I’m just kicking back today, but I thought I’d check in and let Randy Newman say a few words in defense of our country.

No, the teddy bear isn’t named Randy Newman. The cute little guy is just playing three of my favorite Randy Newman tunes on the boom box he’s holding. (Click the itsy-bitsy little belly button—er, I mean, play button).

You can probably guess what I named the bear.

Deal with it.

While kicking back, I’ve listened to a lot more stuff, including some high brow things (like my standby Richard Strauss tone poems—the definitive mood music) that have made me very blue and pensive, indeed. When I get that way, I usually like to listen to jazz and pop vocals. It’s the lyricist in me, I guess.

Here, sans bear, are a few pieces—mostly rediscovered old favorites, but one newly discovered gem of a cut, as well—that either brought a smile to my face or a tear to my eye while I was relaxing.

In all the mail through which I’ve been wading the last several days is one pointed query from a subscriber wondering if my intent is to maintain a well-crafted blog that no one reads. Touché! Yes, I’ve been busy. It’s the end of the fiscal year for us bureaucrats and desk jockeys, and then there’s life—not to mention all this mail. More about the mail in a moment, but above is a playlist of a few things to which I’ve been listening while reading, replying, deleting, and what not. It always helps things along to have a little music in the background, don’t you think? Of course, just as one man’s personal, interior struggle is another man’s violent jihad, one person’s mood music is similarly another’s annoying noise pollution. Nevertheless, there should be something in the list for all but the most obtuse cretins like my friend Jack, who listens to crap that should be illegal. If the whole playlist makes you ill, then you may want to think about it as piped-in sound for the elevator ride you’re sharing with me.

BIMBO’S DATE: “Do you like Billie Holiday?” BIMBO: “I love him!”

As for my intentions as a publisher, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This blog is a lot like western civilization or even modern life as we know it. Just because it’s here today, that doesn’t mean it will be here tomorrow. Only our love is here to stay. All else may just be passing fancy and in time may go. There may be trouble ahead. Soon we’ll be without the moon, humming a different tune, and then there may be tear drops to shed.

So while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance, let’s face the music and dance.

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Since Charles Johnson is still publishing audio playlists on LGF, and I’m too busy right now to write anything meaningful, I thought I’d take a stab at uploading my own playlist. It seems Charles is a bit of a jazz head, and coincidentally so is yours truly. I was pleased to find on imeem dot com some of my favorites in that infidel genre, and I’ve assembled a few of them here.

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I was scared to death to do it, but tonight I successfully upgraded my new WordPress installation to the latest version. Relieved that I didn’t screw everything up, and having worked out all the bugs by discarding a couple plugins, I decided to unwind after a tough week by listening to some music and chillin’ out.

Over on LGF, Charles was toying with his discovery of embedded audio playlists, so since I was in a musical mood I decided to check out “imeem dot com” myself, and I’m glad I did.

The nifty little audio interface for single cuts is way nifty.

Whatever will they think of next.