On which I write about the books I read, science, science fiction, fantasy, and anything else that I want to. Currently trying to read and comment upon every novel that has won the Hugo and International Fantasy awards.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: November 12, 1983 through December 3, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: November 19, 1983 through December 3, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
If you asked me to name the most bland, boring, and unexciting "party" song of all time, I would unhesitatingly tell you it is All Night Long. The video tries desperately to make this song exciting, but the bright colored clothes and the forced smiles just highlight how utterly uninteresting this song is. When Richie sings "we're going to party, karamu, fiesta, forever", it sounds like someone's Dad running into a room full of teens, turning on all the lights, throwing on a Perry Cuomo record and saying "this is how we partied when I was young!". This entire song is a "hello, fellow kids" meme set to a soft rock beat.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: November 5, 1983 through December 3, 1983.
All songs are snapshots in time. Sometimes those snapshots are relatively short-lived. The song Uptown Girl and its related video were made during the rush Joel was experiencing from his new relationship with Christie Brinkley. You can see and hear the joy and exuberance of that fresh and exciting moment in the performance. There is simply so much hope, exhilaration, and expectation evident here.
And of course, now, in 2021, we know that Joel and Brinkley did go on to get married, have a child, and then get divorced. The oddity of moments like that depicted in Uptown Girl is that we now know the ultimate outcome of the events that will flow from that moment, and it casts them in a different light. I will always remember when I found out that the marriage at the centerpiece of John Denver's Annie's Song fell apart, and how that just seemed so wrong. This seems similarly tragic in a way - none of the people in this video know what is in store for them over the next few years, both the highs and the lows. It is a moment in time caught forever, with all of the emotions of those involved untainted by what was to come.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: October 29, 1983 through November 5, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: November 5, 1983 through November 12, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
By 1983, the Bee Gees were essentially persona non grata on the pop charts. Having firmly associated themselves with the disco era, once disco had become an anathema to many people, the Bee Gees went from being the top musical act in the world to an act that couldn't give away tickets. The odd thing is that Bee Gees style music was as popular as ever, as witnessed by the chart-topping success of this song, which had been penned by the Bee Gees, but was handed off to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton to sing.
Islands in the Stream isn't unique on this score. The 1980s featured several hit songs that were written by one or more of the Bee Gees but sung by someone else - a list of artists that included songs by Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and Dionne Warwick. Basically, anyone but the Bee Gees seems like they could have success in the 1980s with a Bee Gees song. This quirky phenomenon suggests that the backlash against disco and disco-associated artists wasn't so much about the music as it was about the culture. Disco music was "urban" music, and "urban" was, as it often is, a code word for black and gay. People didn't like disco because they didn't like the music - they kept making disco-style music into chart-toppers as long as it wasn't called disco and wasn;t sung by recognizable disco acts - they just didn't like black and gay people influencing the wider culture.
A large part of the reason Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton could make Islands in the Stream into a hit in 1983 was that they were safe, white, country music artists who never made a disco song. Except for this one. Which they didn't call a disco song. This isn't to say that Rogers and Parton did anything wrong here, but they definitely benefitted from factors well beyond their control that served to position this song as a hit.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: The week of October 1, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
The Safety Dance is a song that people think is about something really deep and meaningful, but is in fact about something completely different. The persistent rumor surrounding this song is that it is an allegory about nuclear war, or rather the fear of nuclear war and a protest against the same. I have had this confidently asserted to me on multiple occasions by several different people. The writer and singer of the song, however, says it is about dancing. Literally. Or rather it is about doing the 'wrong" kind of dancing as an anti-establishment protest. Or something.
My takeaway here is that people want the music they love to have a significance it often does not have. If the lyrics to a song are even a little bit ambiguous, and you attach it to a weird and nigh-incomprehensible music video with a dwarf and Morris dancers and a mildly confusing coda of images and people will fill in their own interpretations. This song is about what it says it is about. For years, people have tried to make it be about something more, because they want the art in their life to have depth and meaning.
The real question here is does the intent of the creator definitively settle these sorts of issues? Is the song just about getting thrown out of a dance club for pogoing, or does the cultural zeitgeist that it is about more than that carry weight? Does it matter if people want to give a song significance that was not originally intended?
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: February 4, 1984 through February 18, 1984.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: February 4, 1984 through February 18, 1984.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: September 24, 1983 through October 29, 1983.
