for the light blogging last week, but the work was excruciating. I think I should hire extra personnel, but 1° the insane labor costs imposed by the Belgian government and 2° the difficulty of finding qualified personnel, are holding me back. Otherwise, there were a lot of good topics around last week. Hopefully, next week will allow some more time for bloggin'.

The Levellers with One Way, from their second album Levelling the Land (1991). This single is once again proof that you don't have to be mentally sane to make decent music (the Brighton-based Levellers are some kind of anticapitalist econutters).





John Murphy, British film music composer, is as old as I am but a bit more famous.





This number, In the house, in a heartbeat, is from the soundtrack of the 2002 zombie movie 28 Days Later, which was directed by Danny Boyle and casts a.o. the Irish actor Cillian Murphy (not related to the composer, at least not that I know of). The movie was quite good; Cillian and John Murphy and Danny Boyle would work together on another project yet, the 2007 sci-fi Sunshine, which I also recommend, although the idea of re-igniting the Sun with humanity's biggest H-bomb ever is totally ludicrous imho, given that even a dying Sun, like in the movie, remains a massive fusion reactor itself, that dwarfs anything and anything and anything humanity would ever be capable of.


A couple of weeks back, I posted a Youtube video with Mahlers 5th Symphony's Adagietto. I was not entirely pleased with that version. I found a much better one. Here it is:





Breathtaking. Can you believe these are students???


Nite.



MFBB.

PROP IN THE JET AGE: THE DOUGLAS A-1 SKYRAIDER.

Designed by Ed Heinemann of Douglas Aircraft Company during WWII, as a successor to types as the Helldiver and the Avenger, the Skyraider, nicknamed Able Dog, would prove so successful that it was still used extensively, and with success, in the Vietnam War.





These aircraft were HUGE. Flying trucks, actually. Had to be, with all that armor, which allowed them to take terrible punishment from the ground and still fly. But, they weren't sitting ducks for enemy planes either. In 'Nam, Skyraiders were even credited with downing a Mig-17:






MFBB.