This story is from MSNBC Sydney Spies - Today People
By Michael Inbar
TODAY.com contributor
updated 1/9/2012 9:25:33 AM ET
Teen in revealing yearbook photo flap: ‘It’s artistic’
Aspiring model, 18, objects to fellow students’ decision to reject the photo she submitted
18-year-old Sydney Spies wants a future in modeling, and she figured she would make that clear with her senior picture in her high school yearbook.
But the Durango, Colo., prospective graduate found herself embroiled in controversy when her school’s yearbook editors put the kibosh on running a photo of Sydney posing provocatively in a black shawl and short yellow skirt that exposed plenty of skin.
Sydney and her mother Miki Spies are butting heads with the yearbook staff and school administration over a case they believe smacks of censorship, and they appeared live on TODAY Monday to make their case that Sydney should be able to represent herself the way she wants in the annals of her school’s history.
“I honestly think (the picture) describes who I am,” Sydney told Matt Lauer in an exclusive interview. “I’m an outgoing person and I really do think it’s artistic.” read more from Today.com...
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This is from LasVegasBuffetClub
Wow, tough call. The school has standards. The girl’s trying to bust out because she know’s she might have it. A girls gotta do what a girls gotta do, so I’ve heard. Good luck girl. WOW!
I was watching one of those stations that have the member, money-drives and saw, more importantly, heard this guy playing the guitar. Without sounding too much like a little girl, Ohh Myy Godd! I can barely remember being so impressed listening to a guitarist for the first time. Maybe Django Reinhardt or (going way back,) Andres Segovia were two guitarists who were as impressive.
Check out his long, slim fingers fingers…
Anyway Tommy Emmanuel must be considered one of the very best pop/jazz/rock/blues/finger-style picker guitarists in the world,,, if not the best.
If I’m the last one to discover his music, just like Columbus discovering America, tough t—y.
This video is from LasVegasBuffetClub.Com. The screaming ghosts and bones in chains video was produced in a cold basement – Halloween 2008.
The classic tune is Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s Monster Mash, from 1962. “The “Monster Mash” single reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart on October 20 of that year, just in time for Halloween. It has been a perennial holiday favorite ever since.” – Wiki
*”When I was in high school cruising in my ’58 on a Saturday night, I was knocked out by the drumming in this tune; it still holds up after all these years!” WC
Pickett was an aspiring actor who sang with a band called The Cordials at night while going to auditions during the day. One night, while performing with his band, Pickett did a monologue in imitation of horror movie actor Boris Karloff while performing The Diamonds’, “Little Darlin'”. The audience loved it and fellow band member Lenny Capizzi encouraged Pickett to do more with the Karloff imitation.[]
Pickett and Capizzi composed “Monster Mash” and recorded it with Gary S. Paxton, Leon Russell, Johnny McCrae, Rickie Page, and Terry Berg, credited as “The Crypt-Kickers”. The song was partially inspired by Paxton’s earlier novelty hit “Alley Oop”, as well as by the Mashed Potato dance craze of the era.[] A variation on the Mashed Potato was danced to “Monster Mash”, in which the footwork was the same but monster gestures were made with the arms and hands. *Mel Taylor, drummer for The Ventures claimed to play on this, and that fact is repeated many places, including Taylor’s N.Y. Times obituary.[]
The song is narrated by a mad scientist whose monster, late one evening, rises from a slab to perform a new dance. The dance becomes “the hit of the land” when the scientist throws a party for other monsters. The producers came up with several low-budget but effective sound effects for the recording. For example, the sound of a coffin opening was imitated by a rusty nail being pulled out of a board. The sound of a cauldron bubbling was actually water being bubbled through a straw, and the chains rattling were simply chains being dropped on a tile floor. Pickett also impersonated horror film actor Bela Lugosi as Dracula with the lyric “Whatever happened to my Transylvania Twist?”[] Wikipedia
The next video includes the entire Monster Mash song (with a few minor embellishments) by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt Kickers. The accompanying video from YouTube is from SoulRocket’s channel.
Original post from AP – Thursday, July 21, 2011 | 11:05 a.m.
The Associated Press
YouTube Video is from brad88ford.