Karma Chameleon is a song that seems like it should have some sort of subtle subtext in its meaning, but it really doesn't. It seems like it should be a roundabout way to talk about a break up, or a piece of political satire that uses imagery to avoid directly complaining about a particular political movement, or something like that. The song is, however, simply about karma, like the title says. Basically, the song's meaning amounts to "what goes around, comes around", with nothing deeper or more complex than that. Sometimes things are what they seem at first glance, and this song is one of those things.
Over all, Karma Chameleon turned out to be one of the signature songs of the decade. Although Culture Club entered a stormy (and ultimately destructive) period following the success of this song resulting from romantic entanglements within the group gone sour and other issues, and Boy George's incresingly difficult time dealing with both fame and drugs, Karma Chameleon, by itself, cements them into the pantheon of iconic 1980s musical acts.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: The week of September 24, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
In 1983, Billy Joel more or less took his career on a left turn, releasing the album An Innocent Man, which was a collection of music inspired by and paying tribute to the do-wop style of music of the late 1950s and early 1960s, a time frame that coincided with Joel's own teenage years. This video for Tell Her About It drives home the homage, imagining a 1963 appearance on the iconic Ed Sullivan Show. The video says that the appearance was supposedly on July 31, but that day in 1963 was a Wednesday, not a Sunday, so it could not actually have happened.
I think it is not an accident that the video chose a date in the summer of 1963 as the time for the fictitious Ed Sullivan appearance. This was, essentially, the closing phase of the dominance of do-wop music in American pop culture. Within the next six months, Beatlemania would sweep the country, pushing do-wop music out of the limelight. In February 1964, the Beatles would appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, marking a clear end to one era of music and the beginning of another.
This is not to say that Joel didn't appreciate the Beatles. I have seen interviews in which he talks about how much he loved the Beatles and how much they influenced his own music. They did, however, fundamentally change music and push aside a lot of the kind of music that Joel remembered fondly from his early teenage years. I suppose, by putting out this album and this video, Joel tried to rectify that by just a little bit.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: September 17, 1983 through September 24, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
Every era has a hit that is both inexplicably and weirdly out of step with the pop culture of the era and simultaneously a prime example of the zeitgeist of the time. Taco's rendition of Puttin' on the Ritz is an example of this kind of song. An electronica cover version of a decades old song originally made popular by Fred Astaire and quite notably parodied in the movie Young Frankenstein, this was somehow both bizarrely out of step with the 1980s and also emblematic of the era. The fact that Taco himself appears to be channeling Tim Curry's Dr. Frank-n-Furter while cosplaying Astaire just makes this whole set-up seem both stranger and more comforting at the same time.
Previous Musical Monday:Maniac by Michael Sembello
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: September 10, 1983 through September 17, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: Never.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
I have noted before the pervasive influence that television and movies have on popular music, and to a certauin extent, the reverse is true as well. Maniac, from the sountrack of the movie Flashdance is yet another example of a movie pushing a song to the heights of popularity, and the music of a movie making the movie have cultural influence that vastly outweighs its actual performance as a movie.
Flashdance was a surprise success of a movie in 1983. No one expected it to do as well as it did, but the footprint it left on the culture outeighed anything that even its financial success would have predicted. Because of this movie, leg warmers and sweatshits with the neck cut out became ubiquitous fashions. The iconic "water drop" dance has been replicated, parodied, and paid tribute to countless times. "Welder-chic" briefly became a thing. And so on and so forth.
The weird thing is that even though the movie altered the cultural landscape of the decade, it did relatively little to help the careers of those who appeared in it. Jennifer Beales' career meandered aimlessly for a decade with roles in forgettable movies before having a couple of notable roles in the 1990s, and she finally settled in as a moderately successful television actress in the 2000s. None of the other actors had much of a boost to their careers. Michael Nouri's career also drifted from mediocre movie to mediocre movie. Cynthia Rhodes had a highlight in a secondary role in Dirty Dancing and a more prominent role in the Saturday Night Fever pseudo-sequel Staying Alive, but her career petered out after that (although, to be fair, that was in part because she married Richard Marx and started having children). Other than this song and the title track Flashdance . . . What a Feeling and Gloria, none of the other songs on the sountrack had significant chart success. None of the artists who appeared on the soundtrack got much of a career boost from it, and most of them, including Michael Sembello, saw their careers basically fizzle out shortly thereafter. Flashdance was a hit, and it pushed a couple of songs to the forefront of pop music for a bit but it appeared to have very little else in the way of coattails.
