As this is my first SFAS outing since my return from India I thought it would be nice to include a song from someone who was born there.  As this song is a duet, I’ll cover the background of both artists in turn.

One half of this duet was born Harry Rodger Webb in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh in 1940.  He was in the Quintones and Dick Teague Skiffle Group before forming Harry Webb and The Drifters who evolved into his group The Shadows.  He is the United Kingdom’s most successful all-time solo artist; he has won endless awards and sold over 100 million records around the world.  He has had 70 UK Top 10s including 14 UK number ones, and nearly 40 Top 10 LPs.  He fortunes in America, however, have been comparatively poor, with only 3 Top 10 songs, none of which reached the coveted numero uno  He was given an OBE in 1980 and knighted by the Queen in 1995, has made several hit films, had his own TV series and holds the record for the most appearances on the BBC’s Top of the Pops (over 80!). He is also the only artist alongside Elvis Presley who had scored hits in Britain in every decade since the 1950s.

The other half of this duo was formerly the younger sibling in the Everly Brothers, who was born in Chicago in 1939.  His partnership with his brother Don became one of the most familiar acts of the Rock n’ Roll era, with equal success in the UK and the USA.  Following an acrimonious split with Don in the early 70s he tried his hand at solo work, with limited achievements in his native America.  In the early 80s, therefore, he relocated to the UK and lived in London for a time.  It was then that his first chart successes for 18 years would come to fruition, starting with the record that is today’s SFAS choice.

My chosen song reached number 9 in the UK Top 40 chart in the late winter of this particular year, though was never released as a single in either Europe or the United States.

Ladies and gentlemen, from February 1983, I give you Cliff Richard and Phil Everly singing ‘She Means Nothing to Me’.

No Retreat, No Surrender

In the midst of a Nation on the verge of Political Revolution over it’s communist takeover, the nation is about to be blindsided by loss of our Constitution in the name of a fabricated scam Global Warming.

President to Attend Copenhagen Climate Talks

Administration Announces U.S. Emission Target for Copenhagen

The White House announced today that President Obama will travel to Copenhagen on Dec. 9 to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where he is eager to work with the international community to drive progress toward a comprehensive and operational Copenhagen accord.   The President has worked steadily on behalf of a positive outcome in Copenhagen throughout the year.  Based on the President’s work on climate change over the past 10 months – in the Major Economies Forum, the G20, bilateral discussions and multilateral consultations – and based on progress made in recent, constructive discussions with China and India’s Leaders, the President believes it is possible to reach a meaningful agreement in Copenhagen.  The President’s decision to go is a sign of his continuing commitment and leadership to find a global solution to the global threat of climate change, and to lay the foundation for a new, sustainable and prosperous clean energy future.   

The facts that have come out in the last few weeks that ALL the data on Global Warming has been a fraud, right down to the computer codes in the modules to control that the output of the modules always return a warming trend. The Jackass in Chief is about to sign away our sovereignty.

The Supremacy Clause in the US Constitution (Article VI, paragraph 2). This clause establishes the Constitution, Federal Statutes, and U.S. TREATIES as the supreme law of the land. That means we will be subject too what ever he signs. How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Not once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace will have achieved their goals.

What the Treaty says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

Since this is all based on a fraud concocted by the “true believers”, but what they are true believers in is One World Government, the destruction of Capitalism, and the destruction of the United States as a world power, this Fraudulent President must be stopped.

The U.S. needs to re-exert itself to it’s proper place. The Home of Freedom and Industry. The ripple effects of our collapsing economy are already being felt around the world. Our unemployment rate has caused refineries to be shut down in Delaware. The cut back of our oil consumption is causing Dubai to default economically. Even the Chicoms have threatened to stop buying our bonds.

This Treaty is a death nell for our nation. We need to stop this President from accomplishing his goals over the next 3 years.

Then we need to Drill baby Drill, for oil, coal, and gas. Stop the transfer of wealth from our nation and rebuild our steel and auto industries.

And one from long ago – worth a listen and there IS a connection to my musical hero! 

It has been found. Thank you, youtube.

I think it was from the early 1970s. My mother, like so many Irish, would listen to various Irish radio programs. They could be heard on college stations like Bronx based WFUV, whose FM signal was barely strong enough to push past the Manhattan skyscrapers into Bay Ridge.

The Sunday night program was hosted by Adrian Flannery I think. If you positioned the radio just so, you could hear a song or two. Then the signal would shift again, and you’d get more static than song. You’d fiddle with the controls, move the radio around, and you’d have the signal again. Maybe.

