Saturday Matinee – I Dig Safety, I Feel Like Saying a Beatnik Poem & Tom Waits

This is the way it is, baby. I Dig Safety, and it’s about time you paid attention to it. Don’t let the title fool you; this could save your life, and it’s got a cool hip soundtrack with bongos, courtesy of Xerox [1969].

The Utoobage description sums it up: “A great clip from the 1958 teen B movie High School Confidential. This clip features Phillipa Fallon as a beat poetess. That’s Uncle Fester, AKA Jackie Coogan on piano behind her. Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum.” Here’s the whole awesome [via]:

High School Drag

My old man was a bread stasher all his life.
He never got fat. He wound up with a used car,
a 17 inch screen and arthritis.

Tomorrow is a drag, man.
Tomorrow is a king sized bust.

They cried ‘put down pot,’ ‘don’t think a lot,’ for what?
Time, how much? And what to do with it.

Sleep, man, and you might wake up digging the whole
human race giving itself three days to get out.

Tomorrow is a drag, pops, the future is a flake.

I had a canary who couldn’t sing.
I had a cat who let me share my pad with her.
I bought a dog that killed the cat who ate the canary.
What is truth?

I had an uncle with an ivy league card.
He had a life with a belt in the back.
He had a button-down brain.
Wind up a belt in the mouth with a button-down lip.

We cough blood on this earth.
Now there’s a race for space.
We can cough blood on the moon soon.

Tomorrow’s dragsville, cats.
Tomorrow is a king size drag.

Tool a fast shore, swing with a gassy chick.
Turn on to a thousand joys.
Smile on what happened, or check what’s going to happen,
You’ll miss what’s happening.
Turn your eyes inside and dig the vacuum.

Swing For A Crime is a great compilation of hep cat music interspersed with audio snippets from B-movie suspense thrillers (including the distinctive voice of Lee Marvin hollering “Oh you pig! You lyin’ pig!” from the 1953 movie The Big Heat). I have it on vinyl.

The only performer I know of that was able to recreate the hep cat beatnik persona successfully is Tom Waits.

Have a great Labor Day Weekend, folks.

[Yeah, I fixed it, and I know it’s not Memorial Day Weekend. That’s what happens when you realize it’s almost midnight and you’ve been messing around too much on Twitter to post anything coherently. –Bunk]

The .Gif Friday Post No. 450 – Dance Hard

Dance Hard 19

Dance Hard 25

Dance Hard 31

I modified the top one a tad, second one was cropped and culled for size (they’re all way too skinny in the meat department, but the one on the left rocks). Third is pure awesome. Anyone who’s been to Seattle knows that everyone there dances that way.

[Found  here, here and here. More Dance Hard .gifs in our archives.]

On the border.

U.S. Mexico Border Fence at Morelia St.2

View of Calexico from Mexicali on the US/Mexico border.

Found via Google Maps.

Nature’s Custom Pinstripes

Custom Pinstripes

Yeah, this got posted a day ahead of schedule. Posting a stupid cat pic and a stupid bird pic on the same day disrupts blog karma big time. Lo siento un poco.

[Found here.]

How Cats See The World

PixelCat

[Found here.]

James Dean’s Last Stop

Maggie at James Dean's Last Stop Ofer Wolbeger

James Dean’s Last Stop in Lost Hills, California, was where he and his mechanic stopped to gas up his Porsche 550 Spyder and get something to eat before heading off to Salinas for a road race. Most of you know the rest of the story.

Why did I post this? The Missus and Bunkarina went on a roadtrip to see Bunkessa, stopped in Lost Hills, so I axed Mr. Google for a map. The James Dean mural came up and it led me to photographer Ofer Wolberger‘s quirky collection entitled “Life With Maggie.” [More about Wolberger here.]

Hot Links with Extra Sour Cream

Humpty Doo Big_Boxing_Croc

The US Naval Institute released the results of their informal poll “Who Was The Greatest Woman In Military History?”
The results are both surprising and unsurprising. I voted for Boadicea. She gave the military a spine to fight the Romans.

We posted a photo of Stanley The Great in April 2014 without really knowing who he was. Check out the update.

Bravo Land is now on my bucket list, if only to re-install erased history removed by evil people on The Slab o’ Time:

Inside the chain of stores, we immediately spotted the Bravo Land Slab o’ Time, an impressively massive tree cross-section propped against a wall. It’s from a Giant Sequoia blasted down in the 1950s, over 2,000 years old. It features a scattering of little metal labels nailed to it. A plaque explained: “The tags on the log denote growth rings that grew in the same year as various significant world events.”

“214 BC – Great Wall of China”…”197 BC – Roman Empire Begins.” There’s a 1,284 year gap, though, and the sign noted the “conspicuous absence of tagged growth rings from the 5th to the 15th centuries…. That period of time produced few significant events in world history.”

We’re not totally buying that. Closer inspection revealed missing tags radiating out from the slab center, two small holes indicating where each notable achievement used to be. We asked about it, and were told that “some political people” had come in and pointed out which milestone labels should be removed (you know, to fix world history).

We’ve seen timelines ravaged by tourism slab deniers before — but always on public land, at national and state parks. Complainers raise a stink, form a committee, and voila, adjusted! Bravo Land is a private enterprise. But once a slab is called out for being on the wrong side of history, there’s little choice but to get out the pliers and pry off the “Magna Carta,” and Columbus and Ponce de Leon “discovers” tags (we’re just guessing about the discards, since they’re gone).

Petey was a seal, but his real name was Shag. TRUE.

Stupid joke from a long time ago:

Okay, so a penguin is driving through the Mojave to Las Vegas when his A/C breaks down. He pulls into a repair garage in Pahrump and tells the mechanic that he needs air conditioning to survive the heat. Mechanic says, “There’s an ice cream shop a block away, cool down and be back in an hour.”

The penguin hits the ice cream shop, hangs out in the freezer eating ice cream, but since he only has flippers to hold the cones he makes a mess. An hour later he pays for the ice cream, cleans up the mess and returns to the mechanic and asks, “So what did you find?”

Mechanic says, “Looks like you blew a seal.”

Penguin wipes his beak and says, “Nah. It’s just ice cream.”

Trouble at Taminmin Humpty Doo.

Yeah, I said Humpty Doo.

[Top image is a tourist attraction at Humpty Doo and it cost $137,000 in 1983 bucks.]

No r Egrets

Two big birds showed up on our neighbor’s roof yesterday morning.

Saturday Matinee – Heavy Slabs in Tasmania, Puddles Painting Party, Manualist Extraordinaire & Fishbone

August 2016 – “Tasmania’s most famous wave comes to life to launch the Australian winter with a roar. When the southern hemisphere starts to rumble and shake under the weight of wild winter weather, The Stern, out there on the south-eastern tip of Tasmania, bears the full brunt of the conditions.”

[Found here.]

Found here. Yeah, it’s cool for the first minute or so, but hey. I’d rather watch this guy’s stuff.

Dude is awesome.

One of my all time ska favorites. Fishbone kicks it in 2013.

Have a great weekend, folks, and we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

The .Gif Friday Post No. 449 – Valentin’s Wink, Walking on Sunshine & Erdal’s Kite

Lidia Valentin Wink

Catwalk 2

Kite Erdal Inci

[Found here, here and here. I flipped the 2nd one just because.]