Earth Hour 2009: whistling away the dark

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Whistling Away the Dark, sung by Julie Andrews, from the film Darling Lili. Video features photographs of sunsets around the world.


Are you all ready and excited for Earth Hour? You're not alone, as according to this article, the momentum is really accelerating:

Earth Hour is a sort of open-source movement against global warming. On Saturday, March 28, at 8:30 p.m. in each time zone, millions of people in thousands of cities are expected to turn off the lights for one hour to raise people's consciousness about the link between global warming and energy use.

Started in Australia two years ago, the event is mushrooming thanks in part to the Internet and social media.

One day before the start of the event in Asia, "Earth Hour" is the top search item on Twitter. A 30-second clip about Earth Hour on You Tube has gotten almost 59,000 views. Facebook groups count hundreds of thousands of members.

"SEE" you in the dark.......


If you missed my earlier post about Earth Hour it is here.
If you missed the post with our Earth Hour 2008 video it's here.

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Earth Hour 2008 video: fun in the dark for a serious cause

In my post about the upcoming Earth Hour 2009 (March 28) I said I might share our video from Earth Hour 2008. Here it is..........I hope you have a good laugh!
(There are actually some really inspiring Earth Hour 2008 videos out there at You Tube to build excitement for 2009.)




Setting the Scene....... Earth Hour 2008 at our house. First view is across the living room looking out the front windows at the faint gloaming in the sky. After that you'll see the glow of flames in our gas stove and from scattered candles. Mike is on guitar.

Song selections (just clips of): Kumbaya, Light One Candle, and Mir Mir, U mir.
Additional sound effects by Shiva, who was a kitten at that time (and now weighs 13 pounds).


{Mike feels badly that he was goofing around with Kumbaya, but the whole experience of being in the dark for a purpose made us rather giddy with delight that night. We had a lot of fun.}

Kumbaya - (also spelled Kum Ba Yah) is a spiritual song from the 1930s. It enjoyed newfound popularity during the folk revival of the 1960s and became a standard campfire song in Scouting and other nature-appreciative organizations.

The song was originally associated with human and spiritual unity, closeness and compassion, and it still is, but more recently it is also cited or alluded to in satirical, sarcastic or even cynical ways that suggest blind or false moralizing, hypocrisy, or naively optimistic views of the world and human nature.

The origins of the song are disputed. Recent research has found that sometime between 1922 and 1931, members of an organization called the Society for the Preservation of Spirituals collected a song from the South Carolina coast. Come By Yuh, as they called it, was sung in Gullah, the creole or pidgin dialect spoken by the former slaves living on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. In Gullah, "Kumbaya" means "Come by here", so the lyric could be translated as "Come by here, my lord, come by here." Another version of Kumbaya, which locals asserted was a traditional regional folk song, was preserved on a wax cylinder in May 1936 by Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of what became the American Folklife Center. Gordon discovered a woman named Ethel Best singing Come By Here with a group in Raiford, Florida.

These facts contradict the longstanding copyright and authorship claim of Reverend Marvin V. Frey. Rev. Frey (1918–1992) claimed to have written the song circa 1936 under the title "Come By Here," inspired, he claimed, by a prayer he heard delivered by "Mother Duffin," a storefront evangelist in Portland, Oregon. It first appeared in this version in "Revival Choruses of Marvin V. Frey", a lyric sheet printed in Portland, Oregon in 1939. Frey claimed the change of the title to "Kum Ba Yah" came about in 1946, when a missionary family returned from Africa where they had sung Frey's version and slightly changed the words. This family toured America singing the song with the text "Kum Ba Yah". This account is contradicted by the fact that a nearly identical Gullah version of the song was recorded almost two decades earlier.

Joe Hickerson, one of the Folksmiths, recorded the song in 1957, as did Pete Seeger in 1958. Joe Hickerson later succeeded Gordon at the American Folklife Center. The song enjoyed newfound popularity during the folk revival of the 1960s, largely due to Joan Baez's 1962 recording of the song, and became associated with the Civil Rights Movement of that decade. It is a standard campfire song in Scouting, YMCA, the Asian Guides, and others. It was also commonly used in Catholic and "folk" masses of the 1970s.
-Wikipedia

Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya

Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya
Kumbaya my lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Someones singing lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbayah

Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Someones laughing, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Someones crying, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Someones praying, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya

Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Someones sleeping, lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya
Oh lord, kumbaya



{Mike forgot the words, adding to our glee, but you can get the words at the link below.}

Light One Candle -- chords and lyrics
"Light One Candle" is a 1983 Hanukkah song written by Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary. It is a very popular song and it has been sung by the trio at their concerts. It is a song that encourages the Jewish people to remember the history of the holiday and continue their heritage. - Wikipedia



{I have been unsuccessful in finding background on this song. We learned it in a peace group at the beginning of the Iraq War.}

Mir (Russian: Мир, Russian for either Peace or World)

Spirit of Peace
to your cause, we give our strength.
That love may reign and war may cease.
Mir Mir, U mir.





Photo and graphics: tinypic.com

what a wonderful earth hour.......oh yeah

"What a Wonderful World" is a song by Bob Thiele (using the pseudonym George Douglas) and George David Weiss. It was first recorded by Louis Armstrong and released as a single in 1968, and was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.....

.....Intended as an antidote for the increasingly racially and politically charged climate in the U.S. of everyday life. The song also has a hopeful, optimistic tone with regard to the future, with reference to babies being born into the world and having much to look forward to. The song was not initially a hit in the United States, where it sold fewer than 1,000 copies, but was a major success in the UK, reaching number one on the UK singles chart. It was also the biggest-selling single of 1968 in the UK. The song made Louis Armstrong the oldest male to top the charts, at sixty-six years and ten months old. (read more at Wikipedia)

I came across this perfect video one night this week and it moved me to tears. The song seems so different to me now than when it came out in 1968, one of the most tumultuous times in the last 50+ years. Even with all the hell that was going on at the time when I heard this song in those days I felt absolutely hopeful.

Now, not so much. The damage done to this wonderful world in the decades since has put Earth in real peril. We know this. Some argue the causes and the severity, but we know we are in danger of losing the environmental balance that was taken for granted by all the generations before us.

To acknowledge that it is we who have the weight of this wonderful world on our shoulders hurts almost more than bearing the weight of these times. But acknowledge we must. We must become as fully informed of as much detail of what is happening as we can, and we need to let our civic, state, and national leaders know that we are nuanced in our knowledge of environmental concerns.....and that we are watching their actions.

The second annual Earth Hour is coming up on Saturday, March 28, at 8:30 PM (your time). This year it's being promoted much more professionally and enthusiastically than last year, which seemed more an experiment. Inside candy in South Africa posted a great post with links on how to sign up for Earth Hour 2009. Come on, let's make a powerful global difference together that night!

Mike and I participated last year and in a later post I might share the hysterical video from that night. In the meantime, for this year's Earth Hour video I think Mike must learn What a Wonderful World on his guitar....

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