August 2025 – Sippican Cottage

Peak Amusing Pixel Disagreement: The Top 25 Opening Riffs in Christendom

August 28, 2025 22 Comments

Well, I sorta put my foot in it on Tuesday. I called the opening bars of I’ll Be Around by the Spinners among the 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. This led to an internet argument. This is my favorite kind of argument. Internet arguments are so bitter because the stakes are so small. Someone named Hitler even showed up in the comments. When the brushy mustache guy is mentioned in any capacity, you know you’ve reached peak amusing pixel disagreement.

Now, I’ve mentioned Christendom here, which is a geographic term, really. This makes sense in my disordered mind. I’m really talking about American pop culture. Since American pop culture has entirely taken over what’s left of Christendom, except for the parts of France where it’s drowned out by the muezzins, let’s roll with it.

Now, people are going to mention the most recognizable intros to them. This is a bit of a category error. I’m looking for the opening stanzas of pop hits that would be recognized instantly by the largest slice of lowbrow humanity. I won’t be including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or anything numbered and opused and so forth. As a matter of fact, to simplify it, I’m going to specify the years from 1960 to 2000. Everything since 2000 has been churned out of an audio sausage machine, so it’s pointless to argue about it. Everything before 1960 is bound to be Greek to generations that don’t read cursive.

Now some ground rules. They’re mostly for myself. Everyone else can do as they please in the comments, but this is how I played it. First, no artist(s) gets more than one entry. The Beatles and the Stones, for instance, have beaucoup candidates for a list like this, so I chose one each. Secondly, the list is 25 entries. If you want to add something, it’s gotta bump something off. This lends an amusing knife-fight vibe to the proceedings, which I’ve always enjoyed. But remember: no wagering. And thirdly, this is not a list of songs I like. I once played in a band that held a little contest in the middle of our shows. We’d play just the opening bars of songs like these, stop, and ask the audience to identify it. We learned very quickly what songs everyone knew, and which songs had one guy way in the back who yelled Green Eyed Lady! while everyone else scratched their heads.

Also, certain songs are verboten to the list. These include any riff currently banned in musical instrument stores. There is no point in mentioning Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, Smoke on the Water, Freebird, or something by Kansas. The opening riff should make the largest number of people yell, “Hell, yeah,” not groan. I’m also leaving Layla off the list. The opening riff might qualify, but Martin Scorsese only used the piano outro, and we will too. It’s music to see bodies tumbling out of a trash truck now, not whining about George Harrison’s first wife any longer.

The list is in no particular order, but that absolute winner is listed last:

I Can See Clearly Now — Johnny Nash
I Want You Back — Jackson 5
Long Cool Woman — The Hollies
Brown Eyed Girl — Van Morrison
Go All the Way — The Raspberries
My Girl — The Temptations
Sweet Home Alabama — Lynyrd Skynyrd
Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine
The Beatles – Day Tripper
Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
It Don’t Come Easy — Ringo Starr
Stayin’ Alive — Bee Gees
Green Onions – Booker T. & the MG’s
Doobie Brothers – Listen To The Music
Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival
Brown Sugar — Rolling Stones
Surfin’ U.S.A. — Beach Boys
La Grange — ZZ Top
Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) — Sly & The Family Stone
Rikki Don’t Lose That Number — Steely Dan
Super Freak — Rick James
Come And Get Your Love — Redbone
That Lady, Pts. 1 & 2 –The Isley Brothers
Blister In The Sun — Violent Femmes

And the absolute Number One slot on our top 25?

Whiter Shade of Pale — Procol Harum

I’ll tell you why you’ll never be able to bump this from the top spot. Opening riffs? There can be only one. The fellow playing the original organ melody, Matthew Fisher, didn’t write the song. Gary Brooker and Keith Reid did. So forty years or so later, Fisher sued, and said the song wasn’t nothing without his organ riff, and he wanted the credit. He wanted 50% of the songwriting royalties. He won the case, but they only gave him 40%. Brooker appealed, and Fisher kinda lost that one. The 40% held, but not retroactively. Then the House of Lords took it up, and said he should have his 40%, and retroactively too.

When your selection for intro riff is adjudicated by the House of Lords, you can bump A Whiter Shade of Pale off the top spot, but not before.

Upside Down Soul

August 26, 2025 10 Comments

I’d rank the guitar intro in the top 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. Maybe higher. That’s the antipodean Hindley Street Country Club taking a crack at it. I guess they’re just a cover band, but up several notches from the usual.

I was tempted to paste the Detroit Spinners original here. It was a million-seller in 1972. All the vids of the Spinners on Soul Train and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and similar shows are all lip synched. The band does their steps, and generally look genial, but I’d have preferred something fresh.

It’s understandable. Back then, the audiences just wanted to hear their favorite songs without waiting for the top of the hour over and over on the Top 40 stations. They might revolt if it didn’t sound just like the record. People are more interested in different versions of things these days, I think. It comes from having pretty much all forms of entertainment at your fingertips at all times. Something new sticks out.