 It was from such a tenuous link that I recall the heard ” Shanagolden “. For maybe two years in those old days, it was one of the most popular songs in the micro-universe of Irish-American radio. They’d play it every week.

It was written by one Sean McCarthy, a Kerry man who wrote his first song at the age of seven. Many of his songs dealt with sadness and death. The protagonist of this song is a woman, whose husband died fighting ” the Saxon stranger ” in Limerick a long time ago.

There are good versions by female singers, but to me the best is this one, by Brian Day.

 The audio imperfections make this all the better to me. The words harken to a distant past, to long ago battles in Limerick, to long ago broadcasts from the Bronx.

Isuppose if I said an unwanted couple with no business being in the WHite House was discovered to have attended the White House State Dinner for the Indian Primier, some wit here would say – “Who, Barack and Michele Obama?”

However, the answer is Tareq and Michalle Salahi who somehow managed to waltz past the Secret Service and White House Security and attend the Dinner.   They had their photographs taken with many in attendance including Vice President Joe Biden and Palin-slayer Katie Couric.  They seem to have enjoyed themselves, and there is even a photograph of them shaking hands with the President on a receiving line.   Perhaps they offered him some advice on health care.  While I would like them arrested for some felony, I have a grudging admiration for their brazen self-promotion and party sense.

The Secret Service says they are embarrassed and have apologized.  Fine.  But the head of the organization has not resigned and to date, not a soul has been fired.   Who will guard the guards themselves you might ask.  You might also ask, who will kick them to the curbside when they utterly fail in their job?  By pure stupid luck this couple was only intent on assaulting decorum. 

Not since Michael Fagan made his way into the Queen’s bedchamberes in 1982 where he visited with an unamused HRH for ten minutes has there been so glaring a breach.  I don’t know what happened to the Security detail then (Elizabeth I would have had their heads) but I trust it was a bit more than an apology.  After all, Fagan also commited the crime of smoking.       

Glad to hear that Tiger Woods is OK following that car crash outside his house at 2.25am yesterday morning. But what could have caused Tiger to drive through a fire hydrant and into a tree, knocking himself out? The police say alcohol was not involved and that is is being treated as road accident. I wonder where he was going at that time of the morning?

Here’s a song with a political message for those who use the MSM for their information. I was inspired by this nonsense.

The spectre of “Financial Crisis 2” continued to loom over global markets yesterday after Dubai’s revelation that it may not be able to meet its debt obligations.

Stock markets in Asia and the United States fell sharply while the dollar and Japanese yen rose as investors shifted their money to their perceived safety. UK banks were also revealed to be the biggest lenders to the United Arab Emirates, which includes Dubai, with more than $50 billion owed by the Gulf state’s residents.

In another blow to the beleaguered UK banking sector, the Royal Bank of Scotland emerged as the largest single loan-arranger to Dubai World, the state-owned conglomerate that sparked this latest financial crisis when it sought a standstill on its debt repayments on Wednesday.

RBS has received £££billions from the UK taxpayer to bail them out so far, now this could get even worse!

I believe that we are still in severe economic peril and a combination of political foolishness and commercial stupidity means that 2010 will see the global economy dip even further. Those who run with the suckers pally and believe the banks are on the road to recovery are fooling themselves!

Well, I got slated in certain quarters for using the instance of anti-social behavior in west Belfast to raise the general topic of teenage loutishness. So, by way of contrast, I wanted to talk about the 19-year-old woman who has been raped in east Belfast.

She was walking back from a shop along Newtownards Road at about 0530 GMT on Saturday when the attacker came up behind her. He dragged her into an alleyway behind a pub and assaulted her. Police are seeking help from a taxi driver who had brought the woman to the shop from a fast food outlet. She was dressed in pyjamas and a coat.

First things first, this is a sickening crime and anyone coming to ATW regularly knows my view on how rapists should be punished. I trust the guilty party is brought to book asap.

But, and let say that this in NO WAY lessens the attack, what on earth was this teenager doing walking the streets of east Belfast at 5.30am in “pyjamas and coat”? Is there perhaps something else to this story? Maybe she was on medication or ill for I can see little other reason to be out, in the cold, at that time, wearing such clothing? As I say, none of this lessens the wicked crime but some of the details on these stories make one wonder about what goes on out there, in the big bad world. The streets of Belfast, north, south, east and west, contain danger at times and this girl was unfortunate to come across it. I wonder how quickly it took the police to respond? What is the conviction rate for Rape?