A patriarch of rock.

If you get BBC America, note that BBC-A is rerunning the first season of “Orphan Black,” beginning tonight. If you haven’t seen it, now is your chance.

Apparently this was on Conan —

This one’s for c u n d gulag — Jennifer Granholm on the Dating Game in 1978.

As a kind of follow up to the last post, please enjoy the first movement of Bach’s 2nd Brandenburg concerto:

As mentioned in the last post, Bach submitted his Brandenburg concertos as a kind of job application to a Prussian prince of some sort named Christian Ludwig of Brandenburg-Schwedt, who is chiefly remembered today as the guy who didn’t give Bach a job. At the time, Bach was employed as Kapellmeister for Prince Ludwig of Anhalt-Köthen and, apparently, Bach was not happy with his boss. However, Christian Ludwig stuffed the compositions in a drawer and didn’t have them performed. The manuscript went undiscovered for 99 years after Bach had died, and the Brandenburg concertos were performed in public for the first time the following year, a full century after Bach had died.

This second concerto has the particular honor of being included on recordings sent into space with the two Voyager probes.

Watching the equestrian section of the men’s modern pentathlon on live stream. Quelle une hoot. The contestants have to ride a horse they’ve just met for the first time around a jumping course. The horsies have their own plans, however. I think they’re planning to give a gold medal to the horse that causes the most trouble. One poor South Korean rider was not only bucked off, he was rolled on. He and the horse were both OK.

If you’re the least bit curious about what’s going on in the gold medal (semifinal, sorry) game men’s basketball game in London — now in progress — you can follow the action on a live blog. It’s not being shown live on NBC, naturally.

I think I’ve finally figured out why NBC’s Olympics coverage is so … frustrating. It’s designed for people who hate sports and don’t want to watch them. Otherwise this makes no sense.

Last night, a 19-year-old runner from Grenada named Kirani James won the 400-meter race by a substantial number of feet…. This was all wonderful but, for some reason, the entire NBC broadcast crew decided that James’s talent and personality weren’t enough to carry the story. Or, perhaps, the story just wasn’t American enough. So they larded up their coverage with paeans to the moment in 1983 when Ronald Reagan arranged to liberate Grenada from the clutches of Cuban construction workers.

And in the amount of time they were going on about Ronald Reagan, they could have covered several pole vault attempts and maybe some wrestling.