Averaged over the past week, Building Our Dream Recording Studio is at V = 535 and C = 8.00.

To be honest, Tim, I cheated on that one, because I didn’t know the name either. I just looked up a YouTube playlist of instrumental hits and tried them out until I found one I recognized.

Well, the song is from 1961. It’s always seemed to me like a precursor of the theme to the Batman TV series.

Averaged over the last hour of April 19th, Solsbury Hill is at V = 18480 and C = 52.6.

Forgot about this one, which reached number three on the charts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTp_t126Bv4

Yeah, we played that one in my junior high band class! I never knew what it was from.

Yeah, I think Star Wars spoiled us all. It’s cool that you have some merch from the show, though!

I’ve had the date of September 13th, 1999 burned into my brain since the mid-70’s.

My mom was also a big fan of Magnum P.I. She thought that Tom Selleck was really cute. Paul Newman too.

As long as we’re talking Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, this show really intrigued me when I was a kid:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SpX8bVEmJo

I loved the Pink Panther cartoons too. As a kid I used to audio tape episodes of my favorite TV shows so that I could listen to them whenever I wanted. For this one I had to narrate the action as I watched it, which I found took all the fun out of it.

Averaged over the past week, Building Our Dream Recording Studio is at V = 1651 and C = 24.7. This is a 27% increase over the previous week’s viewing rate, and nearly five times the viewing rate of the week before that. Maybe it’s being charged by all the “shorts” from it that have been posted recently?

Oh, yes, Mike was definitely country-influenced. (Listen to the albums he did with the First National Band.) I just don’t think he was involved with this particular song.

I just looked up the credits, Tim, and Peter played almost everything, including the banjo. The only other contributors were Lance Wakely on one guitar part and Buddy Miles on drums. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Mike play the banjo.

This is a very short song that Peter Tork wrote and recorded with the Monkees. It wasn’t released until the early 90’s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9syyXgPDW8

I was introduced to this performance here in the club a couple of years ago. I still can’t believe it’s real!

A chart topper from 1959:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcpelLe8oHo

This jazzy little tune was used as background music for an animated segment on The Electric Company. I just now found it in its original form:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsDww6oCOFU

Thanks, Paul, but to quote Major Winchester from MASH, “I can play the notes, but I cannot make the music.”

I once bought a cassette of Acker Bilk’s greatest hits, and this song was on it. I had never heard of him at the time, but I was intrigued by his name, and there were a couple of Beatles covers on the tape, so I snagged it. I never knew a clarinet could sound so much better than the way I played it in band class in school!

Yeah, as I recall, Monica Seles was the first to do all the grunting. That’s about the time that I stopped following tennis entirely.

In most of the on-line golf tournament scoreboards I can click on any player and see an animation of where they are on any hole, how they got there, and what they have left. So I’m still able…

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Tom, there’s a way to do it on the keyboard, but I usually just copy and paste his name.

I thought of this one yesterday, but I just now remembered the name so that I could look it up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGPG_Y-_BZI

I’m a big golf fan myself. It’s just about the only sport I follow anymore. Every weekend I have several windows open on my computer to track the scores live on the various tours. I seldom watch the coverage on TV these days, though.

Golf originally appealed to me because most of the players projected a sense of…

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That’s a really cool song, Jürgen, but I’m not familiar with it, nor with the group. I just checked on Wikipedia, and apparently none of their stuff was ever released in the U.S. Yay, a new rabbit hole for me to explore!

I’ll venture another one by the Ventures:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqC3BjIyq_0

I wonder what would have happened if they ran…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owq7hgzna3E

This song topped the U.S. charts for nine weeks in 1960:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSsiS-v6_6M

A classic. So cool and jazzy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oox9bJaGJ8

I know this one very well, but more often than not I can’t remember the name of the song or the name of the group. (I got lucky this time.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryrEPzsx1gQ

This is the only pop song I know of — feel free to educate me — that reached the top three with separate vocal and instrumental versions by different groups:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxXZF60EPdM

This instrumental has the coveted MLT seal of approval:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4IfxAQ4TqQ

The first space mission I remember was the Apollo/Soyuz docking in 1975. I watched the hatch open between the two spacecraft, and then the astronauts greeted the cosmonauts in Russian while the cosmonauts greeted the astronauts in English.

I was too young (nine) to appreciate the geopolitical implications, but that…

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Yeah, there’s just no resistance, so everything moves with the tiniest effort.

I once attended a talk by space shuttle astronaut Story Musgrave, who gave a great description of how you manipulate heavy objects during a space walk. He said to imagine trying to push a piano across a stage, while both you and the piano are on rollers.

Arte Johnson has actually intersected with my life several times. He hosted a syndicated kids’ show out of Detroit called The Hot Fudge Show that I used to watch, and when I was living in Los Angeles in the late 80’s he reunited with Ruth Buzzi to make this commercial for an area convenience…

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Yes, that’s Newton’s first law of motion, Jung, and I couldn’t have phrased it any better!

Averaged over the past week, Building Our Dream Recording Studio is at V = 1298 and C = 19.4. This is nearly four times the viewing rate of a week ago!

I just remembered this other Rankin-Bass song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbf1xonAMiQ

Paul, that in turn reminds me of a similar mashup of English and German, composed by Dave Morrah, that was regularly featured in the Saturday Evening Post, featuring a character named Heinrich Schnibble.

Somehow I’m not finding any examples on the internet, but I do recall one sentence from my own reading long ago. Heinrich…

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Jung, I didn’t know about that connection between Artemis and Apollo. Very cool!

I don’t think AI would help much in planning the trajectory. It’s a pretty straightforward calculation on a computer.

Yes, Bud, Hudepohl was brewed in Cincinnati, which was only about 80 miles from me, so we were in the small market for those ads.

I wasn’t quite old enough for Laugh-In, but I remember Arte Johnson from a series of TV commercials he did for a local beer company in the ’70’s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10cb3YmJKfE

Yes, Jung, I’m excited about Artemis too. Closest approach to the Moon will be around 4 PM today Pacific time.

I remember Mona and Lisa once mentioning how intrigued they were by outer space. That shows on their part an admirable mix of intellectual curiosity and intellectual humility.

Thanks for captaining this ship, Tim. It’s been a lot of fun!