Category: Hot Links

Rambling Muskrat Hot Links

A muskrat is not a rat. It’s more like a small capybara and is a resource of food and fur for humans according to Wiki, so send us your recipes and clothing patterns and we’ll post them with credit.

“Muskrat Ramble” was written by Kid Ory and first recorded by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five in 1926.

In 1965, Joseph Allen McDonald, aka Country Joe, shamelessly ripped off Kid Ory’s “Muskrat Ramble” note-for-note for his Vietnam-era protest song “Feelin’ Like I’m Fixin’ To Die Rag.”

“In 2003 McDonald was sued for copyright infringement over his signature song, specifically the “One, two, three, what are we fighting for?” chorus part, as derived from the 1926 early jazz classic “Muskrat Ramble“, co-written by Kid Ory. The suit was brought by Ory’s daughter Babette, who held the copyright at the time. Since decades had already passed from the time McDonald composed his song in 1965, Ory based her suit on a new version of it recorded by McDonald in 1999. The court however upheld McDonald’s laches defense, noting that Ory and her father were aware of the original version of the song, with the same questionable section, for some three decades without bringing a suit. In 2006, Ory was ordered to pay McDonald $395,000 for attorney fees and had to sell her copyrights to do so.”

[McDonald’s parents were communists and named him after Joseph Stalin according to Wiki. That explains a lot.]

From the This Shall Not Pass Department: A Heinz ketchup packet caused a New York woman to be diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. TRUE.

R.I.P. Dominic Frontiere (17 June 1931- 21 December 2017).

The Football Capital of the World.

What’s the smallest hole a mouse shrew can get through? 16.5mm in diameter according to this.

Trains [via].

Jim Flora (1914-1998) was a graphic commercial artist whose work creeped me out when I was very young.

Mambo For Cats was a 33rpm EP featuring various artists. It’s now a collectors’ item for the album cover designed by Jim Flora, and original copies are worth hundreds. Papa had a copy so when I saw the album cover recently, fireworks went off in my head, and the only song I remembered from the compilation was “Muskrat Ramble Mambo.”

[Top image found here.]

Infrasonic Hot Links

Couldn’t find anything on snoring cow omens. According to Wiki, whistling on board a sailing ship is bad luck, it’s thought to encourage the wind to increase. On ships where whistling was taboo, the cook was usually excused, because as long as he was heard whistling he wasn’t stealing food.

Goats were more sure-footed on sailing ships than cows, and ancient mariners would leave breeding pairs on remote islands to provide food for future visitors. Oh, and goats snore, too.

Famed mariner Josh Slocum was once advised to purchase carpet tacks by a merchant. He balked until the merchant explained why he needed them. They were to be scattered over the deck after dark in case pirates attempted to board the vessel undetected. The tacks were a burglar alarm, and according to Slocum, they worked.

Tacks were employed in the design of “Turtle Boats,” Korean warships of the late 1500s for similar reasons.

I’d never heard of the Beano Grenade until now.

I read in a USNI publication that 90% of intercontinental communications are via submarine cable. The same was true in 1850.

Infrasound – the frequency of fear? [h/t Carl L.]

A Mumbo Jumbo was not a niceguy.

The 17 equations that changed the course of history. Pythagoras of Samos was good, but Leonhard Euler came up with the concept of the square root of negative 1, and much more. Also, Euler is not pronounced “yū’-lər.” It’s a Swiss surname, pronounced “ōē’-dər.”

The Catbird Seat.

Pheeew. Jingle Bells is a racist song because of minstrel shows?

[Top image is a panel from “Ploopy The Ghost” by F.O. Alexander, ca. 1940.  Franklin Osborn Alexander was the cartoonist who provided the classic graphics for the board game Monopoly.]

Semi Polychromatic Hot Links

Kiviaq is an Greenlandic Inuit treat: auks fermented in a bladder of sealskin. The link includes this DIY video on preparing the auks. The fermentation takes about three months. Enjoy!

One-armed man won a lumberjack competition. TRUE.

“Large raccoon” knocked out power to 9,600 in New Mexico.
[h/t Alan U.]

There are four kinds of color blindness: protanopia, dueteranopia, tritanopia and achromatopsia.

The COBLIS Color BLIndness Simulator is kinda cool.

What if a color that you perceive as blue is perceived by your friend as red, yet you both call it purple?  If you were a dog, what would your favorite shade of gray be? Stoner questions are awesome.

Actually dogs can see colors, according to this, just not all colors. Humans can’t see all of them either, and some have told me so.

