Friday Nite Video (Michael Buble and Laura Pausini)

Hi all! First off, thanks to everyone for checking out these videos and posts that I put on here. Because you do I recently had my 3000th hit! That's incredible and I'm glad you all like it as much as I enjoy writing it and posting those videos. I started this blog on Jan 5th 2010 not really knowing what the heck I was going to write about but I've always wanted to be a writer and I think I have a pretty good sense of humor so I just started writing. Some of it's serious, some of it's funny and some of it's just completely off the wall. I got the idea of showing a video on Friday nights one day when I was thinking back to my teenage years (yes, I can remember that far back) and about this show that would come on TV late on Friday night called, strangely enough, Friday Night Videos. I think it was around 12:00 or 12:30 and it always featured the videos to all the hit songs that were popular that week. So I got to thinking, wouldn't it be neat to do my own Friday Night Video? Except instead of showing videos of songs popular today, I'll show videos that were popular back in MY day. Hence, Friday Nite Videos. I actually always referred to it in the beginning as the Friday Nite Old Skool Video but I think everybody gets the idea by now so lets drop the Old Skool. Now that brings us to tonight. Since I'm dropping the old skool part of the name we're going to cheat a little. Tonight is a new version of a old classic. In 1976 Lou Rawls released You'll Never Find Another Love Like Mine and it became the song he was known for. That song sealed his future as a soulful superstar. His version was great and he did a good job on it. But tonight I'm showing a remake that does Lou's version proud. It's a duet from that old favorite crooner of mine Michael Buble and the Italian singing sensation Laura Pausini. It's hot, it's sultry and it's sexy. If you don't know anything about Laura Pausini then check her out on Youtube. She can definitely sing and has a wonderful voice. She's released songs in English, Italian, AND Spanish, French and Portuguese. She's won awards from albums released in each of the languages she knows. Michael was recording a concert for a PBS special back in 2005 when Laura joined him on stage and they sang this. Together, they nailed it. So check it out and see what you think. Enjoy!

Friday Nite Video (Simply Minds)

Alright. It's friday night. Sooo that means Friday Nite Video here at Just My Thoughts. Welcome! Tonight I thought I'd feature another cool band from the 80's era, Simple Minds. Not to be confused with that other band Simply Red. Simple Minds were cool. Simply Red? Not bad but Simple Minds blew them away. It's funny but back in the day I actually wore my hair for awhile like the lead singer of Simply Red, Mick Hucknall. He had long curly reddish hair like I did and he liked to grow it long in the front and let it hang down in his face. I thought that was pretty cool back then so I adopted that style for awhile and soon my friends were calling me Simply Ren! Pretty catchy huh? If only I could sing! Now old Mick and his band could certainly croon out a decent song but they were too mushy for me. I was more of a Simple Minds kind of guy. Their songs were more upbeat and rocking then Mick and co. The Minds were from Scotland and they got together way back in 1977. They released a few albums but they hit gold in 1985 (again, another great year lol) when they recorded the single Don't You Forget About Me for the soon to be released movie The Breakfast Club. That single forever cemented Simple Minds as a 80"s icon. The movie was a huge smashing success which carried Simple Minds along with it. You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing the song. They played the video nonstop on music shows and stations (MTV, back when they used to be about music). After that song started to cool down some everybody wanted more of the Minds and their music. They weren't ready to release the album they were working on so they quickly put together a song and released it as a single. And that's the song I wanted to show tonight. I actually liked it better then Don't You Forget About Me. It's a great song and a great video. Simple Minds kept recording and touring but they never reached that plateau that they were on back in 1985. They were on top of the world. Maybe that was their subliminal message they were trying to convey in the video. Their high atop a mountain performing their song looking out over the world. So without further delay, from 1985 its Alive and Kicking by Simple Minds. Enjoy!

This Day In History

This day in history.


1 year ago today- 13 year old Johnny BoJack Jr turns the world of competitive swine showing upside down when he wins the coveted blue ribbon at the Iowa State Fair, narrowly beating out 6 time defending champion hog raiser Norval Tucker by three votes. Even more stunning was the fact that Johnny's winning sow, Barbie Q, was a crossbreed of a Duroc and a Chester White. Barbie Q wowed the judges with her loud and pronounced OINK, which she did at Johnny's command, her straight walk with snout held high and her clearly feminine attitude in a sport that's usually dominated by the males. Afterwards, in a interview, Johnny Jr credited Barbie Q's success to a diet rich in fruits and vegetables. Never fed slop. Giving her a warm bath each night to keep her bristles soft and her hide free of any bacteria and her sleeping on her very own mattress covered by a 500 thread down comforter.


5 years ago today-Floyd "Baby Boy" Jackson wins the golden gloves gold metal at the 2006 United States Special Olympics at Brinson, Ga. Jackson captivated the crowd as he viciously knocked out all twelve of his opponents, eight of them in the first round.


