So, This Used To Be A Thing

When young people hear late Cretaceous period Bob Dylan gargling participles, or are forced to flip the channel hurriedly when the PBS begging jag starts out with the twitching corpse of Peter, Paul, and Mary, they don’t really have a frame of reference for what’s going on. Folk Music used to be a thing.

Not just a thing. THE thing. John Lennon wrote this song because he wanted to take a stab at the folkie thing. It wasn’t really their bag. It was more like a train running on a parallel track. Liverpudlians had skiffle, their own version of folk music, but Gerry Marsden took care of that. When prospective manager Brian Epstein found the Beatles banging away in the Cavern Club, they were wearing leather clothes like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, and they interrupted their fifties proto-rock covers to have Gerry Marsden sing some scouse ballad while he stood on a packing crate because the microphone stand couldn’t be adjusted. It wasn’t any sort of Rock Island Line festival.

Brian Epstein signed The Silkie because he heard them playing in the Cavern Club when he dragged his Savile Row arse in for a gander at the Beatles. It’s hard to say whether the Beatles or The Silkie did the cover version of Hide Your Love Away. Both versions were recorded at the same time by the same people, more or less. It’s assumed that John Lennon always wanted to be someone other than himself on a given day, and that day he wanted to be Bob Dylan for a spell.

Or so everyone says. I’ve never seen a pop-culture vulture offer any other opinion about this record. They all agree that John Lennon wanted to be Bob Dylan because they have no idea what creative people are like. If they were in the slightest bit creative themselves, they wouldn’t be writing for music magazines. It’s like relying on remoras for advice on how to be a shark. John Lennon was like many people who feel an intense need to compete in whatever arena they find themselves in. It might be passive-aggressive combat, but it’s very real. I get a whiff of Oh Yeah, I got yer folk music right here, Bob in this song. Like Marlon in The Wild One, he’s wondering whattaya got he can rebel against.

The song was given to The Silkie to record, Lennon produced the record, McCartney played the guitar, and George kept time by tapping the top of an acoustic guitar. When it was done, Lennon called Brian Epstein, held the phone up to the speaker in the studio, and told him they had recorded a Number One hit.

The Silkie version made it to a respectable #28 in the UK, and #10 in the US. The Beatles version was part of the Help! soundtrack, which was # 1 nine ways from Sunday. Knowing how that happens is why the Beatles had a manager, I guess.

Still More Intelligent and Less Excitable Than Jim Cantore

As my father used to say, “God love ’em.”

This is what all TV weather reports look like to me, only with much less charm. This guy has it goin’ on. He really knows how you’re supposed to prepare for a wikid stahm comin. Let’s go to the transcript he’s so solicitously supplied with his video:

Order your Pizzas and Chinese Food and Buy Cases of Pspsi and Coke and
Do your Grocery Shopping Don’t Wait until the Last Minute Do it Right
Now

I must admit that I don’t keep up with nutritional advice from the government these days. Is that the new Food Pyramid? Well, as long as it’s gluten-free pizza and the chopsticks are harvested in an ecologically sound manner from happy trees, I guess it will do.

Yeah. He’s more tuned in to popular culture than the runt of a Kardashian litter could aspire to:

…have your iPads, iPods, Cell Phones, Laptops and Tablets Charged and
have your 3G and 4G Internet Ready and when you are driving your Car
Take your Time driving your car and Slow Down so you Don’t Get in the
Car Accident and when you are going outside Don’t Walk too Far and have
your Shovels, Snow Scoops, Snow Blowers, Snow Plows and Salt Trucks
Ready and Drink Lots of Green Tea, White Tea and Red Tea and Drink Lots
of Green Tea to keep you warm and have your Furnaces Ready and Turn on
the Furnaces to keep the House Warm during the Blizzard

Funny thing was, while the weatherman was apologizing to New York for no blizzard, the snow was going by my house at 50mph or so. It started snowing inside my house, literally. Snow started to geyser straight up from the crack between the windowsill and the sash, and settled in a little drift on the sill. That was on a window that’s been painted shut for fifty years, easy.

It snows here, so we don’t worry overmuch, but the temperature routinely goes below zero at night, and the loss of power in a blizzard would be a big deal. No heat. We can power a wood furnace in the basement using an inverter hooked up to a car battery, but the car has to be running, and you can’t manage that during a blizzard. The power stayed on, and the house didn’t fall over, so it was just another snowstorm.

We went out yesterday and started shoveling the asbestos snow, with no way to know how much there was. The wind had moved it around so much that it could have been anything from a foot to thirty inches. The end of the driveway defended itself ably against our assaults, but the two exchange students from across the street wandered over and outflanked the last of it. 