Las Vegas headliner Marie Osmond and dozens of showgirls are protesting resort fees charged at many Las Vegas hotels.
Osmond and the roughly 50 performers from the Jubilee! show at Bally’s Las Vegas hotel-casino marched on the Las Vegas Strip Thursday morning to promote Caesars Entertainment’s no fee policy.
Caesars Entertainment claims its no-fees policy saves travelers $3 million per month.
Las Vegas resort fees are usually not included in an advertised room rate. They cover hotel amenities ranging from fitness center access and internet service to valet parking.
The event Thursday morning was dubbed a gesture of solidarity with the American consumer.
Magicians Penn & Teller and other entertainers also joined the protest.
Don’t mean to up-stage the Guitar Center boys, however,
I was searching YouTube for Andres Segovia when I discovered this brilliant, passionate guitarist. She hails from Sardinia, Italy, is young and beautiful, and plays with an impeccable technique. I thought – with one exception being Charo – that one had to be an old-man like Segovia to play like this. I guess Segovia was once young also. Seems like I’ll always know him as that classy, suit-wearing old-man who was – if not still is – the greatest classical guitarist in the history of the world.
Young ladies (or young-men) like this experience a great euphoria. Their music will give them great comfort throughout their lives. Classical guitar performance is not unlike transcendental meditation. If you click the Segovia video you’ll see Andres Segovia (around 4:26) in position as a perfect Buddha. That is to say that he looks like a Buddha figure in meditation. What a lovely man he was.
This is reprint of an older post, from around May of this year, however I thought YOU may have missed the demise of the Sahara.
This is very important news, for Las Vegites. After all, this is like Las Vegas loosing an arm or a leg.
Sahara Hotel - August 1954
BY HOWARD STUTZ
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Posted: May 14, 2011 | 8:52 p.m.
Updated: May 15, 2011 | 1:10 p.m.
In it’s day, the Sahara was Las Vegas’ epicenter.
Peter Villalobos would know.
For almost 35 years, he manned the Strip hotel’s front desk.
He watched the parade of celebrities and the pseudocelebrities.
He supervised thousands of hotel check-ins for high rollers and want-to-be high rollers.
Villalobos will be at his front desk terminal Monday when the Sahara’s final guest checks out at around noon. The nearly 60-year-old Strip resort will cease operations two hours later, a victim of both the recession and of progress.
Sahara owners SBE Entertainment of Los Angeles and private equity firm Stockbridge Real Estate of San Francisco acquired the hotel-casino in 2007 from the family of the late casino pioneer William Bennett. The new owners had hopes of breathing new life into the resort. They have not announced plans for the 18-acre corner of the Strip and Sahara Avenue.
In March, SBE said it was “no longer economically viable” to operate the Sahara.
GOING OUT WITH DIGNITY
Last week, Arash Azarbarzin, president of SBE’s hotel division, who has overseen the Sahara since the company took control, said the goal was to close the Strip resort “quietly and with dignity.”
His thoughts have been with employees like Villalobos, who remained loyal to the property, even as the city’s two-decade building boom added megaresorts that dwarfed the aged, 1,720-room Sahara.
Villalobos gave Azarbarzin a firm handshake last week and thanked him for the four years that SBE kept the property operating. The year SBE took over, the company spent about $2 million to refurbish and make cosmetic changes to the Sahara’s public areas. SBE never operated the casino; that was done by Navegante Group read more…
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Sahara Marquee
From ClassicLasVegas.SquareSpace.Com
Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn Hotel History / The Swinging Sahara Hotel History – 1950s
The Swinging Sahara Hotel History – 1950s
Post-WWII Las Vegas must have looked very inviting. Men with vision were coming into town to build hotels to cater to Americans hungry to travel after the rationing and sacrifices of the War. In less than ten years, there were five hotels, the El Rancho Vegas, Hotel Last Frontier, the Fabulous Flamingo, the Thunderbird and Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn built on the two-lane highway that led to Fremont Street.
Though some locals wondered where all the people would come from to fill the new resorts, the men with vision kept assuring everyone they would come.
