Articles by Jerry Thomas

Since Ms. Dardanella is the only thing keeping this blog alive just now, let’s go with it.

Wikipedia tells us that Sascha Jacobsen lived from 1895 to “1971 or 1972.” He was a violinist, and he played with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the 1950s. And, it seems, he was a musician of sufficient skill to command a Stradivarius. An interesting story of Mr. Jacobsen and his Strad - lost in a rain storm and swept out to sea, fortunately to be recovered and restored (the violin, not Mr. Jacobsen) can be read here.

Not much else seems available for my cursory Internet researches. Perhaps someone will blunder onto this site and enlighten us. Meanwhile, his Dardanella is an interesting addition to our collection.

Click to play, Fenster!

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It’s minutes to midnight, and unexpected employment obligations have left me with almost no time to get this up before June turns into a pumpkin… But I’ll post it now and update with more thoughts later.

I’m surprised I didn’t find this one sooner, and it’s a nifty version, from a group from Budapest called Benko’s Dixieland Band. This music reaches all the world.

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Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. The single biggest recording act of the 1920s. In movies, when they want to evoke the sound of the era, this is who they play. I won’t say he was bigger than the Beatles — he was a chubby, balding, middle-aged man, so his appeal was on quite a different level — but his sound was the standard of the age, and many great names worked with him over the years, including Bix Beiderbecke and Bing Crosby.

Whiteman’s version of the song was not the biggest seller — that honor goes to Ben Selvin and His Orchestra, which made the song famous in 1920. (In those days, everyone had an orchestra. It was mandatory, like getting a Social Security Number.) Read the label on this video, and you’ll note that the song is designated as a Foxtrot. Which it was, after all. Not that anyone cares about such things these days.

Frankly, the Ben Selvin version of the song is better, and I’ll get around to posting that one one of these months. But you can hear the standard Whiteman approach, with competence oozing from every element, as the musicians swap solos in the usual jazzband style of the day.

Anyhoo, here it is. Click to play, Dummy!

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I don’t know if many of you caught the celebrity sighting here on KillThisBlog some months ago. It came in a comment on this post, made way back when, when we were led into a discussion of the fabulously obscure musical ensemble, The Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band. Yes, that highly demented Rootoid, Dr. Mabuse, d.o.a., dropped by to comment:

Nice to be “re-discovered”. The RRGTCB can still be heard on the syndicated Dr. Demento show. We did his theme as discussed on this site. “Pico and Sepulveda” without the Demento references is also on the 1974 Vanguard LP. Demo version available on our self-produced CD “Retro Rooter - 1972-1976? currently available on GEMM.com. All of us are alive and (mostly) well and 5 of us still get together to jam be-bop.

Since then I’ve had occasion to re-listen to the RRGTCB’s sole album, and I’m extremely happy to say it’s better than I remembered it. Maybe my tastes have changed, or maybe my tolerance for weirdness has increased, but there’s something exciting and eclectic about it — the range of influences it draws on, from classical music to The Great American Songbook to rock and roll are impressive. And did I say weird?

We need more wind instruments in our world… where’d they all go?

Turns out, too, that the Roto Rooters have claimed some space on YouTube, and have placed therein some viddies of their vintage performances. I do not know the provenance of these clips, but it looks like they’re in a church basement somewhere, performing with all appropriate gusto. Apparently, it’s from a local public television show, circa 1975.

Here’s one of their signature songs, The Martian March. Dig the fella playing the tuba through a gas mask:

Here they are performing another favorite, The Beer Bottle Polka. That’s Dr. Mabuse, d.o.a. himself, doing the Lawrence Welk imitation:

Finally, here they are singing Happy Trails, in a performance that was aped pretty much note for note by those rascals from Van Halen a few years later:

These guys need more attention. Here are some cool RRGTCB links:

RRGTCB on MySpace

Dr. Mabuse, d.o.a.’s Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band Blog

Retro Rooter, CD available on GEMM.com

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April’s Dardanella is from a group called The Jazz 4, and was posted on YouTube only weeks ago. Where they are playing, I cannot tell. The video had just 21 views on YouTube when I first looked at it today. Let’s give a listen:

Amazing how… perfunctory it all is. These gentlemen were evidently hired to provide background noise at some upscale gig. The musicians make no effort toward flash or stage presence at all, as if they were being paid to fade into the scenery. It would seem that some hotel manager instructed them, in all seriousness, to avoid arousing the notice of the patrons of the venue at all costs. Our entertainers hit the notes in a competent and able fashion while the audience murmurs away, oblivious.

We never see the crowd in our static camera viewpoint. From the evidence presented, they give no indication that they are aware of this performance of one of the great songs of the last one hundred years.

Unappreciated genius! Live, on tape!

A curious document, yes?

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This month’s Dardanella is one of the earliest recorded, and at last we have a version that includes a full vocal performance: a duet, circa 1920, by Gladys Rice and Vernon Dalhart. Click to play, my venerable dummies:

	Gladys Rice and Vernon Dalhart - Dardanella
	Found at skreemr.com

Given that we finally have a performance that includes all the lyrics, it makes sense to post them, at last. Here you go:

Down, beside the Dardanella Bay,
Where Oriental breezes play, there lives a lonely maid, Armenian.
By, the Dardanelles with glowing eyes,
She looks across the sea and sighs, and weaves her love spell so sirenian.
Soon I shall return to Turkestan,
I will ask for her heart and hand.

Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes.
Oh, a lucky fellow, to capture such a prize,
Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true,
Dardanella, oh hear my sigh, my Oriental.
Oh sweet Dardanella, prepare the wedding wine,
There’ll be one girl in my harem when you’re mine.
We’ll build a tent, just like the children of the Orient.
Oh sweet Dardanella, my star of love divine.