The framework of the song lends itself to various permutations of it. This is my favorite bent version of it:

The original song was used to great effect as the outro for the movie Roman J. Israel, Esq., a very underrated movie:

I’ll be skippin’ and a-jumpin’, indeed.

Chad Is Smarter Than Your Average Internaut

August 25, 2025 3 Comments

By “Chad,” I’m refering to Chat GPT, or any of the other goofy AI apps available from every digital so-and-so on the planet these days.

Sippican Cottage is not a heavily traveled website in the scheme of things. My niche is being pleasant, more or less, and the audience for that is vanishingly small on the intertunnel, and getting smaller all the time. Que sera sera.

This website if very popular with bots, however. I block many of them, but it’s essentially impossible to get them all without blocking lots of regular people in the dragnet. And boy, do the bots misbehave. They occasionally hit the server so frequently that they amount to a Denial of Service attack. I have lots of bandwidth, but it’s an annoyance. The only bot from any of the big search engines that actually behaves itself is Yandex, which is a Russian bot. I have no idea why that’s so.

But the preponderance of bad bots these days are AI bots. There are many, many of them, and not just the ones you’ve heard of. Lots of mid-tier companies are assembling their own slopbots, I gather. They scrape the intertunnels willy-nilly, because they can. I thought you’d like to see what the end result of their scraping and reassembling the internet looks like, from someone who notices such things. Let’s start here:

I saw the following on somebody’s Fumblr page. I didn’t save the link, but it really doesn’t matter. Fumblr is Lord of the Flies for copyright anyway. Besides, I’m pretty certain the image isn’t copyrightable. Why? I’d bet folding money Chad made it. Viz.:

Most social media feeds like Fumblr and Instahole are aspirational.

Aspirational, sure. They are of course also full of merde. People are trying to project an image of a lifestyle or a vibe that they’ll never achieve, mostly because they’re not really trying to attain it in the first place. Their aspirations are strictly of the Potemkin variety. For example, Americana+ is always showing pictures of posh island getaways, top-shelf arm candy, and mixed drinks (mixed by someone else, natch). The website is harmless, I’m not bagging on them. In their mind they’re only posting pleasant things, which is rare enough on the intertunnel. But I always picture the proprietors living in a trailer park somewhere with a lot of skewed Live Laugh Love signs on the wall over their particle board kitchen table, with scads of Olive Garden coupons scattered around, and empty Natty Ice cans lined up on the windowsills.

I once saw a picture on their Fumblr page of a river scene, taken in autumn, with the leaves scattering their golden and scarlet casualties on the water. Quite scenic. Aspirational image, I guess. The problem with that sort of aspiration is that more information can ruin it. I recognized the exact spot. The picture was taken almost directly behind my ramshackle house, in my (former) walking-on-its-uppers town, within shouting distance of a reeking paper mill. If you aspired to live there, you certainly could have. That house cost the same as a used Kia. But reality doesn’t intrude much on these here aspirational intertunnels.

Back to our image. I instantly recognized the image when I saw it. That’s not to say it’s simply cut and pasted from elsewhere. It is a shade, a doppelganger of something familiar. It was recognizable, like a message being shouted underwater. I knew it was made by some form of Chad, and from what materials.

Here’s a picture I took and posted here of a real, live Mexican cantina, back in March:

One of the reasons Chad likes Sippican Cottage so much is that despite my loopy writing style and generous sprinkling of fart jokes, there’s rather a lot of information on the pages. You certainly can find a lot more pictures of the places we visited in Mexico on other people’s feeds, but I’ll bet no one has more descriptive text.

So I put the first image into Tineye, to see if I could find where it came from, but it had only one hit. Now it will have two, I guess. I think someone put “Draw me an illustration of a Mexican Cantina” into Chad, and got that back. Let’s look at them side by each, as they say in Woonsocket:

C’mon, man. The proportions of the doorframes, the height of the rusticated plinths, gray in one, red in the other, but the same proportions. Never mind that. Look at the sign that reads “CANTINA” over the door. Same font, same kerning. They’re both on a block background. The left-hand leg of the A and the right-hand leg of the N align with the outside edges of the doorframes perfectly. Even the angle of the wall itself is the same. I took the picture while standing in the street, and the building is raised on a sidewalk base, making it seem to lean back in the snapshot. They both do.

So that’s what Chad does. It learns things. It knows what a cantina doorway looks like, because people like me told him (it) what it looks like. It throws up a different set of swinging doors, but the swinging doors are at the same height. It knows that red and gold is a very popular color scheme down there, so it tosses it in. You can see the hinge-butt edge of the doors in my photo, so Chad shows them closed, and found the right sort of door to display. It’s a good representation of the thing, without being the thing.

