Below The Beltway

The Washington Post lists the most-loved and most-hated Christmas songs according to radio listeners:
A little advice: When friends and relatives come visiting around Christmas, don’t haul out those old CDs with Madonna’s rendition of “Santa Baby” or Barbra Streisand’s “Jingle Bells?” And by all means, avoid “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.”
Unless, that is, [...]

Yesterday, the Post Office unveiled a stamp honoring Frank Sinatra, who would have turned 92 years old on December 12th:
Coming to a mailbox near you: Ol’ Blue Eyes himself.
As Frank Sinatra’s three children looked on Wednesday in Beverly Hills, Postal Service officials unveiled an oversized replica of a stamp commemorating the iconic crooner.
The Rat Pack [...]

The United States Postal Service has honored Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Louis Armstrong among other musicians, so it was only inevitable that Frank Sinatra would get a stamp someday:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ol’ Blue Eyes will get his own postage stamp next spring.
The stamp commemorating Frank Sinatra was announced Wednesday by Postmaster General John [...]

Admittedly, I am not a fan of opera, but I have always appreciated the talent of Lucaino Pavorotti, who died today at the age of 71:
(CNN) — Famed opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who appeared on stage with singers as varied as opera star Dame Joan Sutherland, U2’s Bono and Liza Minnelli, died Thursday after suffering [...]

At some point after their duet, Bono pitched this song to an aging Frank Sinatra, apparently more than once.
Ten years earlier, maybe Frank would’ve taken it, and it would have been great, no doubt.
Bono ended up singing it at Frank’s 80th Birthday Concert back in 1995, and didn’t do bad at all for an [...]

It was twenty-five years ago, on August 17, 1982, that the first Compact Discs started rolling off the assembly line:
EINDHOVEN, Netherlands (AP) — It was Aug. 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time, today [...]

Cause, it’s always just a short walk to the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York:

Surrender, but don’t give yourself away

Confirming trends that have been in place for years now, it seems that the market for music has changed forever:
NASHVILLE, July 4 (AP) — Album sales have continued their downward slide this year, but sales of digital tracks are up almost 50 percent over this time last year.
A total of 229.8 million albums were sold [...]

Someone took the recording of Frank Sinatra’s There Used To Be A Ballpark and set it to scenes of baseball stadiums that are no more: