Those barbaric bastards!!!
I took French in High School. I didn’t want to. I wanted to take Latin or, failing that, maybe German or something. But I had to take a language, and French was the only class with open seats. I ended up actually enjoying the reading and writing part (and being pretty good at it) but sucking royally at speaking. I gots the performance anxiety.
Anyway, that’s neither ici nor là-bas. Point is, somehow, I never mentally translated Alouette until Uncle B brought it up yesterday.
Dude. It’s about skinning skylarks! Those lovely little songbirds! Wikipedia says the song is French Canuckian, where they used to eat skylarks. Check it out:
Little skylark, lovely little skylark
Little lark, I will pluck your feathers off
I’ll pluck the feathers off your head
I’ll pluck the feathers off your head
Off your head – off your head
Little lark, little lark
O-o-o-o-oh
Then they go on to pluck Off your beak, Off your neck, Off your wings, Off your back, Off your legs and Off your tail. Jesus ke-rist, you people!
Eh. The pomme doesn’t fall far from the pommier. The old Ripley’s Believe it or Not Show — the one with Jack Palance, which really should have been called “Believe It Or Not, Foreigners Eat Some Really Weird Shit” — did a whole segment on ortolan prepared and eaten in the traditional French manner.
Bon appetit!
December 16, 2009 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 28
Talk about something else for a freaking second
My taste in music is…what’s the next stop after “eclectic”? Psychotic? Retarded?
Lots and lots of banjo music. Not all of it bluegrass. I have Chinese folk songs that sound like an alleycat with his balls clamped in a bench vise. I have klezmer. Played on the dobro. I own an album called Music to Strip By, which I bought for no other reason than I found it musically intriguing.
Point is, taking a music recommendation from me is often an exercise in x-treme suck.
But try it just this once. I’ve been listening to Pomplamoose lately, which is two kids shluffing around a shabby apartment in their pj’s making music. It’s fun to listen to, but it’s even more fun to watch — which you can do, thanks to their YouTube channel. They manage to put out a really rich sound, which they do almost entirely with conventional instruments. Surprisingly few electronics or post effects.
Watch for free, or download from their MySpace page (tracks are either a buck or free, though the free download thingie is junk). They’re also on iTunes, but I hate that shit — once you download the iTunes app, it stays resident forever.
Here — start with their cover of Beyonce’s All the Single Ladies and see if it’s not more fun to listen to than an cat with his balls in a vise.
November 25, 2009 — 8:23 pm
Comments: 31
Who is Melba that she should have a toast?
When I was in art school, my best friend and I spraypainted the Oscar Wilde aphorism, “who is art that he should have a sake?” in bright yellow on the outside wall of our dormitory. That’s it. My one and only act of vandalism.
Uncle B is feeling a little poorly today, and so his fancies turned inevitably to toast. Melba toast. I did not know there was an actual Melba for whom there was a toast, and it worries me that he did.
She was Aussie opera singer Dame Nellie Melba (1861 – 1931), born Helen Porter Mitchell and a Very Big Deal in her day. In 1897, she fell ill and twice-toasted toast became a staple of her diet, invented especially for her by chef Auguste Escoffier. He also came up with peach Melba. He was, I think, awfully lucky her name wasn’t Snotrag McShitbucket.
I found a recipe for homemade Melba toast (which sounds very nice, actually). Also, I discovered Wikipedia has a whole page on toast, which includes a useful side-by-side split-screen photographic comparison of toasted and untoasted white bread that should enable the alert student to discriminate between the two easily.
It is wholesome when we learn together.
July 17, 2009 — 7:22 pm
Comments: 29
Take it away, Glenster…
I had to go into the hospital this evening for a routine diagnostic — no, no. No big. I have a family history of bum kidneys and they like to give ’em a poke now and then. They’re fine, thanks. I saw them myself on ultrasound! They’re totally shaped like black-eyed peas. But now I’m off my shed-yule tonight.
So why not visit Glenster’s site? He makes nice clean MP3’s of vintage big band 78s and he’s put up ten brand spanking new tracks today — all of ’em from the UK!
My very first web site was dedicated to MP3’s of my 78 collection. There’s all kinds of deeply cool software you can get now to depop, dehiss, rebalance and otherwise restore funky old recordings. It’s like magic. It’s like magic that is a hell of a lot of hard work, so I gave up after the first dozen.
Also, if you can’t bear to listen to Teleprompter Jesus — Greatest Orator of Our Age — stumble through somebody else’s words in primetime one more time, why not listen to this guy talk off the top of his head? He’s a Tory MEP (a British conservative member of the European Parliament). Giving a squirming, smirking Gordon Brown a procto exam. With a rusty garden weasel.
That’s what the thing looks like.
March 24, 2009 — 9:01 pm
Comments: 18
My mama always said…
…for a fresh start, a fresh banjo head.
Okay, I’m lying. My mama never said that. My mama was a music hater in a family full of loud, enthusiastic bad musicians; she flippin’ hated the banjo. (It didn’t help that my dad practiced in the bathroom “for the acoustics”).
You’ll note my banjo has an arched top; it gives the instrument a treblier, screechier sound. Great idea, no? That curious design feature is probably the reason I was able to afford this one. When I was in my twenties, I burned up Nashville looking for a decent banjo within my budget — a good one, even then, was upwards of a thousand bucks (which was, like, a thousand bucks to me in those days). And no more great deals to be had in pawn shops, nossir.