20 years ago today-Vanilla Ice wins the award for Best New Rapper Who is Here to Stay at the BET music awards show broadcast from Madison Square Gardens.


30 years ago today-Employees of Ma Bell make the first cell phone call ever made. The phone, developed between a partnership with Ma Bell and GE, weighs one hundred and twelve pounds. Unfortunately, after the call is made the phone loses the signal and drops the call as the four men move the phone around in an attempt to pick the phone up and place it next to the callers head.


80 years ago today-Researchers at the newly formed tobacco company Philip Morris begin testing mass produced cigarettes on a group of chimpanzees at a research facility in Roswell, New Mexico. Researchers were puzzled to find that the chimps with the darker fur preferred the menthol cigarettes as opposed to the regular ones and that all the monkeys immediately would light up after mating or picking and eating bugs off of their partners. After the six month study started to wind down and the researchers then confidant that the mass produced cigarettes posed no health issues and were not addicting they stopped giving the chimpanzees the cigarettes to prepare them for their reintroduction back into the wild. Three days later, co-workers entering the facility were horrified to find the mutilated bodies of their associates and the monkeys all laying around having a smoke.


On this date in 1783-The first daily newspaper, The Pennsylvania Evening Post, starts production in Philadelphia. One week later, widowed plantation owner Louis Tench takes out the first newspaper personal ad. In it Louis describes himself as a loving, carefree guy who enjoys quiet walks on the beach, outdoor activities, intimate candlelight dinners at the Coats and Arms Tavern or just staying in and snuggling. He does not receive any replies.

Friday Nite Video (Dokken)

Tonight we'll be returning back to the Power Ballard theme and we've gonna do it with one of my favorite 80's big hair bands Dokken. Remember talking about the Power Ballard last year? All the heavy metal big hair bands of the 80's had one. It was a unwritten rule that every metal band had to have one and most all of them did. I always liked to throw in one of my Dokken tapes when I wanted to rock out! They formed in the late 70's and had released a couple albums but 1984's album Tooth and Nail was their big breakthrough album. It had several hit songs on it including their required power ballard. Whats really neat about this video is that apparently Dokken was fans of the old Dukes of Hazzard show! Watch in the beginning at the 25 second mark. Someone walks into a motel room and there on the TV is a clip of the good old General Lee racing down a dirt road. And I was just talking about the Duke boys in my last post. Also check out the guys in the band. Pure 80's all the way. You have the ripped clothes, the big, tall hair, slow motion shots of them head banging along to the music, the fans pumping upheld fists. Classic 80's! Like most of these 80's bands that became successful Dokken later split up after everyone in the band started fighting and arguing about the best ways to keep the money flowing in. They broke up in 1989. Since then they have reunited and split again several times with the most recent reunion tour just last year in 2010. They say the might do another one in 2011. I personally haven't been to any of these bands reunion tours but who knows, maybe one day I will. I just think it would be kinda sad to go see some of these aging rockers that are old enough to be my dad up on the stage trying to relive their glory years. For now, I'll stick with the videos. From 1984 its Dokkens power ballard Alone Again. Enjoy!

