Lives of the Crooners

"I do not think I am alone in requesting that you drop all this nonsense about birds," writes McNeil. "Enough with the tweeting - more with the crooning." In fact, you are quite alone, Mr. McNeil. In a way, aren't birds nature's crooners? As Messiaen said, well, I don't know. He said a lot of nice things about birds. I'm too tired to walk over to the shelf and get the biography and flip through the index. I suppose it is easy for you to criticize the vast knowledge and easygoing prose style of the bird correspondent. But wouldn't it be more constructive to submit some tidbits about crooners instead? The bird correspondent seems to be holding up her end of the workload! As I recall, the last time you started to tell me a story about a crooner, I asked for more details and you told me to look it up in a book! If I bothered to look things up in books, this would not be a "blog" (see Messiaen, above). By coincidence, however, I received the following message on my myspace page today, from a stranger who is designated my "friend" in the strange world of the "internet." I present it here to assuage your avian agitation: "Sometime in the 70s, when my mom was little [!!!! - ed.], her parents took her on a tour of Universal Studios. They were looking at the set from the scene in 'The Ten Commandments' where Charlton Heston parted the Red Sea. Her dad, a theologian, took a couple of steps back to better admire the separating walls of water, and he bumped right into Jerry Lewis." Allow us to interject that the studio was probably Paramount, not Universal. Lewis did the majority of his work under contract to Paramount, and we believe that THE TEN COMMANDMENTS was a Paramount production, if we are remembering correctly. We count Lewis as a crooner because in addition to his many other accomplishments he was(and is) a crooner. Also, to get McNeil off our back.