We’re going to get another foot of snow tomorrow, and I have no idea where we’ll put it. The banks are six feet high already. We’ll figure out something. We always do. We just can’t figure out where to get Pspsi.

BEST. NEIGHBOR. EVAR.

There’s always a lot of competition for BEST. NEIGHBOR. EVAR, of course.  When you were ten, there was that guy that used to whistle while jingling change, and he eventually wore a hole in all his pockets. Boom! Ice-cream-man money up and down his driveway, all the time. That guy was pretty sweet. Then there was that dude that had a stack of Playboys in his bathroom next to the crapper. That was pretty good. There was that guy that put down a plastic liner and flooded the back yard so we could all play hockey. He even put up lights. That guy was like a god. Not the God, but a god, surely. 

Then there was that guy with the hot wife who was always vacuuming in the nude and didn’t have any drapes. Wait, that came out wrong. Pronoun trouble. The guy didn’t vacuum naked, his wife did. And I meant to say that the house didn’t have drapes. The wife had drapes. I guess. I’m not sure she had a head or a face or anything. Anyway, that was a pretty good neighbor. But this guy is the BEST. NEIGHBOR. EVAR.

[Thanks to faithful reader and friend Sam for sending that one along. He’s the BEST. READER. EVAR. At least for today]

The Blizzard of 1899 in New York

The Great Blizzard of 1899 in New York. It’s amazing that we’re looking at a film of it. The oldest film I’ve ever found in the Library of Congress was 1898, so this must be among the first things ever filmed in New York. The Blizzard of 1899 was a big deal. Back before weather forecasts, people got caught unawares fairly often by cataclysmic weather events. The Hurricane of ’38 killed a lot of people, and I have personally been in a house in Rhode Island that was blown across a salt water pond to the opposite shore. The owners just decided to leave it there, and built a foundation under it where it landed. Tornadoes killed people in the mid sixties, I think it was, in western Massachusetts. [Update: I looked it up. It was 1953. The toll was 94 dead, 1200+ injured in Worcester] The Blizzard of 1899 went into folklore because it killed a bunch of people, and it destroyed a lot of things. It was 39 below zero Fahrenheit in Ohio, still the record low. They had a snowball fight on the steps of the Florida State Capitol Building. Cape May, New Jersey, got 34 inches of snow, back when Sesame Street Scientists™ weren’t abroad in the land, exaggerating for grant money, and they used an honest ruler. It was reported that there was a hard frost in Cuba, of all places. It was reported by the US Weather Service, because we owned Cuba then.

Some people in New York City won’t have cable TV for twelve straight hours tomorrow, and they’ll start eating each other soon after if history is any example. The feds will ladle money over corrupt city administrations to fund snowplow contracts that are paid to cronies while the snow waits for the spring to do the work. In short, if we weren’t an incompetent society in all things practical, today’s storm would be handled easily. But it won’t, and Cuba won’t freeze, I imagine. For years we’ll have to listen to the same people claim today’s storm was an arctic cataclysm while simultaneously saying it never happened because the computer model they cooked up ran out of ones and zeroes or something.

Back to the video. When moving pictures first became popular, it was common to simply take pictures of mundane life in and around a city or town, and then display it for the locals while charging a little money for admission. People liked seeing themselves on film, and liked seeing familiar things in a new way.

Movies like this one are more valuable to us because they show mundane life as it was. Entertainment on film from early in the 20th century isn’t nearly as much fun to look at. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in newspapers. A brand new newspaper is useless twaddle. An old newspaper is full of all sorts of interesting things, most of them not the news stories. When I had to fix a dormer atop the back of my house, I stripped off the shingles and found the whole thing was sheathed in newspaper. It served as a sort of primitive house wrap to keep out drafts. It was all from 1910, so I figure the dormer was an addition; the house was supposedly built in 1901. It’s technically a Victorian, because the old girl was still alive, if only for a few more months. The newspaper was perfectly readable. The advertisements were the best part, and the paper on the whole served as a mute tombstone to the bustling city where it was published a century ago, which is now a disreputable place with a ghostly population that favors plywood curtains for their windows.

All in all, I prefer the real ghosts.

I’m the Burning Bush, I’m the Burning Fire, I’m the Bleeding Volcano

That animated gif isn’t from this year. This year there’s been snow on the ground continuously since, since, well, let’s call it forever, because I can’t remember. But there’s not as much as last year. It’s too cold to snow. There’s no ground showing or anything, but the snow is  glacial, not slide-y.

