Mel Tormé
Melvin Howard Tormé (September 13, 1925 – June 5, 1999), nicknamed The Velvet Fog, was an American musician, best known as a singer of jazz standards. He was also a jazz composer and arranger, drummer, and actor in radio, film, and television, and the author of five books. He composed the music for the classic holiday song "The Christmas Song" ("Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire") and co-wrote the lyrics with Bob Wells.
Early years
Melvin Howard Tormé was born in Chicago, Illinois, to immigrant Russian Jewish parents, whose surname had been Torma. A child prodigy, he first sang professionally at age 4 with the Coon-Sanders Orchestra, singing "You're Driving Me Crazy" at Chicago's Blackhawk restaurant.
Between 1933-41, he acted in the network radio serials The Romance of Helen Trent and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. He wrote his first song at 13, and three years later, his first published song, "Lament to Love," became a hit recording for Harry James. He played drums in Chicago's Shakespeare Elementary School drum and bugle corps in his early teens. While a teenager, he sang, arranged, and played drums in a band led by Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers. His formal education ended in 1944 with his graduation from Chicago's Hyde Park High School.
Stardust
Stardust may refer to:
Books and magazines
Film and television
Phencyclidine
Phencyclidine (PCP), also known as angel dust and Sernyl among others, is a dissociative drug. PCP was brought to market in the 1950s as an anesthetic pharmaceutical drug but was taken off the market in 1965 due to the high prevalence of dissociative hallucinogenic side effects. Likewise ketamine was discovered by Parke-Davis researchers as a better-tolerated derivative for use as an anesthetic pharmaceutical drug. Since this time a number of synthetic derivatives of PCP have been sold as dissociative drugs for recreational and non-medical use.
In chemical structure, PCP is a member of the arylcyclohexylamine class, and, in pharmacology, it is a member of the family of dissociative anesthetics. PCP works primarily as an NMDA receptor antagonist, where it blocks the activity of the NMDA receptor. As an addictive drug, PCP is associated with compulsive abuse.
As a recreational drug, PCP may be ingested orally, smoked, insufflated or injected.
Recreational uses
PCP began to emerge as a recreational drug in major cities in the United States in 1967. In 1978, People magazine and Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes called PCP the country's "number one" drug problem. Although recreational use of the drug had always been relatively low, it began declining significantly in the 1980s. In surveys, the number of high school students admitting to trying PCP at least once fell from 13% in 1979 to less than 3% in 1990.
Star Dust (book)
Star Dust is a collection of poetry by Frank Bidart, first published in book form by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005. The book was a 2005 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
The book is split into two sections. The first section, Music Like Dirt, is a sequence of poems that became the first chapbook to ever be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize when it was originally published in 2002. The second section includes The Third Hour of the Night, a dark and violent poem about Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. It is part of a project by Bidart that, so far, includes two similarly titled poems. Third Hour was first published in the October 2004 issue of Poetry, taking up almost the entire issue.
Star Dust also includes notes on some poems by Bidart, and later editions also include an interview with the author conducted by Bookslut.