I also figure that Chad did it, because Tineye hasn’t referenced my image yet, but all the various Chads have crawled it lots of times already:

So what’s it all mean? Well, let me put it like this: People almost unanimously reject the “intelligence” part of “artificial intelligence” when it’s mentioned. Everyone says that all the various Chads are dumb, because they’re able to ask it dumb questions, and get dumb answers in return. All I know is that Chad is intelligent enough to trust what I publish on the internet. It trusts it enough to transmogrify it into something similar, a dispositive image of a thing,while very few real people are intelligent enough to even look at it in the first place. Case closed. Chad might be dumb, but it’s smarter than an average person on the internet.

Ya Can’t Have Too Many Mooses. Mooseses. Meece. Whatever

August 23, 2025 5 Comments

I posted this about fifteen years ago. So sue me. I think that moose are pretty interesting animals. They ain’t pretty, but they are pretty interesting. I don’t know why, but I remember their scientific name: alces alces. A moose is just the biggest kind of deer, when you get right down to it. And by big, I mean 1,500 pounds big, occasionally. Tall, too. Sometimes 7 foot at the shoulder. That’s why you don’t want to run into a moose on the highway. It’s lethal to the moose, but it’s a suicide pact with anyone in the front seats, too. The vehicle hits their legs, and the moose’s big ol’ body flops right in through the windshield. It’s about the same as having a Harley thrown at you.

Like most of the more intelligent animals, they eventually figure out that the weird pink creatures mean them no harm, and let them poke at them without taking too much umbrage. Some animals can even remember a kindness done to them. Your house cat, can, for instance. It doesn’t cut any ice with them, but they do remember it.

A Modest Proposal on Immigration

August 22, 2025 4 Comments

I think we should let any Mexican who wishes to come to the United States and live here to do so. I like Mexicans a lot, and wouldn’t mind more of them here in the US. And I don’t think they should have to swim the Rio Grande and then hide in the shadows, or at least the shadows cast by the Home Depot. I think all they should have to do is fulfill the same requirements that Americans do if they want to move to Mexico. Fair is fair.

So I looked them up. Here they are, the requirements to obtain a Temporary Residency Permit in Mexico (good for one year). As we go along, I’ll be reversing these requirements to see what would be involved if you want to come to the US from Mexico, and converting them from Mexican weights and measures (futbol) to American (football), so that there’s a fair playing field:

Valid Passport

You’re going to have to show both the original, and supply a copy. It’s got to be valid for at least 6 more months. You’ll need additional recent passport-sized photos, too, in color, front view, with a white background, and no glasses.

Completed Application Form

You’ll be asked some uncomfortable questions. Have you ever been arrested? Bye bye. By the way, you have to have the form translated into Spanish if you’re entering Mexico, so turnabout is fair play. Our forms will be in English. The various consulates in the US where you apply for your permit to live in Mexico will be glad to supply you with a list of ~~brothers-in-law~~ translators who are qualified to perform this to their satisfaction. This approach is well known in US government offices in places like Boston, although their brothers in law are all Irish, but you get the idea.

Consular Interview

If you’re an American heading to Mexico, and the consulate likes all the paperwork you submitted, this interview is conducted at a Mexican consulate in the country where you currently live, i.e.: you cannot apply for this visa while you’re in Mexico. You can get it renewed inside Mexico, but not initially granted. So to keep it even, our southern neighbors will have to queue up at the US consulates in Mexico if they want to come to the US. There are nine in Mexico, so the lines to get into one should only stretch to Belize or so. At these interviews, you can be turned down for any reason, by the way, not only because your paperwork isn’t in order, so be sure to stock up on breath mints beforehand.

Proof of Financial Solvency

Now we’re going to have to do some international math, so bear with me. To qualify for a Temporary Resident Permit, which will allow you to live in Mexico legally for one year, you have to prove your financial solvency in one of two ways:

Monthly income. You have to show proof that you’ve earned 300 days of the Mexican daily wage every month for at least the last six months. For Americans, that would be about $4,000USD to $4,500USD a month.
Savings or investments. If you can’t qualify for the monthly wage requirement, you can show proof that you’ve held 5,000 days-worth of the Mexican daily wage for at least the last 12 months. It can’t be borrowed money. Retirement funds are OK. In USD, that would be around $70,000.

OK. The US shouldn’t be so fussy. Let’s just use the same numbers. I had to look it up, but the US national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. So that yields $58.00 per day for an 8-hour day. Let’s plug it in, and see what a Mexican would have to have burning a hole in their wallet to qualify to come to America under the same conditions:

Monthly income: 300 x $58.00 equals $17,400 USD per month, for at least the last six months.
Savings or investments: 5,000 x $58.00 equals $290,000 USD, held for at least the last twelve months.

