Birthday Celebrations

first off, a very healthy and happy birthday indeed to David "Derek" Bowie, who turns an impressive 61 today.
David has long been one of my favourite singers, and he gave us quite a scare a few years ago, having serious heart problems just before he was due to go on stage for a gig.
he has recovered, but has not been seen performing very much since then. oh well, i trust that he is happy doing whatever it is that he does with his time these days; more acting performances like his excellent work in The Prestige would not go amiss, if you are reading!!
the pic here is in relation to an odd article i saw suggesting that he was going to appear in an episode of BBC's celebrated Dr Who revamped series. not heard anything much about that - nice one if he does it!


as for the legacy of music David has given to date, well, where do you want me to begin? there are a couple of dodgy albums from the 80's that you could probably do with never listening to in your life (Never Let Me Down springs to mind), but if you have not had that much exposure to The Thin White Duke, well, firsly where have you been, and secondly practially any album of his from the 70's or the 90's can be picked up and played with safety, and you should hear some classic tunes.
i could not with any ease pick a favourite of his, there are so many. i suppose as for a top album, the two i play the most would be Station To Station and Low, whereas a favourite track could well be This Is Not America from his "difficult" 80's period.
Oddly, we watched Labyrinth again over the weekend - not my favourite performance from him, quite frankly, but not as bad as i remembered. James seemed to like bits of it, at the least!!




January 8 was clearly a great day to be born if you wanted to be a singer, as The King, Elvis Presley, turns 73 today. i imagine he is having a rather quiet celebration as he lives anonymously in China (see earlier posts), as the interwebnet leads me to believe that they do not celebrate birthdays in China as such, they just all mark the occassion on their New Year's Day.

there are many, many ways that you can celebrate The King's birthday today, however. we here at verk have played some of the fine music videos of him at his best (which is whenever he performed), mostly the Las Vegas era perfomances that James took a strong dislike to. i suggest that you do the same, or at least have some of his records playing somewhere. the more bold of you might wish to openly praise his 73rd birthday by singing Viva Las Vegas or something in your place of work.

a meal fit for The King would also be a good idea today. i think we are going to try and arrange for one of his favourites today, and by this i mean we will be purchasing a hefty amount of KFC. for those of you unable to get to a KFC, well, you could always just add peanut butter, bacon and/or cheeseburgers to whatever you intend to have for lunch or dinner. this is what The King will be doing, and if it is good enough for him, it is certainly good enough for us.


in the spirit of the celebrations of today, be most excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!