Thursday, December 20, 2007

A few of my favorite Holiday sounds

Rather than another rant about the general awfulness of selection on radio stations that go "all Christmas songs" before Halloween, let's check out some links to favorite aural treats:

"Sound Opinions," NPR's rock'n'roll talk show, is scheduled for a visit from DJ Andy Cizran, who each year presents a collection of found vinyl Christmas oddities. The show airs Friday, Dec. 21, and a podcast should be posted to the site linked shortly afterward. It'll also be available on iTunes (eyes right for the link), but go to the website for a link to a full 60 min. mixtape download of "Seance with Santa."
Chicago Public Radio - APM: Sound Opinions on Demand - APM: Sound Opinions on Demand

My current favorite music show is freeform radio station WFMU's Saturday show, Fool's Paradise, a full two hours of early garage rock, schlockabilly, R&B and more Salvation Army finds by artists even I've never heard of! This link, when clicked sometime after Dec. 22, will let you stream that day's Christmas show. Roll over, Brenda Lee, they'll be rockin' around more than a Christmas Tree (the Dec. 15 show has an interview and choice rarities by the late Ike Turner).

Speaking of WFMU, their incredible "Beware of the Blog" still has, for your listening pleasure, ripped tracks from both volumes of Rhino Records' "The Rhino Brothers Present - The Worlds Worst Records," issued in 1983 or so. As a bonus, there are the four tracks of the Temple City Kazoo Orchestra's "Some Kazoos" album. Fair Use dictates these links will only be "live" for a brief while, so check 'em out now, even if they aren't holiday-themed.
Only trouble is, the .mp3's for Vol. 2 seem to not include "Paralyzed" by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. Fear not, for they had already ripped both sides of the original Mercury single here!
And here's the greatest radio Christmas story since, well, Jean Shepard's "A Christmas Story." Author David Sedaris reads his "The Santaland Diaries," about his experiences as an elf at Macy's Santaland. It repeats often on NPR's "This American Life," but here's a link to the program where it first appeared. The iTunes link at right has the current week's show (I'm feeling all linky today).
Chicago Public Radio - This American Life - This American Life

And Shep's story was drawn from several radio reminiscences, so there's no single radio show to hear the "original" on, but the site above has lotsa podcasts of original radio shows.

As the Beatles said, "Happy Kringle!"

Friday, October 26, 2007

Quick Photos: The Volo Auto Museum

We visited here to help relatives with the antique fair on Sept. 29. Of course, there's only one thing I really wanted to see:


Volo Auto Museum

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Crossed Out!

Surprise and disappointment this past weekend, as Barb and I got someone to watch the boy Saturday while we headed into Downtown to audition for "Merv Griffin's Crosswords." Yep, another game show, the last one developed by the Mervster.

I had spotted an ad in the Tribune's TV page inviting aspiring contestants to call or go online to get one's name in the hopper. Well, I'm a big aspirer. I entered myself, then after letting Barb know this was going on, I entered her. Luckily, we got called and managed to arrange to go to the same audition time.

In case you haven't seen it, the Chicago NBC affiliate -- WMAQ -- is housed in in a "Main Street USA" replica of the NBC Tower in New York: same peacock on top, plus presumably a Noo Yawk style deli at the side. Only problem is, it's set a few block to the east of Michigan Ave. When the local TV marketing gurus decreed that all morning news shows must be done from a sidewalk-level studio with gawkers' windows, they leased out the ground floor of the nearby Equitable Building.

Once we get there, it's a basic cattle call familiar to any game show veteran or actor. Wait in line to get a numbered tag, then wait in a plain room with uncomfortable plastic chairs (no doubt the same place Jerry Springer's audience get penned up). Finally the show coordinators get finished with the previous auditions, and they fill us in on the game action, some of the rules, and various chitchat. Oh, yes: And a few free T-shirts.

After filling in our personal and tax info, we get a quick quiz testing our crossword solving ability. The last page of our applications had single rows of crossword squares, which we tried to fill in based on clues PowerPointed on the wall in front of us.

Hey! This quiz is hard!

A few minutes later, we hand in our tests. All of us new partners in anxiety chat about the clues; "What did you put down for #12," etc.

Then one of the coordinators reads the numbers of the applicants who get to stay and be interviewed.

Barb and I are not on the list. We both failed the test.

Tails between our legs, we console ourselves with some yummy entres at Lou Malnati's. Hey, no one said we needed to feel bad.

Finally got a chance to watch the show on Monday. Hey, those puzzle are hard!

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Another Class Reunion

I started this blog with a post from my 25th high school reunion back in 2002. So I went back last month for my 30th.

Schaller, Iowa is in a typical rural area where female 4-H members still aspire to be named Pork Queen at the county fair each summer. Yet each year it becomes more of a promotional thing as family farms are swallowed up by giant hog raising factories. The various county pork producers associations will still be out there at local events, but their presentation is kind of indicative of the perceived blandness of Midwestern life. They'll serve "porkburgers," faux McRib, maybe even a pork chop sandwich. But if you want to "promote" pork in, say, the South or the west, you have a whole hog getting smoked up in a barbecue. Or at least some kind of 'cue, not just another fried patty. At least some sausage, perhaps?

