The most amazing book about ABBA’s music is the one called “ABBA: Let The Music Speak” by Christopher Patrick. This book which is subtitled, “An Armchair Guide To The Musical Soundscape Of The Swedish Supergroup” is exactly that in that Christopher Patrick is a musician and he is able to musically guide us through every song in the ABBA catalog from the perspective of a musician. Everything you could possibly want to know about the construction of an ABBA song musically is there.

For a while in the late 1970′s ABBA had shot ahead of the Beatles in terms of record sales, but John Lennon’s death quickly reversed that temporary unseating of the Beatles as best selling act of all time. Despite this achievement, ABBA’s purely Swedish Pop is often not given the same credibility as the Beatles achievement. Their music is often considered lightweight and bubblegum compared to the works of the Beatles. It hardly seems like a fair comparison. In fact at the time the Beatles overtook Elvis Presley as the largest selling act of all time, John Lennon was asked who he thought might overtake the Beatles and he stated, ABBA.

Mountains of books have been written about the musical genius of John Lennon and Paul McCartney all lavishing praise. And yet until now, few books have been written about the works of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, who arguably have written comparable songs to those of Lennon and McCartney. Unfortunately praising ABBA had a heavy stigma for years in both the media and in the public at large that it really seemed that ABBA wasn’t going to get the respect it deserves.

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With the closure of ABBAMAIL, I decided to give former ABBAMAIL list and site owner, Graeme Read, a call. In the past when I’ve called him, I’ve used pre-paid calling cards to get phone rates as low as 11 cents a minute, which isn’t too bad from the United States to Australia. This time I decided to give Skype a shot, which was promising a rate of 2.1 cents per minute to Australian land line numbers for routing the call over the Internet. And the slightly more than an hour that I spoke with Graeme, only cost $1.32.

As technology advances, it gets to be quite amazing how things change. Had I have used a pre-paid calling card, at the previously great rate of 11 cents a minute, the call would have cost approximately, $7 between the connection fee and the time of the call. This was literally a savings of approximately 80%. Had I made the call directly on my cell phone without using Skype, the call would have cost $70 at 69 cents per minute, bring the Skype call a savings of 98%.

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Amazon.com has the new “Deluxe Edition” of Mamma Mia! The Movie’s soundtrack scheduled to come out on November 25, 2008 in the United States. Although the soundtrack portion will remain the same as it was when it was released in July of this year, it comes with a hard cover booklet featuring lyrics to the songs as well as housing some unseen photos as well as commentary regarding the film and the soundtrack. Additionally the set will include a DVD with approximately 30 minutes of footage of the recording sessions as well as interviews with Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, and original ABBA members, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. It will serve as a “making of” for the soundtrack.

The “Deluxe Edition” of the soundtrack comes out in the US, the same week that the DVD of the movie comes out in the United Kingdom. However, US DVD buyers have to wait until December 16th to get a US released copy of the movie on DVD and Blu-Ray. Australian and New Zealand consumers will be the first to get the DVD when it releases in those territories on November 6rd, however they have to wait until December 3rd for the Blu-Ray edition.

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It was a bit of bittersweet sad news today when Graeme Read and Grant Whittingham decided to shut down both ABBAMAIL.com and the ABBAMAIL mailing list which has been a big part of my life for almost 12 years now. The closing was just under three months shy of ABBAMAIL’s 12th birthday.

ABBAMAIL wasn’t so much just a bunch of ABBA fans as it was a living, breathing community. While in the late 1990′s, a lot of online fan communities consisted of lists, fairly impersonal message boards, and fairly simple webpages, I personally was a member of a quite a number of them for various hobbies and interests. And it seemed without fail that as soon as the subjects of the list seemed to disappear off the pop culture radar, so did the people in these communities and many of them fade out and disappeared. ABBAMAIL was different.

Unlike any other forum I had been a part of from the same era, ABBAMAIL was quite a unique beast. A lot of that is due to the community’s founders, Graeme Read and Grant Whittingham, who fostered a true sense of community, simply being an ABBA fan was something all of us on the list had in common, but for Graeme and Grant that simply wasn’t enough. Members of the list were expected to introduce themselves and share that person behind behind the letters that make up our names.

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I just saw this interview of Ryan Higgins from Australia that could change the way you manifest anything you want into your life. You really do have to see this:

http://mindmovies.com/vid1/

You see, he figured out this powerful way to tap into the Law of Attraction that practically guarantees you’ll get whatever you want.

And the surprising thing about it is it is SUPER easy to do, you can start doing it right now…and here’s the really cool part…

He’s GIVING it away! For FREE

Ryan obviously understands abundance, because he’s practicing it in a very big way here

http://mindmovies.com/vid1/

So what is it about Aussies anyway? They seem to totally have this figured out, especially when you consider that the land down under is where we got Rhonda Byrne who is responsible for the movie and book, “The Secret.” I’m sure you’ll agree that was life changing all by itself.

And now, Ryan has added another dimension to the Law of Attraction that ramps up how fast you can manifest anything you want into your life.

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I’ve recently been trying out new software by Vertus called “Bling! It” which is a simple program that removes backgrounds from photos and allows you to replace the backgrounds to jazz up the photos for things like improving eBay auctions to profile pictures.

Granted, I am a user of Corel’s Paint Shop Pro and could literally do all this with the software I already have, but Bling! It is so quick and easy to use, and it automatically makes the output files the perfect size for putting up online that it’s a big saver of time that I could be done with a picture and on to the next one before I’ve finished removing the background in Paint Shop Pro. Don’t get me wrong, I love Paint Shop Pro, but generally when I’m looking to sell some of my stuff on eBay, I’m doing a batch of items at once and I don’t need such a robust program to do the images for my eBay auctions. The time savings I get by using Bling! It, translate into the ability to put up more items on eBay in less time and as they say time is money.

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