My reference books say little about Gladys Rice, but they do note one odd fact: Her father was John C. Rice, the amorous fellow in the famous 1896 silent film, “The Kiss,” which we may show in its entirety here:

Of Vernon Dalhart, more is known, especially since his “Prisoner’s Song,” recorded in 1925, was probably the most popular recording of its decade:

The Prisoners Song - Vernon Dalhart

A rather maudlin song, that. If you register at imeem.com, you can hear the whole dreary thing. My guidebook (Joel Whitburn’s “Pop Memories, 1890-1954″) says that Dalhart began his recording career in 1916, and that it was his transformation from a light opera tenor to a singer of “mournful hillbilly ballads” that “enabled Dalhart to make music history with monumental sales on some thirty record labels under dozens of pseudonyms.” Perhaps the two songs we review today gives us an idea of the range of that transformation.

I first encountered the Rice/Dalhart Dardanella at Archive.org — a tremendous resource that is a vast online warehouse of sound recordings, videos, and other items. I encourage you to click on that link and explore. But be warned before you do: You’ll likely lose hours clicking from one fascinating artifact to another.

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Back in the day - and I’m talking about 25 years ago - if you were an aspiring comedian, and you lived in Milwaukee, you didn’t have a lot of options. There was a handful of dismal open mics in the most depressing rooms you could imagine. One of these was Wimpy’s Hunt Club, which was a corner bar on North Avenue, the sort of place that retired alcoholics would go to drink up their pensions. Comics would stand on a plank set up at the end of the bar and do their bits to heckles, at best, or, more usually, indifference. There was another open mic in the decaying ballroom of the infamous old Ambassador Hotel on Wisconsin Avenue - the hotel’s claim to fame being that it was the site where serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer did in one of his first victims. There were no actual comedy clubs at all.

I was in the audience at a lot of these shows - being a big fan of comedy, but too frightened to take the stage myself, I got to live vicariously by watching a lot of very raw comics struggle to eke out some yuks in the very worst of circumstances. If I had managed to work up the nerve to get on stage then, I’d probably still be dealing with some serious post-traumatic stress issues.

Not one of the dozens of would-be comics I used to watch ever went on to make a career of comedy. Not one - except for Dobie Maxwell. Dobie was a very hungry kid at the time, growing up in some very harsh circumstances without a lot of breaks - his parents were gang members who abandoned him to be raised by his grandparents. Through sheer force of will he fashioned himself into a nationally touring headliner with an aggressive and relentless delivery and the sort of mind that knows how to turn a thought into a real joke - not a common talent. If he reminds you a little of Rodney Dangerfield, that’s not an accident - Dangerfield has been been Dobie’s comedy hero since the first days I’ve known him.

Tuesday night, Dobie gets his first national television spot. He’ll be appearing on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. It’s a break he’s earned. Nobody has paid more dues than Dobie. He’s had no shortage of hardship over the years, including two auto accidents, both of which came close to killing him - the hazards of being a touring road comic. Some of us have been following his career over the decades. Now, at last, the whole country will get its first look at him. I’m thinking that with the world in the state it’s in, he just might be the sort of comic voice we need right now.

Congratulations, Dobie. You’ve come a long way from the Wimpy’s. Tuesday night I’ll be tuning in, and rooting for you.

I’ve found a YouTube vid of one of his performances that will give you a head start on what you’re in for next Tuesday night. Also, check out Dobie’s Dented Can Diary, where he has been detailing the life of a road comic every day for the last few years.

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My obsession with “Dardanella” continues, but today, in a local thrift store, my attention was momentarily arrested by a pristine 78-RPM disc of the Mills Brothers’ singing, “Paper Moon.” In retrospect, I suppose it was not all that big a deal — given that “Paper Moon” was the biggest hit the Mills Brothers had in their sixty-year career, there’s gotta be a lot of these discs floating around. But I did find myself enjoying a fleeting rush of serendipity. I’ll explain the connection to “Dardanella” in a moment, but first, hark! Let’s listen to the song…

Yes, that was an odd clip, one more to add to the endless collection of oddities you’ll find on YouTube. But it fits, because “Paper Doll” is an odd song - one of those tunes that sound nice enough when you listen to it casually, but then when you really listen to it, all kinds of oogie implications creep into your head. Think about it: “I’d rather have a paper doll to call my own,” sings the crooner, “than have a fickle-minded real live girl.”

Really?

Back to “Dardanella.” The authorship of “Dardanella” was attributed, after some dispute and at least one lawsuit, to three writers. One of them, Johnny S. Black, died in 1936 after getting knocked in the head, or so the story goes, in a night club altercation over a matter of twenty-five cents. And so it was that one of the authors of the biggest hit of 1920 never lived to see the success of his other greatest song, “Paper Doll” — the biggest hit of 1943.

“Dardanella” leads everywhere, to all things. Trust me on this, the more you look, the more you find in it.

As for the disc in the thrift store, it’s still there. I don’t own a turntable, so I didn’t buy it. Alas.

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(Note: Thursday is the 200th anniversary of the births of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Yes, it’s true: They were born on the same day.)

Fourscore and several million years ago, our forebears brought forth on another continent, a new primate, conceived at random and subject to the proposition that no adaptations are created equal.

Nature is engaged in a universal war, testing whether that species, or any species so conceived and so generated can long endure. The earth is the great battlefield of that war. We have come to understand that poorly-adapted species, in this final testing-place, must here give their lives, that those who are better adapted might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that they should do this.

For in a larger sense, we cannot speculate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave phyla, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember, the gods to which we pray here, but the fossil record will always mark what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who evolved here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these adaptations we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this species, ruled by nature, shall have a new burst of population — and that its descendants, of the genome, by the genome, and for the genome, shall not perish from the earth.

