J.R. wrote:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHmdu_I_0zI

That rendition was amazing. I listened to it live on the radio on the Super Bowl broadcast as I drove straight through from Saluda County South Carolina back to Chicagoland in my traveling days when I rarely spent over four nights in one town.

I was approaching the Applachians at the South Carolina-North Carolina border, and heard the Whitney Houston rendition in my Honda Prelude as the sun was beginning to set.

At the moment it ended, I knew it was a classic.

I had goosebumps. Even from listening over my stock Honda speakers.

Crack cocaine is an insidious drug

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1QmeEdFOSc


One more view of that rendition.

Her passing was not quite a "where were you when President Kennedy died?" or "where were you when Challenger was lost?", but it's in the range of at least a gut hit of the eqiuivalent for the majority of Americans when we learned Pat Tillman was lost.

Here's my fave Whitney:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPHCThqqt0s

What was the gut hit ? She has been trying to kill herself for a long long time.

rusty2 wrote:What was the gut hit ? She has been trying to kill herself for a long long time.

Of course we all know that.

It was at least a slight gut hit, just the same.


I remember the days that I refused to watch CBS programming.

Charlie Sheen changed all that.



Tonight's Grammy's were carried off masterfully, for my tastes. A great intro with respect and admiration, with a firm line drawn early.....the appropriate praise and fun for the award winners, and then more respective stuff as the evening ended.

(Late edit, seeing Bruce Springsteen on stage with guitar along Paul McCartney with guitar was television worth watching....)

(I wish Charlie T could be my online editor and wordsmith)



(I was most pissed that most of you "back east" saw this programming three hours before my wife and I, even though the event started live at 5PM my time, just down the road about four hours.)


I will add that Whitney Houston had the best voice of any performing artist born in my lifetime, at least that I have heard.

It was a great show. But I missed the end, b/c I changed channels when that mess by Nicki Minaj came on. What the heck was that???

J.R. wrote:It was a great show. But I missed the end, b/c I changed channels when that mess by Nicki Minaj came on. What the heck was that???

I'm pretty sure you are referring to The Grammy's, and not her finger malfunction at The Super Bowl.

At the Grammy's, I'll just offer that she might have been offering her of the moment view of what we used to call "experimental theatre."

Back on the original subject of eating lobster.....



I steamed one tonight and had a mission to find and eat all of it's edible meat.

With a somewhat dry chardonnay against the melted butter dip.

I had always just tossed the lobster legs into the trash, but took a moment to search online and found a tip from a Boston Legal Seafood chef to take a wine bottle and roll the lobster meat out of each leg.

His tip worked, and it was good.


I told my wife that the lobster centered meal was her Valentines Day Eve starter.


Tomorrow we head to an Italian restaurant owned by three brothers born in Italy (imagine that).

Friday we are headed to Tahoe and a date to see a seemingly highly acclaimed Rat Pack tribune band at Sinatra's old Cal Neva. I talked to the GM in The Circle Bar overlooking The Lake on a January trip, and he hooked me up with a suite on the corner overlooking the lake for this coming weekend.

When we go to The Show on Friday, I will be wearing a suit, starched shirt and tie.....and my wife will be wearing a requisite little black dress and heels.

On Saturday night after our dancing at our fave Reno piano bar, I'll play blackjack deep into the darkness of the night, and maybe until I see the first rays of Sunday's sunrise.

I rarely play much longer after sunrise.

Tomorrow morning (today for most here), I am moving my Dad from his present skilled nursing facility into a "board and care". We have heavily licensed "board and care" facilities in California.


I worked my angles and arranged his Hoyer Lift, his air mattress, his high back reclining wheel chair, and his hospital bed.

I think he would have preferred I arranged a young hooker.

I wish I was kidding. Or perhaps, not.

(I found my mitt in the shed yesterday.....I'm ready for "pitchers and catchers")

Tribe Fan in SC/Cali wrote:
I worked my angles and arranged his Hoyer Lift, his air mattress, his high back reclining wheel chair, and his hospital bed.

