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« Fact for the Day | Main | Kids Forever »

June 28, 2006

 Four Facts About Neil Diamond

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

* As a kid, Neil Diamond sang in a choir with Barbra Streisand.

* Neil Diamond is now 65.

* Neil Diamond wrote "I'm a Believer."

* It took Neil Diamond four years of Freudian analysis to wake up to the fact that his song "Solitary Man" -- "I’ll be what I am. A solitary man" -- was about him.

Here's his official site. Here's Wikipedia's entry on him. Neil Diamond is on MySpace! Here's the video for Smash Mouth's amusingly hardhitting version of "I'm a Believer."



Best,

Michael

posted by Michael at June 28, 2006




Comments

Attention computer mavens!! Unless Michael is able to change it, the apostrophe in the word "I'll" in the quoted lyric in point 4 displayed as three characters: a letter "a" with a circumflex, a Euro sign and a small, raised "TM".

I've been noticing that symbol characters such as accented "e" in French look fine in the blog's preview screen, but turn into garbage on the Internet. And I've noticed this result on some other blogs, too.

For this reason I've held off on some topics requiring quotes in foreign languages.

When I write such an article, I insert the symbols while in Microsoft Word and then cut 'n' paste to the blog software where it still looks okay until final posting.

Does anyone know if this is a browser quirk? Something else? And, most importantly, is there a work-around?

Posted by: Donald Pittenger on June 28, 2006 11:45 AM

Smash Mouth's version of "I'm A Believer" is really good. It seems like Neil wrote his best stuff for other people.

Neil D. and Barbra S. actually went to highschool together in Brooklyn---pretty good highschool choir, huh? Interestingly, chess master (and wierdo) Bobby Fischer went to the same highschool at the same time.

Dave Barry wrote a hilarious article 10-12 years ago about the worst songs ever---Diamond's "I Am...I Said" was on the list. He got so much hate mail from distressed Diamond fans that he retracted his initial comments, saying he didn't get it but if the guy had that many fans he must be doing something right. That wasn't enough---he got more hate mail, so ultimately Dave Barry ran an even more hilarious column stating that "Neil Diamond is the Greatest Artist of the 20th Century".

Posted by: annette on June 28, 2006 4:06 PM


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