There are many candidates that might be considered as the very first rock 'n' roll record.  One of the most promising ones is Rocket 88 (watch it on Youtube here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbfnh1oVTk0 ).  This birthday really happened in April of this year since the record was released then.  I am surprised that the 70th anniversary of its release (April 1951) didn't get more headlines. It is credited to Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats, but in fact this was an alias for Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm.  A damn fine record that spawned a whole genre.  What's not to like?  It is certainly worth celebrating.  :-)

 I occasionally look at the worldwide Corona statistics online, because coverage of what is going on with this virus globally is so little covered on our national TV stations.  It is about a week since I last looked and somewhere in that week we have crossed the five million deaths marker.  The stats came from here:  COVID Live Update: 247,557,359 Cases and 5,016,966 Deaths from the Coronavirus - Worldometer (worldometers.info)    If you say that quickly it doesn't sound like much, so lets put it in perspective. The population of the troublesome little province that I live in was about 1.9 million at the 2021 census, so you could wipe every single living being in this whole place off the map and still not even be half way towards that total! The population in the republic was 4.995 million in 2020.  Yet again, if Dublin, Cork, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, etc. etc suddenly ceased to be, we would still not cover the carnage caused by Covid! You could wipe L...