Buddy's Blog

Does this ever happen to you? I love chili, and last week I made my standard 6 quarts. But I forgot and left it on the stove for an hour. It boiled down to mush. It was awful. I added some already cooked hamburger and cooked it again. Well that didn’t help, so I added a bunch cayenne powder and cooked it again. No good. So I added a bunch more of poblano peppers. Ditto. So I added another can of beans and another can of tomato sauce and a bunch more of whole cayenne peppers from my garden and cooked it again. My old step daddy used to say “Mixing horse shit and ice cream don’t improve the flavor of either one.”

Lisa got it.

I wonder if whoever wrote the music got it from the movie. The film was made in 1957, just 22 years after the movie. And Elvis was really, really great in that performance. In my view, he was the greatest entertainer of the 20th Century. Do you know who was the top American performer in the first half of the last century? Al Jolsen started in 1910 and continued performing until 1950.

How many of you can get this one – Frau G and I like the old movies. We get them mainly on TCM on Hulu. One of the really nice things is there are no commercials. Last night we watched Public Hero Number One from 1935 starring Chester Morris, Jean Arthur and Lionel Barrymore. Lionel played a drunken doctor, and he was great in the role. You might remember Chester as Boston Blackie. I always liked him. It was a gangster movie. The bad guys were the Purple Gang. Here’s the quiz: In what other movie was the Purple Gang? Answer tomorrow, but I’m sure some of you will know it.

Any idea what these tiny mushroom are? They are growing on my potting bench and they are about 5mm tall.

Back in 1989 I had a carpenter do some work on my stairs. His name was Ed something. Frau G called him Ed Nedhead. He was a nice guy, and he looked something like my drawing of him. The most remarkable thing about him was that he could talk exactly like Donald Duck. No matter what I asked him he’d answer like Donald Duck, all the while spraying spit. Very funny.

I just figured this out last week:

Sorry I couldn’t get to your comments today. I’ll answer tomorrow.

Who was it who asked for this story. I can’t find the request. It’s about when Doris and Arnold nearly got married. Well here it is, but the wedding isn’t until the third week. First you have to go through some carpentry…

If you like novelty songs, Chris M gave me this link in Comments. It’s Yogi Yorgesson singing All Pooped Out. 

One of my favorite novelty singers was Frank Crummit, the Gay Cabellero.

OK, I went down to the thrift shop, and I bought a new dress for Delores PLUS a bunch of terrific LPs. Three for a dollar! Y0u can’t beat that. Heck, you probably pay ten bucks for one song at the Apple store. Not that I know that. I never buy music at the Apple store. And you know why? It’s not because I’m cheap. No No. It’s because new music for the most part pretty much sucks canal water. I don’t think it’s because I’m old. I dig music from the Baroque to the 90s. There are some good ones later, naturally, but it seems these days most of them have a beat, but no melody – and the lyrics! Hold yer ears kids.

Now here’s a great LP I found at the salvage shop. This is REAL music. Check it out!

When I was in college my roommate, Louie Capone, turned me on to opera and especially old Red Seal Victors. Louie had a huge collection. I collected quite a few myself. I found some real classics in junk stores. When Louie and I parted company (He went to the University of Florida where he earned a PhD in physics despite having only 5% vision in one eye and totally blind in the other)

The best of the bunch in my collection that I remember was a Riccardo Stracciari, I forget the song, but it was quite rare. The other was Caruso singing the bass aria, Vecchia Zimarra (Old Cloak), from La Boheme.  It was not published, I believe, until the 1940’s. It was on some sort of red plastic, not unlike a 45, but it was played at 78 rpm. After Caruso recorded the aria he said “Maybe we better break him up.” Fortunately they didn’t. On the flip side of the record was the alto who sang Musetta telling the story. Here’s the description from the web site www.enricocaruso.dk

During a performance of La Boheme in Philadelphia, Segurola, the basso, who was about to sing the “Coat Song” (“Vecchia Zimarra” from La Boheme), turned to Caruso and whispered “I’ve lost my voice”. Caruso replied, “You just stand still and move your lips and I’ll sing it for you”.  And so, with his back turned to the audience, Caruso sang the aria for Segurola. Segurola then acknowledged the cheers from the audience, who didn’t realize that it was Caruso who had done the singing.

OK, I got my new stylus. I heard the Patti Page version of this song and it brought me back to the Ink Spots version. As I said, I played this LP many many times when I was young. There’s something about the sound of vynil that’s so much warmer than digital, even with the scratches. I’m going to start buying LPs at the thrift store where Delores shops.