Category: Old Shit That Is Still Old

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Latin Football Cheers

Football season is over of course, but you can use these for any sport.  It’s not like Latin had a real equivalent for “touchdown” anyway.

 

Sequimini, sequimini, facite ut pilam relinquat! 

Pursue them, pursue them, make them relinquish the ball!

 

Illos repellite, expellite, compellite ad fugiendum!

Repel them, expel them, compel them to retreat!

 

Utinam vincamus!

Oh, would that we would score!

 

Volebamus atque volemus pilam trans metas deponi!

We have been wanting and shall continue to want a touchdown!

 

Those are from Latin For All Occasions, by Henry Beard, a Classics major who went on to co-found National Lampoon.  For years people gave me books like that.

Here’s a bonus (under “LATIN AT THE AIRPORT”) that might come in handy as we enter the imperial era:

 

Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!

Stand aside, plebeians!  I am on imperial business!

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Twas a Riot

Someone pieced together fan video from the Replacements’ RiotFest Show in Denver (okay, outside of Denver) a few eleven (!) years ago. I of course, was at that show (saw the Stooges as well). Anyway, it sounds great, and Paul is hilarious.

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So This Is Cool

Learned this past weekend on a trip visiting my 81-year-old aunt that my grandmother’s cousin (my first cousin, twice removed) was a songwriter in California. And that I’m named for him, by way of my dad. (Fucked up spelling and all.) Here’s one of his tunes that Bing Crosby recorded.

And here’s another that could be fun to work up as a rocker.

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Long in the Tooth

I have zero desire to watch the same film over. The nostalgiafication of Star Wars was nauseating.

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What Are They Dancing To?

Here’s a Scopitone of Brook Benton lip-syncing Mother Nature, Father Time while bikini girls apparently dance to something else.

If you’re unfamiliar with Scopitones, they were music video jukeboxes typically placed in lounges and similar adult-oriented locations.  It seems that most Scopitones, like the later music-video format, were more about the girls than the songs. (I remember child-oriented ones, but their format and machines had a different name).  The videos often had the hubba-hubba vibe of 50’s-60’s softcore men’s magazines (like here and here).  Although Procol Harum did one, most rock acts snubbed Scopitones. I imagine they’d started looking dated, like something their dads watched for cheap thrills, down there with carnival peep-shows.  One novelty was a live Billy Lee Riley one, unusual in that it’s not lip-synced.

For you film nerds: I can’t verify this, but I know I read somewhere that French (who invented them) Scopitones used Pathecolor, a very early film tinting process that used stenciling.  Wikipedia claims that the last use of Pathecolor was the 1954 Mexican surrealist classic, Robinson Crusoe, but it’s often stated that it was used in that august cinematic masterpiece, Dr. Goldfoot & The Bikini Machine.

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The Wilhelm Scream

It’s positively ubiquitous! According to Gizmodo …

The sound effect that’s been heard in countless movies and TV shows over the decades technically has two birthdays. As a sound itself, it originally debuted in the 1951 film Distant Drums from singer-songwriter Sheb Wooley. But it was officially given its name with the minor character of Private Wilhelm in The Charge at Feather River, a western that came out July 11, 1953. In that movie, Wilhelm (played by actor Ralph Brooks) screams after being shot in the thigh with an arrow, which would come to define its use: in all of its appearances in future media, it would be used when someone got shot, blasted back by an explosion, or fell from a high distance.

Recently, CBS News did a story on the Wilhelm Scream, and the outlet revealed that it managed to find a tape with the first recording session Wooley did for the scream. CalArts researcher Craig Smith explained to CBS that he found the tape among many from the archives of the University of Southern California’s film school that were close to being trashed.

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What, Me Worry?

Gone but not forgotten!

This video is only concerned with the artists who contributed to Mad in it’s first two decades – even if some of them carried on for longer. I’ve got nothing against those who came later but I’m selfishly only dealing with the ones who inspired and influenced me as I grew up. They taught me more than 4 years of college ever did. Apparently in the early Kurtzman comic years Mad was printed in colour, although all the examples I found were black and white only, and according to a particularly grumpy viewer Dave Berg didn’t die until 2002. Mea culpa.

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Hey, I Think I’ve Got A Live One

Billion Dollar Babies is kicking my ass today, this song in particular.

Finally got a ride, this old broad down from Santa Fe
She was a real go-getter
She drawled so sweetly “Think child, that things’ll get better”
We pulled off the highway
Night black as a widow
“Yeah, I read the Bible”
She said, “I wanna know of you”

Hey, I think I got a live one
Hey, I think I found a live one
Hey, I think I got a live one
Yeah, Yeah, think I got a live one
Okay boys

Felt like I was hit by a diesel or a Greyhound bus
She was no babysitter
“Get up now sugar, never thought you’d be a quitter”
I opened the back door, she was greedy
I ran through the desert, she was chasing
No time to get dressed so I was naked
Stranded in Chihuahua

Alone, raped and freezing
Alone, cold and sneezing
Alone, down in Mexico
Alone