Today is Monday, Aug. 26, the 239th day of 2024. There are 127 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On Aug. 26, 1944, French Gen. Charles de Gaulle braved the threat of German snipers as he led a victory march in Paris, which had just been liberated by the Allies from Nazi occupation.

Also on this date:

In 1939, the first televised major league baseball games were shown on experimental station W2XBS: a double-header between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field. The Reds won the first game, 5-2, the Dodgers the second, 6-1.

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In 1958, Alaskans went to the polls to overwhelmingly vote in favor of statehood.

In 1968, the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago; the four-day event that resulted in the nomination of Hubert H. Humphrey for president was marked by a bloody police crackdown on antiwar protesters in the streets.

In 1972, the summer Olympics opened in Munich, West Germany.

In 1978, Cardinal Albino Luciani (al-BEE’-noh loo-CHYAH’-nee) of Venice was elected pope following the death of Paul VI. The new pontiff, who took the name Pope John Paul I, died just over a month later.

In 1980, the FBI inadvertently detonated a bomb planted at Harvey’s Resort Hotel in Stateline, Nevada while attempting to disarm it. (The hotel had been evacuated and no injuries were reported.)

In 1985, 13-year-old AIDS patient Ryan White began “attending” classes at Western Middle School in Kokomo, Indiana via a telephone hook-up at his home, as school officials had barred White from attending classes in person due to his illness.

In 2009, kidnapping victim Jaycee Dugard was discovered alive in California after being missing for more than 18 years.

In 2022, an affidavit released by the FBI showed that 14 of the 15 boxes recovered from former President Donald Trump’s Florida estate contained classified documents, many of them top secret, mixed in with miscellaneous newspapers, magazines and personal correspondence.

Today’s Birthdays:

John Tinniswood, the world’s oldest verified living man, is 112.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is 79.
R&B singer Valerie Simpson (Ashford & Simpson) is 78.
Broadcast journalist Bill Whitaker is 73.
Puzzle creator/editor Will Shortz is 72.
Jazz musician Branford Marsalis is 64.
Actor-singer Shirley Manson (Garbage) is 58.
Actor Melissa McCarthy is 54.
Latin pop singer Thalia is 53.
Actor Macaulay Culkin is 44.
Actor Chris Pine is 44.
Comedian/actor/writer John Mulaney is 42.
Country musician Brian Kelley (Florida Georgia Line) is 39.
NBA guard James Harden is 35.
Actor Dylan O’Brien is 33.
Actor Keke Palmer is 31.

When you’re among the mentors on a show called “The Voice,” you’d best bring your “A” game when it comes time to take the stage and sing. Blake Shelton hasn’t done that much of that this year, and the country star seems to have eased off on the recording habit, too, seeing as he hasn’t released a new album since before the pandemic.

But Sunday night’s show at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand showed that his rich baritone and gift for selling a song are still strong. Before a crowd of 11,156, Shelton and his six-piece backing band piled one country hit on top of another, covering the gamut of his genre’s traditional subject matter and keeping things respectably traditional.

At age 48, Shelton seems to still enjoy getting out to play, but he did lament the fact that he awakened Sunday morning at home in steamy Oklahoma looking forward to a trip to Minnesota for some cooler weather. Alas, he was greeted by high heat and humidity, and looked to be dripping sweat all set long, pausing to hydrate and wipe his head with a towel after almost every song. But he paused to sing the praises of the Fair and heartily endorsed the deep-fried ranch dressing.

He proved an enthusiastic interpreter of everything he performed during what could be called a greatest hits show. This is an artist who’s had 13 songs hit number one on the country charts, and he performed nine of them on Sunday. Even with some friendly between-songs banter, he and his band still managed to squeeze 18 songs into 80 minutes.

Shelton has demonstrated on “The Voice” that he knows a thing or two about interpreting a pop song, but this concert always had one foot firmly in the honky tonk and the other on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

Mostly strumming an acoustic guitar while the sound of a banjo, dobro or pedal steel was ringing out beneath him, Shelton proved most engaging on songs of love and commitment of both the high-energy variety — such as “Honey Bee” and “I’ll Name the Dogs” — and convincingly conveyed ballads like “Home” and “Nobody But You,” the latter featuring a large-scale video of his wife, Gwen Stefani, singing along while looming over the proceedings like the great and powerful Oz.

“My songs aren’t brain surgery,” Shelton said while encouraging a sing-along, and it’s true that there’s a simplicity and a touch too much sameness in his style. That pertains to his lyrical content, too, which tends to check all the cliched country boxes like trucks, rural landscapes, beer, whiskey, dogs, guns and bars, even name-checking Conway Twitty twice during his set.

