“My mama always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.’”
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump tells the tale of a slow-witted Southern boy who grows up to make history in extraordinary ways, albeit through a series of accidents and happenstance.
….. a hit for Meghan Trainor, a classic for my family and grandkids!
Scott Bradlee (born September 19, 1981) is an American musician, pianist, composer, and arranger. He is known for his viral videos on YouTube.
~Biography~
Bradlee was born on Long Island, New York, where he first fell in love with jazz at the age of 12 after hearing George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” for the first time. Bradlee became a successful performer, working in the New York jazz scene. Bradlee also served as music director for an interactive, off-Broadway theater experience called Sleep No More.
In looking for creative inspiration, Bradlee began reworking popular music as an exercise. In 2009, he released “Hello My Ragtime ’80’s”, in which he incorporated popular music from the 1980’s with ragtime-style piano. After playing and experimenting on stage at his regular gig at Robert Restaurant, Bradlee released the compilation Mashups by Candlelight. He would finally begin to gain popularity with his release of A Motown Tribute to Nickleback in 2012, a collaboration with local musicians which arranged Nickleback’s songs in the style of 1960’s style R&B music.
In 2013, Bradlee began to work more seriously on forming Postmodern Jukebox, a rotating group of musicians producing covers of pop songs in the styles of jazz, ragtime, and swing. The group broke out onto the public radar with their doo-wop cover of the Miley Cyrus song “We Can’t Stop“. Several artists have publicly noted their appreciation for the group’s work. As the viral surge grew, Bradlee was interviewed by news outlets such as NPR and also performed live on Good Morning America and Fuse.
The group capped off their meteoric year with a visit to Cosmopolitan Magazine’s New York office for a year end review of their work and popular songs from the year. Among the group’s prominent guest musicians are Dave Koz, who collaborated with them in a jazz covers of “Careless Whisper” and the Game of Thrones theme song, and Niia, who joined them for a “space jazz” version of “The End of the World”.
Postmodern Jukebox’s October 2013 collaboration with Puddles Pity Party on a cover of Lorde’s “Royals” generated particularly strong interest. As of September 2014, this video remained the second most popular on Bradlee’s YouTube channel with over 8.7 million hits.
To celebrate the last week of our European tour, we got some of the cast together to record this special version of one of our biggest covers – Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass,” in the style of PMJ ft. Kate Davis, of course. Not only does it feature vocalists Haley Reinhart, Morgan James, and Ariana Savalas rocking some Andrews Sisters- style harmonies, but it also features a sweet four hand bass solo by Casey Abrams and Adam Kubota.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont is the longest serving independent in U.S. congressional history.
~~Biography~~
Bernie Sanders was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.
Born in 1941 in Brooklyn, Bernie was the younger of two sons in a modest-income family. After graduation from the University of Chicago in 1964, he moved to Vermont. Early in his career, Sanders was director of the American People’s Historical Society. Elected Mayor of Burlington by 10 votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont’s at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York.
Sir Nicholas Winton with some of the people, then children, whom he saved from the Nazis in 1939. Photograph: Dana Psenicova
~~July 6, 2014~~
A Briton named Sir Nicholas Winton, who organized the Winton Train rescue mission from the Czech Republic to Great Britain. Winton, who is celebrating his 105th birthday, did not speak about his heroic act for 50 years. Thanks to his wife, the rest of the world could learn about the rail “Czech Kindertransports” that he organized at the outbreak of World War II in 1939.
The steam train transport reenactment, with some of the now-elderly “Winton children”, brought lots of emotions and awareness to the rest of the world and reminded everybody that even one person’s heroic act can have a great impact on the lives of many others.
~~GRAPHICS SOURCE~~
Google Images
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~~A party for man who saved 669 children from the Nazis~~
100 guests gather to celebrate birthday of Sir Nicholas Winton, who helped evacuate children before second world war
It could almost be a normal birthday party, with music, presents and a cake. But the cake has 105 candles and many of the 100 or so guests who are here to celebrate the birthday of Sir Nicholas Winton owe him their life.
Winton’s 105th birthday party is at the Czech embassy in London, and the guests here are the offspring of 669 children – mostly Jewish – rescued by Winton from almost certain death in the months before the second world war broke out in 1939. Most of their families ended up interned and murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Today they call themselves “Nicky’s children“.
There are around 6,000 people around the world today who owe Winton their lives. It was late in December 1938 when the stockbroker from Hampstead cancelled a holiday to go to Prague to see what was happening to refugees there. Winton spent only three weeks in the city – the most leave he could get from his job at home – but it was enough time for him to recognize the impending threat facing the refugees who had arrived following the Nazi invasion of the Czech Sudentenland in October 1938.
