This one’s been sitting around in the posting queue for too long. Might as well be done with it.
[Image and story found here.]
Category: History
Saturday Matinee – Cup Song, The Wood Brothers, Leon Russell & Friends
Cup Song found here. Nice to see young folks learning a new trade.
The Wood Brothers sing about your trouble.
Leon Russell & Friends’ “Trouble In Mind.” The song dates to 1924 at least, and was recorded by Chippie Hill and Louie Armstrong in 1926 (and no, we’re not going to discuss the double entendres of the lyrics).
Here’s another great tribute to that classic song, featuring Barney Kessel, Tal Farlow, Charlie Byrd, Joe Byrd & Chuck Redd from 1988.
Have a great weekend, folks. May all your troubles be little ones, and all your little ones be trouble.
NSA + IRS = [(1984+30) x 11] = WTF
Football
Not sure how true this is, but it’s kinda true.
Roman Gladiators were the true ancestors of American Football. Brute force, team sport, with audience participation. Thumbs up or thumbs down from the fans could determine life or death of the defeated.
Top: Flag On The Play – Personal foul, 10 yards.
Bottom: Offensive foul – Death By Maggots.
Once the Romans left Britain, the locals needed something to kick around. Some wags found a Roman skull, decided to kick it all the way to the next village. The folks at that village didn’t like it much, and kicked it back to the first. Association Football was born.
Kicking a skull up and down a dirt path is hard on the feet, so the Roman skull was supplanted by the obvious replacement – an inflated pig’s bladder.
Association Football was too hard to pronounce in normal conversation, so it was renamed Assoc. Football, and those who played it were Assoc.’ers – hence the name “soccer,” and it caught on, even though all of the world still called it Football. But it wasn’t good enough for some. The game had lost its Gladiator roots (except for the drunks fighting on the sidelines).
Then one day in the early 1800s, someone got fed up and wondered, “What’s the point of kicking a stinking inflated chunk of porcine offal back and forth?” and decided to pick up the ball and run it directly into the opposition, knocking out teeth, drawing blood and breaking bones in the process. The game of Rugby was born.
Once Rugby was introduced into the States via Canada, America decided some changes had to be made. No more round scrum, the teams had to line up and hit head on in order to move the little leather covered ellipsoid mere yards at a time, and Woody Hayes was invented.
All of this requires physical protection, so the players wear helmets, shoulder pads and crotch protectors. They’re bred to be corn-fed behemoths of people capable of unprecedented brute force trained to bash each other’s heads into the ground. I love it.
Saturday Matinee – Portuguese Man O’ War, Bonanza, David Rose & The Beat Farmers
[Vid found here.]
The Portuguese Man O’ War is amazing, as it’s not a single animal, but a colony of several bizarre organisms, all dependent on the others for survival. One provides transportation, one lures and traps food, one processes it, one cooks, and the other one does laundry and runs the blog.
The harmless gasbag idiot-animal floats while dangling his nasty stinging-tentacled buddies as deep as 160 feet below the surface. How they find each other and decide to hang together is a mystery to me, unless it has something to do with cheap beer, tasers and fraternity parties.
I saw one washed up on a beach when I was a kid without knowing what it was – thought it was an inflatable toy dolphin with seaweed attached. Yeah, I poked it with a stick, and yeah, I found out what the insides of a Portuguese Man O’ War smelled like, as did everyone else within a quarter mile downwind.
When the floating-gasbag idiot-animal washes up on shore and dies, it takes the other idiot-animals with him, and they can’t do anything about it because their free ride is over. Such is the life of a sycophant.
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Okay, bear with me on this next one. Remember the classic 1959-1973 TV show “Bonanza?” Here’s The instrumental TV theme (with opening credits).
The missus informed me that there were words to that great theme, and she’s right. The closing credits for the early episodes included “The Cartwrights” singing the theme (after apparently stumbling out of a saloon/cat house joint venture in Carson City) and mounting up to pick fights with and wreak havoc on the local populace before they rode back to their fortified enclave known as The Ponderosa:
[Little Joe] I’ve got a flair for women everywhere, Bonanza!
[Hoss] BONANZA! ¡AI-AI-AI!
[All] I’m gonna call on any gal at all, she’s gonna welcome me.
[Ben] I’m not afraid of any pretty maid, Bonanza!
BONANZA!
When I give a kiss to any pretty miss,
She’ll learn a lot from me!
[All] One for four, four for one
This we guarantee!
We got a right to pick a little fight – Bonanza!
BONANZA!
If anyone fights any one of us,
He’s gotta fight with me!
BTW, the best comment on that Utoobage link was posted by someone named 75yellowraven:
“144-441 what does that mean?”
The lyrics and acting were so laughably absurd that the clip was canned. Years later Lorne Greene sang the song with much different lyrics: Lorne Greene singing The Theme To Bonanza.
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But that’s not the weird part. The Bonanza Theme was orchestrated by David Rose, same guy who composed “The Stripper,” a number of TV theme songs, and this horrible piece of 1960s grocery aisle music:
Bet you couldn’t last the whole two-point-five minutes of that, so here’s almost a whole hour of The Beat Farmers circa 1984, featuring the late Country Dick Montana on drums, vocals, beer and belligerence.
Hope that grabs on, holds and squeezes you for this edition of The Saturday Matinee. Have a great weekend, even if you have to mow the snow.
P.S. If you ever wanted to sing along to The Chips‘ “Rubber Biscuit” we’ve got the Complete & Accurate day down sum wanna jigga-wah lyrics here.
1 14 1 14 1 14
Second : Minute : Hour; Day/Month/Year
Smallest to largest time/date pattern sequence.
Christmas Arachnids
“An old European Christmas legend tells of a poor woman unable to provide the traditional decorations for the special holiday. A spider made his home in her tree and began to spin beautiful webs. On Christmas morning, the first light of sun struck the cobwebs, turning them to silver. When the woman awoke, she found the tree was covered with silver treasure. The spider had brought good fortune!”
[via]
Other versions claim it’s a German or Ukrainian tradition, and that either the Christ Child or Santa transformed the webs. Although I grew up in an area with a large German population, I never heard the story and can’t find an original source.
Yet, there IS such a creature called a Christmas Spider.
[Image found here.]
8:9:10 11/12/13 – The 8th Second of The 9th Minute of The 10th Hour of The 11th Day of The 12th Month of The 13th Year of The Century
Second : Minute : Hour; Day / Month / Year
Sequential time and date convergence, smallest to largest increments.
A similar sequence occurred at 8:09:10 on November 12 2013, but this one rocks. Unless I’m missing something, we’ll have no more great time/date convergences for a very long time.
Adding the numbers and dividing by 21 (the number of the current Century for those of you not keeping track) results in the Number 3, the minimum number of points to describe a circle, a plane and a non-collapsible polygon; the noblest of all digits according to Pythagoras and one of only 9 Heegner Numbers, the Atomic Number of Lithium (3rd in line after Hydrogen and Helium), the number of physical dimensions we’re able to sense, and it’s also a crowd.
It all means something, I just don’t know what.
Tacky Raccoons 