My 100th Post!

This is my 100th blog post! Thank you to all of my visitors and friends for reading my blog!

Thank you to my buddy Toffee for this great Arte-y-Pico Award!

Here are the rules of the Arte-y-Pico Award:

1) You have to pick FIVE blogs that you consider deserve this award for creativity, design, interesting material and also contribute to the blogger community regardless of language.

2) Each award has to have the name of the author and a link to his/her blog to be visited.

3) Each award winner has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog that has given him/her the award itself.

4) Award winners and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of the "Arte-y-Pico" blog so everyone will know the origin of the award.

5) In compliance with said RULES, the award winner must show the RULES.

I would like to share this award with Pacco, the 4 B-Boys at Secret Schnoodle, and my Spanish-speaking friends Girasol, Verdi y Gaucho, and new friend Yogui. Thank you for this honor, Toffee!

I got tagged by Maggie and Mitch for a really fun game, sent to them from Blue. She's a radio fan & BBC Radio 4, has a looooooooooooong standing programme called 'Dessert Island Discs'. To those of you, not familiar with this long running programme, says Blue, the concept's simple. The presenter has a fresh celebrity guest each week, who's given the scenario of being stranded on a desert island & then asked to choose the 8 records they would have to take with them. He/She then has to save just one from being swept away by the waves, select a book to take - the Bible & Complete Works of Shakespeare are a given; & a luxury item, which must be inanimate. We get to hear the music & their reasons for choosing the tracks.

So M&M let their mom help with the choices, and since I don't have my own i-Pawd, I'm going to let my mom help too.

1. My mom said she couldn't survive without Abbey Road. She loves the Beatles and this is her favorite album. She also likes Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which she thinks is the most influential album of all time (and she'll argue with you Beach Boys Pet Sounds fans!), but Abbey Road is her favorite. I think Pet Sounds might be more my style, for obvious reasons!

2. Rocky is my mom's favorite movie and essential running music. She likes this particular Rocky Balboa album because it has all the best songs from the previous five Rocky movies, along with some quotes from the movies.

3. Apparently my mom also wouldn't survive without a comprehensive collection of Motown artists. This is clearly cheating, Mom. This is several disks in one. She loves the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, and especially all of the girl groups. And she sings along in the car.

4. Harry Connick, Jr.'s "We Are In Love" album. The song "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" is on this CD, and that is my parents' song. They danced to it at their wedding. They love this kind of jazz and my dad even sang two songs to my mom that day. His voice is ALMOST as good as Harry's.

5. So how about some classical? You might know my mom is a flutist, and Emmanuel Pahud is the greatest flutist on Earth, if you listen to her. (Is it his playing, or his good looks, Mom?) And his recording of the Mozart Flute Concerti is her all-time favorite classical album.

6. Dvorak's Slavonic Dances. These are light and fun and my mom likes to listen to them at work. She has the recording of George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra, a REALLY long time ago. He was kind of a mean conductor (like he would throw his baton at musicians) but he made great recordings.

7. Again, she's cheating. There's no way that all nine Beethoven Symphonies would fit on to ONE CD! Her favorites are #6 and #9. I recommend the recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic. After all, I'm named for him!

8. If she could, my mom would bring a bootleg recording of my dad's concert with the big orchestra in Indianapolis this past winter. It was a really fun concert, and the orchestra was of course fantastic. They played Bernstein's "Candide" Overture and Berlioz' "Symphonie Fantastique."

My Book - My mom is having a hard time with this one, but she would pick "The Great Gatsby." I would pick "Dear Mrs. LaRue: Letters from Obedience School" by Mark Teague.

My Luxury - My darling orange Spider Stuffy.

Thanks for the fun tag, Maggie and Mitch! I would like to tag Jackson, Eric, Molly and Taffy, because they're from the UK too - maybe they've heard this on the BBC!