Thursday, January 25, 2001

Synchronicity Is My Middle Name

As I was riding home last night, I caught a short segment on Fresh Air about Bing Crosby. The guest made the case that Bing Crosby was, in his early years, something of a radical, introducing swing into a stodgier orchestral milieu. Unfortunately I didn't catch the guest's name. What I did catch was a rendition of From Morning On, which starts out as a corny barbershop tune, and transforms into a much more up tempo swing number.

I went home and immediately tried searching for it on Napster. I succeeded, and gave it another listen. It's actually pretty cool. I've since tracked it down to several CD's, so I'll probably be picking one up, such as Bix and Bing.

So now for the synchronicity. I was browsing Robot Wisdom during my lunch, when what should I see but a pointer to a review of a book on Bing Crosby by Gary Giddens called A Pocket Full of Dreams. That's not the full title, you can get that from the Atlantic Monthly book review pointed to above. In any case, the guest on Fresh Air was Gary Giddens. The synchronicity is not that I spotted two instances of an author flogging his new book, but rather that I spotted one instance on a snob radio show, and the other on an eclectic weblog. Go figger "qbullet.smiley".

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