Of course very few people earn the American national minimum wage. States set their own minimum wages, and they’re a lot higher. Since so many Mexicans would like to move to California, it might be fairer to use the Golden State’s minimum wage of $16.50 per hour as the base rate. So that gets us:

Monthly income: 300 days x $132.00 USD per day equals $39,600 USD per month.
Savings or investments: 5,000 days x $132 per day equals $660,000 USD.

You’ll have to keep in mind that Mexico demands that the monthly income of a USian has to stay the same after you move to Mexico. You’re not allowed to work in Mexico, or have customers there. So to keep it equal for Mexicans moving to the US, which ever way they were earning their $39,600 per month in Mexico, they’re going to have to make sure that someone keeps mailing it to them after they move. You can’t take a resident’s job to earn it in Mexico, so it should be the same for the US. Your Social Security payments can count towards your income. I suspect that Mexican social security payments are less than $17,400 USD per month, but I might be wrong. The government owns the oil company down there, so maybe they’re all getting fat checks from Tio Petróleo. I am beset by doubts on that score, however.

You can skip renewing your Temporary Residency Permit for Mexico by applying right away for a permanent one. If you’re American, you’ll need to prove you earn around $6,750 per month, or have $269,300 in savings or investments to qualify. I suppose the US could just use the same numbers for incoming Mexicans, but if we were to use their own formula based on days of minimum wage, you’d need around… around…

All this arithmetic is giving me a headache. I’ll let Chad do it for us:

Plenty of movie producers make $66,000 a month, so if you want to move to L.A., I don’t see why everyone shouldn’t be required to earn that. Hell, I don’t think you should be able to move to Los Angeles from anywhere else in the US unless you have at least $2.6 million in ready cash. How else could you hope to put down first, last, and the security deposit on your rental apartment, with enough money left over to fill your car’s gas tank to escape in case the city burns down again?

So let’s stop making Mexicans run the Rio Grande Triathlon to get into the country (running over the Sierra Madre mountains, swimming the Rio Grande, and riding in the back of a stake truck for two days). Just show up at one of our convenient consulates with $1,160,000, and you can stay indefinitely.

It’s true you can jump the line going into Mexico by marrying a Mexican citizen. I believe the reverse still applies. A Mexican man could marry an American woman to become a citizen, for example, but I can’t recommend it. I married the last sane American woman a while back, and the country is currently populated entirely with assistant district attorneys. I suggest you save your pennies and fly solo.

Hickory Shampoo and Other Discontents. WHOOOO!

August 20, 2025 4 Comments

Of course this video has been pawed over, analyzed, and generally chewed like a behavioral studies cud by so many ruminant internet animals that offering my input would be superfluous. But, in the parlance of our times: Do you know who I am? I’m Sippican Cottage! Superfluity is my métier!

I don’t really care too much about these two proto-sea hags in particular. Everyone else has pretty much covered the waterfront [The management cannot endorse this pun, and disavows any responsibility for it] about their sense of entitlement and so forth. Salt water is wet, y’all. But I’d like to bring something new to the table. Add some seasoning to the stew, and stir the pot, too. Share the benefit of my vast experience. So here goes: Just how obnoxious do you have to be to get the heave-ho from Clarke’s bar?

I’ll head the achshually crowd off at the pass and testify that I’m fully aware that the name of the establishment is the Clarke Cooke House. No one ever calls it anything but Clarke’s bar in my experience, which while somewhat out of date, is voluminous. You see, the minute I espied the screen cap on those videos I knew exactly where these two strumpets were getting their comeuppance. The quarterboard that reads Wine Bistro Spirits. The host’s standup desk thingie. The striped awning. I’ve been in Clarke’s lots of time. That’s Bannister’s Wharf in Newport, Rhode Island. I know it inside and out, and since trolling by it on Gargoyle Earth shows that most everything there is unchanged from the way I remember it, I’ll assume what goes on around there hasn’t changed much either.

Bannister’s Wharf is attached to Bowen’s Wharf right next to it, too, another place I know intimately. I performed in bands dozens of times in that general vicinity, and been drunk dozens of additional times, usually not at the same time. They set up a big tent at the end of one of those wharves, I forget which, and we performed there. There was a restaurant across from Clarke’s with a function room over it, and we’d played for another musician’s wedding reception there, and to give you some idea of the way people act at that locale, the groom jumped out of the second story window halfway through the reception. If you manage to cross America’s Cup Ave. without getting run over, you’ll be standing on Thames Street in front of One Pelham East. I performed there several times, and still have PTSD from it. I played in the nearby Newport Bay Club, too, and used to go across the street on our breaks to pound a quick beer with the jazz band that played in the Red Parrot.

You see, Newport has always been THE location for white bread girls like the two imbeciles in the video to let it all hang out. And by let it all hang out, I really mean yelling Whoo! a lot, and asking you to play Brown Eyed Girl for the third time that evening. Did I mention, WHOOH? Of course back in the day the WHOOOOH was accompanied by five drunk girls making ducklips while one drunk girl took an out of focus picture of the other drunk girls with an Instamatic. Now it’s resting bitch face straight into your Instagram cesspit, but the result must be the same. WHOOOOOOH!