I have to pay close attention to the weather because it’s hard to heat the house. I don’t watch television, and wouldn’t watch a TV weather report if I did. I do look at a webpage that has high and low temps projected on a calendar. Well, I did. I got to be a fairly good hand at triangulating what the actual temperature might be by using the hinky numbers they offered. I used to use one webpage, but it went full retard, hid all the temperature numbers, and covered the entire surface of the website with video thumbnails that tout YouTube videos with titles like: You won’t believe what happened to this one couple while they were shoe shopping and eating artisanal cupcakes on their honeymoon! The entire page turned into linkbait crapola too stupid for Buzzfeed. The weather was around back, I guess, like it would be if you bought an elephant and fed it refried beans.

I turned it off and tried what my wife calls the Happy Funtime Weather! webpage. She calls it that because they always say it will be five to ten degrees warmer than it is. It cheers her up to see it. It’s like people telling you that you look mahvelous when you’re caught taking the trash out to the curb in your sweat clothes and slippers, with your hair making architectural poses and sleep seeds in your eyes. Besides, who are you going to believe, the weather channel or your lying eyes and the thermometer?

Anyway, I turned it on a few days ago, and Happy Funtime Weather! decided they’d change the site to default to Centrigade temperatures, because they’re hopeless weenies, and it said it was going to be 22 below zero that day, which looked a bit off to me. It took me a few moments to figure out what had happened.

It had been 17 below zero a week ago, but that was good old Fahrenheit numbers. On the same day I got up and saw it was 17 below zero at daybreak, the Happy Funtime Weather! channel was trumpeting a story I wasn’t interested in from a Maine newspaper. It said that some commissar had announced that ALL WAS WELL, and because it was so hot all the time, people in Maine shouldn’t worry about their heating bills, because it was so hot. Those bills were going to be so low, because it was so hot.

I’ve run out of shipping pallets to burn, so I’m slowly taking apart the barbarous shelving someone built out of rough lumber all around  the basement of my house 75 years ago, and I’m burning it in the furnace.  Luckily, none of that will show up on by heating bill, which will be so low, because it’s so hot.

Putting on the Ritz Cracker

Kids gotta make their own fun. They pick up all the stuff we leave lying around the house of the world, and play blocks with it as best they can. It’s not up to them what kind of stuff they find to play with when they escape the playpen. Crack pipe or Rubik’s Cube, they’re bound to fiddle with it.

My children are a rock band in my attic. I mean that literally as well as figuratively. I have seen what other parents are subjected to when their children get old enough to make amplified noise, and it ain’t pretty. My children are always delightful, and I never get tired of hearing what they play. I guess that means we left the right stuff on the living room floor. Yay us.

Epiphone Wildkat Reviews, Unorganized Hancock-Style

Epiphone Wildkat Guitar Reviews Are All the Rage

My two sons have a band called Unorganized Hancock. They’ve been recording music videos for a couple of years, and they perform here and there around the state of Maine where we live. It’s interesting to see which of their YouTube music videos become more popular than others, and try to figure out why.

Unorganized Hancock: The Most Famous Band You Never Heard Of

Unorganized Hancock have almost reached 50,000 YouTube views for their YouTube channel. No matter what YouTube says, their algorithms don’t count all, or even a small minority of the views these videos generate. YouTube claims they count embedded views, but they don’t. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “embedded,” it means that you watch them directly on the website that features them, without going directly to YouTube first. YouTube might count them if you’re already logged into YouTube, which is uncommon when people are reading text-centric blogs and websites like mine. Actually, I doubt they count those, either.

Unorganized Hancock’s Grandmother Doesn’t Count, Apparently

I estimate that Unorganized Hancock has actually had well over 250,000 video views. It’s easy for me to tell, because I can see how many people watch them on my blog alone. Hell, their grandmother has watched their videos more than 50,000 times. The boys have been embedded on lots of other blogs besides mine, many with much more traffic than mine. YouTube fibs, for reasons of its own. They want people to use YouTube as a social media platform, and that’s that. If you’ve ever wondered why you find YouTube videos that say “embedding disabled by owner’s request,” that’s why. The account holder is tired of showing the video without getting YouTube hits on his counter.

They Did A Killer Version of Take Five

Unorganized Hancock recorded Dave Brubeck’s Take Five about two years ago. I re-posted it on Wednesday, a charming form of recycling, I hope. My little drummer boy was only nine when that video was made, and he was playing flawlessly in 5/4 Time with no metronome, a near impossibility at his age. His big brudder played two guitar parts, and the bass part too. The video was very well-received, and embedded at dozens of blogs and message boards. Their original dub of the song, which has a very cute joke at the beginning of it, has about 4600 views on the counter, and a hi-def upload that’s straight music has another 2600. That’s nonsense of course. Those videos got ten times that, easy, but let’s not quibble. A broken ruler makes the same, reliable mistake. Let’s go with it.

