Latest effort of House star Hugh Laurie is a heartfelt New Orleans jazz album that is getting lots of raves

Hugh Laurie - Let Them Talk: An Introduction
http://youtu.be/gI7_sXFN6t0



High Laurie - You Don't Know My Mind (Trailer)
http://youtu.be/AcYsQJ-ghQs

Monday morning on BBC Radio 5 live's Victoria Derbyshire Show, during the last segment, i.e. just before 7 a.m. Eastern U.S., this Hugh Laurie jazz/blues album was the subject of considerable positive commentary, particularly by singer Cerys Matthews, who was keen to say how much she loved the album and how it was so much better than she could've hoped.

She was also quite keen on saying that people needed to accept it on its own terms, and not pre-judge it. Don't act critical of it to begin with by saying, Oh, isn't that the Oxford University grad Hugh Laurie, the trained actor who was NOT born in Alabama, singing the blues about not having a nickel or dime, even though he is the highest-paid actor on American TV?
Yes, he is, get over it and listen to the music.

Laurie closed this week's Cheltenham Jazz Festival.

John Fordham's review in The Guardian: Hugh Laurie – review, Cheltenham Jazz Festival, 4 out of 5 stars
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/may/03/hugh-laurie-at-cheltenham-jazz-festival

I hope to have more on this topic soon, perhaps even the audio from this morning's BBC discussion, so you can hear it for yourselves. That will also likely include the question of questions: Can't we (England) do better than a '90's boy band like 'Blue' at Eurovision?

See also:
http://www.youtube.com/user/HughLaurieBlues

http://www.cerysmatthews.co.uk/


Why is Hugh Laurie so popular?
Will Gompertz | 09:30 UK time, Monday, 9 May 2011
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/willgompertz/2011/05/why_is_hugh_laurie_so_popular.html

Meanwhile... tonight at 8 p.m....
Previews of tonight's show

Second Broward County 2011 budget meetingTuesday afternoon at 5 p.m.; Broward budget watch: Brittany Wallman in Broward Politics blog: Find the fat!

Above, January 26, 2010 photo of Broward County Government Center, 115 S. Andrews Avenue, Fort Lauderdale, FL by South Beach Hoosier

2011 Fiscal Year budget meeting

Tuesday September 28 at 5:01 p.m.

Public testimony in Room 422 in the Broward Governmental Center, 115 S. Andrews Ave., Fort Lauderdale.

The hearing will be Webcast live on www.broward.org/video but you have to use Internet Explorer. Budget documents, including the County Administrator’s recommended budget
reductions, are posted online at http://broward.org/budget.

Before you walk into the Broward Government Center, be sure to walk to the SW corner of Broward Blvd. & Andrews Avenue and look at the County's so-called Personnel Building.

Back on March 12th, I first wrote about this disgraceful example of local government apathy and incompetency squared, here at http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/errant-drivers-crash-highlights.html but I had first noticed it last year, dumb-founded that less than one block from the County HQ, literally, in the building next door, a govt. bldg. was allowed to become a public nuisance.

After years of being one of the most unsightly govt. eyesores in all of South Florida, have the folks running things finally figured out that having a county building caked in dirt is NOT the sort of thing give taxpayers any confidence in the management iof this county?

As I remarked at the time, "It's almost like Broward County is channeling the management geniuses at Hallandale Beach City Hall! And by geniuses, of course, I mean the motley crew of incompetents who make our city a laughing-stock."

January 26, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier


Same building a month later. February 25, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier


January 26, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier


February 25, 2010 photo by South Beach Hoosier

Our collective guiding principle for cutting government services and employees should be the same as the one that was mentioned by Victoria Derbyshire on her always excellent program on BBC Radio's 5 live this morning on the funding levels of British quangos, many of which are being killed outright: Is it nice to do or essential?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00tw8ms
http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/#two
http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/connect/index.shtml#comments

What has a quango ever done for you?

This morning, we're going to take a look at quangos, or quasi autonomous non-government organisations, to give them their full title.

Last week, we learned that 180 taxpayer-funded groups will be scrapped, and a further 180 will either be reformed or have their budgets cut. It's all part of the Chancellor's, plan to cut six hundred million pounds in a "bonfire of quangoes".

It's estimated they cost somewhere between 34 and 60 billion pounds a year. They employ more than 100 thousand people, and 68 quango chiefs earn more than the Prime Minister, with some salaries as high as £624,000.

We want you to tell us what they've ever done for you.

------

Be sure to take a look at the Florida Taxwatch website, even though they are incorrect in opposing Amendment 4: http://www.floridataxwatch.org/

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Broward Politics
Broward budget watch: Find the fat!
By Brittany Wallman
September 27, 2010 08:00 AM

This is another tough year for Broward County government. Commissioners are standing over the budget with carving knives. Do any of you know where there's fat to be found in the county's $4 billion budget?