Oh man. I’m having flashbacks. Salve Regina night at the One Pelham East. Yikes. Catholic college girls let loose for the evening, packed in like bullets in a box, yelling WHOOOOOH and climbing up on the stage to paw at us and yell whooo into your microphone, which transmogrified it into WHOOOOOOOO! The stage was several feet higher than the floor, thank god, or I wouldn’t be here to call myself Ishmael and finish the story. A WHOOOH! girl once called me to the edge of the stage in the middle of a song and motioned to me to bend down where she was. When I did, figuring all she wanted was to yell Brown Eyed Girl in my ear for the fourth time, she grabbed a fistful of my shirt, trying to kiss me, and pulled me head first off the stage onto the floor below. That certainly made everyone (but me) yell WHOOOOOOOOOH! Later, on my break, I was walking to the men’s room, and the girl’s room door opened, and there she was, with a gaggle of her friends, and they dragged me in there. I eventually escaped with my life, a torn shirt, and more lipstick on me than a maiden aunt, but I still have tinnitus from the WHOOOOOOOOOOH! they let loose in such close quarters.

And Clarke’s? I’ll ask it again. What in tarnation would a girl have to do to get bounced from Clarke’s? If you shot someone in there, they’d probably ask you to put on a silencer before you shot anyone else, but they wouldn’t bounce you. Clarke’s? Really? Oh, how we abused that place. My friend Mark knew someone who worked in the kitchen. He took me and my buddies to the little wooden gate that hides the alley between the buildings, and we entered through the kitchen, made our way through the rugby scrum of sunburned drunken hedge fund managers and dental hygienists in the bar, and came out at that bouncer lectern you see there in the video. Mark would tell the guy we just went in for a minute to see if someone we knew was there, and he wasn’t, so could we have our $10 cover charge back? He gave each of us ten of someone else’s bucks and we’d go right across the alley for oysters and pitchers of beer. That was pretty obnoxious of us, but we were just trying to fit in around there. So I’ll repeat myself: Just how obnoxious do you have to be to get bounced from Clarke’s?

Please understand that I’m talking about how hard it would be for female humans to get bounced from any nightspot around there. If you’re not of the distaff set, you could get bounced, literally and figuratively, by the local constabulary, sometimes at the drop of a hat. This was also a known fact. But girls? Never.

I’m mystified (not really) by the assistant D.A., who not only doesn’t know the law that forbids turning off a cop’s camera under those circumstances, she’s also unaware that the Newport police department has never been in the business of handing out hugs. Everyone always said the were pretty enthusiastic about applying the hickory shampoo to your scalp. I got stopped by the cops while going home over the Newport Bridge once, going about 40 MPH. It was really late (early), and the bridge was deserted. The cops said the limit was 25, because of “construction,” here’s your ticket. I mentioned it wasn’t posted, and there was no construction. He asked me if I’d like to come down to the station and “discuss it.” I demurred, because I’ve never wanted a second chance for my fontanel to fuse up. With cop-worn cameras, that approach seems to have morphed into a hair trigger, no compunction about telling you to STFU and move along, and a quick trip to the hoosegow if you put up a fuss. The STFU part is the same as it ever was, though.

So I know something the assistant D.A. doesn’t seem to. First, the Newport police ask you. Then they tell you. Then they make you. There’s no other steps, and they’re always in the same order. But to even the score, she knows something I’ll never know: How in the hell do you get bounced from Clarke’s bar?

I’ve Caught Bud Jamison Disease

August 16, 2025 9 Comments

By all accounts, Bud Jamison was an affable sort of guy. He certainly had a genial face. He used to play cops and tough guys, too, but it’s his big smile I remember most. He appeared in 450 movies and “shorts” in 30 years. With that sort of resume, he must have played every sort of person at one time or another. Except for a skinny person, of course.

Most of the movies were silent. It’s almost beside the point to describe many of those. Bud tries to punch Charlie Chaplin in The Champion, which is great fun. He’s “That Guy” in a lot of ancient stuff. However, I don’t know about you, but I’m not clamoring for a re-release of John Barrymore’s rendition of Ahab in 1930’s version of Moby Dick, even if I can see Bud play an uncredited shipping agent in it. So it will be Bud’s curse or blessing to be remembered forevermore by almost everyone who recognizes him at all as the guy who suffers along while the Three Stooges do their thing near him or to him. He made 38 shorts with the Stooges, including the very first one.

My mother hated the Three Stooges. We were forbidden from watching them. Back in the day, there wasn’t much on television after school. The Stooges were run on a nearly endless loop on the off-brand teevee stations that couldn’t afford to show anything but re-runs of ancient entertainments. So you can imagine how well the interdiction about watching them went. Mom played pretty good defense when it was man-to-man, but faltered a bit when she had to switch to zone.

