TRIVIA TODAY - Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Greetings Infomaniacs,

One of my friends is turning 30 this weekend, and she wants to celebrate at a karaoke bar. Now, I am no stranger to karaoke. My friends and I used to frequent the karaoke stage on many a Friday and Saturday nights back in our younger 20 years, and tortured the crowd with our renditions of many popular songs.

Then, around four or five years ago, we were at a bar that happened to have a karaoke contest going on while we were there. Maybe it was the encouragement of my friends, or perhaps the confidence I felt after a couple of cocktails, but somehow I ended up on stage belting out Fleetwood Mac's "Rhiannon." If this wasn't surprising enough, at the end of the night they announced that I was one of the finalists for their big karaoke contest to be held a few weeks later!

Well, I did return for the final contest with a bunch of friends in tow to cheer for me no matter how horrible I sounded. I sang my heart out to Gretchen Wilson's "Redneck Woman," but the folks at the bar did not deem me worthy enough to grant me the grand prize. I really can't say I'm surprised, though!

That was my last experience with karaoke, so I am looking forward to singing a few songs this weekend. However, I will definitely not be going by myself this time!

Enjoy!
Melissa

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TODAY'S MYSTERY QUOTE
QUOTE: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."

HINT: (1920-1955), American jazz saxophonist and composer.

RANDOM TIDBITS
From 1961â??1966, the American TV network NBC carried a karaoke-like series, Sing Along with Mitch, featuring host Mitch Miller and a chorus, which superimposed the lyrics to their songs near the bottom of the TV screen for home audience participation.

There are various disputes about who first invented the name karaoke. One claim is that the karaoke styled machine was invented by Japanese musician Daisuke Inoue in Kobe, Japan, in 1971.

Inoue was asked frequently by guests in the Utagoe Kissa, where he performed, to provide a recording of his performance so that they could sing along on a company-sponsored vacation. He made a tape recorder that played a song for a 100-yen coin. Instead of giving his karaoke machines away, Inoue leased them out so that stores did not have to buy new songs on their own.

Karaoke machines were initially placed in restaurants and hotel rooms; soon, new businesses called karaoke boxes, with compartmented rooms, became popular. In 2004, Daisuke Inoue was awarded the tongue-in-cheek Ig Nobel Peace Prize for inventing karaoke, "thereby providing an entirely new way for people to learn to tolerate each other."

Roberto del Rosario, a Filipino inventor, who developed a sing along system in 1975 and patented it in the 1980s called his sing-along system "Minus-One," holds the patent for the device now commonly known as the "karaoke machine". Following a court battle with a Japanese company which claimed to have invented the system, del Rosario's patents were issued in 1983 and 1986, a decade after the device was supposedly invented.

Early karaoke machines used cassette tapes, but technological advances replaced this with CDs, VCDs, laserdiscs and, currently, DVDs. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Pioneer Electronics dominated the international karaoke music video market, producing high quality karaoke music videos.

VIDEO CLIP
Kids Perform Devo's Whip It!
Ask the average person to name a song of the 80's band 'Devo' and chances are they will name the song 'Whip It'. Unfortunately that's the only song they've always been known for, even when they were in grade school .

Watch It Now: Kids Perform Devo's Whip It!


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TODAY'S MYSTERY QUOTE
QUOTE: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."

ANSWER: Charlie Parker.

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