BETTE / TOTO /TOKENS / TALAFREAKO

Yesterday was a bad day for me regarding e-mails.

• First, I was responding to a message from my University of Hawaii address, pressed the wrong button to send it out, and lost all my messages of the past two months.  Fortunately, 15 Craigside has InfoTech service, and one of the staff came up to fix the problem.  This kind of inconvenience happens all the time, and they again saved me.
• 
  Then, I could not access my Hotmail.
• This turned out to be a Microsoft outage, and was not fixed for me until this morning.
• No malicious activity, something to do with their equipment and/or system.
• The company reports that "millions" of people in at least 74 countries suffered.  Microsoft 365 has around 440 million paid commercial and consumer users, so the whole world suffered.
• Microsoft shares dropped 1.7%, but they had gained 8% this year, so all seems well with the company now.

Not a problem for me, as I am not Jensen Huang, nor do I own any Nvidia stocks, but, after his debacle and an all-time high on October 6, share values have plummeted to its lowest valuation since 2102.  

• Huang, who came to the U.S. from Taiwan at the age 9, resigned amid a scandal report of his extramarital affair with an alleged Chinese spy.  He has had other affairs too.
• Met his wife Lori Mills in 1980 when they were electrical engineering students and lab partners at Oregon State University.  They were married in 1985 and have two children.  He went on to get a master's degree from Stanford in 1992, and co-founded Nvidia in 1993.
• He is 63 years old and she, 64.
• Jensen Huang is said to be worth $147 billion.  

Since the midterm elections, this blog site has been too, too serious.  Today, something frivolous.  Now and then I sneak in postings to surprise and entertain.   

Guess who this is?

• Born in Hawaii.  Father painted houses for the Navy.  Mother sewed. They raised four children in Halawa Housing, converted barracks near Pearl Harbor, in a home with one mirror and very few photographs. Ruth named her three girls after movie stars: Judy for Judy Garland, Susan for Susan Hayward, Bette for Bette Davis. The youngest was a boy, Daniel, who had a disability. Bette has said it was their father who taught him to read and write.  That was the whole ʻohana. Six people and one mirror.
• 
  Graduated from Radford High School in 1963, valedictorian.
• Left for New York.  Judy, the eldest, was in the city in December 1963, walking along 44th Street.  "A car came out of a garage and killed her," Bette said years later.
• Real prominence came in 1970 when she began singing in the Continental Baths, a local gay bathhouse.
• Four years after that, her first album was released. Then came the rest!!!  
• 14 albums as a solo artist, selling over 30 million records worldwide, receiving 4 Gold and 3 Platinum albums.
• Has won 3 Emmys, 4 Grammys, 2 Tonys and 4 Golden Globe awards.

• 
  In September 1973, she flew home to sing in Honolulu for the first time as a star. She walked out in a panic. The closing ovation ran seven minutes. In Row C sat her mother, her sister Susan and her brother Daniel.  Her father did not come.  "He never chose to see me perform - except on Johnny Carson," she said. Father saw his daughter on television. Never saw her from a seat in the audience.

• 
  Mom died of cancer in 1979.  In May 1986, her father's heart gave out. Bette was 40 years old, and half of the six in the family from Halawa Housing were gone.  
• Married Martin von Haselberg in 1984 by an Elvis impersonator.  42 years later, still married.
• Bette in 2000 bought 1,400 acres of old sugar cane land above Kapaʻa, on Kauaʻi, from the Amfac sugar company. The price was $4.5 million.

• 
  Her people said it might grow trees someday. She said nothing. By 2002, she had signed up to put about 100 acres into a perpetual federal easement, to bring back wetlands for endangered waterbirds. Perpetual means it has no end date.
• In February 2025, a Kauaʻi nonprofit called Mālama Kauaʻi signed a lease for 87 acres of the same land, from a company Bette partly owns. The nonprofit worked mostly with her daughter. The plan was small, affordable plots for local farmers. On Kauaʻi, farm land is very hard to get.

• 
  "She had the forethought to lock this land away so it wouldn't be all hotels," said Megan Fox, who runs Mālama Kauaʻi. "Not many people do that."
• By April 2026, three farms were on the land. Naoshi Grady grows kava there. Brianna and Corey Ansley run Aloha Ola Farms. Heather and Pono Nero run Mahina O Kailani. The nonprofit is raising about $1 million for a well, to bring water to the land.

She is now 80 years old and, of course, her name is Bette Midler.