She testified that she was certain that if we watched the Stooges, I’d eventually hit my little brother in the head with an ax. That was just another of the endless series of moral panics that has gripped the American female zeitgeist down through the ages. Of course I would have liked to hit my little brother in the head with an ax from time to time, but I didn’t need the Stooges to urge me on. Who hasn’t wanted to hit their little brother with an ax, or drag a crosscut saw across their fontanel, or grab their nose with a pliers? But like most moral panics, there was no real danger of stuff like that happening. We didn’t own an ax.

In a broad sort of a way, there were only two camps in the recycled vaudeville teevee audiences. The Three Stooges, and the Marx Brothers. The Marx Brothers made full length movies, and the Stooges made shorts, but they were essentially weird doppelgangers of each other. It’s easy to say the Stooges were more lowbrow, because the Marx Brothers relied more on wit. But I’m not so sure that’s fair. The Stooges, like Bud, were genial. I like snark as much as the next guy, so I can enjoy the Marx Brothers movies, but in its heart it’s a bit nasty.

America has become a very snarky place. The teevee got really snarky after a while, when all the gentle humor was expunged and replaced with nothing but situational cutting remarks, doled out by the half hour. The Stooges hit each other, and made fools of themselves, but they didn’t ever exhibit a truly mean bone in their body, except by compound fracture, of course. Groucho was funny, but he helped adumbrate the proto-bile we’re all drowning in. They were both sets of Everyman, with posh operators, authority figures, and criminals taking whacks at them. The Stooges were better at taking haughty people down a peg when you get right down to it, just by being themselves, really. Like they did to Bud, when it was required:

“Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years.” There it is. That’s Bud Jamison disease, and I’ve got it bad.

You see, I’m on the sidelines now, as far as doing anything practical in the real world. At one time or another, I’ve done all sorts of manual labor that results in the world being physically altered by the end of the day. Besides the stuff I built or repaired out in the landscape, at any time in the last thirty years or so I’ve been able to go downstairs and return with whatever was required at the time, everything from a dining room table to a patched bicycle tire. Now I live in an apartment, and my tools fit in a shoe box, and I get to see people doing practical things, and think, Gosh, I’d sure like to help.

So I saw this video about mimicking oak woodgraining by a man who appears to paint scenery for lord knows what.

He’s disabled, so we have to make allowances. By disabled, I mean he’s English or British or something. He’s required by the Magnum Cortex or whatever they use for laws over there to talk with that funny accent, and call everything by its wrong name. He’s required to call shellac “button polish,” and starts blabbering about PVA, which stands for poly-vinyl-acetate. The poor sod is forced to talk in acronyms instead of saying Elmer’s Glue and being done with it. Then he’s probably got a gun to his head, and they force him to call latex paint “emulsion paint.” Just because it’s a British gun and will probably hang fire, doesn’t mean the threat won’t feel real. They really treat folks unfairly over there.

Everyone in the good ol’ USA calls every kind of paint you can wash out of your brushes (and your nose hairs, if you’re like most housepainters) using only water. Of course latex and acrylic paint (emulsion) are two different things, but no American can keep two things in their head at the same time, alongside all that freedom we keep in there. And man, did my eye twitch when he called a roller cover a “rag roller.” English, do you speak it? I’m pretty sure I do. Fairly sure. Whatever.

At any rate, videos like this turn me right into Bud Jamison. I’m sure if I told David Rowse, the pleasant and talented fellow who made the video, that Gosh, I’d sure like to help. You know, I haven’t had a paintbrush in my hand in years, he might be tempted to tell me to go mix up a batch of spotted paint. Fair enough. But in addition to being a busybody, I’d be the worst kind of busybody extant: I wouldn’t offer to help. I’d offer advice. That’s miles worse.

Of course my method is what we fellows in the painting trade used to call “quick and dirty.” You know, like having sex with a car mechanic.

Anyone can review my technique in an old couple of posts here: Graining a door.

And please remember my braggart’s motto: I can do it better than anyone who can do it faster, and I can do it faster than anyone who can do it better.

Playing Office

August 11, 2025 12 Comments

All thanks to Leslie the watercolorist for this portrait.

My younger son had a wish come true.

Maybe wish is the wrong word. No, definitely the wrong word. Wishing is done on an industrial scale these days. I never liked anything to do with Harry Potter, for instance, because at its heart, it’s just wishing that things were different, and by wishing, it happens. A steady diet of that rots the mind, and the soul.

No, not a wish. He had an ambition? I guess. I seriously don’t know what to call it.

He was really young. Maybe eight or nine years old. We didn’t have any money to speak of, so the kids had to amuse themselves a lot with whatever’s handy. He’d make Rube Goldberg machines with his marbles and various bric a brac from his toy box. Stuff like that. Then his ambition, if that’s what it was, showed up.

