Lettercolumn
Well, the only guy who really responds to my articles is my dad, but since he had some interesting points I thought I’d take a minute to answer some of them here.
I am always amazed at how inept the democrats are at attacking Bush. On TV talk shows there is usually a representative from each side. The left says Bush lied about WMD and the right says he didn’t lie, everybody thought the same thing, which is not true, but the left says nothing. The fact is everybody thinks we know because we have a large network of spies and satellites, so they believe us. Powell went to the UN to convince the doubters with pictures from space which he claimed to be WMD but which could have been anything. If you keep saying the same thing over and over, eventually people believe you. Congress should have known, but even they may have thought that Bush had info they didn’t have. However, they should have demanded to see it instead of giving up their authority. Only Hans Blix knew the truth. He kept asking them to tell him where to look, and everywhere he went he found nothing. But his voice was too small.
Damn straight. Colin Powell’s been getting off too easy lately. He’s the one that went to the UN to present the evidence, so clearly he had access to it, why didn’t he realize it was shoddy? Or is he accusing the CIA of tampering with it? Either way, he should be up to a little more than whining “I didn’t know” on the talk shows. Dude, how do you get WMD out of this???
And on the Charlie Brown tip he had this to say:
I found your musical epiphany very interesting. I think there is something about music or sounds which can spiritually transport people back to their early years. I think psychologists are even studying this phenomenon. When I was very young I watched very primitive Felix the Cat cartoons, probably from the twenties since there was no talking, on a very primitive TV. The cartoons were accompanied by music which was nothing more than background noise to me and there was no explanation of what it was. It wasn’t until almost 50 years later that I realized as I listened to certain pieces of music that something long forgotten awakened in me. It took me a while to make the connection to Felix the Cat, but once I did I was sure it was correct. The music was Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bizet’s Children’s Games. Even now whenever I run across route 9 with Melonie, my feet beat out a rhythm which is translated in my mind into Bizet’s music.
According to this site about Vince Guaraldi, using classic themes in animation is commonplace and musicians working on classic animation were often incredibly creative in their choices of themes and arrangements:
Just in passing, staunch fans of quality animation music should seek these three CDs: two volumes of “The Carl Stallings Project,” which feature themes, variations, and a few complete Warner Brothers cartoon soundtracks; and “Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights,” which showcases the wildly original Raymond Scott compositions excerpted by Stallings. Scott was decades ahead of his time; you’ve truly never heard anything like this stuff before…except in just about every Warner Brothers cartoon ever made.
Now that they mention it, I do remember that Warner Brother’s music being pretty cool. But this made me curious about Felix the Cat, a cartoon not exactly in reruns on Saturday mornings, and I found this site, and man is that stuff cool. They even have a collection of music and videos so maybe you can track down that lost theme, or at least enjoy some hillarious silent cartoons with top-notch music.