Dec. 30th, 2012
Memphis Blues
Dec. 30th, 2012 09:07 pmOne hundred years ago, in the autumn of 1912, an African-American musician by the name of WC Handy published a song that would take the US by storm - Memphis Blues. It launched the blues as a mass entertainment genre that would transform popular music worldwide
In 1903 William Christopher Handy was leading a band called the Colored Knights of Pythias based in Clarksdale, in Mississippi's Delta country, when one day he paid a visit to the little town of Tutwiler.
"A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me... His face had on it the sadness of the ages," Handy writes in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20769518
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20769518
Chief Mouser of Downing Street
Dec. 30th, 2012 10:00 pmLarry was appointed to the post of Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office nearly two years ago, after being adopted from the mean streets of south London via Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
He was brought in to keep down the local rat population after a rodent was seen scuttling past the door of Number 10 Downing Street.
In June 2011 David Cameron announced that Larry had killed his first mouse after arriving in Downing Street.
Larry sits on the Cabinet Room table wearing a Union Jack bow tie ahead of the Downing Street street party.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/9612986/In-pictures-David-Camerons-cat-Larry-Chief-Mouser-of-Downing-Street.html?frame=2370652