It was immensely charming, and quite offbeat. It was all his idea. He put on a suit jacket and a clip-on tie. He wore eyeglasses with no lenses in them. He carried a leatherette backgammon board that looked vaguely like an attache case. He set up an office in his room. He didn’t have a computer or anything for his office workstation, so he made one. He found an old monitor and set it on the desk. He got a printed image of a spreadsheet, and taped it to the monitor. He found an old IBM keyboard in the electronic junk box we keep, the kind that goes clickety clack real loud, and put it in front of the faux spreadsheet. He found a recording of office noise somewhere or another, and played it in the background. And best of all, he’d commute down the hall, and sit down and pretend to work.

Later on, he started to crush on Mavis Beacon. We had a CD with her lessons on it, and he loved her voice, and I guess the typing lessons, although I can’t remember when he couldn’t type. Eventually, he composed a vaporwave tribute to playing office called, get this, Playing Office, and sampled the little burble of notes that used to play when Mavis turned on.

His mother taught him at home in his grammar school days, dutifully slipping one worksheet after another under his nose as he sat at an antique school desk we got at a flea market. When he got to high school age, we enrolled him at a statewide charter school. We lived in a rural place, and the schools were uniformly awful, so it seemed like the way to go. He was co-valedictorian of his school, which since it’s a statewide thing, that technically makes him a valedictorian of the whole state, I guess. It was entirely online. When it was time to attend college, I’m sure he was smart enough for fancy schools, but he likes Maine, and we couldn’t afford to send him anywhere else, anyway. He went to UMaine, and graduated in three years, summa cum laude, with a B.S. in Computer Security. He got an A-minus once, to avoid being boring.

Everyone goes into debt to go to college these days. They select the most expensive one they can find, and then they treat it like a four year Carnival cruise, or early retirement or something. Our boy stayed in Maine, because that’s where he grew up, and he has a loyalty, or affection or something similar for it. Practical, too. He did the whole thing online, same as high school. He got every manner of scholarship they had, including one that we never did figure out the reason it was awarded. After the tuition was paid, there was money left over for living expenses, but he lived at home the whole time. He had enough to buy a car, and graduated with the leftover ten grand in his bank account.

We love the picture of him they took with his cap and gown and diploma. He’s smiling so broadly you can’t see his eyes. It really meant something to him. It certainly meant a lot to my wife and I when we sat in the big auditorium and watched him get his sheepskin. You couldn’t see our eyes, either, because we were wiping them.

He wanted a job, but they’re hard to come by, no matter what the BLS says. He limited himself to Maine jobs, for the same reasons that he stuck with it for his education. He was willing to start out for short money for any job even remotely associated with his credentials. I couldn’t believe anyone would turn him down, but they did. If they had a brain in their head, they would have driven to his house and kidnapped him as soon as he applied. But the process for filling jobs is supremely dysfunctional nowadays. I really shouldn’t have been surprised.

He hung in there, and didn’t complain. Eventually, it was all for the best, and a useful company, run by nice people, with an office in a posh town in Maine, decided that maybe they could use someone like him in their office. You know, the best of the best this state has to offer.

His car was in the shop for repairs, so we gave him a lift home after work the other day. A mundane thing, perhaps, a quotidian chore at the end of an almost endless series of everyday tasks, strung out on the calendars in the rear-view mirror since the day the doctor slapped him, instead of me as I deserved.

I remember distinctly the last time I carried my two sons in from the car after a long road trip, and up the stairs to bed. One on my back, and one in my arms. Such ghosts appear unwonted from time to time. The finality of things sometimes cements them in your head. So I’ll remember dropping him off for the rest of my days, watching him walking up the driveway to his house, his empty lunch pail under his arm, a man in full. When things shift like that, you notice. He’s not playing office any more.

Ginger vs. Mary Ann? Please

August 8, 2025 11 Comments

Ginger or Mary Ann comparisons are so over. The Bailey Quarters vs. Jennifer Marlowe contest isn’t much better. C’mon, Wilma Flintstone vs. Betty Rubble is more interesting than those two. You can have your Beatles vs. Stones arguments all day long for all I care. There’s only one, real, true way for me to get judgey about your judgment:

Perez Prado vs. Esquivel!

Perez didn’t write the first tune in that medley, Guaglione. It’s a Neapolitan song with music by someone named Giuseppe Fanciulli. I’ve heard Italian names before, that one about takes the cannoli. The song has words, too, by Nicola Salerno, a name that sounds like a guy with bodies in his trunk. Anyway, it got covered by everyone from Claudio Villa to Dean Martin, but it wasn’t until Perez Prado put some mambo afterburners on it that it really took off.

So there’s contestant Numero Uno. A mambo king. But in this corner, weighing in at 97 pounds (if he has rolls of quarters in his pocket), we have Esquivel!

Cher and Madonna and Elvis think they’re so cool because they only need one name, but Esquivel! puts them all in the shade. Those other pretenders don’t have an exclamation point in their names. Case closed.