Fred Schivo was a long-time gamer who had the idea for the Club Bingo, a 300-seat bingo parlor. He had to find investors that would be willing to take the financial plunge. He lucked out when he met Milton Prell from Butte, Montana. Prell had operated the “30 Club” in Butte but like many other gambling visionaries of the day he relocated to the friendly climes of Las Vegas in the 1940s. Though not as well known today as others such as Wilbur Clark and Del Webb, Prell nonetheless, made an impact on Las Vegas.
Club Bingo opened on a rainy day, July 24th, 1947. In addition to the bingo parlor there were a few other games of chance but the Club Bingo had a reputation for fine food in its Bonanza Room. There were no hotel rooms, the Club Bingo was just a club for gambling, fine dining and they had a small showroom that showcased the talented Dorothy Dandridge, comedian Stan Irwin and the Treniers.
Milton Prell soon realized that the future of the Las Vegas Strip was in having a resort hotel that catered to the tourists swarming in from Southern California. That meant financing the building of a major hotel
Located on the east side of the Highway and directly across from the El Rancho Vegas, the Club Bingo had a prime location. In the years ahead, Prell would also build the Lucky Strike and the Mint Hotel on Fremont Street but it was the construction of the Sahara that led to the creation of the Sahara-Nevada Corporation which he would ultimately sell to Del Webb.
Prell approached Dallas financial wizard A. Pollard Simon with plans for 276 two-story units. Simon agreed to go ahead with the Sahara project despite the fact he was also helping finance Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn. Local air-conditioning contractor Al Wild introduced Prell to Del Webb. Webb had just finished working on the Fabulous Flamingo. Wild had known Webb since 1935. Ultimately, according to Wild, Webb, Prell and Simon agreed to a “cost plus” arrangement that included a percentage of stock (20% it was later learned) in the new hotel be given to Webb as partial payment for his services.
The architect was Max Maltzmann and the designer was Albert Parvin. Maltzmann had been working in Los Angeles since the 1920s. Architecturally, according to Alan Hess, “the Sahara followed the basic partner of the Desert Inn and the Thunderbird. It featured a tall brick pylon at the entry which anchored the low wings that spun outward from its center like a pinwheel.” The motif was similar to the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix by Frank Lloyd Wright. There the sculptural elements of the textile block provided ornament. At the Sahara, the signage became the ornament.
The theme was North Africa. Statues of plastic camels and Arabs dotted the facade. Inside there was the Congo Room (the showroom), the Casbah Lounge and the Caravan Room. All that seemed to be missing was the Cafe Americain from Casablanca. Life-size models of African warriors, spears held high, flanked the Congo Room entrance. A nomadic caravan including camels was placed out front on the lawn.
The Caravan Room looked out over the pool terrace. Like all the other hotels back then, the Sahara was basically a motel in form. It had a low main building with a lobby and a casino in the front and the rooms to the sides. The glassy restaurants such as the Caravan Room looked out not only on the pool area but the well manicured and landscaped lawns. Lucius Beebe gushed “its twenty acres of landscaped ground with rare blossoms and shrubs to make even Boston’s Public Gardens look to its tulips” read more, virtually all about it with note-links, photos and more.
NEW MATERIAL HERE – REVISED, Friday May 27th at 10:00 PM Mountain time.
Bob (Robert Zimmerman) Dylan
From The LA Times Music Blog
Bob Dylan turns 70: ‘I’m younger than that now’
May 23, 2011 | 11:59 pm
Somehow, a chorus of “Happy Birthday” just doesn’t cut it for Bob Dylan, the Poet Laureate of his generation, today as he hits the milestone of 70. First and foremost, Bob didn’t write it.
Not surprisingly, the momentous occasion is being observed in many quarters. Rolling Stone magazine has devoted the cover of its latest issue to him, for a story listing the 70 greatest Bob Dylan songs as selected.
Tonight at the Grammy Museum here in Los Angeles, author and historian Sean Wilentz (“Bob Dylan in America”) and journalist-author Mikal Gilmore will lead a musical and philosophical exploration of Dylan’s legacy following a screening of Murray Lerner’s documentary “The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live at the Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965.”
And—gulp!—AARP magazine, the publication of the American Assn. of Retired Persons, also has a Dylan cover piece in which the editors coaxed Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Judy Collins, Mavis Staples and Martin Scorsese into writing a few words in recognition of their peer/hero and/or friend.