TV

I used to love watching TV. Not anymore. I just don't enjoy the shows on these days. I think all the reality shows are crap. To me, there's not ten cents difference in any of them. I don't like the sitcoms on either. Most of them feature a dysfunctional family where the Dad is is always a clueless idiot. The mother is the only one in the family who has any sense. Reality? Far from it! They just don't make good shows like they used to when I was a kid. I mostly remember Friday night being the highlight of the week for great television viewing. CBS ruled Friday nights in the early to mid eighties. The Incredible Hulk started off the night at 8:00. I can do this day recite the opening monologue. Dr David Banner. Physician, Scientist, searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have. I loved that show. Remember whenever he would get angry he would turn to the Hulk? Today he could have signed up for some anger management classes or wrote himself a prescription for a mild sedative. Each episode would always feature David getting involved in some kind of illegal activity or plot as he hitchhiked mindlessly around to town after town. He would end up working some menial job to make a few dollars, probably to pay for all the clothes and shoes he destroyed each time he would change into the Hulk. I never understood why he wouldn't quickly pull his shoes off and rip off his clothes whenever he felt "the change" coming on. There were always two metamorphoses each week. Usually the first one was David getting roughed up by the shady characters that were involved in that weeks shady deal David had gotten involved in. The second one was always near the end. David would turn to the Hulk and beat the daylights out of the bad guys and save the damsel in distress and end whatever plot of evil had been cooked up that episode. Great entertainment! Next up at 9:00 was The Dukes of Hazzard. Now I know a lot of you reading this are rolling your eyes but hey, this show was every young guys dream show! Each week there were car chases, car crashes, dumb a&& cops, leggy cousin Daisy who always wore high heels and shorts that barely qualified as being shorts. Bo and Luke Duke and Daisey lived with their Uncle Jesse and like the The Incredible Hulk featured some kind of far fetched plot each week where the boys would get into trouble, usually trying to help out a neighbor or friend and save the day at the end of the show. The opening song and the narrating during the show was done by country Waylon Jennings. Bo and Luke would race around in the General Lee, their customized 1969 Dodge Charger. How cool was that when Dodge reintroduced the Charger and few years back. Whenever I see one I'm reminded of the General Lee. Roscoe P. Coltrane, the dimwitted sheriff , would always end up being in hot pursuit of the Duke boys or Daisy and he would usually crash and total the cop car. I couldn't figure out why Boss Hogg didn't fire that idiot just on reasons of totaling so many police cars. It certainly kept the town mechanic Cooter busy! Then to end the evening at 10:00 was the ongoing nighttime soap opera Dallas. Now that show featured a family that would make you feel good about yours! Sure, they had money but man o man did they have problems! The three sons, J.R, Bobby and Gary, were as different as night and day. J.R was a conniving, under the table dealing, wife abusing, sell his soul to the devil for a dollar, egotistical bad guy. Bobby on the other hand was kind and trusting. Gary stayed mostly out of the family business dealings and pursued other interests. They all lived under on roof at the Southfork ranch and mom and dad Jock and Miss Ellie tried to keep sanity among everyone but it just didn't happen. You almost needed to keep a journal to keep up with all the illegal business dealings and affairs going on each season. Dallas aired for thirteen seasons and always ended each season on some kind of big cliff hanger, the most famous one being when bad brother J.R gets shot in his office while working late. All that summer people wondered "Who shot J.R"? Articles were wrote about it. Gary Burbank recorded a song that asked the question. People wore shirts that said "I shot J.R". Finally when the next season started it was revealed that J.R's mistress Kristin Shepard (who was played by the hot Mary Crosby) had done it. Those three shows were just Friday night! Other favorites of mine were Steve Austin in The Six Million Dollar Man. From that was the spin off of the female version The Bionic Woman with Jaimie Sommers. Throw into the mix Gunsmoke, Wonder Woman, and The Waltons and that's why I don't like watching television today.

Lorenzo

Lorenzo and his "Serious Guy" look













That's better son!









Me and Lorenzo at San Jose in Clermont, Cinco De Mayo 2011

Friday Nite Video (Lost Boys)

Hey all! Happy Friday Nite! Tonight I thought it would be fun to do something not yet done on FNV and do a video of a song from a old skool movie. And what better movie to feature first on FNV then that 80's classic The Lost Boys. The Lost Boys came out in 1987 and it was a pretty good and popular movie. Now most people reading this more then likely have seen the movie but in case a few of you didn't here's the brief story. This family moves to Santa Carla, California to start fresh only to discover the town has a vampire problem. The vampires run around in a gang and their leader is David, played by Kiefer Sutherland. Well pretty soon David and his cohorts are chasing the new kids in town, trying to indoctrinate them into their gang. Really cool movie but what was just as cool was the soundtrack. I remember going out and buying the soundtrack soon after I had been to see the movie. My cousin Shawn Whaley and I would ride around jamming out to music from the Lost Boys. Most of the songs were older songs that were covered for the movie by modern artist like, for an example, the old Doors hit People are Strange. Echo & The Bunnymen redid that one and did a good job. But I think my favorite song from the movie was the one that opened it. Cry Little Sister was the song that started playing at the beginning of the movie and it set the stage for the whole movie. After that movie whenever we would pop The Lost Boys soundtrack in the old stereo we were transported back to Santa Carla, the town that was overrun with vampires. It's one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite movies. Irishman Gerard McMahon (who?) recorded the song and did a darn good job. From 1987 it's Cry Little Sister from the movie The Lost Boys. Enjoy!