On a kind of unrelated note: Beals was not a dancer, despite being cast as the lead in a movie that was about a dancer working in a bar with other dancers who aspired to become a professional ballet dancer. As a result, most of the dance scenes in the movie, including the dance scenes in this video, were performed by a body double, mostly Marine Jahan, who was not credited in the movie. The only scenes in the video that are actually Beals are the close-ups of her face. Pretty mucyh everything else is Jahan. Flashdance doesn't really seem to have helped Jahan's career much either.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 34.7 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 1,092.7 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Current Weigh-In: 180
I ended up missing more days that I would have liked this week, so I think that to avoid this in the future, I'm going to be adding a short morning run to me routine. I don't really have enough time before work to do a full run the way I would like to, but I can put in a short run every day before I need to settle down and put in my workday. That way, on the days when I won't be able to do a full run in the evenings due to scheduling issues, I'll still get a couple of miles in to kick off the day. I've started experimenting with this, and I am cautiously optimistic that this will have some further benefits, as the day I tried this, I felt better the rest of the day as well. The upcoming week is the real test, so we'll see how this goes.
Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: Have you ever participated in the NaNoWriMo? If yes, how did it go?
Nope. I have enough going on without adding an effort to write a novel as well.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: The week of September 3, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: September 3, 1983 through September 10, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
This song is where synthesizer music crashed into the pop world. There had been techno pop hits before this, but none had topped the charts, none launched a figure to as much pop cultural dominance as this song did with Annie Lennox.
Literally everything about this song and this video was a metaphorical punch to the face of pop music. From the very first beat through to the very end, this song basically said to people who had grown up with pop rock from the 1970s "we aren't doing this the same way any more". There aren't any actual instruments being played on this track - it is entirely a synthesizer-generated song with the exception of Lennox's vocals. Layered on top of a driving bass line, Lennox's vocals are what really set this apart, soaring high above everything else in the song.
The video is just as in your face about its difference from the past. Lennox appears with a buzz cut, her hair dyed orange, and wearing a business suit, giving her a look that is simultaneously androgynous and incredibly sexy. Dave Stewart isn't even shown playing a keyboard or anything else that might be constructed as a "normal" piece of musical equipment. Instead, he taps on an MCS drum computer keyboard, almost daring the audience to try to figure out how his tapping links up with the music they are hearing. The only tiny concession to "music" in the video is the repeated showing of a cello, but the cello doesn't seem to actually have been used to create the string sounds in the song - apparently that was an Oberheim OB-X synthesizer.
It is hard to say exactly when "the 1980s" really arrived. The pop cultural zeitgeist of a decade always comes a few years after the calendar rolls over to a new tens digit, but the moment represented by this song is a strong candidate for when the 1980s swept away the last vestiges of the 1970s.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 36.4 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 1,058 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Current Weigh-In: 180
I missed three days of running this week. The first, Thursday, looks like it is going to be unavoidable going forward due to scheduling issues. I'm just going to have to factor that in as my weekly rest day going foward. The other twu - Saturday and Sunday - were because I was recovering from a nearly fifteen mile run on Friday. I like the really long runs, and to get to where I would like to be, I'm going to have to figure out how to incorporate them without putting me off the roads tfor two days afterwards.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: The week of October 15, 1988.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: The week of October 15, 1988.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: September 3, 1983 through September 17, 1983.
This version of Red Red Wine is a cover version of a cover version of a 1967 Neil Diamond song that was rereleased in the U.S. five years after it was a top hit in the U.K. That's a pretty long and winding road for a song to take.
This song is actually an example of something that probably can't really happen any more. The song was a big hit in the U.K. in 1983, but went almost entirely unnoticed in the U.S. Five years later, it was promoted by some interested music industry folks following a performence of the song at Nelson Mandela's birthday celebration, and it became a top hit in the United States. This sort of delayed flow through the cultural psyche just doesn't happen in the modern interconnected world where pop culutre flashes around the globe so quickly that if you blonk you miss it.
