Yesterday, I wrote about how it was little-known that Frank Loesser wrote the lyrics to the classic song "The Boys in the Backroom," which is largely known for Marlene Dietrich's performance.  You may known the song from Destry Rides Again," which starred James Stewart, but you most certainly know the parody of it in the Mel Brooks comedy, Blazing Saddles.  That's when Madeline Kahn did her take-off of Dietrich and sang, "I'm Tired."  (The song itself didn't exactly parody the original, but the whole scene did.)

Since the song is fairly known, but most people haven't likely seen the original film sequence, I thought we'd correct that here.  So, here it is, with music by Frederick Hollander and lyrics -- before he began writing his own music and heading to Broadway -- by Frank Loesser.
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Max Boot is an extremely thoughtful and insightful conservative analyst who is a senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations.  I don't agree with everything he writes, but I admire that thinking and perspective he puts into his work.

He wrote an article last week the Foreign Relations website which I was going to bring up here at the time, but other news stories got in the way.  It had a most-decided provocative title -- all the more so since he's generally a very low-key, even-handed writer -- though as blunt as the article is, he makes his points with highly-researched reasoning.  The article is "Donald Trump is Proving Too Stupid to Be President."  (The sub-heading is, "'You know, I'm, like, a smart person.'  Uh-huh."

He begins the article by saying that Trump is so far from being smart "that he may not be capable of carrying out his duties as president."  And Boot then goes on to give example after example.

Like Trump's exchange with a couple of Presbyterian pastors, bragging how well he did with evangelicals -- when they had to explain to him that they weren't evangelical.  When he demanded to know what they were, and they answered Presbyterian," he shot back, "But you're all Christians?"  The lager point isn't that they had to "reassure" him that they were -- but that Trump himself is Presbyterian.

Or the recent story where Trump tried to convince editors of The Economist that he had come up with the expression "Priming the pump."  (When I initially heard this story, it was beyond cringeworthy since I couldn't imagine Trump even having the slightest idea that pumps had to be primed.)

There are more examples, and Mr. Boot goes into a analysis of the difference between "stupidity" and "ignorance," the latter of which his defenders have been trying to explain Trump's gaffes, by his being "new on the job."  But as Boot points out, Trump is 71-years-old and has given no sense of learning on the job or wanting to.

As Boot writes, "The surest indication of how not smart Trump is that he thinks his inability or lack of interest in acquiring knowledge doesn’t matter. He said last year that he reaches the right decisions 'with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words common sense, because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.'"

To which Max Boot asks, "How's that working out?"

His analysis jumps off from here, from his firing of James Comey to his responses toward the recent London terror attacks, and leading "code-level" top secret information to Russia, as well as starting a Twitter fight with Qatar, and pulling out of the Paris climate accord because he believes global warming is a hoax.  Boot gives Trump defenders' their say -- and then explains why they're wrong.

He ends the article this way --

"The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet certify that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” he can be removed with the concurrence of two-thirds of both houses. That won’t happen, because Republicans are too craven to stand up to Trump. But on the merits perhaps it should. After nearly five months in office, Trump has given no indication that he possesses the mental capacity to be president."

You can read the whole thing here.

Back in 2006, the Turner Classic Movies channel produced a documentary about Frank Loesser, titled Heart & Soul.  I don't recall if I wasn't aware of it until a few days after it was on, or if I knew but missed the airing, figuring I'd catch up with the the next time.  In any event, I didn't see it – and to my continued surprised, as far as I can tell they didn’t repeat it.  At most, they repeated it once that same day or the next, and I missed that.  But I'm pretty certain that that's been it, because I’ve been checking ever since, to see if they’d have it on their schedule, or if it would show up on Netflix.  And it never has.
 
