Kid Koala

Eric San (born 1974), who records under the name Kid Koala, is a Canadian DJ, turntablist, musician and an author of graphic novels. He is signed to the British record label Ninja Tune, is a member of alternative hip hop supergroup Deltron 3030, and The Slew with Dynamite D and former members of the Australian rock band Wolfmother, bassist and keyboardist Chris Ross and drummer Myles Heskett. He has also made appearances with many other artists from Amon Tobin to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band and has made contributions to Lovage,Peeping Tom,Gorillaz and numerous other projects.

Biography

San attended Sir Winston Churchill Secondary School in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, but graduated from Thomas Sprigg Wootton High School, in Rockville, Maryland, U.S., and went on to study elementary education at McGill University, in Montreal, Quebec. He would eventually distribute copies of his demo tape Scratchcratchratchatch to students living in residence at McGill. He is well known for his enigmatic style of turntablism, which uses an unusual collection of samples. He has been known to use samples of music from Charlie Brown television specials, old comedy sketch routines (including those that mock turntablism), people sneezing, and people reading a menu in Cantonese. He is well known for his cheerful demeanor at concerts and having a good sense of humour.

Ninja Tune

Ninja Tune is an independent record label based in London, England, UK. It has a satellite office in Los Angeles, California, US covering the whole of North America. It was founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More, better known as Coldcut and managed by Peter Quicke and others. Music Week has written that Ninja Tune is one of the most credible independent labels in the UK.

Inspired by a visit to Japan, Black & More primarily created Ninja Tune in 1990 as a means to escape the creative control of major labels, and to act as a vehicle to release music of a more underground nature, free from the restraints that were put on them via their brief stints with Arista and Big Life. The label has been called "visionary" and "reliably excellent". It has signed a diverse range of uncompromising artists, encourages interactive technology, embraces the audio-visual world, has created its own publishing company, Just Isn’t Music, and finds innovative uses of software.

The label’s first releases —the first five volumes of DJ Food's Jazz Brakes— were produced by Coldcut in the early 1990s, and celebrated by the music press and beat aficionados. They were composed of instrumental sample-based cuts that led the duo to help pioneer new instrumental hip hop beats genres (alongside the Mo'Wax label and Ninja Tune artists such as Funki Porcini, The Herbaliser and DJ Vadim) and, to this day, are recognized as being indispensable tools for DJs.

Koala

The koala (Phascolarctos cinereus, or, inaccurately, koala bear) is an arboreal herbivorous marsupial native to Australia. It is the only extant representative of the family Phascolarctidae and its closest living relatives are the wombats. The koala is found in coastal areas of the mainland's eastern and southern regions, inhabiting Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia. It is easily recognisable by its stout, tailless body and large head with round, fluffy ears and large, spoon-shaped nose. The koala has a body length of 60–85 cm (24–33 in) and weighs 4–15 kg (9–33 lb). Pelage colour ranges from silver grey to chocolate brown. Koalas from the northern populations are typically smaller and lighter in colour than their counterparts further south. These populations possibly are separate subspecies, but this is disputed.

Koalas typically inhabit open eucalypt woodlands, and the leaves of these trees make up most of their diet. Because this eucalypt diet has limited nutritional and caloric content, koalas are largely sedentary and sleep up to 20 hours a day. They are asocial animals, and bonding exists only between mothers and dependent offspring. Adult males communicate with loud bellows that intimidate rivals and attract mates. Males mark their presence with secretions from scent glands located on their chests. Being marsupials, koalas give birth to underdeveloped young that crawl into their mothers' pouches, where they stay for the first six to seven months of their lives. These young koalas, known as joeys, are fully weaned around a year old. Koalas have few natural predators and parasites, but are threatened by various pathogens, such as Chlamydiaceae bacteria and the koala retrovirus, as well as by bushfires and droughts.

Jan Kerouac

Janet Michelle "Jan" Kerouac (February 16, 1952 – June 5, 1996) was an American writer and the only child of beat generation author Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac.

Early life and career

Kerouac was born in Albany, New York. Her mother left her father while pregnant, and Jack refused to acknowledge the baby as his daughter. A blood test when Jan was nine years old proved his paternity and he was ordered to pay $52 a week for her upbringing. Jan met her father only twice, at the blood test in 1961 and again in 1967, when she visited him at his mother's home in Florida, before traveling to Mexico with her first husband, John Lamb Lash. For the next few decades, she traveled across the country with a fearless curiosity that echoed that of her father and Neal Cassady.

She began to write seriously in the mid 1970s, often seeking guidance through correspondence with her Godfather, Allen Ginsberg.

Jack Kerouac died in 1969 and Jan began a long legal process through the 1970s and 1980s that would eventually give her rights to one-half of the literary revenue from his books sold domestically. Her friendship with Carolyn Cassady bolstered her drive to achieve this--Carolyn once remembering her fondly as a "poor little lost waif." Encouraged by Kerouac biographer Gerald Nicosia,she entered into a lawsuit in the 1990s that proposed the will of Jack's mother, Gabrielle Kerouac was a forgery, in the hope winning could expand her legal rights to her father's works and physical property. After her death, the lawsuit was dismissed.

Moon River

"Moon River" is a song composed by Henry Mancini with lyrics by Johnny Mercer. It received an Academy Award for Best Original Song for its performance by Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). It also won Mancini the 1962 Grammy Award for Record of the Year and won Mancini and Mercer the Grammy Award for Song of the Year. The song has been covered by many other artists.

It became the theme song for Andy Williams, who first recorded it in 1961 and performed it at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1962. He sang the first eight bars of the song at the beginning of each episode of his eponymous television show and named his production company and venue in Branson, Missouri after it. His autobiography is called "Moon River" and Me. Williams' version was never released as a single, but it charted as an LP track that he recorded for Columbia on a hit album of 1962. Cadence Records' president Archie Bleyer disliked Williams' version, as Bleyer believed it had little or no appeal to teenagers. Forty years later in 2002, a 74-year-old Williams sang the song at the conclusion of the live telecast of the NBC 75th Anniversary Special to a standing ovation.