But I found one outfit that went about it in a much more appropriate way. During the saturday afternoon Pop Corn Days parade, the kids in our family group were treated to fire companies, churches and various other floats all throwing out candy, mostly Tootsie Rolls. But toward the end of a parade was a horse-drawn wagon from a metal fabrication shop in nearby Galva. One of things they were showing off on the wagon was a smoker. As the wagon passed our location, for some reason the riders gestured to me to come up to the wagon. As I did, they handed me a delicious slice of smoked pork loin on a piece of bread. Mmmm… parade meat!

For all the images of bucolia I'm conjuring up, the Schaller area also happens to be one of the leading areas in the development of wind energy. Seems it's along the "continental divide" between the Missouri and Mississippi River basin, and thus a high point which gets plenty of steady winds. So now over 100 turbine windmills are spread around the area. Looks an awful lot like the Martian tripods standing along the landscape.

Cicadas R Gone

(A quick catch-up)

What was more amazing about the cicadas than their appearance was how fast they disappeared. A few news stories about the mess their dead bodies were leaving behind, and then—gone. Guess those birds and other bug-eating critters did a very efficient job, not to mention the fact that dead insects dry out pretty quickly. Many of 'em probably just disintegrated.

Interestingly, the biggest nuisance I found with the cicadas was in a downtown area: along Dixie Highway in Homewood. Seems they had a nice avenue of trees planted some time ago, and the traffic noise along that street keeps the birds away. That made a haven for the bugs, which swarmed around all day, getting into hair, flying into stores, and just bumping into things in general. You just had to remember that adult cicadas have no jaws to bite you with, and just be glad that hornets don't operate this way.

Still waiting to see the damaged twigs and gooey masses they say we'll have as the cicada nymphs drop to the ground.

Monday, June 11, 2007

Cicada Time!


As of this week, the li'l bugs are swarming. This is some video (actually audio) taken during lunchtime from work.

At home, we don't have as many, but we have lots more fat, happy birds. In nearby Homewood, where Dixie Highway has several trees planted along its downtown stretch, the constant traffic apparently keeps the birds, so the bugs are swarming like sparks at a campfire. In our area, we have a lot more seagulls, attracted by wide expanses of empty parking lots with plenty of garbage to eat, and they compete with local birds for the cicadas.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Not Stampworthy

Ranting about Star Wars stamps as I did below made me think about the topic of who has and who hasn't been honored on a U.S. Postage Stamp. What group of people is guaranteed to be placed on a stamp?

Only deceased U.S. Presidents. Gerald Ford gets one in July. Clinton, Carter and the Bushes each get one after their time on Earth is done. It's tradition, so no kvelling about the appropriateness of honoring any certain president.

Few other national office-holders are according a commemoration. The most under-represented group in this regard is U.S. Vice presidents.
By my count, there are 31 deceased people who served as Vice President without later becoming President. Of these, only one has been singled out for stampage:

  • Hubert H. Humphrey (under LBJ). Humphrey's stamp wasn't even a commemorative; it was a regular issue 52-cent stamp for heavier letters.
    • Elbridge Gerry, who served under James Madison, was depicted, but not named, as he was one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence and was thus shown in the John Trumbull painting, itself printed on a few stamps, …
      • …which was not of the actual signing of the Declaration, but its presentation by the drafting committee to the Contintal Congress; Trumbull just stuck in as many of the signers as he could. But I digress…
So for a Veep, getting honored isn't a slam dunk. Otherwise we'd be collecting stamps of scalawags like Aaron Burr or Spiro Agnew. Still one has to wonder why the Postal Service hasn't thought to just put out a sheet of all the Veeps. They've gone through all the Presidents more than a few times.

Many other historical people may be long overdue. I only count four Supreme Court justices, although several Supreme Court rulings have been commemorated. Only eight Cabinet Secretaries and nine U.S. Senators. There's still a lot of history to be explored.

Monday, April 02, 2007

What I Learned Today #2: Herbie Flowers

This comes from the fine radio show "Mint," which, regrettably, is being pulled from the BBC 6 schedule:


Herbie Flowers is someone you've heard, if you've heard classic rock at all. He's a session bass player who started out playing tuba on cruise ship bands in the early 60's, and began to pick up the jazz bass. During a stopover in New York he discovers the new trend of electric jazz, and starts out with the electric bass, which leads to a career as a session musician. Result: He created the two coolest bass lines of all 70's rock: David Essex' "Rock On" and Lou Reed's "Walk on the Wild Side." He's also on David Bowie's "Space Oddity," though I suspect most people don't associate that song as much with its bass line. And on Jeff Wayne's double prog LP "War of the Worlds."

Just as extra filler for this space, we was in the classical pops group Sky, with guitarist John Williams.

Your nugget of stuff you never knew was connected for today.