Not to be outdone, Pop & Hiss views the occasion as a chance to offer up a salutary bonus episode of Dylan’s brilliant radio series, “Theme Time Radio Hour.” Number-conscious guy that he is, Dylan signed on with XM (now Sirius XM) satellite radio and delivered exactly 100 shows from 2006-2009, each devoted to a broad swath of songs reflecting a given theme, such as the Devil, Christmas, Cadillacs, Jail. Then it was time for he and those famous boot heels to be wanderin’. (TTRH had still been part of the Sirius XM lineup in reruns until, ironically, this month. It’s been taken off the air to make room for the Earle Bailey show.)
So with all humility, here’s a chronologically organized playlist of 70 minutes’ worth of Dylan songs spanning nearly 50 years, songs that reference various facets of age, a topic that’s surfaced repeatedly in his music over the decades: birth, death, youth, maturity, fate, heaven, hell, existentialism, spirituality, generational differences, paradise, past, present and future. read more from The LA Times on line…
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I’m going to add to the story. I was still living with my parents when I first heard Dylan on AM radio. I don’t remember the song, maybe “Subterranian Homesick Blues?” Whatever it was the jacket was on the wall above my bed and I listened constantly. It was like the second coming. I’d been through Elvis and that was really cool. Dylan did it again. I listened – and played and listened and played from the Dylan music that appeared shortly after the “Minneapolis hotel tapes” as I understand through his 70th Birthday.
I still have questions. How did he do it? Where did the music/poetry come from? Knowing Dylan’s apparent clear honesty and crystal integrity why did he change his name? Did he have an issue with his being Jewish?
One word to describe Robert Bob Dylan Zimmerman: BRILLIANT! The closest I ever got to Dylan was at The Tropicana Motor Hotel in Hollywood in the 70s. I was checking in and he was checking out. My understanding was that he came down from Malibu with his kids. I recall that he was driving a station-wagon. Chuck E Weiss and Tom Waits were there…
THE GIVERS AND THE TAKERS
From WIKI:
“At this point, music manager Albert Grossman began to take an interest in Dylan’s business affairs. Grossman persuaded Dylan to transfer the publishing rights of his songs from Duchess Music, whom he had signed a contract with in January 1962, to Witmark Music, a division of Warner’s music publishing operation. Dylan signed a contract with Witmark on July 13, 1962.[18] Unknown to Dylan, Grossman had also negotiated a deal with Witmark. This gave Grossman fifty percent of Witmark’s share of the publishing income generated by any songwriter Grossman had brought to the company. This “secret deal” resulted in a bitter legal battle between Dylan and Grossman in the 1980s.”
Some say that the beginning of the END will start on May 21, 2011.
Plan your Rapture parties now, if you wait it will be too late.
“Judgment Day begins and the Rapture on May 21, 2011… The end of the world on October 21, 2011… Are you crazy? You’re just another one of those lunatics like Nostradamus or the Mayans who say the apocalypse will be in 2012 and all the other crazy, absurd people who have predicted dates for the end of the world throughout history only to be proven wrong each and every time. And doesn’t the Bible say that no man knows the day and hour? You’re just playing on the fears of people because you’re some kind of a sick control freak or something.” read more from May-212011.Com
First of all, Cinco De Mayo has nothing whatsoever to do with a Fifth of Mayonnaise.
Las Vegas will be helping Hispanics celebrate Mexico’s victory over French forces – May 5 -8, 2011
From WIKI [Brackets are Wiki’s.]
“Not to be confused with Mexican Independence Day, which occurs on September 16[].”
“Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for “fifth of May”) is a holiday held on May 5 that commemorates the Mexican army’s unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.[2][3] It is celebrated primarily in the state of Puebla and in the United States.[4][5][6][7] While Cinco de Mayo sees limited significance in Mexico itself, the date is observed nationwide mostly in the United States as a celebration of Mexican heritage and pride.[8] “Cinco de Mayo is not a Mexican holiday—it is an American Civil War holiday, created spontaneously by Mexicans and Latinos living in California who supported the fragile cause of defending freedom and democracy during the first years of that bloody war between the states.”[9] Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s Independence Day,[10] the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico.” read more…
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