And yet he persists. I don’t know why. Except when I watch old clips of these shows (and I do watch them), I see the crowds — the old, homogenous, white, square crowds — and I’m always impressed at how much fun these people seem to be having. I guess you can do that in an era before irony was invented. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to mock that. People should enjoy their lives. Probably 95% of the people in this clip are dead now.

So enjoy this clip of our favorite song. Dig the swirling Wurlitzer. And say what you like about Mr. Welk, but the man is a freekin metronome.

Click to play, dummy!

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There is a song called “Pico and Sepulveda,” recorded but not made famous by an outfit called Felix Figueroa and His Orchestra in 1947 — not made famous because as near as I can tell, the song was never a hit, and apart from what I will shortly relate, it had only local significance. The lyric of this ditty (and, for some reason, the term “ditty” seems especially apt for this one) consists almost entirely of the names of Los Angeles streets: Doheny. Cahuenga. La Jolla. And so on. And then there’s that incessant invocation of The La Brea Tar Pits.

Here, let me point you to YouTube for the song itself, and a video which somehow captures the mood quite exactly, even while presenting very little of what the song is actually about (as if the song is actually about anything):

The singing skeletons burbling up from the dripping tar are a nice touch, yes?

Now we dig a little deeper into the pit: “Felix Figueroa” is a pseudonym. The actual band on the recording is Fred Martin’s, his being one of the more renowned acts of the Big Band era. While not on a par with the more-remembered names like Benny Goodman or the Dorsey Brothers, Martin’s band had quite a long string of hits (none of which I remember, but that was before my time, dammit). Why Mr. Martin did not want to put his own name on this fine piece of work, I don’t know. Maybe he thought it was too silly, or too trivial. (Now YOU guess!)

The only reason I know about this song at all is that decades later a fellow named Barry Hansen adopted it as his theme song. Because, you see, Mr. Hansen is the aforementioned “Doctor” Demento, who has for years been the nation’s foremost purveyor of novelty music, as well as a musical scholar and historian of no small repute.

I was a rabid Doctor Demento fan in my formative years, and he brought a lot to my awareness of the world, introducing me to the likes of Tom Lehrer and Benny Bell, not to mention Barnes & Barnes and Weird Al. Turns out that novelty music is a good channel for learning about the world you live in, and for becoming socially aware. When Tom Lehrer did a Gilbert & Sullivan parody, you had to figure out who Gilbert & Sullivan were to fully understand the joke. And so on.

“Pico & Sepulveda” was a piece of that. When I moved to Los Angeles some years later, the place names were not as foreign to me as I might have expected. I was constantly bumping into places mentioned in the song. I was connected to my new city in a way I had no real right to be.

Thing is, the version of “Pico & Sepulveda” that Dr. D used as his theme was not the Felix Figueroa version, but one offered by a 1970s novelty group called The Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band. Another anonymous YouTuber brings it to us here. Note that the video portion of the clip is just a static shot of — what? A bed frame? So just listen, kay?:

Somewhere in my obsolete stacks of vinyl I actually have the Roto Rooter LP version of that recording, nabbed some thirty years ago in a cutout bin in a record store, where exactly I couldn’t say. And I can’t even play it because I don’t have a turntable any more. That album, as I recall it, seemed to be an attempt to sum up whole centuries of musical absurdity in one round volume of sound. It fails in that attempt, but in a very splendid and silly way. But, I digress.

I wonder whatever happened to those guys…

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Beaconing

Batgirl

Airfish

Intrepid

You can click on these individually to see them enlarged. And you can view the entire page that they’ve been lifted from here, but be warned that it’s a pretty big download.

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Fortunately, we have the YouTube, and some anonymous person has posted it there. If you have not heard it before, you can enlighten yourself now. If you have heard it, here is your opportunity to indulge yourself again.

This “video” is a static picture, so do not be alarmed. The soundtrack is lifted from Woody’s second LP. Click to play, Chester.

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This month’s Dardanella is from someone named Tom Smith, and it’s simply his hands on a keyboard bringing this ancient and venerable song to life. There are no frills here, just Tom and his electric piano. I don’t know who he is, but something in him has brought him to YouTube to share his music, and he has posted almost three dozens songs, some with other musicians, but most with just his own good self. I like that.

Click to play, numbskull!

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1. A spare-looking theme that doesn’t have a lot of distractions.

2. A narrow, customizable header.

3. A reasonably eye-catching RSS button.

4. Posts that can display images with something approaching style and simplicity.

5. A sidebar with the usual controls for the widgets. These sidebar items (Archives, Blogroll, etc.) can go in the footer, too, as long as I can control what goes in it.