So now we’re really getting down to it. Prado’s Mambo King act, vs. Esquivel! and his Space-Age Bachelor Pad Music. Fight!

Of course truly major decisions like this one require careful assessments of the essential differences. So let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. You’re going to have to choose between Prado’s pencil-thin moustache and Esquivel!’s gamma-ray-resistant eyeglasses.

Perez has made this decision even tougher by occasionally sporting both the pencil-thin moustaches and uber-cool sunglasses.

I know, tough choice, huh? Esquivel! was a visionary, of course, and not just for music. He correctly surmised that his taste in eyewear would become so universally accepted as cool that even plagiarizing presidents of Ivy League colleges would be wearing them eventually. So he tried to steal a march on history, and perhaps on Perez, by upping the ante and barging into the seventies with a wispy Van Dyke beard, suitable for a modestly dangerous villain on the old Star Trek.

Ah, the Engelbert Humperdinck “polyester lasagna” shirt, the Vitalis hair, the bow tie suitable for manned flight, the doughy Abba-looking chicks. Esquivel! truly had it going on.

You’re going to have to decide if Mucha Muchacha or Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White (the latter half of the first video) is the happiest song ever recorded. This may be impossible, because they basically both are in some sort of Heisenberg dead cat/live cat in the box situation. They both can’t be Numero Uno, but they are. Maybe you’ll just have to decide if you like The Big Lebowski or Office Space better than the other. But that invites a temptation to settle the challenge by dragging in Henry Mancini from Jackie Treehorn’s house, and “third man in” is considered bad taste in street fights like this one.

The first person that says, “Neither. Xavier Cugat,” I’m coming looking for you. And not with binoculars, either.

She’s Got That Kind of Loving

August 5, 2025 6 Comments

Both Jean and Bob Moffett mentioned Patsy Cline in the comments after an earlier post about George Jones. I found this video of Patsy performing Lovesick Blues on Community Jamboree in 1960, with a charming Ferlin Husky introduction.

I made the same mistake most everyone must make when they hear that tune sung by anybody. You figure it’s a Hank Williams song. Well, it ain’t.

It was written by Tin Pan Alley composers named Cliff Friend and Irving Mills, way back in 1922. It was recorded a bunch of times after that, including by a minstrel show singer named Emmet Miller and a country singer named Rex Griffin. Hank must have heard on the radio and liked it, and he performed it on the Louisiana Hayride radio show in 1948. The audience loved it, so Hank recorded it in 1949, and it spent 16 weeks at Number One on the Billboard Top Country and Western singles chart. People forget the minstrel show versions of things right quick when you have a smash like that.

The name Cliff Friend probably doesn’t ring a bell for you, but maybe it should. He’s one of those anonymous guys whose name you used to see going round and round on the label in small print on the center of a 45 record. But Cliff never really got much public acknowledgement for his most popular tune, one that makes Lovesick Blues pale in comparison. He co-wrote The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down.

What the hell is The Merry-Go-Round-Broke Down? You can be forgiven for asking, but trust me, you know it:

Maybe you prefer the later versions:

By the way, to go even further down this rathole, the wild lap steel Hye-Wye-En glissando that opens up the later versions of the Looney Tunes song was played by Freddie Tavares. Besides being a crack lap steel player, he was a lead designer of the Fender Stratocaster guitar. You can see him at work alongside Leo Fender in 1959 in an earlier blogpost, Minor Seventh Heaven.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, let’s get back to Patsy Cline singing Lovesick Blues on teevee. It’s fantastic.

People often think they’d like to be singers or other forms of famous musicians. If you’ve never had a curtain rise in front of you and been confronted by 2,000 eyeballs, or 1,999 if Peter Falk is in the audience, you might not understand how unnerving it might be. To take it up a notch, Patsy has to stare into the cold, dead eye of the TV camera, and somehow connect with anonymous people in a virtual audience as if they’re in front of her. She makes it look easy. It ain’t, or we’d all be doing it.

I was going to commend Jean and Robert for their enthusiasm for Patsy, but I’m not sure exactly why. I’ve literally never met any human being who doesn’t think Patsy Cline is excellent. Stoner, greaser, big band devotee, punker, jazz aficionado, blues singer in a porkpie hat, hip hop breakdancer, it doesn’t matter. Everyone loves Patsy Cline.

So I guess I can only thank Jean and Robert for reminding me to post a video of her. It’s the least I can do, and I always do the least I can do.

Sippican Cottage

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Chad Is Smarter Than Your Average Internaut

Ya Can’t Have Too Many Mooses. Mooseses. Meece. Whatever

A Modest Proposal on Immigration

Hickory Shampoo and Other Discontents. WHOOOO!

I’ve Caught Bud Jamison Disease

Playing Office

Ginger vs. Mary Ann? Please

She’s Got That Kind of Loving

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