Welcome to the stone age, South Dakota! Here’s your new logo. (via)
Month: March 2006
Round Swamp
… is a band whose influences include Frank Zappa, Rufus Wainwright, Wilco, Weird Al and Flo & Eddie. Whoah, will have to give their tracks a listen when I get home. Look at those influences! Might as well have thrown Liza Minelli and the Tuvan Throat Singers in the mix while they were at it.
Meet The Press
TV interviews gone awry (including of course Zappa on Crossfire). I’d read about Tom Cruise’s looney bin performance on Oprah but hadn’t seen the actual footage until now — what can I say, the guy frightens me.
Würzburg ’82 (2)
… können Sie ab Heute hier döwnlöaden für eine Woche.
The Lost Tour
From AlterDudes (a site well worth keeping an eye on, methinks), an interview with Frank Zappa in Electronic Musician, dated September ’86:
EM: What about live performances? Would you go out with the Synclavier?
FZ: I’ve been trying to figure out whether it’s practical. I’ve talked to an agent about it and discussed the possibility of a tour in the fall, but without a major advertising campaign to create an interest for what the machine can do or what I’m doing with it, I doubt whether a tour like that would attract much attention. I’m certainly not going out and playing “Dinah Mo Hum ” or the rest of that stuff anymore because that’s like–what?–that’s a million years ago.
Doorknob
Today’s Newsgroup Post of the Day comes from a drawing-group I subscribe to, that shall remain nameless:
I’ve just added some posts to my blog. They may not be quite “on topic” but as Karen says, “draw whatever you want…” I am, however, working on my doorknob and after that I’ll get to a self portrait.
Gag Me With A List Of Catch Phrases
Here’s a massive list of catch phrases to waste some time on, including “Gag me with a spoon!”, “Yowza, Yowza, Yowza!” and “Hi-ho Silver!” yet sadly missing “Great Googly Moogly!”. (And yes, I probably need to get out more.)
Cliché Finder
Have you been searching for just the right cliché to use? Are you searching for a cliché using the word “cat” or “day” but haven’t been able to come up with one? Just enter any words in the form below, and this search engine will return any clichés which use that phrase.
Drinking The Kool-Aid
Time for our bi-monthly linguistic minute. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” — now there’s an expression I didn’t know the origins of!
Wikipedia to the rescue:
The idiomatic expression drinking the Kool-Aid is a reference to the 1978 cult mass-suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Jim Jones, the leader of the group, convinced his followers to move to Jonestown. Late in the year he then ordered his flock to commit suicide by drinking grape-flavored Flavor Aid laced with potassium cyanide. In what is now commonly called “the Jonestown Massacre”, 913 of the 1100 Jonestown residents drank the brew and died. (The discrepancy between the idiom and the actual occurrence is likely due to Flavor Aid’s relative obscurity versus the easily recognizable Kool-Aid.)
Well I’ll be. You’d be surprised how many people are still drinking the Kool-Aid by the way.
Rock Swings
I know most of you will have to resist vomiting when I mention Paul Anka, but bear with me: his Rock Swings album, a collection of rock covers, has an oddly irresistible charm to it which at times transcends the unintentionally comedic arrangements (listen to “Black Hole Sun”!). And in the same vain, here’s Henry Mancini’s version of “Walk Like An Egyptian”.