I think he would have preferred I arranged a young hooker.

We can take up a collection if that would assist?

Cali

RE: Lobster --

Do you eat the green stuff? I think it's pretty good on some garlicky and crusty bread or crackers.

Good deal on the legs and wine-bottle trick. I've seen that before, and now that you've confirmed it will work, I will have to try it.

I suck every last morsel from lobster. When I get done cracking, sucking and slurping, the only things left are assholes and eyebrows.

Oh yeah....don't eat that little sac right behind the eyes....makes you real sick.

Darkstar wrote:

Tribe Fan in SC/Cali wrote:
I worked my angles and arranged his Hoyer Lift, his air mattress, his high back reclining wheel chair, and his hospital bed.

I think he would have preferred I arranged a young hooker.

We can take up a collection if that would assist?

LOL!

Truth be known, without a lot of detail, he actually had a hooker and a stripper living under his roof after the age of 70. At least as best I could tell and ascertain from long distance and short visits back to his then place in Ohio. I do know the stripper, about 40 years younger than him, shared his bed while I was there, and I do know he was well stocked with little blue pills.

He spent all of his money, his property values, and savings.

I'm not saying he necessarily wasted it.


Come to think of it, I had a "dancer" essentially living with me in the closing days of my one year separation required for divorce in South Carolina. My ex-wife actually signed papers that she did not mind if I "dated" while we were separated, and I signed same. I let that dancer move in because I thought she was good fodder for a "rebound relationship." I figured she was calloused about life, and neither of us would be hurt when the necessary end of that particular relationship arrived.

With a nod to the words of Ron White....."I was WRONGGGGGGG....."

I signed the title to a 300ZX (albeit used...but with a sun roof) over to her Mom for her to drive in a "go home happy" end to that living arrangement.

Apples and trees, it seems, in retrospect.

seagull wrote:I suck every last morsel from lobster. When I get done cracking, sucking and slurping, the only things left are assholes and eyebrows.

Whoa, LOL again!

No worries about me.

I never eat anything from an animal that was close to the eyes.


I love trout and if I am in a rare restaurant offering (normally whole) trout I always request that the chef chop the head before presenting me the fish. I hate that eye looking at me, and remember vividly one day as a 16 year old kid getting nauseated in a restaurant in Cripple Creek CO while on "vacation" (hah!) with my parents as the trout was presented.

I had already been sick, and that fish eye did not help my digestive comfort.


It was some old western period place and I asked the waitress where the men's room was located. She directed me down a hallway that seemed to become a labyrinth as I sought the destination and eventually blacked out and hit the floor in a thud.

It took awhile for anyone to notice I was missing, or come looking for me. Actually, it was the waitress.


We were in Cripple Creek to visit with an astrologer author by the pen name of Linda Goodman. Linda Goodman authored some pop books in the 1970's about astrology under the titles of "Love Signs" and "Sun Signs." I'm not saying the books were great, but they did get her enough note to make the Johnny Carson-Merv Griffin-Mike Douglas talk show circuit on more than one occasion.

She was my mother's best friend in high school, and her real name was "Mary Alice." She and my mother used to follow river boats in the Ohio River from Parkersburg and offer to read tea leaves for the passengers for a fee. At least that was mother's possibly cleaned up version.

Mary Alice let it slip that my mother had been married at least two times, and possibly four, before she married my father. My mother denied after the fact, but my grandmother confirmed.

My wife still believes the man who is said to be my father is not really my biological father. "No way," she says. We haven't and aren't going to order any DNA tests.

He does love baseball though.

Man, I can't wait for the 2012 season.


Our new guys from the land of the misfit toys might actually help Santa save the Cleveland Indian baseball season.

I saw similar happen here in The Bay Area with the San Francisco Giants. Albeit with spectacularly proven pitching.