On Friday, I had a brain storm to do a search for it online, in general, just to see if there was any information about it where it might be tracked down.  (I don't know why I didn't have this belated brain storm until Friday, but my best excuse is that I felt certain that TCM would indeed air it again -- I could see no reason why they wouldn't -- or sure it would eventually be available on Netflix, so there was no need to check elsewhere.  Except that after a decade, it finally became clear that there now, at least, was a need.)  Well, to my amazement, I not only found some very good information about it (for one thing, I found out the full name of it, Heart & Soul: The Life and Music of Frank Loesser), but there was a website that has the full documentary embedded for viewing online!  So, that night, I finally got to watch it.
 
It's quite enjoyable – not great, but done well enough, with of course great material.  It's largely on positive, though not a puff piece since at least, to its credit, it touches on his dark side, which I'd heard reports of, a pretty explosive temper.  Mainly, it celebrates some really wonderful songs, from his early days writing the lyrics only in Hollywood through his Broadway year with both words and music.  

Among his movie songs, for which he only wrote the lyrics are such classics as "I Don't Want to Walk Without You, Baby" and the number Marlene Dietrich made famous, "The Boys in the Backroom," that Mel Brooks parodied with Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles.  

​If you never saw the documentary (which is probably highly likely), or want to see it again, unfortunately I can't embed it, but happily you can watch it all here.

One thing I'll add is that I was always a bit surprised by the title of the documentary, since the song "Heart and Soul" was written by Hoagy Carmichael.  Or so I wrongly believed.  But it turns out that he only wrote the music, and the lyrics were written by...Frank Loesser!  In fact, there's a very funny sequence in the film about how arguably the most-famous song by the man who wrote the scores to Guys & Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, The Most Happy Fella and the movie Hans Christian Anderson is a number that most people have no idea he wrote -- including (in a very amusing on-camera interview, Frank Loesser's oldest daughter, who talks about playing the song and "Chopticks" all the time when growing up at piano recitals and parties, and even she did not learn until much later that it was written by her father.)

So, in honor of perhaps his most-famous song (lyrics only...), here's what has now probably become the most-famous version of it, (music only -- except for one word, "Madly" at the 1:20 mark...) performed on their feet by Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia from Big.
 
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But, okay, that's just the music, and this is about Frank Loesser who wrote the lyrics.  So, to be fair and to round the whole thing out, this is the original version of the song, "Heart and Soul" -- words included.  It's from the 1939 Paramount short, sung by Bea Wain and with Larry Clinton, who I assume is the bandleader -- music by Hoagy Carmichael, and lyrics by...Frank Loesser.
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From the archives, this week's contestant is David Hempling. from San Francisco.  What I wrote previously was "It's a very easy hidden song to get.  As for the hidden composer style, it's clear after hearing the answer, but I didn't find it typical for that composer so I missed it."
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"UK Parliament Hit by Cyber-Attack"

Maybe it was that very same 400-pound guy who's living in his parents' basement.  Dang, he's good.  He's really good.

For those Columbo fans among us, today -- Saturday -- the Hallmark Movies & Mysteries channel has an all-day marathon, on now until midnight West Coast time.

At the moment, they have the episode with Theodore Bikel as the Mensa-like genius who kills his accounting business partner -- and the scene on as I type this has a snarky waitress giving Columbo a hard time, until he finally orders something ("I can come back," she snaps), which ends up being a doughnut, displeasing her all the more.  It's a day-player role, played by very young Jamie Lee Curtis.   

By the way, at 3 PM on the West Coast (I don't know how the schedule works out in other time zones), the episode is a good one with the murderer played by Jack Cassidy as a mystery writer.  It's directed by an up-and-coming fellow named Steven Spielberg.

Heading back out On the Road, this week Charles Kuralt has a short, simple piece about the old world way of making molasses in a Tennessee holler.

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Hats off to CNN for bringing a courtroom artist into today's White House press briefing, where the Trump administration has been banning cameras.
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Anything the press can do to shine a big Klieg light on the pathetic offensiveness of the Trump people blocking news access is great.  The more the merrier.  Perhaps at one point, John Oliver will do a similar thing with White House press briefings that his show has done with Supreme Court sessions, using dogs as stand-ins...