On my way out of town, I stopped at one more music shop…and found this Epiphone deluxe marked down to $300. Seventy-something percent off. Flamed maple, arched top, fake abalone inlay.
It’s gaudy as shit.
But it is a pretty decent banjo. And trebly. And LOUD. Needs a new head, though. The old one’s go-bust, so I’m not *really* getting the volume out of it.
While I was unscrewing the brackets tonight, I said to Uncle B that I’d like a good banjo mute for my birthday.
And he goes, “what’s a banjo mute?”
And I’m like, “if you value your happiness, I suggest you find out. Soon”
March 23, 2009 — 8:43 pm
Comments: 37
Platinum by Christmas!
Exclusive! The Weasel Times has obtained this beautiful short audio sample from the Katzenhuffins’ upcoming album:
[audio:bluedanube.mp3]
Or click here to download. You’ll want to save this one and enjoy it with headphones!
March 12, 2008 — 8:12 am
Comments: 44
As popular as Ringo!
Okay, okay…one more, then I stop. One of my favorites. 1964. You get the feeling even the antiquated old coot who came up with this cover knew that “as popular as Ringo” ranked right up there in the compliment universe with “as comfy as a supperating boil on your bottom.”
This was one of life’s most important early lessons, though, wasn’t it? No, no…not the supperating boil thing. That the scene on the cover of a comic generally had NOTHING WHATEVER to do with whatever went on inside, which was always more boring but made lots more sense.
Okay, maybe not in this comic: a criminal from the future steals a time machine but can’t operate the controls, so he autopilots it to 1964 to pick up Jimmy, who can…and they both go back to ancient Greece, where Jimmy supports himself making Beatle wigs out of wool. And then…I dunno. It got weird.
Speaking of special needs, Wikipedia says that after George Reeves shot himself (“died of a gunshot wound” as they delicately put it), the producers of the Adventures of Superman approached Jack Larson (Jimmy Olsen) with a series of his own. It would concentrate on Jimmy’s rise in the newspaper biz and feature a stunt double and old footage of Reeves. Larson, horrified, said no.
And thus an instant classic died a-borning.
January 16, 2008 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 19
YABACS
Yet Another Bad Album Cover Site. I never get enough of these. I grew up thinking the world was a hideous, terrifying place…but it turns out, it was just the Seventies. Whew!
This site is particularly fun, as it’s the man’s actual vinyl album collection, and he offers digitized samples of the delights in store. Also, links to CD’s and DVD’s (uh-huh…some of this stuff has been recently re-released). Yes, they sound EXACTLY the way they look.
I found this trawling through my stats page. Whenever someone finds sweasel.com through a Google search, I always run the same search and see where I place next to the competition. This was an MSN search of “peanut lady fuck.” I do not actually have any posts about “peanut lady fuck” (and neither did this guy), but search engines aren’t very clever about these things. As long as those three words ever appeared together on a page (including comments), it’ll register a hit. That’s right; you guys contribute to my search engine mash-up weirdnesses. Thank you!
I am not an authoritative “peanut lady fuck” source (though I will be now). I placed on page eight. Somebody clicked through eight pages of links searching for his answer. Just, damn.
I am, however, hit #5 on page one for “supernumery nipples”!
That thumping sound you hear is my grandmother. In heaven. Wagging her tail.
September 21, 2007 — 8:31 am
Comments: 53
I’m Dyin’ Over Here
And a third one pipes up and says, “you’re only supposed to feed birds puffins!”
And a fourth one says, “what’s a puffin?”
And #3 says, “I don’t know…isn’t that what Mary Poppins said? ‘Feed the birds, puffins a day’?”
I almost swallowed my tongue. I was a huge Mary Poppins fan, incidentally. Here’s a little something you can do that will affect your maternal relationship for life. Ask your mom, in a wistful tone, “Mother, if you died, what are the chances Dad would marry Julie Andrews?” Works a treat!
Oh, hey, and if you don’t read The Corner, you probably missed this:
“That morose day of Napoleon’s surrender…witnessed one of history’s grandest homophonic sentences, a homophone being, we might say, a verbal coincidence….Napoleon stood silent on the deck for a painful while and then muttered with resignation: ‘Cast off, it is time to go.’ Only the Corsican said it in his accented French which he had learned at the age of ten: ‘A l’eau, c’est l’heure’ [literally: ‘at the water, it’s the hour’ — stoaty]. A young British sailor standing on deck knew not the gilded tongue of mankind’s golden race. Under the impression that the fallen emperor was speaking English, the sailor was flattered by what he mistook for familiarity and later reported that Napoleon had the courtesy to address him, ‘Hello, sailor.’”
From a new book out called Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections. Looks like fun.
All of which puts me in mind of the Archive of Misheard Lyrics.
Yeah, I know you’ve been there before…but how long ago?
August 27, 2007 — 5:58 pm
Comments: 28
“Everybody loves cats and banjos”
— Old Mama Weasel, deceased
Cats and banjos. Pure blogging gold.
It was the day before 4th of July, and the minions were frolicking, happy and congenial. I just couldn’t bear to post some angsty political think piece and ruin the mood.
Okay, you know what? I had nothing on my mind today. Enjoy!
July 3, 2007 — 5:00 pm
Comments: 10