Minor Swing, By Minors, Swinging

The most popular video Unorganized Hancock has recorded, Take Five, is about to be eclipsed by their take on Minor Swing, made famous by gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. It’s a so-so take for the boys if you ask me. They were tired, and the big one had been sick, and though the audience wouldn’t notice so much, I can still see it wasn’t their lively best. It did OK when I posted it on this blog, and then it was forgotten. Here it is:

Epiphone Wildkat Guitar Reviews Are Now Unorganized Hancock’s Biggest Fans

Minor Swing is about to pass Take Five, even though it wasn’t that popular when it was posted, and we’ve done nothing to promote it. That’s because Unorganized Hancock’s version of Minor Swing made the list of the most prominent videos for people searching for: Epiphone Wildkat Guitar Reviews. It really isn’t a review, or it’s a far superior review than all the others, depending on your outlook on life. The Heir plays an Epiphone Wildkat Guitar that his mother and I gave him for Christmas a couple years back, using money that generous supporters of this blog put in our tipjar. The guitar is prominently displayed in the thumbnail of the video, completely by accident. That’s it. Every morning when they get up, their YouTube counter tells them that somewhere between 25 and 100 people watch that video while they were asleep, because they want to see a Epiphone Wildkat Review, and the thumbnail is irresistible.

Hell, they’ve played Minor Swing live and done a better job:

That second video doesn’t have the Epiphone Wildkat guitar in the thumbnail picture, so it has 384 views, no comments, and 10 Likes.

By this method — or lack of a method, just YouTube madness — Unorganized Hancock’s version of Minor Swing is watched more than any of their other videos, by people who have nothing to do with me, and nothing to do with them. You get an unvarnished opinion, straight from the world that Unorganized Hancock must enter if they are ultimately to be successful. Do strangers like you? The rest is applesauce. Strangers do.

A Busted Ruler Measures the Same Way, Every Time

Unorganized Hancock’s version of Minor Swing currently has 77 likes. [oops, while I was writing this, the counter turned to 78] There are more comments than any other video, and they’re full of enthusiastic swears in affirmation. That video has delivered more subscribers to their YouTube channel in the last month than they got in the previous year. People looking for Epiphone Wildkat reviews on YouTube are quickly becoming Unorganized Hancock’s biggest audience, if only because they’re the only ones that are being counted fully. It’s the way the Internet works. It doesn’t make a lick of sense, but no one asked us how to run it. The kids just play — play Minor Swing — along.

Preciso Praticar Meu Português. Never Mind. They Speak Beatles

That’s from a show in Brazil called Programa do Jô. It’s something along the lines of the Johnny Carson show. Oops, I mean the Leno Show. Dammit, the Letterman Show or something.

Wait a minute, I have no idea if Letterman is still on the air, either. Whatever. On Programa do Jô, a Chilean waiter serves the guests cocktails and food while they’re on the air. And they have Beatles cover bands that probably don’t have any idea what the words mean in the songs they’re singing.

Hey, you’ve got to guzzle Cabernet!

Hey, you’ve got an ugly fiancee!

Hey, Yul Brynner hides your lunch away!

Hey, read me a book by le Carre!

Hey, you’ve got to give me some sorbet!

As I said, whatever. Most people have no idea what the words are, or what they’re driving at. In most cases, the composer had no idea what they were driving at either. Writing songs is more a knack than a trade. You’re supposed to give the audience a vague feeling one way or the other, and try to concatenate the notes so it can be hummed. That’s about it.

A half-decent folk song is hard to come by these days. These Brazilian coves knew where to look.

Take Five. Now Hipster Brubeck Aficionado Approved

Firstly  let me adjust my Patagonia heritage jacket. I won’t take it off, even if it’s 95 degrees at the loft party. I wear it open. Totally insouciant that way. There’s a hint of plaid underneath. Not in my outfit. That’s entirely plaid. The hint of plaid is on my skin. I’ve never been outdoors in the daytime, so I’m sort of sallow, and my plaid shirt, T-shirt, tie, and underpants are starting to leave little checkerboard patterns directly on my skin. Must be all the Fair Trade dye. I’m not wearing sunglasses, of course. That would be silly. I’m wearing mountaineering glasses. Inside. At night.

Anyway, I only listen to Nepalese Dave Brubeck cover bands. You probably haven’t heard of them.

When I can’t find Nepalese Dave Brubeck cover bands on vinyl at my locavore Greek yogurt stand/independent music store, I’ll settle for these two deck cronkites laying it down in an unheated hovel. It’s Western Maine, but at least it isn’t midtown. They make me want to bust a polyrhythm moby. Peace out.

[Update: Many Thanks to Kathleen M. in the Nutmeg State for her constant support of my boys’ efforts via the TipJar. We greatly appreciate it.]

Month: January 2015

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