I just Googled “hybrid freak animal.” Now I won’t to be able to sleep for a month.

[Top image found here.]

RIP Joji Tani (1922-2017).

Born in San Pedro, California, he graduated high school in 1942.  He grew up on Terminal Island, and that same year all people of Japanese ancestry were given 48 hours to evacuate to internment camps. His father was taken to North Dakota and interrogated for six months. Allowed only two suitcases per family, Joji’s family was sent to the Santa Anita racetrack, where they lived in makeshift housing among the horse stables. From 1942 to 1944 Tani’s family lived in various internment camps in California, Arkansas and Texas.

He’s the father of one of my wife’s best friends and unfortunately I never met him.

Some Assembly Required Hot Links

Here’s a nice collection of jazz artists with short bios.

Singer, songwriter, performer and actress Norah Jones was born Geetali Norah Shankar. Her half-sister is Anoushka Shankar. Their father is Ravi Shankar.

See what I did there? Gonna do it again.

The French term is mèche sur le front (wick in the front) or un épi (an ear of corn); German, it’s ein Werbel (vortex or whirl); in Spanish, chavito, mechon (tuft) or remolino (swirl); In Danish, it’s hvirvel i håret (whirl in the hair); Afrikaans, kuif (crest); Polish kosmyk (strand). The English term for an unruly spiral of hair is “cowlick” and it first appeared in 1538 according to this site.

I’ve had cowlicks all my life, and in recent years the one on the right gave birth to another that migrated to the left side of my forehead. Now I have Dagwood Hair.

Bob McFadden provided the voice for Dagwood Bumstead in a forgettable cartoon, and had a successful career as a voice actor. He also worked with Rod McKuen (credited as “Dor”) to record the classic song “Beat Generation” in 1959, covered in 1980 by Richard Hell & The Voidoids (“Blank Generation“) and re-covered in 1986 by The Beat Farmers.

Tommy Smothers nailed Johnny Carson.

Here’s what’s happening in Japan.

[Top image found here.]

 

 

Employee Of The Month Hot Links

The Fallacy of the Heap. One hair does not make a beard, therefore a beard doesn’t exist.

Walk like an Egyptian. The Cleverlys cover The Bangles.

Talk like an Architect. Say stuff like this and everyone will go “Wow.”

Bear pants for only $50 here.

Highway 51 Blues – Curtis Jones recorded it sometime in the late 1920s or 1930s, and it was covered by Bob Dylan in 1962. (Jones also toured with a minstrel show.)

I have a digital collection of Rolling Stone Magazine’s Top 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time that I obtained entirely by accident. Guess what No. 1 is (and it wasn’t recorded by Muddy Waters).
Now guess the name of the band that made No. 2 on that list.
No peeking.In the lyrics of those 500 songs, the words love, I’m, oh, know, baby, got and yeah had the most usage in order of frequency, so if you’re a songwriter, “Know, baby, I’m got love, oh yeah,” is a winning phrase.

Bunkessa just informed me that she was named “Employee of the Month” where she no longer works. AWESOME.

[Top image from here. No idea who she is, but she’s pretty and obviously deserves the Award.]

[Updated top image for privacy reasons. New image found here.]

Spontaneously Mutating Hot Links

Smell the bird.

The Weasel War Dance is a colloquial term for a behavior of excited ferrets and weasels.

The Russian Revolution occurred 100 years ago. “Harsh Realities of 1917 Revolution in Paintings of a Petrograd Police Officer” captures some of it.

North Korean defectors speak. Read between the lines because a lot is understated (by necessity). If these defectors’ identities are ever revealed, three generations of their families would suffer punishment.

“During planting and harvest season, we would wake up at 4 a.m. and walk three hours to reach the farmland. We’d take a little break for lunch or a snack, then work until 8 p.m. before walking home again. Doing the weeding was the hardest because we had to get rid of them by hand. And we’d buy beans from the market and make tofu that we’d sell from our house. Our profit was less than 5,000 won [60 cents at the black market rate] a day. But because the bean price fluctuates, sometimes we were left with nothing at all.”
Farmer from Hoeryong, escaped 2014.

“Who was America’s first President?” The answer is obvious.

New technology allows you to swing through a waterfall without getting wet.

The National Lampoon Suicide Hotline.

The Reuben Hair Shift.

Germany is No. 3 for internet domain name ownership by country.

Before I die I want to see Rome.

[Top image from here. h/t Alan U.]