The delay in the song reaching popularity in the U.S. did create a kind of oddly jarring circumstance in which a song made during the ennui of the economic malaise of the early 1980s in the U.K. became a big hit in the U.S. in 1988, when the country was kind of riding high. The song and the video that goes with it depict a kind of depressing existence in which drinking is the only respite from a life of underemployment and disappointment, which fit perfectly with the zeitgeist of the recessionary economy of the early-1980s. It also fit perfectly with a band whose name was a reference to a government form used for claiming unemployment benefits. By 1988 though, the song felt kind of weirdly out of place.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 36.3 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 1,021.6 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Current Weigh-In: 180
I was able to run seven miles every weekday this week, but I wasn't able to get any running done over the weekend, so I missed my weekly mileage goal again. Even so, I was able to run 36 miles this week, which has me feeling pretty good about my conditioning. on the downside, one of the reasons I didn't run over the weekend was that my right heel was bothering me again, so I'm hoping that doesn't run into an issue that hampers my running again.
In a fit of optimism, I'm going to aim for 45 miles again this week. Also, since we are getting close to the end of the month, I'll be aiming for my monthly goals as well. The largest goal I set for this month was to run 300 kilometers this month - an average of just under ten kilometers per day. I'm pretty much on track for that, so with any luck I should get there in the next week.
Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: If you go trick-or-treating with your favorite book character, who would it be?
Éomer from the Lord of the Rings. I'd definitely go trick or treating with Éomer. We'd probably ride horses from house to house, looting the candy from each dwelling as we go.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: August 13, 1983 through August 27, 1983.
This is a song by a band at the end of its life, bereft of interesting ideas, desperate to churn out anything that will keep it relevant and failing badly. By 1983, the career of KC and the Sunshine Band was on life support. Their last notable hit had been in 1980 with the eminently forgettable Please Don't Go. They were, by 1983, a disco-era band that was trying to make it in a pop music landscape that was extremely hostile to disco music.
It doesn't help that this song is simply not very good. It has a dance beat, but everything about it seems almost like the band is just going through the motions. There's no real hook, no real substance to the lyrics, nothing particularly interesting about the vocal delivery, and nothing particularly memorable about the instrumentation. This song is bland, generic, and boring.
The blandness of the song isn't really helped by the video, which doesn't really do anything to illustrate or highlight the song. In the past I highlighted a couple of music videos that had inexplicably science fictional themes, and this one goes onto that list. The song is a generic dance song, while the video is a badly acted oddball fantasy horror quest where the climax is untying some ropes and an almost completely random deus ex machina. There's literally no connection between the music and the images presented, and that makes the entire thing almost entirely unmemorable.
This was the last gasp of KC and the Sunshine Band, and I can only say that after this they deserved the obscurity that awaited them.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 35.5 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 985.3 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Current Weigh-In: 180
I should have known going into this week that my running schedule was going to be disrupted. I took the week off from work because the Redhead had her midterm exam this week, and that allowed me to spend the week taking care of the Littlest Starship Captain. That also meant that the day before the exam I wasn't able to go running at all because I needed to stay home all day so that the Redhead could study. Then, over the weekend, we helped run a virtual convention, and once again, I wasn't able to get away to run on either Saturday or Sunday. On the other hand, that means that I was able to run 35 miles in only four days of running for the week, so there is that at least.
Going forward I am hoping to have an uneventful but productive week. There appears to be no reason for me to miss any running days this week and I've gotten to where my weekday run is a seven mile route, so I am aiming at 45 miles as my weekly goal again. I should top 1,000 miles tracked this week, so that's kind of exciting. We'll see how this goes.
Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: Would you consider giving out books to trick-or-treaters instead of candy?
First, I would need to have some trick-or-treaters. I live in a condominimum, which one might think would be a good spot for attracting trick-or-treaters, given the fairly high density of the residents and the fact that there are clearly many children living in the neighborhood. In practice, however, we have had so few trick-or-treaters show up that we have even contemplated not even buying candy, since we get so few knocks on or door on Halloween, and the few we do get are older teenagers.
On the other hand, the rarity of actual trick-or-treaters might be an argument in favor of giving out books, since I would only have to hand out a few. The problem is that while candy is pretty much an all ages kind of handout, to give books in a way that would be worthwhile, you'd have an array of books on hand that would be suitable for a variety of age ranges. Books that would make for good handouts for a five-year-old kid are probably going to be completely unsuitable for a ten-year-old kid, and vice versa. This would make planning for the night a lot more complicated.
The other issue with handing out books is that if you end up with extra books at the end of the night, there's not a lot of good options for what to do with them. With candy, you can just eat the candy yourself over the next month or so, but if you end up with a dozen leftover copies of the same book there's not much you can do with them. I suppose you could save them to give as gifts later, or possibly donate them, but that seems like more work than it would be worth.