Read the rest of the post at:
http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/broward/blog/2010/09/browards_budget_find_the_fat.html

British Labour leadership debate on BBC Radio's 5 live with Victoria Derbyshire was ab fab -everything U.S. debates aren't: illuminating & humorous

In my Friday post I referenced having gotten up very early Thursday in order to do something. That something was getting-up in time to listen to the BBC's 5 live broadcast of the British Labour party leadership debate from Stevenage, north of London, in Hertfordshire. The Wikipedia entry for Stevenage says among other things:

In 1861 Dickens commented "The village street was like most other village streets: wide for its height, silent for its size, and drowsy in the dullest degree. The quietest little dwellings with the largest of window-shutters to shut up nothing as if it were the Mint or the Bank of England."

Not unlike most of you, so many times in the past, I've gotten up early for things that have proved quite underwhelming and disappointing personally, and I wondered the night before if this was going to just be the latest such incident.

For instance, in my own case, in the mid-'80's, when I lived in Evanston and Wilmette, just north of Chicago, right off Lake Michigan, I once caught the first "El" train of the morning to meet a friend of mine at O'Hare who was on lay-over for a few hours for her flight to Europe, but she was so tired from her late-night flight from the West Coast that she was barely awake while we had the Tartan Tray restaurant at O'Hare pretty much to ourselves, almost like it was a VIP suite.

(I used to know the layout of O'Hare like the back of my hand for it was easier to navigate than my own neighborhood, since once you knew the basic parameters, it was easy to get around, even logical, a far cry from MIA when I was using that so often in the '70's and '80's. I especially loved the Tartan Tray restaurant because they were always friendly, delicious and safe after midnight, with very reasonable prices for an airport vendor. Plus, the radio reception there was among the best in the entire airport, even if you weren't near a window.)

So getting back to Thursday morning, not surprisingly, given how closely I follow what's going on in Great Britain, I've been closely following all the press stories and leaks surrounding the five candidates vying to succeed Gordon Brown as leader of the Labour Party, even as they fight for a job where they don't know exactly when Prime Minister David Cameron might call for a new general election and they will have to show their mettle during a 4-6 week window of a campaign: Andy Burnham, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, his brother Ed Miliband, Ed Balls and Diane Abbott.

Just as is often true in team sports, sometimes it's better to not be the guy who follows a certain head coach or manager but rather to be the one after that, where the legacy, good or bad, has dissipated enough so that you can be judged on your own relative merits.
See Vince Lombardi, Earl Weaver and Ara Parseghian.

Gordon Brown was the person who had the unenviable task of succeeding someone who had fundamentally changed the public perception of the British Labour Party, Tony Blair without ever having been voted in as PM himself, and he suffered greatly for it, not unlike Gerald Ford's presidential campaign in 1976.

Since Cameron's election, something I openly hoped for on this blog, I've read with great interest the stories in the British press, especially in The Times and The Telegraph, as well as those on BBC Radio 5 live and TV4 News, the various heartfelt and exasperating interviews with former Labour leadership personnel about how the longstanding personality clashes between the Blair and Brown wings of the party had caused continual friction and heartburn for many caught in-between in ways that had never been publicly known 'til recently.

There were always lots of rumors, but it turns out that where there was smoke there WAS, in fact, fire.
And at this debate, you'll hear plenty of very specific criticisms for how that party cleavage affected morale and political decisions during the last campaign.

This cleavage between the two wings was particularly problematic when it came time to have an agenda (manifesto) that could win in non-Labour strongholds.

Like the most liberal Democrats here in the Northeast U.S. and on the Left Coast, many Labour MPs have very safe constituencies that allow them to travel around the country stumping on behalf of the party and other candidates, with very little concern that they'll lose their own election because of all the natural institutional advantages they have, which have little, if anything, to do with them personally.
The best example of this in Florida is the dreaded Debbie Wasseman-Schultz for instance.

It's all very well and good for her to spout very liberal, reflexively pro-Obama nostrums since she doesn't run from an evenly remotely competitive district, but for those Dems who come from evenly divided congressional districts, or even Republican-leaning districts, like many of the DLC candidates I've mentioned here previously, it's not such an easy thing to simply vote with blinders on.

What made listening to this debate -and watching it via streaming- so fantastic was that the host, Victoria Derbyshire, was like a combination of the best of Ted Koppell and Charlie Rose, plus those rare great old moments on NBC's "The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson," where politically astute pols of the late '60's and early '70's would eagerly
answer questions from Johnny that were either personally revealing or sometimes fraught with political danger, especially if you bombed and came across poorly, knowing the whole nation was watching.

Just like all young comics appearing on Carson for the first time, you desperately wanted Johnny's approval!


Johnny Carson, Rolling Stone 287, March 22, 1979,
Photo by Annie Leibovitz

I only read this article about 50 times when it first came out!


Derbyshire was masterful going from one candidate to another to elicit some intensely personal insight or political reflection to some often very difficult questions of a sort that you rarely if ever see on American TV, due to American pols reluctance to appear and 'let it all hang out' as it were. And she even got some of the candidates to personally call each other out in a way that you never see here publicly.

If you consider yourself even slightly a political activist or Anglophile or both and watch this video -available for viewing until Wednesday night U.K. time- you will get a first-class education into how to conduct a proper political debate that is both informative and lively, and something we should very much like to see more of on this side of the Atlantic.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t7f6q




http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/#two

Listen to the Labour leadership debate

Read listener comments from 5 live Connect