Category: Retro & Vintage

Mothers Day Hot Links

Family in front of shack home. May Avenue camp, Oklahoma City. July 1939.

You Didn’t Try To Call Me, The Mothers of Invention (1968) Track 8 of TMOI‘s debut album Freak Out! – a double record set of songs composed by Frank Zappa that won the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999, and ranks at No. 246 on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2012 list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

[CORRECTION: Taminatorpgh noted that this version of You Didn’t Try To Call Me is from the  1968 album Cruising With Ruben and the Jets. The original version from Freak Out! is here. More in the comments below.]

Tourons.

Drill fight.

The Pylon Men.

Magpie smarts.

The end of sleep.

Sticks and stones.

Recycling styrofoam.

Norty Blues Episode 63.

Nice collection of rat rods.

A chair of geometric solids.

Fun machines [via Mme. Jujujive].

Zinaida Portnova [h/t Charlene J.]

Look at this moth [via Bunkerville].

Where to go over summer vacation.

Put this girl in charge of everything.

35 Flapper Fotos [via Memo Of The Air].

The 50 most commonly prescribed drugs.

The Gordie Howe International Bridge Gap.

Re-enactment of the 17-year cicada’s lifecycle.

There’s a live video “portal” between Dublin & NYC.

Uber driver with Tourette’s picked up passenger with Tourette’s.
[h/t Kirk W.]

[Top image from Shorpy, cropped and colorized: “July 1939. ‘Family in front of shack home. May Avenue camp, Oklahoma City.’ Photo by Russell Lee for the Farm Security Administration.”]

From the Archives: 1 year ago. 5 years ago. 10 years ago. 15 years ago.

Saturday Matinee – Nina Simone, The High Numbers & GA-20

1987 claymation video by Aardman Animations features the voice and piano of Eunice Kathleen Waymon, aka gospel / jazz / R&B / soul singer Nina Simone, with a song from 1958. She changed her name to elude family members and play “the devil’s music” in an Atlantic City nightclub. The management told her that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, and that launched her career as a jazz vocalist.

“What’s your band’s name?”
“The High Numbers.”
“The who?”
“Yes.”

The Detours, a British group formed in the early 1960s, changed their name to  The High Numbers and recorded a few tracks before reverting to a previous band name, The Who. That’s a young Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Keith Moon covering Jesse Hill‘s Ooh Poo Pah Doo (1960) and The Miracles‘ I Gotta Dance To Keep From Crying (1963).

GA-20  covers Hound Dog Taylor‘s She’s Gone (1971). Great authentic electric blues cranked out with respect.

Too far south to see this weekend’s aurorae, and I hope everyone who can survives the EMT barrage. I’ll take the event as a good omen, and yet another damn good reason to do some porch sitting tomorrow.
See you then.

…To Be Wild

Bohn Aluminum and Brass Corporation was a manufacturing company based in Detroit, Michigan and formed in 1924 from the merger of the General Aluminium and Brass Company and the C.B. Bohn Foundry Company.

[Ads from 1947 found here and there.]

Parbuckled Hot Links

The Colour of Don Don, The Cactus Channel (2012)
The Cactus Channel is/was a hip hop funk & soul group from Melbourne AU. Nice Stax/Volt influence. The 7-10 piece group has apparently disbanded to pursue other projects.

The Doggos.

Negative space.

Diddy Wah Diddy.

Fugu [via Bunkerville].

Homage to GMC trucks.

Norty Blues Episode 60.

Drawing a Phénakistiscope.

Another movie I haven’t seen.

“People have raised concerns…”

Asteroid City [via Mme. Jujujive].

In ’71, after I graduated high school…

“What’s your source?” [via Mogadishu Matt].

The last Woolworth’s Lunch Counter [h/t Paul Y.]

Carnival of Venice, Mosé Tapiero on ocarina, 1908.

Making ocarinas in South Korea [via Memo Of The Air].

California’s 3rd largest city is a ghost town [h/t Paul Y.]

Beautiful rendition of the Theme to Titanic [h/t Charlene J.]

[Top image: 1954 Hubley’s Atomic Disintegrator. A weapon like this may fetch $300 or more at auction.]

From the Archives: 1 year ago. 5 years ago. 10 years ago. 15 years ago.

Photos Of An Unknown Family Who PROBABLY Owned A Liquor Store

In 2005,  someone named “BENBENEK” found a box of photos at a Southern California swap meet and realized he’d found a treasure, a glimpse of unknown history. The photos were bland and banal, yet oddly endearing, so he set up a website to share them with the world: HouseplantPicturesStudio.com.

Unfortunately the site is defunct, but via the Wayback Machine we can still enjoy Photos Of An Unknown Family Who PROBABLY Owned A Liquor Store.

The .Gif Friday Post No. 846 – Nancy & Sluggo

Ernie Bushmiller‘s ubiquitous comic strip has intrigued me since I was a kid. It was rarely funny, sometimes creepy, and the drawing style was unique and constrained. Bushmiller was more of a draftsman than a comic strip artist, and it’s obvious that he used tracing templates, photography, and in his later years, photocopiers.

One day in the early 1980s, this panel showed up in the Sunday funnies. I was hooked, and I began paying closer attention to the Zen of Nancy.

The .gifs above have been posted here previously, and scraping them into a pile seemed like the proper thing to do. The one in color was an early experiment with Jasc Animation Shop v.3.11, a program I acquired in 2012 (thanks, Possum). Most of the panels were lifted from Nancy strips posted on X/Twitter by @JohnnyCallicutt and re-used with minimal editing.

[For more Nancy, Sluggo & Aunt Fritzi stuff visit The Nancy & Sluggo Archive.]