But he nevertheless came off as a very conscientious performer, pouring an impressive amount of passion and lung power into each song. And that voice is still pretty darn good.

Speaking of “The Voice,” that’s where Shelton first met Emily Ann Roberts back when she was a high school student from Knoxville, Tenn. She was a member of “Team Blake” back in 2015, but she’s undergone a very promising transformation since, as she demonstrated with the evening’s opening set on Sunday.

Not just another “voice,” she showed off her songwriting chops and a traditional country aesthetic. She also carried herself with an engaging stage presence and voice both reminiscent of Dolly Parton, even covering Parton’s 1980 hit, “9 to 5.” And there are few better role models for a young woman singer-songwriter in Nashville.

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Rob Hubbard can be reached at wordhub@yahoo.com.

Halloween arrived early to St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center Sunday night when the double bill of Alice Cooper and Rob Zombie brought two generations of shock rock to a gleeful crowd of about 10,000.

From the early days of the Alice Cooper band to his solo career that began in 1975, the man born Vincent Furnier has enjoyed his position as one of the most-loved musicians in the business, thanks to his hard-driving songs, spirited live performances and comically ghoulish persona that earned him the title of the Godfather of Shock Rock.

Cooper has influenced countless musicians who’ve followed him, including Zombie himself, who inducted the Alice Cooper band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2011.

Now 76, Cooper has said he’s six years younger than Mick Jagger and that whenever the Rolling Stones frontman retires, Cooper figures he’s got six more years left in him: “I will not let him beat me when it comes to longevity.”

Sunday night, Cooper felt as ageless as ever, from his barking voice to multiple costume changes. He has continued to record new music, including his most recent four albums which he worked on with Bob Ezrin, the mega-producer behind Cooper’s biggest records from the ’70s.

Not that Cooper played any of the new stuff, though. In his tightly paced hour-long set, he focused on his early hitmaking days (“No More Mr. Nice Guy,” “Elected,” “I’m Eighteen”) and his successful second act during the hair metal era (“Poison,” “Hey Stoopid,” “Lock Me Up”).

Of course, he also found time for his famed theatrics. Cinematic serial killer Jason Voorhees showed up on stage during “He’s Back (The Man Behind the Mask),” a giant monster joined him for “Feed My Frankenstein” as did a whip-cracking demon in a bikini during “Go to Hell.” Cooper’s most famous bit took place during “Ballad of Dwight Fry,” which opened with him wearing a straitjacket and wrapped with his head on a guillotine.

The crowd ate it all up and showered love on his terrific band, which includes three guitarists. Fan favorite Nita Strauss even got her own solo.

Zombie, 59, first found fame in the ’90s as the leader of the metal band White Zombie. After a pair of hit major label albums, the band split and Zombie went on to pursue a solo career. He’s also become an accomplished director of horror films inspired by the likes of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” “The Shining” and “A Clockwork Orange.”

As such, his show offered plenty of visual spectacle with custom graphics, vintage film clips and heavily treated live footage flickering on the numerous screens that decorated the stage. One of the most effective combinations of audio and visual happened during “The Satanic Rites of Blacula,” a track from his most recent album “The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy” that blended footage from the 1972 cult classic with pentagrams and blood red washes of color.

Zombie’s solo songs can get a bit murky, but “Living Dead Girl,” “Superbeast” and “Dragula” helped make the night a blast.

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Salvation Army service centers around the metro are available as “cooling centers” during hot weather, including on Monday when real temperatures and heat index are expected to soar. The National Weather Service has predicted the Twin Cities’ temperature will reach 92 degrees, with a peak heat index of 107 degrees, which could be the summer’s hottest, they wrote on their social media.

St. Paul public library branches and recreation centers will also be open during business hours to provide space to cool down.

The Salvation Army will have the following centers open during normal business hours Monday through Friday, and anyone is welcome who needs to escape the heat.

Salvation Army – Eastside, 1019 Payne Avenue, St. Paul 55130 (651) 776-8169
Salvation Army – Citadel, 401 West 7th Street, St. Paul 55102 (651) 224-4316
Salvation Army – Lakewood, 2080 Woodlynn Avenue, St. Paul 55109 (651) 779-9177
Salvation Army – Temple, 1604 East Lake Street, Minneapolis 554107 (612) 721-1513
Salvation Army – Parkview, 2024 Lyndale Avenue North, Minneapolis 55411 (612) 522-4871
Salvation Army – Noble, 10011 Noble Parkway, Brooklyn Park 55443 (763) 425-0517
Salvation Army – Central, 2727 Central Avenue Northeast, Minneapolis 55418 (612) 789-2858

More information on locations and hours can be found at SalvationArmyNorth.org.

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