Animated music videos for Yiddish theater songs?

I found these tiny books of cabarat songs from Warsaw: the author, Itzik Zhelonek, said they were famous and popular and the latest thing. I was surprised and then saddened that most of them had disappeared from the world almost entirely and decided to find their melodies and bring them back.

A stupid, time-consuming, expensive project but it's engaged me wholly for more than a year now. After I got my friend Randy to come up from Florida and sing some of the songs with me, I made a digital-only cd called In Odess: Yiddish Songs from Warsaw (see below) with him and with the help of Aviva Enoch and Roger Lynn Spears and Ken Bloom we put out 18 of the songs. I'm also selling sheet music for these songs.

Then I thought I would like to do some animated music videos, but I didn't know how, so I took a couple lessons ... this is the first. (I did some cartoon music videos for the cd Mrs. Maccabee's Kitchen: new Hanukah songs in 2012, but I used the Youtube's GoAnimate rather than starting from scratch.)

There's hardly any point singing in Yiddish if you don't provide captions. The Cabaret Warsaw project proved that if you let people see the translation of your song line by line, they'll laugh at the jokes.

Here's the whole "In Odess" cd. You can buy it for the cost of a taco lunch at the food truck.

What the poor state of American manufactury has reduced me to.

This is how to fix a toaster when the catch doesn't work any more.

Protest sign from sanity rally

Muzak's Top Ten (Roz Chast)

Cleaning up my desk I found this oldie from the New Yorker. "Let's wait in this room forever!"

In which my Sarah Palin "Drill Baby Drill!" painting becomes famous!

I was amused to get an email from Ron Gompertz, creator of the Send Sarah Palin to the Louisiana wetlands to help clean-up the oil Facebook page, retroactively asking permission to use my painting on his site. He also said I should make a Drill Baby Drill Sarah Palin t-shirt. It's customizable (change colors, styles, sizes, add text of your choice) and you can actually stick the picture on any Zazzle product you like.

See Sarah and my other paintings at my Uncle Shlomo's Pushcart Zazzle Store.

Muzak Top Ten (Roz Chast)

This reminded me of my daughter...

Those devoted young readers. From awkwardfamilyfotos.com

I can't keep up: why, exactly, is social media networking so crucial?

Found at Language Log, from Stone Soup:

Thoughts for the day

Laurence J. Peter: "An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today."

Cyril Connolly: "Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you."

Mark Twain: "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

I HATE keyword stuffing. SEO over-optimization blows.

Now that I've been writing squidoo lessons I run into some pretty seedy, spammy online neighborhoods.

I don't mean the neighborhoods where people offer to put a tiger in my underwear. I mean those neighborhoods where people that say the same thing over and over again, and over again again, hoping by repeating their "catch phrases" endlessly to convince google they are the ultimate and most perfect answer to the our searches.

It's like this, from a post called keyword stuffing keyword stuffing (heh):

Good eating advice from the New York Times

People are sending in their rules for healthy eating and here's one:

"When drinking tea, just drink tea." I find this Zen teaching useful, given my inclination toward information absorption in the morning, wen I'm also trying to eat breakfast, get the dog out, start the fire and organize my day.

I believe it's so much better for our bodies when we are present to our food. Perhaps a bit of mindfulness goes a long way first thing in the morning.

Of course, some time ago I came across a humorous anecdote about a hapless Zen student whose teacher taught him this aphorism and then was discovered by the same student, drinking tea and reading the paper. When confronted, the teacher said, "When drinking tea and reading the paper, just drink tea and read the paper!"

Michelle Poirot

Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny's | The Onion

Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny's

Good quotes from dvd "John Adams"

I'm really enjoying the first disk of this series, John Adams. I had to stop the elliptical trainer twice today to write down a smidgen of the dialog.

1. Abigail Adams to her husband John: "You have overloaded your argument with ostentatious erudition." (Nota bene, all ye grad students and lawyers.)

2. John Adams to his son: "Manure is an art, and I consider my self an accomplished artist."

Which reminds me of what one of my website clients told me the other day, was he cribbing from this movie? "I regard myself as a sculptor, but my medium is bull-t."

"The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time"

From Retro-comedy; this one made me really, really wonder, as I often have before: Who were all the people who approved these ads, who spent the time and money to have them published? What were they thinking? The other 12 are just as good... and Hannah, the clown is for you...

This makes me laugh every single time I hear it.

Pal-Yat-Chee.

New favorite: "Your logo makes me barf."

These are some of my favorites from Your Logo Makes Me Barf. The first one is for Hannah, who has always been afraid of clowns. Go visit maybe my favorite post on the blog...

[Hannah] Verizon Wireless newsletter??

Hannah wrote:

WTF a newsletter from Verizon Wireless?

New from Verizon Wireless this month:

"Why YOUR phone bill is so high!: We finally let you know"

"Horror Story: I Switched to Cingular - and Paid Even More!"

"Top Ten Places to Get a Good Verizon Wireless Signal. Hint: Try Standing Directly Underneath the Cell Tower"

Everything under a dollar. Or over a dollar.

I saw this at Consumerist. Hah! See the small signs too.


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XKCD sometimes makes me sigh.

From xkcd.com.

It's Hannah and Ezra's fault...

That I'm stuck chortling in the middle of the night over Failblog.