6. AdSense-ready. Widget-ready. Plug-in ready.

7. Room for whatever pages I might like to add.

8. A font that isn’t fancy. Preferably sans-serif.

9. It can be a one-column theme, a two-column theme, and even a three-column theme, as long as it grabs me with some kind of ineffable appeal. It could even be one of those themes with the toggle switch to control the number of columns. That could give a blogmeister a real sense of control over things.

And that’s it. You’d think there’d be scads of themes like this. Lots and lots of themes have most of these features. But I haven’t found one that has all of them.

Consider Cityscape, for example. It’s close to what I want. I hate the headline font, for starters (why doesn’t it match the font of the body of the post? Theme after theme, including the one I’m currently using, gets this basic rule of design wrong. Why?). And I could do without the black rectangles on the sides of the header. But the header is customizable, and AdSense seems to play well with it, at least in my experiments. But the RSS buttons vanish, for some reason, when I make any adjustments to the sidebar at all. Grrr!

Then there’s Nashita, which has a really clean and spare look that I admire. It’s designed for image display and really stays out of the way of the picture, which is what a theme designed for images should do. But it does not have a customizable header, and there is no room for any widget stuff of any kind, not even in the footer. And it only allows you to display one post at a time — there seems to be no way to adjust for the display of multiple postings. The RSS feed button might as well be invisible as well, and worst of all, the comments only appear in a pop-up window. Blech. I could do a LOT with this theme if only it afforded some greater control over its features.

Really, what I’d like is a theme with the look and feel of Nashita, but which allows for some kind of header of my own design, along with the features listed above. A mash-up of CityScape and Nashita might be just what I’m looking for. I don’t think I’m asking for the moon here, and it may well be that I just haven’t looked hard enough.

Or maybe it just doesn’t exist yet. It may be that I’ll just have to suck it up and learn enough CSS and HTML to design it myself. But that could take many months at the rate I’m going.

Is my ideal theme already out there? Can anyone offer a suggestion?

Other close examples:

If Dooce had a header about a third the size of what is has, and a less distracting sidebar, I could live with that sort of design until I figured out how to build something I liked better.

Good ol’ StrangeMaps, hosted on the WordPress.com site itself is also darn close. There’s no customizable header, obviously, and you’d have to deal with all the constrictions that come with not hosting the blog yourself, but this is a decent, functional design that gets the job done. I could run with this look a long time until I got my own design skills up to standard.

Anybody else have Tales of Theme-Hunting Heartbreak to share? And have I overlooked something obvious? I would appreciate any suggestions from any of the cognoscenti who might be passing through…

And one final question: Is there a rule that says that virtually every default header picture has to look like it came out of a Pottery Barn catalog?

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I’m happy to plug Giovanni’s book, How Many Clients Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb? because it gives me the chance to say some good things about him and what he’s doing. First, Giovanni gets my undying admiration as the author of the following one-liner:

If I seem a little nervous, it’s because my doctor prescribed a new placebo for my hypochondria.

Damn, I wish I had written that one.

Second, I like the way Giovanni has been exploring the tools available to us on the Internet. For example, did you know that you can download a pdf copy of much of his standup act for a mere 49 cents at Amazon.com? He’s also maintaining a very active blog at Amazon.com, where I didn’t even know you could keep a blog until I discovered Giovanni there. Anyway, the book:

We all love to hate lawyers, and we love to mock the ruthlessness and venality they are perceived to possess, at least according to the popular conception of the legal profession in the culture at large. How Many Clients Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb? turns the archetypical Lawyer Joke its head, and lets lawyers laugh at the rest of us for a change. As such, it might be a little too inside to attract a general audience, but if you know a young person who is just graduating from law school, you might want to slip this slim little book (thirty-two pages) into his pocket when he isn’t looking. It might tell him something about the attitude he needs to develop to survive in the dismal day-to-day world of earning a living.

Check it out:

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Of course, if you’re the twisted sort of person who enjoys this kind of very naughty drawing, I invite you to ogle it interminably, and to admire both its captivating message and the artist’s prowess.

Click to enlarge, dummy!

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This month your Dardanella is from a group I’ve never heard of called Papa Joe’s Jazzmen, playing in a club in Germany. According to the notes on YouTube, the band is from Cologne, and these fellas do their Dardanella-ing in authentic Dixieland style. They’ve got their own website, too, which lists the band members’ names as Didi, Klaus, Wiel, Wolfgang, Reiner, and Michael.

Watch for Klaus on the clarinet — this guy can really shred.

Click to play, dummy!

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