Lost in Translation

British music producer Adam Kidron has come up with the idea of a Spanish-language version of the US national anthem. Here is the English translation of “Nuestro Himno,” the Spanish-language version.

The day is breaking, do you see it? In the light of the dawn?
What we so acclaimed at nightfall?
Its stars, its stripes,
flew yesterday
In the fierce battle
in a sign of victory,
The glow of battle, in step with liberty
At night they said: It’s being defended!

Chorus:
Oh say!
The voice of your starry beauty
is still unfolding
Over the land of the free
The sacred flag?

Its stars, its stripes,
Freedom, we are equal
We are brothers, in our anthem.
In the fierce combat in a sign of victory
The glow of battle, in step with liberty
My people keep fighting
It’s time to break the chains
At night they said: It’s being defended!
Oh say! Your starry beauty is still unfolding.

Compared with the actual version below, the Spanish language version seems to have misplaced the point of the anthem. It did manage to get the "stars and stripes" and an "Oh say" included in the lyrics.

Here's the words to the REAL national anthem of the United States of America, "The Star- Spangled Banner":

Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Nicole Kidman Doings

Even though it's being widely reported, the marriage of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban on June 25 in Sydney has not been confirmed by her Australian publicist Wendy Day who says this:
"Clearly they (Kidman and Urban) are enjoying a nice friendship together, but Nicole's personal life is her personal life and I have no further knowledge of their friendship."

Wherever the truth lies in regard to her personal life, there is no doubt Nicole has been busy with her career. Here's a rundown:

• Fur, biopic, complete,will be shown at Cannes in May, and is scheduled for US release in Nov 2006
• The Visiting, horror sci-fi, complete
• Happy Feet, animated, complete, scheduled for US release Nov 2006
• Untitled Noah Baumbach project, filming
• The Lady from Shanghai, pre-production 2006
• Headhunters, announced, 2007
• Untitled Baz Luhrmann project, pre-production, 2008

59 Ingredients in a Fast Food Strawberry Milkshake!

An excerpt from Eric Schlosser's new book for children, Chew on This, which explains fast-food and how companies exploit children:

If you wanted to make a strawberry milkshake at home, here's all you'd need: ice, cream, strawberries, sugar and a touch of vanilla.

Now take a look at the ingredients you might find in a fast-food strawberry milkshake: milkfat and nonfat milk, sugar, sweet whey, high-fructose corn syrup, guar gum, monoglycerides and diglycerides, cellulose gum, sodium phosphate, carrageenan, citric acid, E129 and artificial strawberry flavour.

And what does that "artificial strawberry flavour" contain?

Just these few yummy chemicals: amyl acetate, amyl butyrate, amyl valerate, anethol, anisyl formate, benzyl acetate, benzyl isobutyrate, butyric acid, cinnamyl isobutyrate, cinnamyl valerate, cognac essential oil, diacetyl, dipropyl ketone, ethyl butyrate, ethyl cinnamate, ethyl heptanoate, ethyl heptylate, ethyl lactate, ethyl methylphenylglycidate, ethyl nitrate, ethyl propionate, ethyl valerate, heliotropin, hydroxyphrenyl- 2-butanone (10% solution in alcohol), ionone, isobutyl anthranilate, isobutyl butyrate, lemon essential oil, maltol, 4-methylacetophenone, methyl anthranilate, methyl benzoate, methyl cinnamate, methyl heptine carbonate, methyl naphthyl ketone, methyl salicylate, mint essential oil, neroli essential oil, nerolin, neryl isobutyrate, orris butter, phenethyl alcohol, rose, rum ether, undecalactone, vanillin and solvent.

Happy 16th Birthday Hubble!

The Hubble Space Telescope was carried into space aboard space shuttle Discovery on April 24, 1990. The Hubble telescope has revolutionized virtually every field of astronomy, from planetary science through stellar evolution to gamma-ray bursts.
View images taken with the Hubble telescope here.

Blog Milestone

It's a milestone for That's Not Writing, That's Typing! I finally reached a 1000 views. According to my comments and my cluster map, I have hits from all over the world. When you consider that there are 6 billion people in the world, it puts my 1000 hits into perspective, but I'm still happy to have people read what I have written and return to read the posts again. As all of you who write blogs know, it's lots of fun to write these posts. I love to read other people's blogs too. It's an odd feeling of intimacy to think of other people sitting at their keyboards writing for themselves and for everyone else. When I read a recent post, I always think "someone just typed and posted that!" It took nearly four months to tally the first 1000 hits on my blog. How long will it take to tally the next 1000?