Dark Side of the Hot Links

R.I.P. Malcom Young 1953-2017.

The horse knew what it was doing. One tried to pull that old trick on me when I was a kid, but I saw it coming and ducked.

Questions for stoners to ponder:

“What if nothing didn’t exist?”
“Where did barn owls live before barns?”
“What if there were no hypothetical questions?”

There’s a critter under the sink in the kitchen.

Wife: “I just got stung by a jellyfish! Quick, pee on it!”
Me: [peeing on jellyfish] “This is for stinging my wife!”

Regarding Windows 10: No sherlock, Shinola.

This article states,”Females are the victims of one-third of all sexual abuse cases committed by prison staff.”  Now about the other two-thirds…

According to Table 13 of the DOJ report Sexual Victimization Reported by Adult Correctional Authorities, 2009–11: There were 1,226 substantiated incidents of staff-on-inmate sexual abuse. Of the perpetrators, 51.5% were male, 48.5% female. Statistically even. Of the victims, about a third of males and two thirds of females were accosted by male staff, while 92.7% of male victims were accosted by female staff. Note also that  during this period, staff-on-inmate vs. inmate-on-inmate incidents were approximately equal – 49% to 51%. [h/t Needull]

Chaotic Pendulum is chaotic.
It’s the source of the top images. (Meerkats. They’re everywhere. Cutesy little weasel-lookin’ standy-uppy bastards.)

Daylight Savings Hot Links

Sometimes I Google random words, like Dog Pumpkin Apple, and I learn stuff.

This virtual shark tank is realistic. Check out this guy’s reaction. More info & vids here.

I can recite all the digits in the number Pi: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 , 6, 7, 8 & oh crap. Wait. I got it. 9. Meanwhile, this guy memorized and recited 22,514 digits of Pi in order in only five hours and nine minutes on 14 March 2004.  Daniel Tammet thinks in colors and shapes.

“Triggered” amused me. Cultural appropriation indeed.

Take off your tighty-whities and bury ’em. Dig ’em up two months later and they’ll reveal how fertile the *ahem* soil is. TRUE.

Buddy Hackett tells The Duck Joke.

The Medusa Guitar is an absurd absurdity.

Check out these Vietnamese Water Puppets [via].

One Of These Days other folks’ blogs we link to are gonna link back, but I’m not holding my breath. 😀

[Top image from here.]

Mistress of the Dark Hot Links

Halloween Stories For Children includes “The Hairy Toe” but I never heard of it. It’s similar to “Der Vinder Viper” without the punchline “I’m Der Vinder Viper man, come to vipe der vinders.”

The first link above says there’s a pun in the story title, but I didn’t catch it. All I could come up with was “Jarritos.” It means “little jugs” in Spanish, and its anglicized pronunciation is “hairy toes.” It’s one of the better soft drinks to come out of Mexico, and Jarritos Tamarindo is the best.

1978 UFO drone. “The problem was not getting it to fly… The problem was getting it to land.”

Here are some examples of skeuomorphism.

Here’s jaw-dropping evidence that President Trump colluded with Russia to throw the 2016 election after a year of investigation by the DNC, DOJ, FBI, CIA, MSM and others.

The greatest voice in cartoons: Mel Blanc described the business to David Letterman in 1981. At 03:28, Blanc described how Porky Pig’s voice came to be – he went to a pig farm and listened.

A kilowatt hour is the distance a kilowatt can travel in 60 minutes and it’s faster than a cheetah. (Okay, it’s not, but it is because I just said it is.)

From the Hoodathunkit Dept.: 47 year-old Filipino man was rescued after living three years in a coconut palm. His body was covered in blisters and insect bites, suffers from muscle atrophy and his spine became deformed after so much time spent crouching in the tree. He exhibits symptoms of psychosis, including delusions, hallucinations and paranoia.

[Top & bottom images: Cassandra Peterson, (aka Elvira, Mistress of the Dark) is ending her long-running Halloween show at Knotts *Scary* Farm at the age of 66.]

Right-Justified Hot Links

Nice groove: The Gaylads‘ 1967 rocksteady version of The Sounds of Silence.

This source states that wombats poop bricks.

This source explains how and why wombats poop bricks.

This source explains what wombats’ poop bricks are used for.

Nice precision paper work.

Nice precision wood work.

Nice precision tile work.

Art. It’s sometimes a misnomer.

“What do you think of Bernie’s tax plan?” These students like it .

[Top image: Animated .gif of Frederica Wilson’s hats.]