“We don’t make mistakes here, we just have happy accidents. We want happy, happy paintings. If you want sad things, watch the news. Everything is possible here. This is your little universe.”

These are the immortal words of Bob Ross, the ultra-mellow painter whose happy little trees and puffy little clouds actually made PBS fun to watch. Bob died in 1995, but if he was alive today would have been his 65th birthday. Many people retire at 65, but something tells me Bob would have kept on painting, and kept on encouraging others to do the same.

If you want to celebrate Bob’s birthday you can:

• check out Bob’s biography
• learn how paint like Bob (in Photoshop at least)
• take a quiz about Bob on his official site
• Listen to Patton Oswalt’s take on him (Patton and I are from Sterling, VA, where Bob’s offices were!)
  Patton Oswalt - The Magic Of Oil Painting
  
• read Bob’s obituary from the NY Times

Or check out a full episode of his show, The Joy of Painting:

It was twenty years ago today
Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play

Meaning it was really 60 years ago today, since today is the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. How influential has the album been? Check out this opinion piece by Daniel Levitan in today’s Washington Post. Or coverage over at I Guess I’m Floating. Or this nostalgic look back at AZCentral.com. Or John Weiner’s take at AlterNet. My point is that everyone and his brother has something to add about this.

All I have to say is that I can’t possibly hope to be as fresh and kick as much ass at 40 as Sgt. Pepper does. Thanks John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

So What

Bill Evans and Paul Chambers kick of the album with the iconic intro to “So What”, one of the most famous passages in jazz, sketching out the basic call-and-response structure of the song. Miles enters with a masterfully understated solo that Eric Nisenson described as “the jazz equivalent of the impressionism of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin — the kind of lyrical impressionism usually associated with some European folk music”. Miles passes the solo off to Coltrane, who shows atypical restraint and economy. Adderley takes his turn next, providing a little more energy to the tune. Evans rounds out the solos and the piece ends with a restatement of the call-and-response introduction. In just under 9 1/2 minutes Miles and his all-star band altered the progression of jazz and created the standard against which all of its future pieces would be measured.

For more information about the modal improvisational structure of the album read Eric Nisenson’s excellent in-depth account of the recording sessions The Making of Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and His Masterpiece. Or, if you’re REALLY interested, read the “manual”, George Russel’s The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, though I must warn you, it’s for SERIOUS music geeks only.

Fun facts about the commercial:

• It was directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed Gladiator, Blade Runner, and Alien
• It almost didn’t air: Apple’s board didn’t want to show it, but VP of Marketing William V. Campbell and Executive VP of Marketing and Sales E. Floyd Kvamme decided to run with it anyway
• TV Guide named it The Greatest Commercial of All Time in 1999

Is TV Guide smoking crack? You decide:

Bionic Man

On January 19th, 1974 ABC aired the premier of The Six Million Dollar Man. The show centers around a test pilot named Steve Austin who is involved in a horrific crash, but is pieced back together by scientists to be stronger and faster than he was before, and make really cool noises when he did anything. Somehow he moved in slow motion too. Kick Ass!

Here’s the intro from the show, which really gives you all the information you need.

Fun trivia about The Six Million Dollar Man:

• In today’s dollars he would have cost over $20 million.
• In Caddyshack, Chevy Chase’s character Ty Webb makes the bionic noise when he’s putting blindfolded
• Star Lee Majors went on to star in The Fall Guy, where he sang the theme song: Fall Guy Theme
  

Note: Also on this day in history, Washington, DC mayor Marion “Goddam bitch set me up” Barry was arrested for drug possession (ok, that makes it sound pretty tame. Let’s face it. He was smoking crack with a hooker). You may remember that he served 6 months in prison, then got out and was RE-ELECTED. Only in DC man. Trust me, if I could find the video of him getting busted this would have been the story. But sadly YouTube, Google Video, and the internets in general let me down.