Bits and Babs for 1.17.09

Watching: Adulthood
Listening: I Need Love by Plan B f Jacob Anderson
Reading: The Company by Brian Littell

News of the Day:

• A brief history of American presidential inaugurations, which is like feting someone before their execution.
• A pottery-load of Iron Age coins are unearthed, but still not enough to bail out a bank.
• A book about how to not write a book.
• James McAvoy drops a new play and a load of f-bombs.
• Millionaire goes to the clank for stealing pages of really old books. Don't mess with the British and Oxford Libraries.
• Telling it like it is. The Times says: 'Temperatures in Western Europe go crazy'.
• The NEA's most recent report on reading gives hope that we aren't doomed to idiocy after all.
  
• A Michael Jackson musical - because there are no original ideas on Broadway.
• Impact diamonds spell death for woolly mammoths! (Featuring a quote from an SIU prof.)
• Third-hand smoke. Just quit already.

The Kennedy Center Honors aired a few weeks ago, and Barbara Streisand was one of the vips. The lady does not like the prospect of being out-diva-ed - as evidence by her enthusiastic reception to performances by Idina Menzel, Ne-Yo, and Beyonce. I sense that this willful convergence of star power from every corner of the entertainment industry could have been better orchestrated. Ms. Menzel is fantastic - when she's a mooing lesbian or painted green (or with her hot husband). Her version of Don't Rain on My Parade sounded like an overeager theatre grad who thinks she's right for every part. Think Bunny's daughter on Extras or, it must be said, the blond chick in High School Musical (but with punchier vocals). Next up was Mrs. Jay Z. I heart Beyonce and she does a fierce Etta James, and Diana Ross if you want to count the Dreamgirls gig, but she couldn't seem to find a balance between reverential and original. Result: uninspired. And then there was Ne-Yo. That was just odd, and uncomfortable in a this-night-can't-get-any-worse-because-I-just-kissed-George-W.-Bush-and-he's-sitting-next-to-me sort of way. But I guess they love her, they really love her.

(Alright, this was just my excuse to post a clip of Heather Headley, of Aida fame, who killed Elton John's Your Song at the KCH some years back. Her performance defies my vocabulary.)