Ella Stands

Our granddaughter is pulling up and standing! She is so pleased with herself as obvious in the photo. Right now she is a superfast crawler, so look out world! When she starts walking, there will be no stopping her.

Moonrise Over Hernandez, NM

Breath-taking Ansel Adams photograph

Screw Caps Over Cork

Do you know where cork comes from? Portugal is a huge producer of cork for lots of purposes, including corking the contents of your favorite wine labels. So it was shocking when one of the leading producers of Portuguese wine announced they were abandoning cork closures for their wine in favor of screw caps. The winery is Quinta do Cotto, described as one of the top wine producers in the country. It gave the simple reason for leaving cork behind that it is just too expensive. At least the cork industry was spared the indignity of hearing the truth: that wine is kept fresher and livelier when topped with a screw cap instead of a cork plug. Give me a screw cap any day for my white wines for two reasons: one, it keeps the wine's integrity in tact and two, it's faster to open!

Concerning Celeb Babies

The following rave is from Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times:

I understand the media fascination with Cruise and Holmes and their bizarro love affair. I just don't get the baby thing. I don't understand this relatively new phenomenon that has the aforementioned magazines, not to mention sites such as Egotastic, and shows such as "Access Hollywood" and "Entertainment Tonight," providing month-to-month coverage of celebrities, from pregnancy through birth through the first few years of the child's life. (Celeb kids seem to disappear around the age of 7, only to resurface when they're 15 or 16, sporting rebellious haircuts and tattoos while they're giving the finger to the paparazzi on their way to rehab.)

Instead of mocking this trend, maybe I should run with it and launch a magazine devoted entirely to pregnant celebrities.

I'll call it FetUs Weekly.

New Engagement

I hope this is true! It's being reported that Naomi Watts and Liev Schreiber are looking for an engagement ring to seal a December 2005 proposal. I don't know much about Liev so I looked up his bio on IMDb.com.

Liev (pronounced Lee-ev) is the son of Tell Schreiber, a theatrical actor with some film roles. His mother, Heather, was a painter. At age 1, the family moved from San Francisco to Canada. His parents divorced when he was 4 or 5. He and his mother then moved to New York, where she drove a cab. During that time, they lived as squatters in an abandoned building. His mother now lives in an ashram in Virginia. His mother taught him to read. She also forbade him from seeing color movies. Thus he grew up seeing movies at a local revival house, particularly those of Charlie Chaplin. Started acting at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Then graduated from the Yale School of Drama in 1992. He originally wanted to be a playwright, but his teacher encouraged him to become an actor.

They both star in the upcoming film The Painted Veil which is in post production. Here's the plot summary. Sounds heavy.

This story tells the recovery journey of a shallow, young adulterous British woman (Naomi Watts) whose intellectual bacteriologist husband (Edward Norton), on finding out her unfaithful act, takes her to a remote area of China ravaged by a cholera epidemic, where their perils in battling the health crisis leads finally to the death of her husband and the beginning of her spiritual awakening to the true meaning of love and life.

Wine in a Juice Box

What do you think of a juice box filled with wine? The Three Thieves 250-ml “bullets,” sell four to a pack, resemble elongated, narrow juice boxes with less severe edges. The new format offers 250 ml and less waste. The box eliminates the need to recycle glass and cuts down on shipping costs, which is one reason why airlines have taken a serious interest since its unveiling late last month. According to the article at MSNBC.com, the potential of this format is immediate on first glance: Toss one of these suckers in a backpack and haul it to the beach — no corkscrew needed. No cup needed. Drink it and toss it in the recycling bin.

I won't even drink wine from a plastic glass, so no, I'm not ready for a juice box of wine. The packager even tried to have a straw taped to the side of the box! Ewwww

Ava Gardner Biography

I like biographies of movie stars if they're truthful and interesting. This one, Ava Gardner "Love is Nothing" by Lee Server, is receiving wonderful reviews in the US and the UK. The US review begins:

When a smitten great-grandson of Charles Darwin pronounced Ava Gardner "the highest specimen of the human species," he summed up the consensus about this voluptuous movie queen. With remarkable unanimity, those who met Gardner were apt to second that emotion.

