Friday, March 15, 2024

Proof the Editors of Rolling Stone Were Actually Stoned: The 410th Greatest Song of All Time

 

"Monkey Gone to Heaven" by the Pixies is NOT a great song.

Behold:

  • Its melody is almost nonexistent.
  • Its lyric is, as confessed by its composer, Black Francis, lacking coherent meaning.
  • It never made the charts.
  • The phrase "monkey gone to heaven" never even appears in the song.

The phrase that DOES get repeated and repeated and repeated is "This monkey's gone to heaven."

After a while, it even stops sounding like that's what they're saying...

This monkey's gone to heaven
This money's long too leavened
This muck keeps bongs in head bed
Thick mud seeps strong to deadheads


Deadhead Monkey Going to Heaven



Friday, March 8, 2024

The Second #MakeAMovieEdible

 

Movies to get hungry by.

Gladcontainer  -  A former Roman General keeps his leftovers fresh.

The Fryin' King  -  Mufasa tries to teach his son everything he knows about being a short-order cook.

Quesoblanco  -  "Of all the Taco Bells, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine."


Hot Pocket Lips Now  -  Go on. Just look at Marlon Brando's face and tell me this doesn't make sense.

Drive-Thru Window  -  A photographer in a wheelchair spies on his neighbors from his job at a fast-food restaurant, and becomes convinced one of them has committed murder.

Crullers of the Lost Ark  -  "Indiana Jones. I always knew some day you'd come walking back through my door. Want a doughnut?"

Cocoa  -  Aspiring chocolatier Miguel, confronted with his family's ancestral ban on candy, enters the Land of the Dead.

Good Dill Hunting  -  A janitor at M.I.T., has a gift for pickling but needs help from a psychologist to find just the right spice.

The Waffle of Wall Street  -  "Let me tell you something. There's no nobility in poverty. I have been a rich man and I have been a poor man. And I choose rich every bleeping time. Because, at least as a rich man, when I have to face my problems, I show up in the back of the limo, eating the best breakfast buffet money can buy."

To Grill a Mockingbird  -  Atticus Finch, a widowed lawyer in Depression-era Alabama, defends a black man against an undeserved negative restaurant review.


Friday, March 1, 2024

The First #MakeAMovieEdible

 

The concept isn't originally mine, but the following executions of said concept are:

The Shawshank Reduction  -  A prison's population is reduced in volume through evaporation over a medium-to-high heat

The Codfather  -  A Sicilian crime boss launders money through his chain of seafood restaurants

The Dark Chocolate Knight  -  "I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the raspberry drizzle."

12 Hungry Men  -  A sequestered jury can't agree on what to order for dinner

The Lord of the Onion Rings  -  Well, this one can't be all that original, seeing as how I found this graphic on the World Wide Wackfest.


The Good, the Bad & the Sushi  -  "You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who roll rice and kelp. You roll."

Star Wars: Episode V - The Potato Salad Strikes Back  -  Food poisoning in a galaxy far, far away

One Stew Over the Cuckoo's Nest  -  A precariously-placed crockpot threatens an entire hospital ward

It's a Wonderful Loaf  -  "Zuzu's sourdough!"

Back to the Buffet  -  The merry adventures of a time-traveling gourmand


Friday, February 23, 2024

The Birth of MY Blues: The 411th Greatest Song of All Time

 

I know I've whined before about how I don't think a particular song belongs on Rolling Stone's list of the "500 Greatest Songs of All Time," but seriously...

I Feel Love, by Donna Summer, is an experiment in totally computerized (Moog synthesized) instrumentation with a thin veneer of smooth vocals consisting of the repetition of seven short phrases and the word, "ooh".



  • Ooh
  • It's so good
  • Heaven knows
  • I feel love
  • Fallin' free
  • You and me
  • I'll get you
  • What you do
  • Ooh
  • I feel love, I feel love, I feel love

The word on the street is that this song broke open a new territory of sound and ushered in electronic dance music.

Just one more reason for me to not like it.

Ooh, I feel sick, I feel sick, I feel sick...


Friday, February 16, 2024

Observed Absurdities™ 66 - Vroom Vroom

 

Yes...I realize this ad, photographed in a mode of public transportation, is really TWO ads that, through the rules of happenstance, have been partially destroyed to the point of them blending into each other...



...and creating an amazing mental image of tater designers building a poultry-powered vehicle that can be driven under the influence of hallucinogens.

Created by Bing's AI



Friday, February 9, 2024

My Semi-Embarrassing Afternoon with William Windom

 

It was 1979...maybe 1980. I managed the box office at the historic Embassy Theatre in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana. Coming up on a particular evening was a one-man show featuring the works of James Thurber. The one man starring in said show was none other than William Windom...a name meaningless to most people under the age of 40...an awful lot of people over 40 can't quite place it either.

But make no mistake, William Windom was a real-life Hollywood quasi-big shot. In the Fifties and early Sixties, he appeared both on Broadway and in many television shows like Hallmark Hall of Fame and Twilight Zone. He is most well-known for his co-starring role with Inger Stevens in The Farmer's Daughter (Those who remember it at all remember the chair/escalator that ran along the stairs to the second floor of the house.) and his starring role as a cartoonist with a wild imagination in My World and Welcome to It.

If you're a fan of 1962's To Kill a Mockingbird, you have seen him go up against Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch in the courtroom.


In later years, he also had a recurring role in Murder She Wrote as Dr. Seth Hazlitt.


It was Windom's work in My World and Welcome to It that led to his one-man show and his arrival in the Summit City: Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Ticket sales were less than impressive, so in an attempt to get more tushes in the theatre's seats, we had arranged for a meet-and-greet with Mr. Windom at a high-end department store in Fort Wayne's largest mall. I was his only companion at the event...me and the supply of tickets I had on hand to sell to the fawning crowd.

There we were, sitting at a table not far from the fragrance counter, hoping people would wander by, recognize his face, and go, "Well, now that I've met the guy, I simply must buy some tickets to his show!"

About halfway through the afternoon, a high school classmate (named Andy Williams...#NoJoke) walked up to the table because he was excited to see ME. I kind of had to interrupt Andy in order to introduce him to Mr. William Windom. Andy heard my intro, looked at the Emmy-winning star and said to him, "Hey! Did you know that Dewey is a really good actor, too?"

I was grateful for the positive evaluation and all but seriously, I felt like hiding under the table.

It was like I had turned to Buddy Rich or Ringo Starr and proudly announced that I played the bass drum in my freshman marching band.



Friday, February 2, 2024

Mystery Solved: The 412th Greatest Song of All Time

 

For 14 weeks in the late summer and early fall of 1967, Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billie Joe climbed the charts to number one and dominated the talk around water coolers, gym lockers, and sewing circles across the country:


  • Was it really the family's daughter who was seen with Billie Joe throwing something off the Tallahatchie bridge?
  • What were they throwing, anyway?
  • And what were the two of them talking about after church last Sunday?
  • And for crying out loud, why in the world did Bille Joe MacAllister jump off that bridge?


Here we are, almost 57 years later, and our researchers at Almost the Truth are pleased to announce the answers to all these questions raised by the 412th greatest song of all time.


Was it really the family's daughter that was seen with Billie Joe, throwing something off the Tallahatchie bridge?
       Yes. Yes it was.

What were they throwing?
       Something.

What were the two of them talking about after church last Sunday?
       A personal matter.

Why did Bille Joe MacAllister jump off the bridge?
       He wanted to die.


See? It wasn't so all-fire mysterious.