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I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but YouTube’s tiff with Warner Music has resulted in a lot of viddies being removed from the one place where somebody might actually stand a chance of seeing them. I’m not about to weigh in on the proze and conz of the various copyright issues involved, except to say that when giant corporations battle, wee tiny widdle bloggers get stomped on, meaning that some of the Dardanellas I’ve posted here are now Officially Dead Links. No great loss in the scheme of things, and I’ll find replacements for them if I can, and for whatever else might be missing, eventually, when I get around to it, and so forth. The worst of it all is that we’ve lost Judy Garland. Somebody will have to break the news to Liza, but not me, as I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment, mainly with the arrangement of my sock drawer.

In the meantime, let’s have our monthly musical interlude, as follows:

And here we see that our venerable Dardanella survives even the vicious assault of a gang of harmonicaters. And who are we to complain, as long as these fellas look like they’re having fun?

The group is called Troupe de Gaita, and they have a website, composed in a language I can’t read, but which I take to be Portuguese, and which would perhaps make them Brazilian.

Gotta love how our favorite song translates to so many places around the globe, yes?

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Hey kids! Dig this:

I’ve been digging through my old comic book collection and found this ad on the back page of a Sugar and Spike comic, circa 1967. The same ad also appears on the back of one of my old Jimmy Olsen (Superman’s Pal!) issues, but this one was the cleaner copy.

This is a genuine artifact from my actual childhood. It’s shocking! You’d never see such a thing today, a toy M-16, manufactured by a mainstream toy company, advertised on the back of a DC comic - DC Comics, the same guys who brought you The Flash and Batman and Mr. Mxyzptlk. I was seven years old, and the kid in the ad looks about the same age. You’d have congressional hearings if they tried anything like this today. BRA-A-A-AP!

Read that ad copy: Keep cocking the fantastic M-16 Marauder and you can cut loose with a solid blast almost a whole minute long! Over 50 rounds! And all with the loud, realistic sound of the actual M-16 rifle! Hey, Mom! Can I bring this for Show and Tell?

The point being, I was raised on a strange planet. Fortunately, I turned out unimpeachably sane.

The rest of my generation, not so lucky.

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Doctors, scientists, theologians, and mystics agree — there are precisely 10,000 ways to day. Ten thousand! Exactly! How it came to be that the manifold means of human demise should come to equal this surprisingly exact number — one hundred times one hundred! — remains a mystery. Nevertheless, the number stands. Of the many ways to die, there are exactly ten thousand, and ten thousand is the number of ways of dying.

And so was born the need for my new website. DieToonDie.com is my ongoing project to document, in full cartoony splendor, each particular means of morbidity. Click on over, and you’ll see, to your horror and fascination, a man Choking On Eeyore… the depravity contained within a bowl of Radioactive Pudding… and even a secret, shocking image of a man being Killed By A Tapeworm!

I’ve been posting my little sketches there for the past three months, give or take. Five pics per week, excluding holidays. At that rate, it should take me about 40 years to run through the full ten thousand numbers. I expect it’ll be fun getting there, especially considering how much I hate toons. (Some people have assumed that these are “faked” drawings with “stunt” or “stand-in” toons, and that none is actually harmed in their production. To which I say Ha! Be it known that these are actual toons depicted in the final moments of their lives — or moments shortly thereafter. My pledge to you is: I will never shortchange my audience by presenting anything less than real, documented, bona fide, cartoon death.)

So please, click on in. Make DieToonDie part of your daily websurfing ritual. Subscribe to the RSS feed. And always remember: There are 10,000 ways to die. Collect ‘em all!

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December’s Dardanella is something of a curiosity — Judy Garland sings, apparently for a live broadcast. I don’t know anything of the backstory that would account for this recording — it is simply yet another of those YouTube non sequiturs that are the objects of my endless fascination. The present video is a simple static shot of Judy; the recording is scratchy and quite low-fi. Nevertheless, for Dardanella fans (and maybe I’m the only one), it is an interesting document. Dig this, Chester:

Groovy, yes? And quite singular, in that Judy actually sings this Dardanella. Yes, friends, the song actually has lyrics. “Dardanella” is a song which is almost always, even in its earliest recordings, played as an instrumental, but in this version, Judy sings the actual lyric, or some of it, anyway. She skips the verse in favor of the chorus, to wit:

Oh sweet Dardanella, I love your harem eyes
I’m a lucky fella to capture such a prize
Oh Allah knows my love for you, and he tells you to be true
Dardanella, Oh hear my sigh, my Oriental
Oh sweet Dardanella, prepare the wedding wine
There’ll be one girl in my harem when you’re mine
We’ll build a tent, Just like the children of the Orient
Oh sweet Dardanella, my star of love divine

And with this, a bit of the Dardanella mystery unravels. “Dardanella,” you discover, is a girl’s name, and you learn that that girl is beautiful, and “Oriental,” and the song contains references to Allah, and harems, and the romance of places a long ways off from here. Go back to the popular music of the early part of the 20th century, and you’ll find it rife with exotic maidens of various types — hula girls, Indian princesses, sleepy-eyed ladies in opium dens, and so on. “Dardanella” is a song of a type. But that chorus is the only glimpse we get of it, for now.

In this video, the song is essentially rewritten from this point Judy finishes that chorus. This new version then becomes an occasion for playing an old popular song in the newly popular manner, and by that, we mean Swing, baby! This Dardanella is not as an ode to an alluring princess, but an object of nostalgia recast for a new era. If Judy had two turntables and a microphone, she’d be sampling the original shellac 78s. By the time we return to the chorus, the lyrics are jazzed up, and the song is shifted to an uptempo swing rhythm. In the second chorus, we love Dardanella, not for her “harem eyes,” but for the way she “jives.” Whatever that means. And by that, I mean, like, far out, man.