He immediately set about organizing eight evacuations of the children on the Czech Kindertransport train. He advertised in newspapers for foster homes, got the necessary permits from the immigration office in the UK, and persuaded the Germans to let the children leave the country. When Winton returned to his job in London on 21 January 1939 he continued the rescue mission, working in the evenings until the last train was cancelled when war broke out in September 1939.
Ruth Hálová is 88 and has flown over for the party from South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. Others have come from as far as New Zealand and the USA. Hálová was one of the children who came over on one of the Kindertransport journeys and she stayed with a British family throughout the war while her mother was in the concentration camp at Terezín, Czechoslovakia.
“I first met Nicky when he came to visit Yad Vashem in Jerusalem,” Hálová told the Guardian. “I was there just visiting family and they phoned me at 10 o’clock at night and said: ‘Nicholas Winton is here!’ It was just amazing to meet him and to see him again today. It is never too long or too far to come and see Nicky.”
But Hálová would never have met Winton had his scrapbook of the rescue not been passed to the BBC in 1988. Having kept quiet about the story for 50 years, when it emerged it did so in spectacular fashion on the programme That’s Life. Sitting in the audience, Winton was astonished when Esther Rantzen announced live on air that the woman sitting next to him, and much of the rest of the audience, were people that he had saved.
The programme reunited Winton with one of his party guests, Lord (Alfred) Dubs, a Labour politician. Dubs’s father fled Prague in March 1939 for England and they were reunited when Dubs arrived on the Kindertransport at Liverpool Street station. Dubs has become firm friends with Winton since. He says: “It’s not often you can say to somebody: it’s thanks to you that I am here at all. I make more speeches because I know Nicky than because of everything else I know.”
Sir Nicholas Winton with Lord Alfred Dubs, who escaped on the Kindertransport and his daughter, Barbara Winton who has written a book about him. Photograph: Dana Psenicova
Guests have brought presents and gifts but one in particular stands out: a book from his daughter, Barbara Winton. The party also serves as the launch of the biography she has written about him, its title paying tribute to one of his many catchphrases, humble and pragmatic in equal measure: “If it’s not impossible, then it can be done.”
There are birthday cards and letters too – from the prime minister and the president of the Czech Republic. Michael Zantovsky, the country’s ambassador, announces that in October this year Winton will be awarded the Order of the White Lion, the highest order in the Czech Republic.
Sir Nicholas Winton with ambassador of the Czech Republic, Mr Michael Zantovsky. Winton will be awarded the Order of the White Lion, the highest state decoration in the Czech Republic. Photograph: Dana Psenicova
“Nicky is a national hero in the Czech Republic,” says Vera Egermayer, a holocaust survivor who was interned at Terezín transit camp. “In England, you don’t know about him but everywhere else we do. He did a kind act and never told anybody.” Born in 1940 in Czechoslovakia, Egermayer has long known the story of Winton, who was knighted in 2002. Egermayer now lives in New Zealand where she has founded theNew Zealand Children’s Holocaust Memorial Project.
When the man himself arrives, he is quiet but alert and clearly delighted. Still living at his home in Berkshire, with only a day carer, Winton lived almost independently until a few years ago and only gave up his driving licence – much to the relief of his family – at the age of 99.
He speaks softly and the whole room goes silent in a moment: “I am always surprised every time I come here to see all kinds of people who have come really very great distances to say hello,” Winton says. “As far as I am concerned, it is only Anno Domini that I am fighting – I am not ill, I am just old and doddery.”
~~Sir Nicholas Winton – BBC Programme “That’s Life” aired in 1988~~
~~Uploaded on Sep 1, 2009~~
Sir Nicholas Winton who organized the rescue and passage to Britain of about 669 mostly Jewish Czechoslovakian children destined for the Nazi death camps before World War II in an operation known as the Czech Kindertransport.
This video is the BBC Programme “That’s Life” aired in 1988. The most touching video ever.
~~Our Silent Hero~~
Original Song – Mickey Bavington Sir
(Nicholas Winton Tribute)
~~Published on Jul 20, 2013~~
This is an Original Song dedicated and about The Wonderful Sir Nicholas George Winton who worked as a banker all of Europe until a time he mastered a pan to rescue hundreds of children from being at risk from the Nazi world of war.
Born in Hampstead in London it was only due to the fact that secret photos of all the children he had saved was found by wife that any one ever knew of his work see more here
No good deed should go unrecognized, especially one like this which entailed saving the lives of so many young children who became members of their communities and contributed to it’s enrichment.
It Is What It Is 