So, I guess the answer is that I would consider it, but I probably won't actually do it.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: July 23, 1983 through August 6, 1983.
This recording is yet another example of a lightweight British pop star covering a song originally performed by an American soul singer. Like most such efforts, this one is completely forgettable, and the only reason to listen to it is to remember just how much better of an artist Marvin Gaye was.
Don't bother with this. Just go listen to Marvin Gaye's 1962 recording of this song and if you are lucky, you will completely forget this version by Paul Young exists.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 43.6 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 949.8 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 45 miles Current Weigh-In: 180
I was on pace for a 50+ mile week this week, but a muscle strain today made me decide to take Sunday off, which left me at only 43.6 miles for the week. That's still higher than my mileage goal of 40 miles for the week, so I suppose it is wrong for me to be a little disappointed at not hitting 50 miles. In any event, I've had two good running weeks in a row, so I am going to up my mileage goal to 45 miles for this week. I am still ridicuklously slow, but at least I can put in more miles now. With any luck, as I get in better shape from the extended mileage, I will get faster again.
Jen at Crazy for Books restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another, but then couldn't continue, so she handed the hosting responsibilities off to Ramblings of a Coffee Addicted Writer. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them.
This week Billy asks: Do you read paranormal romances? If so, what is your favorite thing about the genre?
I have read a few paranormal romance novels, actually it would be more accurate to say I have read very few paranormal romance novels. The only ones I can remember reading are the first Sookie Stackhouse novel Dead Until Dark, and a couple of C.J. Archer's books from the Glass and Steele series, although those I "read" more or less over the redhead's shoulder when she was listening to them as audiobooks.
I can't really say what my "favorite thing" about paranormal romances is, because I have read so few that I can't really give any sort of accurate assessment of the genre like that. I'm not even really sure I have much in the way of a fix on the genre as a separate entity from non paranormal romance fantasy, other than paranormal romance fantasy seems to always take place in a slightly more magical version of our world as opposed to a secondary world.
Other than that, it just seems like fantasy fiction to me.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: The week of July 9, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
In 1983, Eddy Grant seemed poised to become a huge star. He had been a successful performer for quite a while by the time the early 1980s rolled around, but with a big hit in 1982 in I Don't Wanna Dance, and a massive hit in 1983 with this song, Grant seemed like he was due to break through and become the kind of superstar that would soar acorss the sky and leave a lasting mark. Instead, this was the high-water mark of his career. He released a couple more albums, and even had a modest hit in the early 1990s, but more or less faded from the pop music scene after 1983.
The real shame of Eddy's fade is that he was doing music that was really unlike most everything else that was being put out at the time. This song, for example, is a funky, Carribbean dance song that has bitter, biting lyrics about the troubles of and unrest in a primarily Caribbean neighborhood in London. Although the musical style is very different, from a tonal perspective, Grant's song is a successor to the angry disaffected voices of punk rock from the late1970s and very early 1980s, a tone that became progressively muted in pop music as the 1980s went on.
It seems to me that something was lost when Grant didn't become a bigger star. Maybe if the U.S. hadn't been being swept into a false sense of euphoria by Reagan, people might have paid attention to people like him more and there might have been a chance to address some issues in the world. It didn't happen, and there's nothing that can be done about that now.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 49 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 906.2 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Current Weigh-In: 180
This week has been a good week for me. I was able to run six out of the seven days this week and turned in the longest run I have doen in months with a fourteen mile jaunt on Friday. On Sunday, I got better news when I noticed that the new scale I had recently acquired needed to be properly calibrated, and when I had done so I discovered that I weigh significantly less than I had thought. I don't know if I will be able to replicate this week of mileage next week, since I don't have this Friday off to allow me to take a long run this week. I think aiming for another forty mile week is a doable goal though.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: July 2, 1983 through July 16, 1983.
Rod Stewart has had a long and illustrious career with numerous classic rock hits. This is not one of them. This is Rod Stewart basically mailing in a song and being rewarded by the British public with a number one song. This song is such a rote, by the numbers, boring number that listening to it dfeels like eating a mayonnaise sandwich made on white bread.
