How sweasel posts are born
So Uncle B says, “what’s the temperature?” stabbing at the coal fire with a long poker.
“Seventy six,” I say, consulting my therm-O-meter.
UB: hums a few bars of “Seventy-Six Trombones.”
Me: he sure was gay, that guy. The Music Man guy.
UB: was he?
Me: I don’t know.
UB: what’s his name? I can’t picture him.
Me: <heading to Wikipedia>
Me: Robert Preston. And — ZOMG! — he’s the Go You Chicken Fat guy!!!
Go You Chicken Fat. If you’re American and something between, oh, forty and sixty, you’ll know what that means. If you’re not…
In 1956, responding to a report that European children were fitter than American Children, President Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness. Which is still going, as the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. God knows what they do.
Anyhow, the main deal was, they established a physical fitness test comprised of five activities. The current ones are: curl-ups or partial curl-ups, shuttle run, endurance run/walk, pull-ups or right angle push-ups, and V-sit or sit and reach. I don’t know how they compare to the test when I was a lass — I’m not even sure what some of those things are — but I remember the mile walk/run, push ups, sit ups and chinning on the bar.
I mean, I remember that a chin-up was part of the test. I don’t actually remember doing one. I do not believe I have successfully lifted my chin above anything by the strength of my arms ever, in my whole life.
My school made us take the damn thing every year. If you made above the 85 percentile on all five tasks compared to the other kids in the country, you were eligible for the President’s Physical Fitness Award. If you made above the 50 percentile on all five, you were eligible for The National Physical Fitness Award. And if you made it through the test at all, you were eligible for The Participant Physical Fitness Award.
I really think there should have been an additional “Shoot the Moon Award” for mongs like me, who failed all five components. Year after year. I was a tall, wormy, bookish, proto-Goth kid and I had smoked since I was, like, a fetus. You couldn’t make me run a mile if you roped me to a trailer hitch.
In 1961, Robert Preston and Meredith Willson (who wrote The Music Man) were asked to write and record a song to help children prepare for the test. The result was the intensely trippy Go You Chicken Fat, Go!. The most complete YouTube version I can find is here (notice what skinny little weeds all the 1960s kids in the pictures are).
The lyrics are like,
Push up
Every morning
Ten times.
Push up
Starting low.
Once more on the rise.
Nuts to the flabby guys!
Go, you chicken fat, go away!
Go, you chicken fat, go!
It became a surprise novelty hit. They were still using it for Phys Ed a decade and more later, when I was in school.
My PE teacher in Middle School was a little four-foot nothing red-headed fireplug of a woman with (thank christ for my sake) a kindly heart. After she watched me huffing and grunting and pulling on the chinning bar for a while, she leaned in and whispered, “you’re going to be a lovely tall woman when you grow up.”
Sweet. Wrong, but sweet.
As far as I’m aware, Robert Preston was not gay.
February 17, 2010 — 7:05 pm
Comments: 29
Loot! Plunder! Swag!
This? A British Airways place setting…from the Concorde. This is just the sort of brilliant, clever gift-giving Uncle B excels at and I…do not. I made him circle shit he wanted in a gardening catalogue. I’m pretty darned sure this is the first time in my life I’ve ever bought anyone vermiculite for Christmas.
We’ve just polished off the champagne…the turkey is in the oven…it has been an good Christmas. Hope yours was, too!
See you on Boxing Day! (Don’t ask).
December 25, 2008 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 36
Meet my leetle freen’ Johanna
Many activities which appeal to stupid people for stupid reasons appeal to me for good reasons. Really good reasons. Really. It is my curse.
I mean hippies. And recycling (also patchouli, but that doesn’t really figure here). Human beings don’t make enough garbage to spoil the view, let alone wreck the planet (except maybe in China, which is full of diabolically clever and hard-working little people). Upscale Western suburbanites sorting their garbage into colorful plastic bins to be picked up by a fleet of giant belching diesel trucks to Save the Earth is an idea so pointless, loony and mathematically-challenged that even I can work out the formula.