Over the passage of years — and Judy’s version here is far closer in time to the original recordings than we are to Judy’s — this effort to “modernize” a song held as quaint and nostalgic has itself become such.

Nothing we can do about that. Time does its evil work, and we are all doomed to the same fate. Yes, in spite of all our striving to be hep, we will all, eventually, seem sweet and old-fashioned one day. And maybe the more so because of our striving.

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Crime is rampant. Our cities are overrun with thugs and hoodlums. Law-abiding citizens fear for their lives, besieged on every side by ruthless cutthroats and sinister desperados. Yes, in these troubled times, the phrase, “Eek, help!” has never been more apropos.

But you can help keep our streets safe for ice cream trucks and touch football. Look at the fellow sitting next to you. Is he doing something illegal, like embezzling public funds or stuffing a hamster down a funnel? Then it is your civic duty to report this heinous cad to the proper authorities!

Please be on the look-out for the following dastardly villains:

ELMO “THE AXE” NORDINE: Alias Elmo “The Hook” Nordine, alias Elmo “The Ice Pick” Nordine, alias Elmo “The Eyebrow Tweezers” Nordine, alias Elmo “The Even Sillier Alias” Nordine, alias “That Guy On All The Wanted Posters,” is wanted for armed robbery, narcotics trafficking, battery, and for letting a self-avowed spackle salesman roam freely amid a crowd of debutantes. A classically-trained noodge, Nordine was once arrested for crouching in a public bus shelter while disguised as a bowl of wheat flakes. Witnesses claim to have seen this notorious scoundrel give a spanking to a department store manikin, and he has previously served time for grooming an otter without a permit.

WILFRED HINKLE: This extremely shady character is wanted for attempted murder, grand larceny, manslaughter, assault, and for gesturing provocatively at a cardboard cut-out of Ted Koppel. A master pickpocket, Hinkle boasts that he once stole the leotard off a trapeze artist in mid-air without being detected. Criminologists have created a detailed psychological profile of this infamous bad guy, and theorize that his anti-social tendencies may be traced to his mother’s insistence that he wear scuba gear while receiving his first communion.

HENRIETTA PERCH: A former carnival barker, stable hand, cover girl, and part-time mass killer, Perch is wanted for ignoring the posted city ordinances regulating the care and feeding of ferns. She is also suspected of illegally wiping mucus on ABC News Correspondent Lynn Sherr. Perch, who displays a high degree of awkwardness in routine social situations, has a bizarre yen to sit on an ostrich while attending the opera, and has been known to carry wallet-sized photos of Japanese Emperor Akihito showing tourists how to gargle. She can be identified by the prominent tattoo of Barney Rubble on the underside of her pancreas.

RHOMBUS FIGG: Reputed to be the meanest man in America, Figg enjoys inducing cardiac arrest in dandelions by sneaking up on them and yelling “lawnmower!” He has also been caught selling wax lips with cold sores on them to the elderly. Figg is wanted for conspiring to overthrow the U.S. Government by printing nude pictures of Orrin Hatch in the Congressional Record, and was last seen near Des Moines, Iowa, taunting an emu with a feather boa.

RUDOLPH PLORTZ: Born to a family of simple yet illiterate nougat farmers in the rugged mountains of New Jersey, Plortz now leads a vast, multi-national lint smuggling cartel on five continents, two of which he carries concealed on his person. Plortz is also a notorious international weapons dealer — his despicable intrigues have made him the leading supplier of squirt guns to the Children’s Television Workshop. This arrogant scofflaw (who mocks propriety by wearing fake moose antlers while dining alfresco) vanished six weeks ago when, surrounded by police, he dove head-first into an open piano bench and pulled the lid shut behind him.

Be advised that these criminals are not only armed and dangerous, but extremely weird. Should you have any information as to the whereabouts of these fiendish outlaws, please contact your local Homeland Security office or send a self-addressed email message to Justice@I’mARatFinkSnitch.org

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This time our coveted Dardanella of the Month Award goes to Satchmo, i. e., Louis Armstrong and his All Stars, circa 1956. Curiously enough, Mr. Armstrong himself does not seem to appear on this recording, apparently stepping aside to let his highly accomplished ensemble step into the spotlight. And that spotlight focuses most strongly on clarinetist Mr. Edmond Hall, who, it seems from my twenty minutes of exhaustive research, had quite an impressive career, spanning many decades, even, for a time, fronting his own band. There is, alas, no video to accompany this recording, but we do have the imeem.com player for me to embed and for you to enjoy:

Unfortunately, it seems that imeem now requires registration to hear more than a thirty-second clip of the tune. But it’s free, and I think it’s worth the trip, if you’re interested in hearing more of it — just click the “Dardanella” link in the embedded player. It’s an impeccable performance of the song — but what else would you expect from a group with Louis Armstrong’s name on it?

Since we don’t have a video Dardanella this time, let me throw in an extra treat: A video featuring Louis with Bing Crosby cutting loose in a big way. It’s a chance to see the spotlight fall on quite a few of the Armstrong group, including the aforementioned Edmond Hall. It’s a fun clip, with charisma splattering all over the place. And, being that it’s YouTube, there’s no registration required.

Click to play, dummy!

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(Note to the reader: I’m too lazy to join these random thoughts into a coherent essay. Connect your own damn dots, people!)

I was thinking about Prince Charles today. You know those people who are, like, you know — British? Well, he’s like the KING of that.

