The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Back during Napster’s golden age I got hooked on finding as many versions as possible of certain old songs. One was Ghost Riders. Another was The Lion Sleeps Tonight, which I discovered was actually an old South African song that became the pop hit I listened to on AM Radio when rock’n’roll (and I) was young. So it was interesting to run across an article in Bag and Baggage about Solomon Linda, the Zulu migrant worker who composed the song Mbube (lion) in Johannesburg in 1939 and recorded it with a group called the Evening Birds; and about how folk singer Pete Seeger came across the song in 1949 and performed it, calling it Wimoweh, from the Zulu “uyiMbube” meaning “he is a lion”; then done by the Tokens (the version I listened to as a youth) in 1961, who added the lyrics “in the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”. After all these years, Linda’s heirs are suing Disney for royalties on account of using the song in Lion King.

What’s Up With RSS?

I thought RSS would be complicated. Turns out it’s simple. It stands for Really Simple Syndication, and it’s true. So, some three months after starting the blog I finally added the RSS links. Actually, I restored them. Originally, I commented them out, thinking I was going to have to learn XML and figure out what Blogdex was and how to ping a register that alerts everybody there’s a new article. Well, I guess bloggers that are really into their “blogrolls” do all that pinging and blogdexing and whatnot, but it’s certainly not necessary. And it turns out that WordPress automatically creates the XML for the RSS feeds for articles as well as comments.

RSS may become the main way people surf the www before too long. In a way, it’s like bookmarks. But, instead of opening up the web page, the RSS aggregator shows a list of, say, the 10 most recent items on a web page or site, with a short summary or sometimes the first sentence or two. If it looks interesting you can click the title and get the whole thing in your browser. In other words, it’s a quick way to scan what’s new and pick what’s of interest. Check out dozens of websites without actually having to visit and browse through them. It’s especially useful for news websites, financial websites and, of course, blogs.

I’m still new to it. The aggregator I use is a free extension to Mozilla Firefox, called Sage. By the way, everybody should use Firefox; although, as I was paying credit cards online earlier today one of the websites wouldn’t work with Firefox. This is pretty rare. I mostly only use IE when I want to open myself up to risky surfing. There are many available aggregators, some free, some cost, some standalone, some browser add-ons. If anybody has a list of websites they regularly check, I recommend checking out RSS. If anybody has a list of blogs they regularly check, it’s the only way to go.

New Lows

Now that it’s officially summer we’ve been having record low temperatures for several days. I think they’re talking about it finally getting into the 80’s later in the week. Let’s see, yeah, should be able to arrange for stupid hot by around July 9. Heh-heh!

Listening to my favorite radio station on the way to work the other day. The hosts are some guy and girl and they talk sex a lot. The guy has no hesitation, for example, describing in detail what sort of nipples he likes. :nuts:

Anyhow, they were talking about some performer and he referred to her as stupid hot. And then I realized that in today’s lingo, apparently, “stupid” means “extremely”. So I finally understood “stupid hot” as applied to Kansas weather. Y’know, even when you’re inherently hip, it’s difficult for old folks to keep up with everything!

p>. :propeller: