Thinking

 

(That sure is a big dictionary page.) Remember what I was saying last week?  "Old time radio mashup site."  

"Thinking" is a good title for this week.  It's from "The Dental Clinic of the Air", performed on a musical saw by Sam or Stan.  The program is in a collection of Old Time Radio one-shots, on the Internet Archive.  At least it used to be.  I found it just now on a new site called "Radio Echoes".

Thinking.  What do I really want to do, here?  Still want to put up something brand new and weird every week.  Not giving that up yet.  At least weird, if not new.  Perhaps more OTR.

Play (1:42)

D-Day, with the Kingsmen

(...Maybe I should just turn this into an Old-Time Radio Mashup site.)  

 

Oh, hey, folks.  I have to say, as an experiment, this site may be reaching the end of a phase.  My intent remains to have a kind of open audio lab, with new bits tossed out every week.  But I already know, the ratio is about 20-30 hours of fooling around to 5 minutes of completed bit.  Which I've been expecting to do, eventually. 

 

But we're not anywhere near that.  It'll be a couple of years in October, since I started posting again.  Let's see if I can set up a more resilient process for the whole thing over the next three months.  If not, I might try something else for art.

 

**

 

The King's Men  

 

 

(not the band that sang "Louie Louie") were an a cappella quartet of the last century, emerging from the rich ferment of Vaudeville.  They were possibly considered a more "hep" version of Barbershop Quartet music, but that entire genre was supposed to sound corny, so they could never quite escape being associated with the moldiest of figs.  And sometimes, they sounded downright eerie.

For example, as we remember D-Day this week, June 6, 1944, the beginning of the liberation of Europe-- that evening, America tried to carry on as normal, but everyone was too nervous about whether it would succeed.  Fibber McGee and Molly substituted their regular comedy program for half an hour of patriotic music broken by news bulletins-- one of which, unfortunately, ran into the beginning of The King's Men singing Fred Waring's Army Hymn: a rare song,  a rarer rendition, missing the beginning but with enough to make one realize how differently this country went to war, in those days.

 

Til next time

-Ye Olde Farte 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Electoral Collage 2024

 

It's been a couple years.  Are we used to it yet?  Maybe not.

Play (3:13)

FDR (& Fala), Antifa

We fought a war to defeat world fascism.  I guess you could call the president of that day an "anti-fascist".  He talked about it sometimes.  If he were to discuss it today, it might go something like this... 

 

play (4:10)

Smokin'

From the Bandcamp collections.

 

Smokin' (0:49) 

Elmer Davis on the News

 

 

This week's installment of Old Time Radio Ventriloquism captures the voice of Elmer Davis, attempting to craft a new understanding of The News.

play (2:23) 

 

What is "eye-watering" supposed to mean?

I have never heard this expression until recently, and now it's in the headines a couple times a week.  "Eye-Watering Budget Projections", "Eye-Watering Scale of Scandal".  Eyes water for a lot of things- sad, happy, onions.  Aren't there better words people are already using, like "shocking"?  

It sounds like AI made it up.  Some weird concatenation of "mouth-watering", and the same body-function reaction to shock that's in so many other expressions.  But AI doesn't appreciate (or even know about) the emotional context that would cause an eye to water.  Can it ever?