summertime and the breathing is wheezy

[alonewiththemoon]

cottonwood fluffs floating in the air = miserable me.  ow my sinuses.

Found an excellent Arabic song translation resource, Musicarabi at Blogspot.  A Hasna song I've been wanting lyrics for was listed there, happily it's just a silly love song so I'm free and clear to dance to it.   I want more shaabi or otherwise "ethnic" sounding pop in my repertoire, it makes a very happy medium between the music I want to dance to and the music a restaurant crowd wants to hear.  I love Saad and Hakim and Nancy Ajram but I'd also like stuff that's less overplayed.  But it's important to find lyrics, you never know when a really earthy sounding pop song might be highly political or outright offensive. 

Speaking of politics, after reading about it in spitcurl 's LJ, I rented The World According to Sesame Street.  It was a fantastic look into what goes into making Sesame Street relevant for kids around the world, and how it might be a genuine force for healing in places like Kosovo.  I think one of my favorite moments was when the Bangladeshi crew received their own custom Muppets from Henson's studio--the absolute delight and joy on the puppeteers' faces was contagious as they flung themselves immediately into character.  Suddenly it wasn't the people congratulating each other on the arrival of the puppets, it was the puppets hugging and congratulating each other instead.  But there were many serious moments as well, when production crews were threatened with cancellation by politics or threatened with bodily harm by the strife going on around them.  The utter commitment and integrity of the people producing the Sesame Streets of the world is deeply inspiring.  (I was surprised to see in the coverage of the "Muppet with HIV/AIDS" media frenzy that of all people, Jerry Falwell understood the point of having that character on the South African Sesame Street and stood up to the Bill O'Reillys of the media to defend the idea.  Bizarre.  But good for him, I guess.)

Comments

[saturniidae.livejournal.com]

So that's what that miserable fluff is!

[rojagato.livejournal.com]

Another friend noted on her LJ that she was frightened to the dickens by a (probably desperately wanna-be egg-laying) snapping turtle crawling out from under her car in the morning when she was about to enter it (the car), the turtle white and furry, being entirely festooned with the cottonwood fluff.

Man, that would scare the bejeezuss out of me, too.