Server also wrote the biography of Robert Mitchum subtitled "Baby, I Don't Care" which is considered one of the best film star biographies around.

NASA's Best

What a beautiful NASA website from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology!

To see the Sombrero Galaxy and more of the best pictures of 2005, click here. (uses flash)

Charles Frazier's New Book

If you liked Cold Mountain, you'll be happy to know that Charles Frazier's follow-up novel will be published on October 3. It's been 10 years since Frazier's first novel, Cold Mountain, won the National Book Award for Fiction. Here's how the publisher Random House describes thirteen moons:

"At the age of twelve, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins — for a brief moment — a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will's destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians — including a Cherokee Chief named Bear — he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and men, and eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington City to preserve the Cherokee's homeland and culture. And, he will come to know the truth behind his belief that 'only desire trumps time.' Brillianty imagined by a master of American fiction, THIRTEEN MOONS is a stunning novel about a man's passion for a woman, and how loss, longing, and love can shape a man's destiny over the many moons of a life.''

Easter in Denmark

This article appeared in the Hobart Mercury, a Tasmanian newspaper. It concerns Princess Mary, the Little Prince, and Easter in Denmark. The photo is from Danish Royal Watchers blog and shows Queen Margrethe II holding Prince Christian.

PRINCESS Mary's "baby kingaroo" looked more like a floppy-eared Easter bunny at his grandmother's birthday party.

Mary and her husband Crown Prince Frederik proudly showed off their six-month-old son Prince Christian as Denmark's royal family gathered to celebrate the 66th birthday of Queen Margrethe II.

The party at Marselisborg Castle was a double celebration combining birthday and Easter festivities -- including some uniquely Danish traditions.

As well as the usual chocolate eggs and rabbits, Danes enjoy a special Easter beer from their breweries.

The stronger, tastier brew is used to help wash down the traditional Easter Thursday meal of cabbage -- sometimes up to seven different types.

Danes also traditionally do large loads of washing over Easter in the belief that the clothes will stay cleaner for the rest of the year.

The royal family gathered at the baroque-inspired Marselisborg palace, the summer holiday home of Queen Margrethe and her husband Prince Henrik.

Maira Kalman

I knew I was going to love this website as soon as I read about it on Dave White's blog. (I'd give you the link to his blog, but I'm not sure you're cool enough. If you think you can handle serious LA cool, write for the link in the comment box and I'll send it out.) Anyway, Dave referenced this website of Maira Kalman's so I had a look and her art is wonderful. She has several New Yorker covers (see "Crosstown Boogie Woogie"), many children's books, and other art on her site. Check it out!

Planting Herbs

Here is an herb pot for spring which would be perfect for your five favorite herbs. Or you could have two pots, one for Italian herbs, and one for your other five favorites. Since you only snip the plants, there's no reason why they can't share the same soil and water.
Shop.com has the fresh herb pots, but the link doesn't work. I got there by froogle search for "herb pots".

What a Marvelous Idea!

The Queen has had lunch with 99 people who were born on the same day as her, as part of her 80th birthday celebrations. The monarch described the 70 women and 29 men who attended the Buckingham Palace reception as her "exact twins".

Can you imagine all those 80 year-olds together for a birthday party at the palace? What a treat!

John Forrester, who had travelled from Australia, was rewarded with a seat next to the Queen at the lunch. He described her as the "most natural person in the world", adding that she would "endear herself to anybody and everybody. You look back over your life and say 'when have I bettered it?' Well, when I got married, when I had kids, yes, but beyond that this has to be the top of the tree."

The guests were treated to a three-course lunch, with the main course of filet de boeuf bordelaise being served on a royal silver dinner service normally reserved for state banquets. The solid silver plates, decorated with the Prince of Wales's feathers, garter and coronet, date from 1893 to 1902.

The Queen, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, told her guests "we can and should count our blessings. I doubt whether any of us would say the last 80 years has been plain sailing. But we can give thanks for our health and happiness, the support we receive from our families and friends, some wonderful memories and the excitement that each new day brings."

The Queen thanked her guests for coming, adding: "I hope all those of you who are my exact twins will make the most of our special day on Friday."

Record Oil Price? Maybe Not...

Here's the lead in most reports today concerning the price of oil:

Crude oil set an all-time high Tuesday as worries over supply persisted in Iran and Nigeria.
Light sweet crude for May delivery, which expires on Thursday, traded as high as $70.88 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, surpassing the previous record of $70.85 set last summer after hurricanes devastated the Gulf Coast.

Here's the reality:

Though a record in absolute terms, the price is still well shy of a record, if adjusted for inflation. The peak price would have been set during the Iranian revolution in March 1981, when a barrel of oil would have cost about $90 in today's dollars.

Source: CNNMoney.com

Ella's Easter Egg Hunt

Still a crawler, Ella needed Daddy's help with her egg hunt. We made sure she closed her eyes while the eggs were hidden.

Urban Cowboy

Spending the long weekend with son, daughter-in-law, daughter and Aussie, we did a lot of talking about lots of stuff. Being family we agree and disagree, but one thing we all gave a big nod to was that Urban Cowboy was one of the best movies ever. John Travolta was the perfect Bud; Debra Winger was the perfect Sissy; and we all know someone like Scott Glenn's Wes Hightower. Also Looking for Love is the perfect country/western song. If you're too young or too old to remember this movie, rent it on DVD and enjoy a real Texas story with a universal theme.

Think about this: The role of Bud was written for Dennis Quaid and Michelle Pfeiffer was originally cast as Sissy.

Spielberg Joins 2008 Olympics

Film-maker Steven Spielberg is joining the design team for the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympics as a consultant to Zhang Yimou who will lead the team.

Spielberg, whose last film, Munich, concentrated on the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics, said: "Our one goal is to give the world a taste of peace, friendship and understanding. Through the visual arts, the art of celebration of life, we are dedicated to making this the most emotional opening ceremony ever."

Zhang, 54, said: "I'm very honoured. I make a solemn promise to the Chinese people I will complete the task beautifully and successfully."

The opening ceremony is scheduled to take place in the Chinese capital on 8 August 2008.

It's Springtime in the Hill Country!

Happy Easter Everyone!

Kiss Those Pounds Good-bye

This is the sandwich which will make you shed 85 pounds! (English currency, not weight) The McDonald sandwich - named after its creator Scott McDonald, the chef at London department store Selfridges - is said to be the world's most expensive. Its cost is down to the Wagyu beef that makes up most of the filling, packed in a 24-hour fermented sour dough bread. Wagyu cattle are one of the most expensive breeds in the world. The Japanese cows are raised on a special diet, including beer and grain. They are supposed to be regularly massaged with sake, the Japanese rice wine, to tenderize the flesh. The ingredients of the sandwich are Wagyu beef, fresh lobe foie gras, black truffle mayonnaise, brie de meaux, rocket, red pepper and mustard confit and English plum tomatoes.

Here's Our Mary in Portrait

Danish Royal Watchers is a terrific blog for everything that's "Danish royalty news". Go there to see photos of the unveiling and a photo of the entire portrait. Pictured on left is the center portion of the work.

This is an excerpt from the press release concerning the portrait:

It was the expressed wish of the museum that the portrait was not to be a typical official portrait, but a more personal characterization of the new member of the Danish Royal Family.

Since his first sitting with the Crown Princess in May 2005, Heimans has been working intensively on the portrait and has repeatedly visited Denmark. The result is a resounding success: a work that fuses the Crown Princess’ present day situation with her Australian heritage.

The Princess is seen in the Garden Room of Fredensborg Palace, where Lauritz Tuxen more than 100 years ago painted King Christian IX Danish and his extensive Pan-European family. She is getting ready to leave the palace - her coat lies at the ready over a chair, and she is putting on her gloves. She gazes pensively at something we cannot see. The room around her is multifaceted and labyrinthine: It is reflected outwards and inwards in the great mirrors that Heimans has replaced the room’s actual landscape paintings with. In the mirror behind Mary, a glimpse of Hobart can be seen, and in another mirror, a reflection of the Danish flag can be detected in the ceiling. In this way, the painting represents the Crown Princess on the brink between the old life and the new, the known territory and the unknown. At first glance, it is difficult to find one’s bearing, but the Crown Princess seems calm and confident, ready for her challenge.

Canberra Portrait of CP Mary

Chinese-born Australian Jiawei Shen made this portrait of Crown Princess for Canberra. It is currently on display in the Australian capital, but will be a temporary part of the exhibit in Denmark when the first official portrait of the Crown Princess is unveiled tomorrow.

