Diogenes Borealis: Blues for a Saturday Night

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Blues for a Saturday Night

I just got back from Diana Krall's concert at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa - all I can say is wow. She's so much more than the sultry balladeer of the "Peel Me A Grape" days - I couldn't believe it was the same artist. She covered songs ranging from Fats Waller and Nat King Cole to Bob Dylan and Tom Waits. Her version of Waits' Temptation, backed by her amazing band, almost blew the roof off the place. Being married to Elvis Costello has obviously worked out well for her - she was amazing.

Here's a live version of Krall performing Doc Pomus' song Lonely Avenue, which was a hit for Ray Charles in 1956. She sang it in her concert tonight.

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Words of wisdom ...

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted one will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

John Gardner

As we neared our sixties the cloaks we had wrapped about our essential selves were wearing thin.

Robertson Davies - Fifth Business

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.

Joshua Reynolds

Men who look upon themselves as born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.

Thomas Paine

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

Galileo

The younger generation of today has grown up in a world in which in school and press the spirit of commercial enterprise has been represented as disreputable and the making of profit as immoral, where to employ a hundred people is represented as exploitation but to command the same number as honourable.

F.A. Hayek

The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.

Thomas Jefferson

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing the truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of the truth.

H.P. Lovecraft

In the country, no one can hear you scream. In the city, people hear you scream but no one cares.

Tom Waits

It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.

Alexis de Toqueville

Liberals who celebrate tolerance of other views always seem surprised that there are other views.

William F. Buckley

Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful, good society' which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean: more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

No man's life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Mark Twain