It goes like this: if it is more expensive to recycle a thing than make it from scratch THAT MUST MEAN it requires more energy to do so (in some cases, a lot more energy) and that makes Gaia cry.
Yes. Yes, my hippies. There is recycling that is bad for the planet. Perhaps most of it, as it is practiced today.
And yet…waste is a terrible thing. Maybe because I am sometimes poor…maybe because I was raised by a pack of wild hippies. Whatever. Wasting a thing that can easily be reused offends me right down into my bones. It is an aesthetic judgment, not a scientific one — but I’m an aesthetic sort of a weasel, so bite me.
And zo…meet my new compost bin. Not any compost bin. Oh, no. This is a Green Johanna — a Swedish design that will devour tea bags, coffee grounds, banana peels, meat and fish (including bones!), garden clippings and all that goddamned fruit and veg you buy but don’t eat before it goes off — oh, yes. I’ve seen you do it — and transform them into lovely, glossy black soil. Which, using the magic of whatever the hell it is he does in that greenhouse, Uncle B will transform back into delicious food (if things carry on getting worse, he says, we’re going to grub up the front lawn and plant potatoes).
I love Johanna. I love her better’n that pig we had in the ’70s
And the sweet thing is, the local Council is so chock full of stupid hippies, they’re giving us a Johanna for £19.95, not the £114 list. Hooray for stupid hippies!
December 2, 2008 — 8:20 pm
Comments: 24
It will be interesting to see where this goes
Went to see An American Carol this afternoon. That, for the benefit of people 500 years from now who somehow encounter a stray data backup from sweasel.com accidentally beamed into space, is an explicitly conservative comedy from the man who made Airplane!, the Naked Gun series and the Scary Movie series.
I don’t actually like Zucker-style comedies (okay, I liked Airplane! But, really, I think liking that one is some kind of federal law, if only because June Cleaver speaks jive). I went today because I wanted this thing to get way better first-weekend box office than Bill Maher’s Jesus-thumping douche-fest (dude, I’m an atheist, and your ignorance embarrasses me).
It was a solid Zucker movie. It was not at all mean-spirited (the Michael Moore character comes off as a likeable boob, as do two out of three terrorists), the tear-jerking corny bits were few, effective and superceded by low slapstick in nanoseconds. Leslie Neilson is lookin’ damn good for a hundred and twenty.
It lacked a certain je ne sais quoi to be a great film. But then, I really disliked Team America the first time I saw it. Then it became my favoritest film evarrrrrr. An American Carol should do at least as well as any other Zucker film. So go see it, if only to help those guys who put their toosticles on the line stay in work.
Weasel gives it two….waaaaait a second! Weasels don’t have thumbs!
October 4, 2008 — 6:45 pm
Comments: 35
Goodbye, Mister Clean
In an effort to help McGoo scrub Barney Frank off his eyeballs before his manly bits run away from home, I give you — House Peters, Jr. Peters died in the night. He was 92.
He starred in a fair bit of movie and TV between 1930-something and 1960-something, but he will be forever remembered as the original Mr. Clean.
Was he the one that came whooshing out of the bottle when you opened it, like a big, bald genie? Must be; how else would you explain a dude with an earring in 1958? Or am I confusing him with the White Tornado…?
The world of unconvincing early advertising mascots reels from another blow. First Mrs Olson, then the Maytag repairman, then Madge, then Mr Whipple. Now this. I may never buy stupid household shit for no good reason again.
October 2, 2008 — 3:01 pm
Comments: 36
Yeeeaaaaarrrrrgh!
So I finally got around to watching the DVD of LOTR: Return of the King last night, and Legolas plugs an arrow in some dude who falls shrieking off the back of the oliphant, and I thought, “damme if that wasn’t the Wilhelm Scream!” And I looked it up, and and damme if it wasn’t.
What’s the Wilhelm Scream, you ask? If you wanted to be helpful and set up this post you would, anyhow. Go on. Ask.
The scream (or series of screams) that came to be known as the Wilhelm Scream was originally recorded for the 1951 film “Distant Drums.” It is intended to represent a man being eaten by alligators. Most probable voice talent that screamed this screamy scream: Sheb Wooley, bit actor and musician. You know him best for “Purple People Eater.”
It subsequently appeared in a Number of Warner Brothers films — a thing that did not escape the attention of film student Ben Burtt. He picked it up and named it after the second character to scream it: Private Wilhelm, with an arrow, in “The Charge at Feather River.” Then Bratt got hired to do the sound for Star Wars, and The Scream went nookylar.
Here is Wikipedia‘s list of Wilhelm’s screen credits (you can hear the file there, as well):
So now you know something you didn’t know before, unless you already knew this, in which case you can just go straight to hell, smartass. I really don’t have to take this from you.
May 13, 2008 — 12:30 pm
Comments: 20
A Farewell to Arse: Charlton Heston’s Buttocks 1924-2008
Those of you who missed the theatrical release may not know this, but the original Planet of the Apes starred Charlton Heston’s ass. Oh, there were other characters in it — the rest of Mr Heston, for example — but the 44-year-old Heston bottom stole the show. It left round, bi-lobal smoochies all over that movie.
I was eight years old in 1968 when Planet of the Apes was released. I had never seen male ass before, not counting the brief flash of white as my father dove behind the dresser the morning I walked into the parents’ room unannounced. I imprinted on the Heston brand instantly.
“Yes,” I thought, “that is correct. That is what one of those looks like.”
Women are, as a rule, not moved by visuals the way men are. Men will react to a mere silhouette, which is why so many of them drive right off the road chasing the Mudflap Girl, Silent Killer of America’s Highways.
Women are turned on by the backstory. Will he wrestle a bear? Does he like kittens? Is he the unacknowledged illigitimate son of the Earl of Wessex? There’s a bit of hairy chest and heaving bosom in there, sure, but it’s mostly about personal history. Women can get the vapors from A&E’s Biography.
It’s a true but seldom-acknowledged fact that Harlequin romance novels are hard-core porn for women.
So I’m not being cute when I tell you you my fascination with the Heston ‘tocks is not an especially sexual thing. It’s more like…recognizing an archetype. Like finding the Golden Mean of bottoms. Oh, sure, there are plenty more muscular asses out there, but I hate gym bodies. Heston had a splendid ordinary guy physique. I went to art school a decade later and paid large money to stare intently for hours at various specimens of naked humanity: no ass ever truly measured up. Not one.
Charlton Heston died on Saturday at the age of 84. Of Alzheimer’s, which is a shit disease because it kills you years before it kills you.
He was by all accounts that matter a good and genuine man: a real outdoorsman, a great father, happily married to the same woman for sixty something years.
Lefties snark that the causes he supported in his lifetime show a philosophical change for the worse, if not plain old intellectual confusion: from his strong pro-civil rights and anti-McCarthy stands in the 1960s to his later prominent support for Reagan and the NRA. But it’s all of a piece: it’s about people minding their own damn business, getting out of the way and leaving each other the hell alone.
Good man. Great movies. But, oh dear, what an exceptionally fine ass.
April 7, 2008 — 5:43 am
Comments: 66
They’ve dug up the Gipper!
George Gipp (1895-1920) All American football player. Died of pneumonia and may or may not have said the following:
I’ve got to go, Rock. It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.
Which was immortalized in Knute Rockne, All American, with Ronald Reagan in the role of Gipp. Which is why…etcetera.
Anyhoo! Somebody dug him up this Fall to see if he was that somebody’s babydaddy. Which he wasn’t. ESPN was invited to film the exhumation, which sounds like it was very badly done. Messy. Bad feelings and lawsuits all around.
I’m pretty sure that quote is bogus. I’m pretty sure most deathbed quotes are bogus. Surely, nobody dies talking about football, unless it’s a hammer murder.
I bet you anything the vast majority of last words are something
along the lines of, “HOLY SHIT MARGARET I’M DYING!!!!”
February 15, 2008 — 3:46 pm
Comments: 45
Psycho killer, Qu’est-ce que c’est?
This, O my minions, is no pussycat. It’s a Scottish wildcat (Felis sylvestris grampia) — pound for pound, one of the evillest badass mofo’s on the whole mo-effing planet. Srsly.
About ten thousand years ago, two things happened in Catworld. Somewhere in the Near East, maybe out Iraq way, the ubiquitous wildcat, Felis sylvestris, up and self-domesticated its own self. Just rolled over, waved its legs in the air and showed mankind its collective fuzzy belly, becoming adorable Cheezburger-wantsing, succotash-suffering Felis sylvestris catus on the spot.
At the same time, two thousand miles to the North and West, the land bridge connecting Britain and France was drowned by global warming, isolating the local population of Felis sylvestris, which promptly morphed into Felis baddassicus mofocus. The bite of a radioactive spider may have been involved.
The Scottish wildcat is truly one of the wildest animals alive. It cannot be tamed. Hand rearing them from itty-bitty psycho-kittens makes not one bit of difference. Fancy Feast? Fuggidaboudid! A zookeeper who will happily go into a tiger’s cage will not go into the enclosure of a wildcat he raised from babyhood. A wildcat will attack anything and everything in its territory, including another wildcat. They were believed to be maneaters until the Fifties.
The Wildwood Trust, where Uncle B and I go to par-tay with the musty-lids, has a pair of Scottish wildcats. Never has a hating of my guts been communicated to me more eloquently through mere eyeballs. They made the wolf pack look like pussies.
The prehistoric version was up to four feet long, but modern wildcats are cat sized. They look like…adorable housecats. Like a squarer, chunkier Damien. Their tails are thick, and their ears kind of stick out sideways, but they’re totally catty in their catlikeness.
And that’s the problem: they’re interbreeding themselves out of existence. Like wolves and coyotes with dogs, wildcats freely interbreed with domestic cats. That’s the deal with keeping some in captivity, though captivity is clearly hateful to them: there may be as few as 400 purebred Scottish wildcats left. I’m not down with the hand-flapping over every newt and guppy and little brown bird that loses a bit of territory, but 400. That’s Siberian tiger kind of endangered.
Anyhow, dude has made a documentary about Scottish wildcats, due out on DVD this Summer. There’s a trailer at the link, but no ordering information yet. Part of the profits go to the Scottish Wildcat Association, a new charity that will be launched this Spring (let us hope by that time they’ve purged the dozens of “it’s” that should be “its” on their Web site).
I’m not necessarily advocating giving them money. Somehow, when you give to an animal charity these days, some human-hating commie seems to wind up with the money. But, you know, a DVD or a t-shirt might not hurt anything.
Protect our beloved endangered psycho killers.
SPECIAL BONUS QUIZ
Can you tell which one is Felis sylvestris catus and which one is Felis sylvestris grampia?
That’s right! They’re both crazed psycho killers!
February 4, 2008 — 1:13 pm
Comments: 45
Vampira: really, REALLY dead this time
Behold, Maila Nurmi (1921-2008) — Vampira — who died last week in her Hollywood home of unknown causes. She was 87, so there’s a possible cause right there. You may know her from…well, probably just Plan 9 from Outer Space, unless you grew up in California. Her main gig was hostess of several TV creature features on the West coast.
I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did; I don’t think she could squeeze a sardine past that corset.
Maila was born in Finland, but moved to the dark, old world atmosphere of Ashtabula, Ohio when she was two. She arrived in Hollywood in 1938, where she did a lot of modeling and, probably, ‘modeling’ as well. She wore a gown inspired by Charles Addams to a costume ball in 1953, where she was spotted by a television producer. And the rest, as they say, is footnote.
In addition to Plan 9, she also had roles in other premium Hollywood productions, such as I Passed for White, Night of the Ghouls and Sex Kittens Go to College.
Fare thee well, Vampira! Let us hope — just once before she died — she had the strength to open her eyes, bolt upright in bed and scream, “psych!”
January 18, 2008 — 8:21 am
Comments: 13