Well, that’s the swinginest version of Take Five I’ve heard since breakfast. It’s like the third-best version of the song except all the ones that are better. It’s performed by the Mighty Typhoons. They appear to be a wedding band from Amsterdam that wish they were half as cool as my two sons.
I think the MIghty Typhoons did manage to get halfway to being as cool as Unorganized Hancock, which is more than most can claim. The drummer was only 10 when they made this video, and he has a tie that adjusts on his neck using a zipper. It’s hard to compete with zipper-tie awesomeness.
Fun fact: I’ve ridden in about 75 percent of the non-dragster cars in this video, including the T-Bird and the Corvette convertibles.
That’s Rocky Gresset and some guy that owns a dog house playing a Henry Mancini/Johnny Mercer song.
Funny to think of what becomes a jazz standard. The Days of Wine and Roses was pretty predictable, but lots of other less predictable things make it into Real Books, or Fake Books, or whatever they call the bootleg books of songs that might be needed on a General Business bandstand.
I’m not in the business anymore, but I notice things. The Beatles have a bunch of things that trad jazz bands don’t turn their nose up at anymore. Stevie Wonder songs, quite a bit, too. It’s Not Easy Being Green, originally sung by Kermit the Frog is another one you might not see coming. Hell, Wichita Lineman gets murdered by naugahyde-and-well-drink assassins as often as Autumn Leaves. Honestly, would you expect My Favorite Things to become a jazz standard? I would, but I’m strange.
Of course “For Dummies” is my idea of a joke. Despite what you’ve heard, no one was allowed to be a dummy when shelter like this was in vogue. If you can afford to have a smartphone in your pocket, you’re allowed to be as dumb as you please. You can believe almost anything about the natural or intellectual world and get away with it. You can think panthers are cute and cuddly if you want, or that living in a state of nature is a lark, or commendable in some way.
I’m more from the Rose Sayer school of philosophy: Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.
The only mistake this fellow made that I noticed was using wattle to reinforce the smoke shelf in his little chimney. The people he’s copying would have gotten a flat stone from the river for that, and then continued on up the chimney with daub. The temperature right at the smoke shelf in a chimney goes way above 1000 degrees. The wood inside the daub will first become pyrolized, and then ignite at very low temperatures if the daub fails. He could have made a bow drill to chafe his sticks to make a fire faster, but I subtract only style points for that.
I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret: Your wood-framed home isn’t really much more complicated than this hut. If your house is 100 years old or so, the interior walls are wooden lath with plaster applied to it. The plaster is a form of daub, and it’s keyed into the wattle — the lath — by smooshing it through the cracks, same as this. Gypsum drywall has replaced wattle and daub for interior surfaces, but it’s still basically the same crap. Gypsum is just a fancy kind of dried mud, and the paper faces of the drywall sheets are the wattle, even made out of the same stuff — they’re just ground up and reconstituted into paper.
Only pole barns are made by putting vertical members into holes in the ground to frame walls now, but the fellow’s little platform bed is basically the first floor framing in a regular house, designed to get you up off the dirt in the “cellar.” Almost all roofing shingles work in the same way as his leaves and bark, simply overlapping the row below it to shed water. I’ve nailed shingles over skip sheathing in the same way. If you split boards out of logs you could put clapboards on that shed and it would be at home in any number of cul-de-sacs I could mention, waiting for the vinyl siding salesman to come along. If the fellow with the uneven tan and all the bug bites had made bricks instead of pottery with that mud, even the wolf couldn’t blow his little shelter down.
I’m often amazed at how little the average person knows about they house they live in. It’s a very simple machine, really. All the complexity that’s been added to it has generally made it worse. Although I like window screens a great deal, I must admit.
(Thanks to reader, commenter, and stalwart supporter of Unorganized Hancock Chasmatic for sending that one along)
You keep that up, dude, you won’t be able to stop a pig in a ginnel.
Barnes!
Who’s the Brit cycling ninny
That’s a sex machine to all the hinny?
(Barnes!)
You’re damn right
Who is the man
That would risk a dunch for a Black and Tan?
(Barnes!)
Can ya dig it?
Who’s the cat that won’t cop out
When there’s dibble all about?
(Barnes!)
Right on
You see this cat Barnes is a workyticket
(Shut your mouth)
But I’m talkin’ about Barnes
(Then we can dig it)
He’s a antwacky man
And no one understands him but a gadgie
(Martin Barnes)
Month: June 2015
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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