My friend Chet just died. The last thing I said to him was, “You wanna know the definition of insanity? It’s when you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result.” Looking back, I’m thinking this was maybe not the smartest thing I could have said midway through a game of Russian Roulette.

True fact: Although ants are highly social insects, they almost never give each other nicknames.

My favorite part about doing the laundry? Cleaning the lint screen. True!

Moreover, both of the R’s in J. R. R. Tolkein’s name stand for “Redundant.”

My life is full of disappointments. For example, I was all excited when I started reading John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women until I realized it’s not a how-to manual.

Yes, I am outraged that The Blue Man Group has been denied membership in the NAACP. Thanks for asking.

Meanwhile, curing cancer aside, consider that if you’re already bald and sleepy, chemotherapy offers you absolutely nothing to look forward to.

Used to be, everyone knew what a Sharpie was, but nobody knew that everybody knew that. Then that football guy whips out a Sharpie in the end zone, and suddenly everybody knows that everybody knows what a Sharpie is. So that’s what real fame is — not when everybody knows you, but when everybody knows that everybody knows you. So start telling people you’ve heard of me, dammit!

By now, the more observant among you will have noted that while the title of this piece promises Thirteen Stupid Thoughts this list contains only eleven items. This can be accounted for as follows: Firstly, I’m counting the idea that I should be posting this at all as One Stupid Thought. And thirdly, I can’t count, which brings the grand total to seventeen, thereby bringing our list in line with our title (overlooking a rounding error).

Finally, if you think innovation is easy, remember that the guy who invented the pencil had to carry the idea around on a blank napkin.

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Lawrence Welk has survived in our national memory as something of a national joke. Insofar as he is recalled at all, it is as the foremost purveyor of the worst music our culture has managed to produce. His every instinct seemed to lead him to the hokiest, the blandest, the whitest music possible. Champagne bubbles and safe, innocuous rhythms.

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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As I recall from my days as a resident of the City of Los Angeles (located just south of Tarzana), the corner of Pico and Sepulveda Boulevards was fairly nondescript as intersections go: there was a lumberyard on one corner, a strip mall across the street. A doughnut shop. A generic office building. And so on. And yet, every time I drove through it, I’d get a little ping of excitement, as a kid from Milwaukee who spent too many nights listening to The Doctor Demento Show on the radio might.

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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This might be fun… a few doodles from a few years ago. I’ve been messing with images and figuring out how to prepare them for the web, and these seemed handy. I still have much to learn, and in the meantime, I can post them here for your edification and entertainment.

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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Woody Allen’s Moose Routine is a quintessential American classic. And yet, too many people tell me that they have never heard it. To me, that’s a little like telling me you’ve never heard the national anthem. People should be taught The Moose Routine in grammar school, and forced to memorize it like they memorize the Gettysburg Address. At gunpoint if necessary.

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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As I’m almost certain I’ve mentioned before, I have an endless fascination for YouTube and the things people feel compelled to share there. I find it charming in a way that makes me glad I’m human — the little songs, the pratfalls, the cinematic experiments, the hokey amateurism, and the fun of it all.

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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Well… I spent a good chunk of the day scoping out WordPress themes to no avail. I’ve seen so many Close But No Cigar layouts that it’s depressing. What I want to do isn’t elaborate at all:

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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A few weeks ago I got a note from DC stand-up comedian Giovanni Diviacchi asking him to give his new joke book a mention here on KillThisBlog.com. Well, sure, I said, and then promptly got myself distracted by a project that’s been taking up whole weeks of my free time but which should bear fruit by the end of the month. But, I digress.

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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Hi kids!

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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Gather ’round, children, while I tell you a story.

Long ago, in the dim ages before the Internet, we had this thing called “television.” It was a lot like YouTube, but you had to watch whatever happened to be on, and shut up and like it. There were only four channels, one of which was “good for you,” and everything was in black and white. If you wanted a cartoon, you had to wait until Saturday morning. And you never had a thought that things could ever be any different.

But then there was Tom Terrific, which ran occasionally on the daily Captain Kangaroo show, perhaps the best children’s show of the era. Tom was what he was: a boy with no apparent adult supervision who wore a funnel for a hat. Where he came from, or how he got the hat, was never explained. The funnel imbued him with the magic power to change into any object he could imagine, which stood him well in difficult situations. Thus equipped, Tom sought adventure with his “faithful companion,” Manfred, a talking dog who mostly wanted to stay home and sleep.

Tom had a winning enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur, and was drawn as simply as possible, probably due to a constrained budget. I, too, am drawn with a constrained budget, and that accounts for my featureless countenance and underdeveloped personality. One does not get the impression that there was much money backing the Tom Terrific production, but the show had a palpable charm nonetheless.

There does not seem to be much available of the Terrific oeuvre online, but YouTube does provide a sampling. Watch it now and get an idea of what I was watching then. There are some unfortunate characterizations of Native Americans herein, but such was the time.

Click to play, dummy!

And part two:

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JESSE KATSOPOLIS:  John Stamos

JOEY GLADSTONE:  Dave Coulier

DANNY TANNER:  Bob Saget

DJ TANNER:  Candace Cameron

STEPH TANNER:  Jodie Sweetin

MICHELLE TANNER:  Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen

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GILLIGAN: Tommy Lee Jones

THE SKIPPER:  Andy Dick

THE MILLIONAIRE:  William Shatner

HIS WIFE:  Leonard Nimoy

THE MOVIE STAR:  Kathy Bates

THE PROFESSOR:  Noam Chomsky

MARY ANN:  Triumph the Insult Comic Dog

Could be worse, I guess. Or could it? Leave a comment to suggest any even scarier ideas.

