the story of the horse Trigger

Roy Rogers's horse Trigger started his movie career as the horse rode by Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland) in "The Adventures of Robin Hood."  His name was Golden Cloud.  His next role was in a Roy Rogers western and shortly thereafter Roy bought the horse and re-named him Trigger.  When Trigger died in 1965, two fiberglass replicas were made of him.  One was part of the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum (the museum is now gone; the replica is privately owned) and the other is the bronco that still tops the scoreboard at the Denver Broncos stadium.

that Finnish and Hungarian are distantly related to Japanese and Korean

I had always known that Finnish and Hungarian are related languages.  They are called Uralic (as in Ural Mountains) languages, as is Estonian and a couple of others.  They are not in the Indo-European family as most European languages are.  There is a theory that Uralic languages are distantly related to Altaic languages, which include Japanese and Korean. The evidence is commonality in pronouns and in some key words. But, this is highly controversial and by  no means readily accepted in linguistic analysis. Still, fascinating.

About Keyboards in Different Languages

In English, we have the QWERTY keyboard. But the Latin languages use what is called the AZERTY keyboard and Germanic languages the QWERTZ keyboard. Just never dawned on me.

that wrinkled fingers are like tire treads!

When your fingers wrinkle when wet, it is an evolutionary adaptation to give you better grip -- like tire treads! I thought that was pretty cool. http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ArtikelNr=328223&Ausgabe=0&ProduktNr=223831&filename=328223.pdf

Oops

I forgot about this blog!

about 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight'

First, I found out that an album I have wanted for a long time is available on iTunes! "Rhythm of the Pride Lands" was something Lebo M. put out after the success of "The Lion King" but it is no longer in print.

Anyway, I came across this because I started looking into the history of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight." This song, which was a hit for The Tokens in 1961, was extensively re-written at that time. It was originally popularized in America by The Weavers who recorded it in 1952.

The original song, as you might imagine, is African, specifically South African. There, it is called "Mbube" which is Zulu for lion. It was written by Solomon Ntsele, known by his clan name as Solomon Linda. He is also primarily responsible for developing and popularizing (in South Africa) the a cappella style of singing that most Americans know from Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

The musicologist Alan Lomax (you knew he was in this story) in the 1950s discovered a 1939 recording that Solomon Linda had done of "Mbube" with his group the Evening Birds. Lomax brought the song to the attention of Pete Seeger.

Seeger misinterpreted the Zulu word uyimbube (Zulu, meaning "you're a lion") as "wimoweh" for The Weavers' recording -- which is why the refrain in the English versions of the song is wimoweh and some people even know it by that name.

that I had forgotten about Gary Grimshaw

who was an artist and White Panther Party member from Detroit. He did a lot of posters for bands playing in town in the '60s. Here's his website: http://www.garygrimshaw.com/

Check out the gallery.

I got there by reading the Free Press (freep.com) and seeing that they are going to tear down the Eastown theater which made me think of the Grande Ballroom. I found a website about the Grande which had a link on it about Grimshaw's recuperation from a serious illness.