• Her film debut was The Rose in 1979.  Also went on to Down and Out in Beverley Hills (1986), Ruthless People (1986), Outrageous Fortune (1987), Big Business (1988), Beaches (1988), Stella (1990), Hocus Pocus (1993, which has become the #1 Halloween film for normal people--there was a sequel in 2022), Gypsy (1993), The First Wives Club (1996), The Stepford Wives (2004), Parental Guidance (2012), and The Addams Family (2019).

• 
  Many of her songs became chart hits, including "The Rose", "Wind Beneath My Wings", "Do You Want to Dance?", "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy", and "From a Distance". She won Grammy Awards for Best New Artist, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for "The Rose", and Record of the Year for "Wind Beneath My Wings".

Ever heard of the band Toto?

• Formed in Los Angeles in 1977.
• Named after Toto, the dog from The Wizard of Oz.
• They were the band for Sonny & Cher, Seals & Croft, Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs and others.
• Two most popular songs are Africa and Rosanna.  Member Steve Porcaro was at that time dating Rosanna Arquette, but said the song is not about her.

• 
  Released 14 albums and sold over 50 million records worldwide.
• Has won 6 Grammys.
• Still touring, and will kick off its 50th Anniversary world tour in March of next year.

• 
  But I did not create this posting for the above info.  Members of the band were also active creating for events and films.
• Moodido (The Match), the boxing theme for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.  A future contribution for the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics?

• 
  The entire musical score for David Lynch's 1984 sci-fi film, Dune, collaborating with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
• Some of their songs appear in commercials.  I noticed when reading about this foray that Barry Manilow wrote the commercial jingle for State Farm, about being a good neighbor, and made $500.

Next, on to The Tokens.  Of course, you must have heard them.

• A doo-wop band from Brooklyn, they formed in 1955 at Abraham Lincoln High School, and was then known as the Linc-Tones.  Neil Sedaka was an original member, and was the lead vocal in its first single, While I Dream.  Sedaka left The Tokens and the Coins in 1958.

• 
  Recorded The Lion Sleeps Tonight in 1961, the English version of Mbube.
• Now that's a song that has a remarkable history.  You read my posting of 26April2018.

The song was recorded in 1939  by Solomon Linda with the Evening Birds in South Africa as Mbube (lion in Zulu).  Linda actually initially wrote the song in the 1920's.  He sold it to Gallo Studios for the equivalent of 87 cents and got a job as a janitor.  The record was the first from Africa to sell over 100,000 copies.

My first recollection of this tune was by The Weavers, recorded in 1951.  But they titled it Wimoweh, which was a mishearing of Uyimbube in the original chorus.  Here they are again at one of their re-unions.  

However, a couple of them were identified as Communist Party members (never confirmed), and they had to disband in 1952 at the height of their career.  Pete Seeger in particular kept dropping out of the group for various reasons when they were able to do anything, but kept returning.  If you really like them, here is their 49-minute Carnegie Hall concert in 1963:  with On Top of Old Smokey, Goodnight Irene, Tzena Tzena Tzena, etc.  Here, a one-hour documentary entitled Wasn't That a Time.

• 
  But again, I did not insert The Tokens into this posting because of their hit song.  Turns out that:

The doo-wop vocal group The Tokens made history during their 1998 Anthem tour by becoming the first pop group to perform the U.S. national anthem in all 30 major league baseball (MLB) ballparks in a single season. [1]

• Watch this video of their feat.

Finally, on to Talafreako.

• Senator-Elect James Talarico got called all kinds of names during these recent midterm elections.
• President Donald Trump coined Talacreepo and James Talafreako.
• Rather than shying away from this insult, the campaign adopted the term by selling Talafreako t-shirts, badges and everything else they could find.
• T-shirts from $32 to $40.
• Black baseball cap for $32.
• Crewneck sweater for $55.
• Bumper stickers for $6.
• Yard signs for $24.
• 4-pack buttons for $12.

• 
  Then, Dallas-born Lil Texxan released a viral freestyle track title Talafreako (Ken Paxton Diss).
• This became a campaign anthem, fueling a wave of TikTok dances and Ai-generated memes.
• Featured clean-cut middle school teacher Talarico in exaggerated cultural scenarios.

For the record, as I've been featuring betting sites to predict the future for those Mississippi and Alaska senate races, here is what the James Talarico vs Ken Paxton numbers looked like on Polymarket:

                                     Talarico   Paxton

• September 13        49.5        49.5
• October 3              64.3        34.5
• October 15            62.5        37.5
• November 1          70.5        29.5
• November 2          72.5        26.5
• November 3          83.5        17.5
• November 4          100            0

Final tally                        55.1         43

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