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HAMLET, Prince of Denmark: Wallace Shawn

CLAUDIUS, the King:  Adam Sandler

LATIFAH, the Queen:  Kenneth Branagh

OPHELIA:  Courtney Love

HAMLET’S GHOST: Stephen Hawking

POLONIUS:  Larry the Cable Guy

HORATIO:  Sir Mix-A-Lot

GRISWOLD: Chevy Chase

LAERTES:  Dustin “Screech” Diamond

CATWOMAN: Julie Newmar

ROSENCRANTZ:  Otto

GUILDENSTERN: George

YOUR BARTENDER:  Ted Lange

PLAYER KING: Donny Most

MARCELLUS:  Carlos Mencia

BARNARDO:  also Dustin “Screech” Diamond

FORTINBRAS: A Department Store Mannequin Dressed Like A Norwegian

GRAVEDIGGER:  Billy Crystal

LORDS, LADIES, OFFICERS, SOLDIERS, TELEMARKETERS, SCIENTOLOGISTS, LOUNGE SINGERS

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Since we’re talkin’ stop motion video (see my previous post about Neighbours, an innovative short artsy film made over 50 years ago), and since Kenny just mentioned it in the comments to that post, let’s look at Poop Today, a very short stop-motion viddie made a couple of years ago. It went semi-viral a couple of years ago and boasts some 69,032 YouTube views as of this writing. The soundtrack includes a cryptic song with an offensive lyric, but the Internet is unexpurgated and you deal with it, yes? Here you go:

I find it endlessly fascinating how these ideas ping around, and how people make their own versions on the same concept. I guess this is whatcha call a “meme,” meme being a word I find beyond annoying, but I don’t know a shorter way of expressing the thought in this case. Here’s an answer to the “Poop Today” video above, called “Poop Tomorrow.” Just some teenagers goofing around in a basement, but still:

That being said, it would appear that the undisputed YouTube Champion of this business is a vid called “Tony vs. Paul,” with over 4.5 million YouTube views. Maybe you’ve already seen it. It doesn’t try to achieve as much as “Neighbours” did, but it’s fun nevertheless:

There are a lot of people on YouTube trying this stuff. The means of production are in our hands, people. Can the Revolution be near?

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Until tonight, I think it’s been something like forty years since I’ve seen this film.

I remember it in black and white, but shazam! Turns out it was in color. Being that I was only slightly more than an embryo when I last saw it, the bits of it I remembered were hazy. But it’s the sort of film that sticks with you, especially if you see it young, and I did see it many, many times.

They used to show it on television a lot, on Sunday mornings. Sunday because, as you’ll see, it presents a rather important moral lesson that you’d best pay attention to, you licentious ninny. We didn’t have a color television (we were Amish, as I recall), so that’s why I remember it being in black and white (I was mistaken). (I was also mistaken about being Amish just now.) It turns a lot more violent than I remembered, too. Mayhem! Havoc! Two thumbs up!

I’ve had vague memories of it ever since, and I didn’t think I’d ever see it again, given that I didn’t know the title, who made it, who was in it, where it came from, or even if it wasn’t something I had dreamt. But, as I’ve pointed out before, we live in an era beyond obscurity. I put four words into the Google-izer (the four words: fence flower fight animation). These represented the few solid details I could recall. Booyah! There it is, right there on the ol’ YooToob.

The film is called “Neighbours.” The director was one Norman McLaren, hero of the National Film Board of Canada. (Canada is a small country near Spokane.) It was made in 1952, and it won an Oscar for Best Short Subject (or something) way back when. It runs about eight minutes. And you can tell it’s authentic Canadian because they spell “neighbor” with that ridiculous and laughably unnecessary “u” in it. Those Canadians with their weirdo orthography — they’re lucky they don’t have oil or we’d force proper spelling on them at gunpoint. No wonder they hate war.

Click to play, Dumstead!

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This post may only be of interest to those who are building their own blogs. The study of blogs and blogging has kind of taken over my life lately, to the point where I’m neglecting my own blog as I look in to see what other people are making of theirs. That being said, every day I’m tweaking something, and while it may not be very apparent to anyone who reads this page from week to week, things are slowly changing and my skills keep developing. You maybe can’t tell, but I can.

The weirdest part about having this blog so far is how my traffic keeps trending upward, even as I post some rather, um, eclectic items. Until now the world has been pretty consistent in letting me know that the things that interest me tend to be of little interest to the rest of humanity. But online, things are different. People find you. Tribes sort themselves out. And increasing numbers of people are visiting these pages. The numbers, to be sure, are small, but they are getting bigger, and at a rate that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. It’s not something I’ve expected, but there it is.

Please note: Everything I post here has had some kind of fascination to me (yes, even the Dardanella). I just never expect anyone else to dig the same weirdo stuff. And yet, more and more visits are showing up in the stats. And that’s encouraging.

My new favorite traffic stat is RSS subscribers. If you look above and to the left, you’ll see a little orange icon for those who wish to subscribe to this blog via what is called a “reader.” I only started using one about six months ago and I don’t know how I got along without it. They’re a little tricky figuring out at first, but they makes it much easier to get to web content that you want — “RSS” stands for… actually, I don’t know what exactly, but most people refer to it as “Really Simple Syndication.” Google has a reader — that’s the one I’m using. There’s also a website for reading blogs called bloglines.com. It has another good reader with a friendly interface that’s very easy to read.

Anyway, my point: A couple of weeks ago, I rigged that RSS link to start counting the numbers of people who are coming to my blog via an RSS reader, and as of today, with my little half-assed blog, I have six (count ‘em) six RSS subscribers. I’m one of them, I know who two of the others are, and that means there are three people I’ve never met out there in Webland who are actually following what happens here. They’re interested to the point where they’re having it delivered to them automatically. And that just knocks me out.