The thing is, you can tell that Stewart himself realizes that this song is a limp piece of blandness, and spends the entire video vainly and desperately trying to inject some life into it. There is no saving this song from its own medicocrity, but Stewart really tries hard here, so at least there's that.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 25.6 miles Run/Walk Miles: 0 miles Cumulative Mileage: 857.2 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Current Weigh-In: 198
I was sick this week and missed three days of running. On the other hand, I got my new running watch and my running routes are now apparently more accurate. My phone's GPS appears to have been just inaccruate enough to short my running routes by just enough the be annoying. I ended up having to throw a bit of extra distance on all of my regular routes in order to keep up with my plan of running at least a 10K every regular running day. I am feeling better and I am hoping to be able to push things further this week to get back to running 40 miles per week.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: July 9, 1983 through August 27, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: July 16, 1983 through August 27, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: June 4, 1983 through June 25, 1983.
This is not only one of the signature songs of the Police, it is one of the signature songs of the decade. Even though they had at least a half-dozen other significant hits, this is the song that they will be remember for. Decades from now, when all of their other songs have been forgotten, this one will still be being inappropriately used for weddings and engagements.
Fundamentally, this is not a romantic song. This is not a sweet ballad about caring devotion. If you thought this was anything other than a song about creepy, stalker obsession, then you weren't paying attention. I have seen interviews with Sting where he expresses astonishment that anyone would use this song for their first dance or other significant moment with their spouse.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 37.3 miles Run/Walk Miles: 5 miles Cumulative Mileage: 831.6 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Current Weigh-In: 192
I'm not sure if this week's results are reliable, as I had some trouble with the GPS on my cell phone. I figured it out, but ended up ordering a new running watch to head off any future porblems, which should show up in a few days. I missed two days of running this week, only one of which was planned. The other day I missed was because I felt a bit under the weather.
#1 on the Billboard Hot 100: May 28, 1983 through July 2, 1983.
#1 on the Cash Box Top 100: May, 28, 1983 through July 2, 1983.
#1 on the U.K. Chart: Never.
Irene Cara should have been a bigger star. Before singing the title track to the movie Flashdance, she had starred in the movie Fame and sung two of the hits from that soundtrack - the number one hit Fame and the top twenty hit Out Here on My Own. She won a Grammy award, and this song, which she wrote, won an Academy Award. A sitcom was planned as a vehicle for her to star in, and even had a pilot filmed and aired. She was a blazing, incandescent talent and seemed poised to become the kind of huge, international star that would dominate the rest of the 1980s.
But she didn't. She had a couple more movie and television appearances, had a couple of very minor hits, and then her career more or less dwindled away, fading first quickly and then slowly over the next several years. The odd thing is that the movie Flashdance seems like the sort ofm movie Cara should have been in - It is a movie about a group of women working as dancers (but not strippers) in a kind of seedy bar in Pittsburgh. Alex, the main character, works as a welder by day and dances at the bar by night while dreaming of making it big with a professional ballet company. One would think that this part would be perfect for someone with Cara's dance ability, but instead the lead was played by Jennifer Beals, who is a perfectly fine actress, but can't dance at all. In fact, virtually all of Beals' dance routines were done by body doubles, and it is painfully obvious when they are not, becasue Beals looks awkward and unsure of herself.
From what information is available about the movie, Cara wasn't even really considered for the part of Alex. Whether she simply didn't audition for the part, or if her status as a "rising star" made her too expensive, or the studio executives were just too dumb to realize how good she was is unclear. I can only wonder how Cara's career might have been different if she had starred in what amounted to one of the signature movies of the decade.
Last Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Actual Miles Last Week: 33.8 miles Run/Walk Miles: 5 miles Cumulative Mileage: 794.3 miles. This Week's Mileage Goal: 40 miles Current Weigh-In: Not done (scale not usable)
In good news for this week, I completed the "Run the L" virtual challenge, and have now logged enough miles to have run the entire length of the Chicago L-train system. I'll be looking to sign up for another virtual running challenge in the upcoming week.
In bad news for this week, I got a little bit sick on Saturday and Sunday, and didn't run either of those days. I blame the fact that I got caught out in the rain while running on Wednesday and was soaked to the bone for most of the run. I'm going to be cautious about my mileage goal for the upcoming week and hope to get back out on the roads soon.
In neutral news, I am switching my "running week" from Sunday to Saturday to Monday through Sunday. This will allows my "running week" to coincide with the tracking system used for weekly miles by Strava. This is mostly for my convenience, because this means I won't have to calculate my weekly mileage tallies by hand any more.
