The Diary of A Simple Man

I'm the nostalgic type. I remember a lot of my favorite things from when I was a child, and I try to share them with Sebastian.

Books, for example; I have a copy of almost every old book that I loved as a young boy. I've managed to get copies of some of those old TV shows and specials, too (although I still haven't managed to get Hodge Podge Lodge, unfortunately).

Records were a bigger problem. My turntable died not too many years after I bought my first CD player - which was one of the first CD players on the market - and I hadn't picked up a new one. Many of my particular favorites were never reissued on CD, and some couldn't be obtained even in LP form. They seemed to be completely forgotten.

Most of those favorite old records had been lost over the years, but my parents still had a few of them. There were three that I remembered particularly fondly: dramatizations of the lives of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach. All that was left was the Mozart LP, and that was almost certainly in terrible condition. Sebastian is still young enough to enjoy those records, but time was running out...and I've never seen them on eBay or anywhere else.

Fast-forward to last month. Teri bought me a USB turntable for my birthday. I ordered a record-cleaner, which arrived on Friday; I tried to use it to clean The Story of Mozart. The record had been stored directly in the jacket for thirty years, and was very, very dusty. When I finished, the record looked clean. But as it played, large balls of dust were plowed up out of the grooves. The recording sounded terrible, with lots of loud hissing, strange distortions, and loud clicks from scratches. I worked the results over with the Audacity software that had come with the turntable, and was impressed at how much the results were improved. But they were still pretty poor.

Nonetheless I made a CD for Sebastian. I also decided to make the mp3 available online, because as far as I knew I was the only person who remembered that series and I thought it deserved to reach a new generation. I started to annotate the mp3 before posting it. But neither the jacket nor the label on the LP included the year that it was recorded! So I Googled "Tale-Spinners for Children", and found...a site that has mp3s of all 49 records in the series, plus dozens of recordings from similar series! The site's copy of The Story of Mozart sounds MUCH better than mine.

I suppose if you're old and cynical, you may not be able to enjoy these recordings. I'm sorry, if that's the case. But if you know any young children, you'd be doing them a favor to let them listen to some of these.

Tale-Spinners for Children

This is torture.

I've found something absolutely, totally wonderful online. Something I've wanted to find for decades. And now that I've found it, I have absolutely no one to share it with!

I'm listening to it right now: Jean Shepherd in 1973 on WOR, telling the story of the carbide cannon. I can remember clear as day the first time I listened to it, back when I was nine. And I'll be honest: I actually freaked out a bit when I heard the Dubonnet commercial ("Before, yeah before..."), and heard Jean talking about the "Watergate thing" that was going on. Holy cow!

But more than anything else, it's great to hear that story - the carbide cannon. Jean Shepherd, of course, is best known as the narrator and author of "A Christmas Story", but that's a bit of a misrepresentation of him; he's that funny, but more complex and a bit darker.

If you have 45 minutes to spend, you might want to give it a listen. Apparently there are lots more stories available, too.

I'm running an incredible sleep deficit.

I've reached the point where I'm sweating, all the time, and I'm half in a daze.

Maybe that explains why I've been struggling with an overpowering urge to talk like Lo Pan for the past couple of days...

Shut Up
Pisses Me Off

While I'm at it, here's a cool blog entry somebody did about Big Trouble In Little China.

Stan Ridgway is an American original - a real character. He's also a damned good musician.

If you've heard of him at all, it's probably as the lead singer of Wall of Voodoo; their best-known song was "Mexican Radio". But that was a long time ago, and he's been solo for many years.

His music is like the essence of the American southwest; dry, ironic, clever, a little seedy and desperate. A lot of his songs are stories, too, usually about the dark side of life. But there's a lot of humor underneath.

By the way, I saw him perform at a nightclub in the Boston area eight or nine years ago. He did a damn good show, and sounded as good as he does on his records. Which is, in my experience, pretty unusual.

What I have for you today is a "what the hell?" song. That's what I said the first time I heard it, but a year or two later, when I played the album again, it jumped into my head and stayed there. Stan and his band apparently like it too; I've heard that they perform it at almost every concert, sometimes extending it and jamming for a long time.

By the way, Teri said "what the hell?" when I first played it for her, too. That was about a year ago. Maybe I should play it for her again.

This is a relatively low-quality rip - 64 kbps. It's just over 2 megabytes. Give it a try, and see if it makes you say "what the hell?" too.

Stan Ridgway - (OK?) Uba's House of Fashions

Oh yeah - the first 24 seconds are...um...not exactly related. They're the "OK?" portion of the song. Uba's is the better (and louder) part.

Happy New Year!

We've been watching the Underdog show on Boomerang lately. I used to watch it as a kid, of course; it was one of my favorites.

The part I liked best was the theme itself, of course - one of the best of any cartoon, in my opinion. So I was particularly dismayed to discover that the Boomerang broadcasts did NOT have the original theme, but rather a horrible instrumental version that sounded like they were played by an amateur on a cheap sythesizer - simply awful!

"But maybe the originals sounded so horrible that they HAD to be replaced", I thought, and did a little research. Here's what I found:

NOTHING - no explanation anywhere of why the Underdog show was altered. No one on Usenet or on the web seems to have noticed the change. There's nothing in Google News, not that I expected there to be. Even the most popular Underdog websites have nothing at all about the substitution.

What's more, I checked my own hard drive and found a good-quality mp3 of the opening theme, and a decent one of the closing theme.

Lest we forget...here they are.

Underdog Opening Theme
Underdog Closing Theme

Sebastian has been singing a new song lately, and it stuck in my head.

I first heard him sing it when he saw a bale of hay at Wright's Dairy Farm. It was so cute that my brain melted. So today I tried to record it while we were driving in to the station. If you were wondering, Teri was driving and I was sitting in the back seat.

Unfortunately Sebastian was not co-operative. But I'll keep trying.

Here's what I was able to get from him: "Edith the Elephant" (failed)

I always liked this song. And it always irritated me that the only version I could find was the instrumental one by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I don't know who sang the version in the movie, but he's clearly insane and has a lot of gusto. That's a winning combination in my book.

So I snagged a WAV off of TV and converted it into an MP3 with Switch, which I must say is a great program.

Casino Royale

If that link doesn't work, try this one!

Casino Royale

I search for cool rare things. The internet has made that a lot easier, and I've found most of them. I can't afford them all, but I can find a source for them.

There are two exceptions. One is the TV movie Shadow On The Land, which I've been working on but will probably never be available (more about that some other time). The other was a song from a compilation of new wave/punk songs of the late 1970's called No Wave.

Someone borrowed that record from me in the 80's, and I never got it back.

So my extremely cool friend Steve had a CD sent to me of the album. The strange thing is, I had no idea that it was ever made into a CD! Turns out it's a Japanese disk that he found on eBay. The disk arrived today.

(I have to admit that I don't know why my friends like me, but I'm not complaining.)

I'd found lots of the songs on that album, but there was one that had stymied me: I'm Alive by a Canadian band called The Secret. I'd searched various peer to peer networks for years, and never found it. And now I have it legally!

I ripped it immediately, of course, and have put it up on my server overnight to download elsewhere.

The song is basically insane. You'll need a good sense of humor to enjoy it, but it's so bizarre that it's great. If you liked Ween's Push th' Little Daisies you might like this one very much.