Some blogs have literally tens of thousands of RSS subscribers. But these six are mine.

I recommend that you look into trying out an RSS reader. Like, um, maybe start by clicking MY orange button thingie. It’s up there on the upper left just under the header. It could completely change the way you spend your time online.

In a post at the beginning of June I set up a blogging to-do list. Looking back on it six weeks later I can say that I’m pleased with my progress, even if I haven’t completed every item on it. I haven’t set up a contact page, I haven’t updated my About page. But I have improved the appearance of this blog (I know - lots more to do here) and I’ve done a lot of messing around with social media sites. I’ve more than tripled my list of Facebook friends (okay, the number was pretty low to begin with, but still), and I’ve set up accounts on some of the other social media sites. Frankly, a lot of these have not been very enticing to me (Plurk, Twitter, etc.), but I imagine that as I develop a circle of friends on these sites their charms will become more apparent. For now, I’ll keep checking into them on a regular basis, and let my participation grow at a natural rather than a forced pace. Who knows what wonders wait for me there?

More useful to me have been sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. These are sites where people vote for items they find online, and as the votes are tallied, some good web content finds its way to the top of the list. There is some Wisdom Of The Crowd at work here… stuff that gets voted up the lists tends to have something going for it, even if only turns out to be some kind of crude joke. And perhaps one day I’ll actually produce some content that’s worth Digging. We’ll see.

I’ve also been doing a lot of stuff that isn’t apparent here. I’ve been studying a bit of html, and I’ve been looking at some various page lay-outs for blogs. The current lay-out for this blog is a WordPress theme called Tarski, which I’ve found simple and clean, if not ideal. One day I’ll know enough about this stuff to get things the way I want them. Until then, the world of blogging has endless fascinations, and the written word is only one aspect of it. I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time noodling around with this stuff.

And that’s my report on my progress to date.

Oh, and one last thing: I’ve actually earned some money with this blog. Yes, after three and a half months of heroic effort, I’ve banked a whole $2.71.

This bodes well, yes?

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Hey Boys & Girls! It’s July’s Dardanella of the Month! Woo hoo!

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One of my ongoing projects, as you know, has been to seek Global Domination by bending Cyberspace to my will. One aspect of this quest has been to explore the various social media sites that have been springing up online. Some (MySpace, FaceBook) have been around quite a bit longer than some of the newer upstarts (Twitter, Plurk), and all of them have their various quirks and idiosyncrasies. I still have a long way to go before I figure it all out, but most of these sites have some compulsive entertainment value if nothing else.

One thing that is true of all of these sites is that they work best when you’ve connected yourself to a significant and growing number of people. While I’ve had Facebook and MySpace accounts for years, my presence on the other sites is only weeks old. In other words:  I need friends! I need followers! I need minions!

Below are links to my profiles on some of the sites I have joined. If you are a member of any of these sites, please add me to your friend lists and whatnot, and you can follow my exploits online. Soon, as you find yourself more and more engrossed in the ongoing saga of my life, you may even be finding yourself more interested in my well-being than in your own. And that’s exactly the way the world should be, yes?

So click in and join me everywhere:

Join me on MySpace

Friend me on Facebook

Follow me on Twitter

Digg Me

Yummy yummy del.icio.us

Plurk Me, Baby!

In time I’ll be adding these and others to my About page, which still is in serious need of updating. That will happen eventually, and in the meantime, I look forward to connecting with you on any and all of these sites.

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I’m such a doofus. Or not. Okay, you decide. And my apologies for this post, which pretty much amounts to an unabashed commercial message. But there’s a real bargain going on here, so please indulge me.

I’ve been on a Shakespeare kick for the last year and a half or so. I live in Alexandria, Virginia — that’s northern Virginia, inside the beltway, a short drive to the Folger Shakespeare Library and, more to the point, within range of at least three theatre companies that regularly put on productions of Shakespeare’s plays.

It’s been an embarrassment of riches. In the last 18 months I’ve averaged a different live Shakespeare play every two months or so. Just ask Random Kath — she’ll vouch for me. Highlights: Teller’s production of Macbeth. The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Love’s Labors Lost outdoors at the Carter Barron Ampitheatre. And an impromptu Christmas version of Hamlet at the Clark Street Playhouse.

So, to the point: Back in March of 2007, I paid $200 for a complete set of hardcover Pelican Shakespeares: 38 volumes. It’s a terrific set — an easy-to-read quality hardcover edition of the 37 plays in Shakespeare’s canon, plus one volume of the Sonnets. Way better than one of those giant one-volume Shakespeares that threaten to snap your arms off at the wrist, these are easy to carry, easy to read, and each volume is self-contained with all the support you need to enjoy the play without being overwhelmed with footnotes.

I repeat: I paid $200 for this. Full price. Here’s a pic of my actual set, on my actual bookshelf, taken with the crappy li’l camera in my actual MacBook:

And now, here’s the doofus part: Amazon has it for sale right now at $59.80. That’s a 70% discount from what I paid for it. Doing the math, that comes out to less than $1.60 per volume. As Othello put it just before offing Desdemona, “Oy vey iz mir!”

There are a couple of drawbacks. I would have preferred that the volumes be a little bit smaller so that they would be truly pocket-sized. And I would also have liked if they included a couple of more volumes in the set so that I’d also have Two Noble Kinsmen and the narrative poems to round out the oeuvre.

But at this price it’s hard to complain.

I realize that most of my readers have already clicked away at this point. But for a few of you, well, I can already hear you drooling. I’m miffed as all get-out that I way overpaid for the set, but I also know that some of you will be thanking me for putting you wise to this.

So, does that un-doofus me a little then?

Here’s the link:

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Smothered in a prolonged group hug.

