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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.
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
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!
(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.
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!
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…
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.
Please excuse this extraneous doodle. I’m experimenting with images in the blog-hosting software, and I want to see how this comes out.
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!
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!
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?
Hey Boys & Girls! It’s July’s Dardanella of the Month! Woo hoo!
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:
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.
I’m thinking you’re tired. People are dumping on you, the insensitive louts. They expect you to solve their problems, never stopping to consider that maybe you’ve got some problems of your own.
Am I right? Yes, I am very right.
But I’m not here to dump on you. No, not me. I’m here to make you feel better, friend, if only for a moment. I’m gonna make your day. I’m gonna make you smile for a couple of minutes. Then you can get back to the louts, back to your lousy day, but maybe a little happier, a little lighter. So watch this viddie and thank me later.
Click to play, Dummy!