Technology

I took my son Lorenzo into Best Buy today and wow! Ive always considered myself a pretty hip up to date kind of guy but I think I'm starting to fall behind. We were looking at laptops and the sales associate was kindly explaining the differences between models such as dual verses quad processors. RAM memory bits. Mega-bytes, mega-bits and pre installed Intel technology and 64 bit verses 32 bit. Me, not wanting to appear to be a total idiot, just kinda nodded and added a few ahhs and ohhs all the while nodding my head as if I completely understood everything he was saying. Then the questions started. What mattered most? Speed? Storage? Memory capacity? I was gonna say price mattered first but I held that one in. And I gotta admit, that voice of materialism started whispering in my head. "Get the one that will make him the envy of all his friends". The one that will have all his friends drooling and wishing they had a dad as cool as he did and was as willing to spend the Bens as I was. You ever hear that voice? I'll go years in a raggedy pair of shoes that are falling apart but I want the kids to have the cool in style pair. Anyway, we ended up getting a very good one that was on sale at a very attractive price and he was ecstatic. We had gone there "to look" but he didn't expect me to buy him his first laptop. Every now and then I surprise them I guess. But before and while he was looking at the computers I was looking around the store and started thinking how much technology had evolved in the past twenty or so years. I don't consider myself old by any means but when I was a kid we didn't have ANY of the things out nowadays. When I was a kid it was all about having a decent bike. We used to get a new kite a couple times a year. We played outside. I could climb any tree that was planted in the ground. Technology for us back then was a telephone in the house. A huge TV enclosed in a wood cabinet that got three stations and that was if it was a clear night and it wasn't raining or stormy. Dad had a big antenna screwed on a telephone pole outside the house with a big rotor dial control thingy by the TV that when you turned the dial the antenna would rotate in the direction you turned the dial. Some nights the picture was clear and sharp. Some nights you couldn't get rid of all the snow and all the characters had "ghosts' around them. And that was about as tech as we were growing up at my house. When we got a little older I remember my best friend Joel Wharton and his family were on the cutting edge of technology. His dad Ronnie was the first person I knew that bought and had one of those monster sized NASA looking satellite antennas installed in their front yard and boy was that thing off the charts! It picked up over a hundred channels! I would spend the night there and we would stay up all night watching movie after movie, show after show. It was like OD'ing on television! Soon after that they got one of those new gaming systems that you hooked up to your TV and could play video games. An Atari! That thing replaced the television viewing for quite awhile. We would play frogger, missile command and space invaders for hours! I would beg and plead my parents for one of them but they never bought me one. But I vowed to buy myself one when I had saved enough money which I did a few years later but then the Atari had been replaced by the Nintendo system. I bought that first Nintendo and literally stayed up all night for a week until I beat that dang Mario Brothers game that came with it. My love of video games stuck and the Super Nintendo followed, then the Nintendo 64. Then it was the Playstation 2. They are my weaknesses. I wanna upgrade again but to what? Now there's XBox, Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3. I just don't know. I feel like I should get a big flat screen when I get my new system and that's something else I've been putting off. I still have my Magnavox 27 inch full size TV that would probably kill someone if it fell on them. It's old and heavy and if you try to pick it up to move it or dust under it and you don't use the proper bend knees and keep your back straight while slowly exhaling you WILL pull a muscle in your back but hey, it still works! I remember when my older sister Joy and her husband Gary bought one of those new gadgets called a VCR that actually played copies of movies. There was one place in my hometown that you could go and rent a VCR tape of a movie. They called it the video barn and it was a small portable shed will shelving added on the sides and they had maybe twenty or so movies to chose from. Joy and Gary would invite us all over and it was just mind blowing to be able to put a tape in that thing and watch a movie of your choice on the TV. It even had a twenty foot cable with a remote control on the end that you could use to rewind or pause or stop or fast forward the movie. It was amazing to our technology starved generation. Then today while in Best Buy I was looking at all the different kinds of 'Smart' phones. Do people really need phones that surf the web, send and receive emails, let you post on Facebook and Tweet? I don't, or I don't THINK that I do. Then again, I swore I would never own a cell phone and I did good for several years but I finally succumbed and bought one and now its pretty much a extension of my body. Where ever I am, my phone is beside me. Even typing this, it's two inches beside my computer. Just while typing this post I've received and sent a couple texts. My alarm went off a few minutes ago to remind me of something I had to do. My phone is part of me. If I was to lose it I'm sure I would go into full panic mode. Could you imagine a kid today trying to think back to ancient times when cell phones didn't exist? Like most other kids, both of mine have and have had cell phones. They can't imagine life without one. Last week when Emily was here her phone never left her hand. Constantly texting. She could probably text a sentence faster then I could say it. I got mad a couple times. "Put your phone down and listen to me", I would bark and she would but she would have it in her hands again within a few minutes burning up the keys. Today while looking at the phones in Best Buy I realized my basic flip phone and her sliding keyboard phone is nothing compared to some of the higher end phones. But do we really need it? Again, I don't think I do. Talking and texting keeps me busy enough! I don't need to be able to do banking or watch You tube videos on my phone. Looking at all the new products in Best Buy made me realize how behind the times I have fallen. 3-D TV's with built in WiFi. Computers that can download videos and movies in blazing speed. Phones that can do anything a computer can do. Blu-Ray players ( I'm just getting comfortable with DVD). Iphones, Ipods, Ipads. Gaming systems that you can go online with and play with people halfway across the planet. It's all to much for me to keep up with but hey, if I'm not sure about something or a certain product I can just ask my kids. I'm sure they will know!