Why was Eartha Kitt not mentioned at the Oscars this year when they showed their usual tribute to actors and other film celebrities who had died over the past year?
Eartha Kitt died of colon cancer on Christmas day, 2008. She started as a dancer in Vaudeville and became a popular singer and actress who appeared in TV shows and movies for about 60 years. She is perhaps most famous for playing Catwoman on the 1960s Batman TV series.
Speaking about the Oscar's oversight, her publicist told the NY Post, "It's clear that they thought that publicist Warren Cowan was more of a household name." Never heard of him.
Orson Welles once called Eartha Kitt the "most exciting woman in the world."
My friend Nick posted this video from TED, which gives a very old (but now fresh again) approach to dealing with creative inspiration. It's well worth watching. Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of Eat, Pray, Love.
Being involved in burlesque I'm often on the look out for clothes from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. Sometimes thrift stores just don't have what you need.
I have found a couple of websites that sell old sewing patterns from the last one hundred years or so. I can't vouch for any of them because I haven't yet ordered anything from them--I still have to persuade one of my friends who actually knows how to sew to make them for me.
Microsoft is working on new software that I believe will hurt music education around the world: it's called Songsmith and their webpage has a nauseating video that demonstrates how it works.
Songsmith generates musical accompaniment to your voice. To create a song, you just choose a musical style from reggae to big band, sing into your PC's microphone, and Songsmith will create backing music for you, even changing the underlying chords as you sing.
Andrew Dubber at New Music Strategies is hoping that technology like this might bring back a resurgence in parlour music -- amateurs who play music for the fun of it. Maybe now instead of buying your kids their first guitars, or paying for piano lessons, you can just buy them Microsoft Songsmith and be done with it.
But wouldn't people be better off if they just learned how to play an instrument for real? Learned how to write songs themselves? It's not that hard. I would argue that it is far more rewarding, and of course the music would be better, too.
Why was Eartha Kitt not mentioned at the Oscars this year when they showed their usual tribute to actors and other film celebrities who had died over the past year?
Being 
Microsoft is working on new software that I believe will hurt music education around the world: it's called