Pierced in the forehead by a metallic Ninja hurling star.

In a fall from a high tower, while holding an armload of harpoons.

Blacking out from anesthesia as a group of fat guys close in with spoons.

Crushed by an inexplicable number of doilies.

Gummed to death by malicious old men.

Shot from a cannon onto a long, pointy stick.

Alone, on the subway, holding a potted fern.

And, finally,

Melanoma.

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You need to read more. You need to read a lot more. You need to read every damn book ever printed, right Bucky? Okay, so slack off and narrow that list down to, say, the thousand best books ever written. It’ll only cost you $7,989.50 (plus shipping).

This post is an experiment. I’ve recently been accepted as an Amazon Associate, meaning that if I link stuff here that people actually end up buying, I get a small percentage, and I’m posting to see if the links work properly. And why shouldn’t I test it with the most expensive set of books in the entire Amazon catalog? Hey, I might get lucky!

My aim with this blog is to learn how the Internet works, including online marketing. Eventually I’ll be doing some honest-to-gawd product reviews, but for now the main point is not that I manage to sell something, but to learn how online marketing gets done. So thank you for your indulgence as I give myself this marketing lesson today.

If you were to click the link below and do thing you know, deep down, that you really, really want to do, by my calculation I would make $319.58. I would very much like to have $319.58. In fact, maybe you should buy two sets, so that, I dunno, you could lend some of the books out to friends, and in that case I’d make $639.16. So why aren’t you getting out your credit cards and ordering, you buncha pikers? These pixels are costing me money! I neeeEeeEEEeeeeed this! Buy ten sets! ARRRIIIHARRRGGGHHH!!!

Not that the great classics of Western Civilization aren’t worth spending some time with. And at least one Amazon reviewer apparently actually bought the set. Quoting a reader review from the Amazon website:

This is an orgy for a book-lover. I have had a wonderful time from the moment I placed the order. They arrived in 25 boxes shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, over 750 lbs. of books. It took about twelve hours to unpack them, check them off the packing list (one for each box), and then check them off the list we downloaded from Amazon.com. They take up about 77 linear feet. 

Turns out I’ve actually read some of these. And there’s much, much more to read about it on the Amazon review pages (I’m an Amazon addict. I especially like reading one-star customer reviews. Indignation is a minor art.).

So check it out. And don’t feel obligated to buy it or anything. But check it out, and then buy it:

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Yesterday the nice folks at Daily Blog Tips posted a glossary for bloggers. Unfortunately,  they got a lot of it wrong. Below are my revisions.

A-List: That’s “A” for “Arianna,” as in “Huffington.” A-List Blogs are those with more power and prestige than others. They’re not bad people or anything, but that Dooce lady scares me, and I think I once saw Seth Godin eat a bug.

Akismet: A popular plug-in for WordPress blogs which automatically blocks comment spam, thus eliminating what is often the most interesting part of the conversation.

Archive: That special place on a blog where posts which have seldom been read are kept so that they may be more thoroughly ignored in the future.

Blog: That which was formerly achieved with a brick wall and a can of spray paint, and which is now affected with a file transfer protocol client and pixels.

Blogosphere: A sort of digitized English soccer riot, but without the respect for decorum.

Blogroll: A list of websites a blogger keeps in the hope that they will one day send him backlinks.

Digg: A mysterious icon at the bottom of this post with no known function. There are no reports to suggest that anyone has ever dared to click it.

Domain: Given the bleak and solitary nature of blogging, and considering the Seinfeldian sense of the word, a “domain” is that which a blogger spends many, many, many hours attempting to “master.”

Feedcount: The total number of RSS subscribers to a given blog (e.g., in the present instance, zero).

Google Analytics: Pornography for webmasters.

Niche: That designated subject which is officially neglected, often for weeks, while an author posts about politics.

Page View: What a blogger gets when a reader looks at his blog once. If that same reader looks at the blog again, the blogger gets a second Page View. And so on. Are we going too fast for you?

Pligg: Please. Somebody just made that word up. For crying out loud, stop wasting everybody’s time.

Splog: The hazy toxic smoke often seen polluting the skies above Splos Angeles.

Squornk: See? I can make up words too.

Technorati: A website that, theoretically, ranks blogs according to the number of links they receive from other websites. We say “theoretically,” because to date, no one has ever been able to get a Technorati page to load.

Twitter: The world’s largest 24-hour online ADHD support group.

Unique Visitors: People who visit your website who, for the purpose of web statistics, are deemed exactly as important as, and who are therefore considered interchangeable with, any other individual visitor to your site. Hence “Unique.”

WordPress: Blogging software developed by people who are probably having second thoughts now that they know it was used to compose this glossary.

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I don’t know if this is worth a whole blog post, but I’ve been clicking around Imeem.com and finding some nifty stuff there, nifty at least to me. The song provided below is an a cappella version of Randy Newman’s “Short People” by a group called The King’s Singers. And, no, I nevuh hoid uv em eeder.

Perhaps I should take a moment to point out that I actually like the songs and videos I’ve been posting here. The thought has occurred to me that since much of this (much? how about all, buster?) is offbeat and loopy, that maybe people could be thinking I’m only yanking chains with what I post.

On the contrary, I consider myself the standard of good taste and high art, and I provide these materials merely for your edification. Yes, clearly you’re all a bunch of filthy troglodytes, and I am all too aware that I am wasting my time in my fruitless efforts to bring you to civilization. But perhaps when the walls of the citadel are crumbled finally to dust, you will then find a moment to thank me for these vain attempts at instruction. Alas, your regrets will be futile, as I will already be lodged in my island fortress laughing at your post-apocalyptic horror from my giant mad genius evil display monitor.

Click to play, dummy!

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