Crown Princess Mary's Portrait

Tomorrow at the National History Museum at Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark's first official portrait of Crown Princess Mary is unveiled. It has been executed by the Australian artist Ralph Heimans, who makes links between Mary's old and new homelands in a way which accentuates her particular background. The Danish magazine, Billed-Bladet, reports that Ralph Heimans has found Mary to be a wonderful subject since they met 10 months ago (last May). During that time he has made five visits to The Chancellery House at Fredensborg, where Crown Prince Frederik dropped in on proceedings to check out how things were going. Heimans says he was nervous to begin with because he hadn't painted a royal before, but Mary was so down-to-earth and charming that she put him at ease and made him feel welcome straight away. So far nothing has been revealed about the painting except that it is painted in oil and is 1.7 metres high and 2.5 metres wide.

To view some of Ralph Heimans's work, visit his website.

Judy Collins

Aussie and I saw Judy Collins at the Kerrville Folk Festival a few years ago. Her voice is still amazing! She sang Someday Soon, Both Sides Now, Amazing Grace and lots of other songs, accompanying herself on guitar and piano. (That's Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary accompanying Judy in the photo.) She's appearing now in Australia on the east coast. Here is a poignant excerpt from an interview she did for Australian Broadcasting, the ABC.
MARK BANNERMAN: The 1960s were kind to Judy Collins, the next two decades would show her that other side of life. First there was the battle with alcoholism. What drew you into that?

JUDY COLLINS: I was born with the Irish virus. That's easy. I came by it honestly through centuries and centuries of ancestors, I am sure. I even know some of them - who some of them were.

MARK BANNERMAN: Was it tough to give it up?

JUDY COLLINS: I had a very dark about four years where I was drinking around the clock. I thought, well, it is all over. What will I do if I can't sing. So I started to think about what will I do if I can't sing? Then I thought I don't have a choice. I think I 'm going to have to give it up and I went into treatment.

MARK BANNERMAN: Alcoholism may have been hard to deal with, but the death of her son by suicide was much tougher again. You said something that in a sense is very brave, that you said "That decision ultimately to commit suicide must be respected".

JUDY COLLINS: Oh, absolutely. If you don't have that right, then you don't have any rights. A human being.

MARK BANNERMAN: You really feel that?

JUDY COLLINS: Oh, absolutely.

MARK BANNERMAN: Despite the pain it's brought you?

JUDY COLLINS: Well, if you've had a suicide in your life, then you have no right to take your life because you know too much.

MARK BANNERMAN: A decade on, though, Judy Collins, it seems, is back, aligned with old friends she's found a new lease on life. And all of it because of live music.

JUDY COLLINS: It's a shared understanding of the meaning of art and the meaning of music in people's lives and live music in people's lives is deeply important. It's deeply healing and it's deeply spiritual.

Counting Time

Set your alarm for 1:02 a.m. tonight, and three seconds later, you can revel in the fact that it's 01:02:03 04/05/06. Won't happen again for exactly a century.

Paul Simon's New Release

After several years of work, Paul Simon is ready to release Surprise, his first album since 2000. Simon latest effort is a collabration with U2's producer Brian Eno, the avant-garde artist best known for his musical work with Robert Fripp, Talking Heads, David Bowie and U2.

Simon insists that their working together is not as strange as it (or the resulting album) sounds.

"We're both 'sounds' people," Simon explained. "We're both about soundscapes. I thought he would bring an element that I hadn't ever encountered before, electronics, into a guitar record. Theoretically, it seemed to be a good idea. And when we actually did it, you could tell right away it was a good idea."

Simon was a fan of Eno's eclectic work, and they met at a London dinner party. They decided to "throw it together, see what the mix of sounds were, see what we produced," Simon recalled.
The results are evident from the opening track, "How Can You Live in the Northeast?," where Simon's songwriting meets Eno's wall of sounds to almost hypnotic effect. "Outrageous" is the hilarious tale of a middle-aged man doing 900 sit-ups a day while "painting my hair the color of mud."

And there's the autobiographical "Sure Don't Feel Like Love," with its lyric about a man who remembers how "once in August 1993 I was wrong/And I could be wrong again."

"That's pretty much me," Simon confessed with a soft chuckle. "You think of it. It's hilariously arrogant."

Back to Texas for the Summer!

Well, I just got back to Texas and here is what was there to greet me.....

But she is Fabulous!