Friday, March 30, 2007

I vote for "Old" Vader

Before I was a comics, Star Trek and beer geek, I was a stamp collector. So I still keep up with new issues and buy cool ones to address my mail. And I know some of the rules about who can be honored on a stamp.

The primary rule has been that no living person is honored on a US stamp. Traditionally, they waited until someone had been dead for ten years before putting out a stamp, except for U.S. Presidents. There have been exceptions: Walt Disney's portrait was postified in 1968, two years after he died. Gemini astronaut Ed White's 1965 space walk was commemorated in 1967, a few months after he died in the Apollo 1 fire. And there've been several stamps showing the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon, despite Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin still being very much with us.

In some cases, the 10-year rule was more strictly enforced, leading to interesting omissions. In 1989, a block was issued honoring four of the five Best Picture nominees for 1939. They showed John Wayne from "Stagecoach," Gary Cooper from "Beau Geste," Judy Garland from "The Wizard of Oz," and Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh from "Gone With the Wind." All of these actors passed the "10 years gone" test, but the fifth nominee, "The Philadelphia Story," was not honored since their stars, Kathryn Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, were still around. There's a lot more excruciating minutiae I could go into, but I'll just note that recently the official window was reduced to five years.

Now that whole rule seems to fly out the window in 2007 with the issuance of a sheet commemorating "Star Wars'" 30th anniversary, It's a good profit maker for the Postal Service after all: every stamp sold to collectors and not used to mail something is a 39¢ profit. But let's take a look: over a dozen characters from the six movies, most of them portrayed by actors who are very much among us.

I suppose we're seeing a new rule at work here. The stamp design is actually paintings of the characters, not photographs of the actors. That just might open the door to a whole new range of subjects for future issues.
Meantime, the post office is also taking votes on which of the ten stamps from the sheet will be issued later as an individual stamp. Absent one Jar Jar Binks on this sheet, we must throw our support to "old" Darth Vader. Emperor Palpatine will get his due with the passing of his acolyte, Darth W. Bush.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Creepiest Johnny Cash soundtrack

Click here, while the link is active, for the raw footage of the overserved Chicago cop beating up a bartender:

http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=83968

(c) 2007, WMAQ. All rights reserved.

Without the voiceover of a news reader narrating the story, we find out that the beating ends just as the jukebox finishes playing Johnny Cash' "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

Somehow eerily appropriate.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Strange Dreams

If I have dreams all the time, like some say, I don't remember 99% of them. But last night was the exception.

I dreamed I was surfing the Web and I stumbled upon a new web site. It started installing software that kept asking me for personal information. My address, my Soc., my phone number, passwords, names of my family, all that. Somehow I realized this was the Devil's personal web address, and he was using data mining to make it easier to tempt souls. The more I tried to ditch the malware (how aptly named!) and restart, reboot or reinstall, the more each file or web page I tried to open creating pop-ups nagging me for personal information.

I was losing the battle to save my online soul.

And then I woke up, wondering what that was all about. A manifestation of our general paranoia about privacy on the internet? A warning to stop surfing the net at work?

I remembered the alleged evil web address, so I checked it out. Seems like a harmless personal site. I won't put up the name here, since in real life they had nothing to do with my dream.

But does anyone has apocalyptic visions about the internet?

Thursday, February 22, 2007

What I Learned Today #1: Loulie Jean Norman

I want to try and start a little feature that I may be able to update more often than I am now (my Super Bowl rant is still coming, trust me). In the course of wandering the internet, I pick up lots of halfway interesting facts. Some are answers to questions that have been in the back of my mind for years. I call this
What I Learned Today


Back in 1959, the inestimable Spike Jones produced an album called Spike Jones in Stereo--of course there was a mono version titled "Spike Jones in Hi-Fi." Subtitled "A Spooktacular in Screaming Sound!", it was a cute riff on monster movies that had become popular on TV at the time. Of course voice artist Paul Frees is there, reprising his rendition of "My Old Flame," and employing his stock voice cast of monster characters and mad scientists. He's joined by others in Spike repertoire company, plus Thurl Ravenscroft and a female character referred to only as "Vampira." Long had I wondered, after first hearing the album back in 1980; could this have been the legendary Vampira, one of the first TV monster movie hosts back in 1955, and later a star of the cult classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space?"

I was finally moved to look it up. The album's listing on allmusic.com shows the only female vocals are by one Loulie Jean Norman. As I suspected: "Vampira" was just an easy and generic name for a monster-based comedy bit.

But who was Loulie Jean Norman? Of course, she had a Wikipedia entry, where we find she was a coloratura soprano who had dubbed the singing voice of Diahann Carroll in the movie version of "Porgy and Bess," including the song "Summertime."

But, and here's the payoff: she also sang the vocalese in the opening theme for the original series of "Star Trek" back in 1966. Yes, there are lyrics that Gene Roddenberry wrote to get in on the music publishing royalties, but for most of the world, the only words to that theme are Loulie's "Aaah-AAAAAH-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahh!"

Now you know. Go read a book.