I’ve been a music lover since the age of seven. My tastes in music are eclectic to say the least because I love good old rock ‘n roll from the 50s and 60s, psychedelic rock from the 60s and 70s, and a few other things that caught my fancy along the way like opera and Glam Rock. Most people that know me would be shocked to know that I’ve been a David Bowie fan for many years and with his death the music industry lost a true star and innovator. This post today is celebrating the birth and introduction of Ziggy Stardust in London’s Toby Judge pub on February 10, 1972.
Bowie was just a minor rocker at the time but with the creation of Ziggy Stardust, Glam Rock was born. Any rock musician can put on a costume, but how many could have inhabited the identity of an androgynous Martian rock star come to Earth in its dying days, so effortlessly? To quote Vince Taylor, a figure well-known in late-’60s London, He was “A finger up the nose of pop sincerity…a boot in the collective sagging denim behind of hippie singer-songwhiners”. The album of the music age, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. was voted one of the top 30 concept albums in history.
David Bowie
With the death of David Bowie in New York City on January 10, 2016, music lost one of its greats. Fortunately for us all, Ziggy Stardust will live on forever.
George Chapman (1559–1634) Was an English dramatist, translator and poet. He was a classical scholar whose work shows the influence of Stoicism. Chapman is best remembered for his translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.
I’m sitting here looking out the window and it’s hardly worth doing. It’s snowy, sleeting, cold, and in general a real shit show. It’s a great day to be inside and to stay inside. It’s also a slow news week due primarily to the Olympics of which I really don’t care much about. With that in mind I thought I’d take you back 30 years to revisit some vintage bumper stickers. These were collected between 1988 and 1990 and might prove interesting to some of you and others won’t give a damn anyway. I’m feeling lazy today so here they are . . .
Watch Out! I Drive Like You Do.
Go Ahead, Make My Day.
I Brake For Idiots Like You.
Instant Fool. Just Add Beer.
Live And Let Die.
If It’s Too Loud, You’re Too Old.
Clothes Required, Underwear Optional.
Left-Handers Are In Their Right Mind.
Good Girls Go to Heaven. Bad Girls Go Everywhere.
Still Crazy After All These Beers.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Naked.
Old Musicians Never Die, They Just Decompose.
I’m Not Playing Hard To Get. I Am Hard To Get.
We Came, We Saw, We Yawned.
Sure, I’ll Respect You In The Morning. What Was Your Name Again?
I DON’T KNOW, I DON’T CARE, AND IT DOESN’T MATTER ANYWAY.
I thought I would offer up a few of the oldest limericks I’ve found so far. After reading a few of them I quickly discovered that the sense of humor then was a touch bawdier that many recent ones. Our ancestors probably needed something a little more attention getting in their humor. I’m sure many of them had very little to cheer about.
1882
There was a young sailor from Brighton
Who remarked to his girl, “You’re a tight one.”
She replied, ” ‘Pon my soul,
You’re in the wrong hole.
There’s plenty of room in the right one.”
1870
A young woman got married at Chester,
Her mother she kissed, and she blessed her.
Says she, “You’re in luck,
He’s a stunning good fuck,
For I’ve had him myself down in Leicester.”
1868
There was a young lady of Ealing
And her lover before her was kneeling.
Said she, ” Dearest Jim,
Take your hand off my quim.
I much prefer fucking to feeling.
1871
There were three ladies of Huxham,
And whenever we meets’em we fucks’em,
And when that game grows stale
We sits on a rail,
And pulls out our pricks and they sucks’em.
I hope to post many more of these. I live to keep the tradition alive and well here in the 21st century.
“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a writer, philosopher, and intellectual. He wrote nearly fifty books, both novels and non-fiction work, as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. He is well known for his 1932 work, A Brave New World. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and was elected Companion of Literature by The Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was also a humanist and pacifist.
Sixteen years ago, I was a lonely bachelor living with two ferrets and a cat. Part of my routine at that time was to explore the internet, read blogs, and participate in selected chat rooms. It was about that same time I serious became interested in blogging but was really unsure just how to get started. One of my favorite blogs at the time was called gutrumbles.com. The gentleman that ran that blog was Rob Acid-Man Smith. He captured my imagination immediately because he was brutally honest, totally outspoken with absolutely no filters, and had a great sense of humor. I exchanged emails with him for a time, learned a lot, and I was hooked. That day he became my blog-father. To say he upset a large number of people over the years was an understatement, but he did it with humor and a whole lot of truth. After reading his blog for almost two years I decided to give it a try myself.
My four years of blogging on my first blog were eye opening. I was brutally honest and voiced my opinions loudly and crassly. I spent most of my time complaining about politics, religion, and any other topic that piqued my interest. It was great fun, and the responses were more than just a little interesting. I actually received a number of death threats from idiots around the globe. That was enough to convince me I had more to say and to hell with the critics.
But as with all things age tends to mellow a person. I decided to discontinue that first blog and then created Every-Useless-Thing. Hoping against hope that I could mellow my opinions down a little and make the blog something more than a bitch session. I’ve been doing Every-Useless-Thing now for approximately eleven and a half years and ten months ago I felt myself slipping and losing my edge. A lot of it had to do with my medical issues but it was more than just that. Anytime I felt myself slipping in the past I returned to gutrumbles.com to reinvigorate me. Gut Rumbles continues today at Rob’s request even though Rob passed away in 2006. It was and will always be my “Happy Place”.
Today after that lengthy and boring explanation I’m going to repost an article from Acid-Man’s blog. Hopefully you’ll read his thoughts and then understand where I’m trying to come from. I hope you enjoy a little of Acid Man, because I always have. If you want some good reading, go to his blog and read some of his archives. Here he is!
I have a Southern accent. I drop the “g” off the end of gerunds, so I say talkin,’ climbin,’ smokin,’ and runnin’ instead of speaking standard American English the way Dan Rather does as he lies his ass off on the CBS Evening News.
I say y’all. I have ‘druthers. I know how far yonder is. I know how to see ’bout that. Whatchadoon is a real word to me.
That’s the reason I don’t like to talk on the phone. I sound like a goddam hick. I AM a goddam hick, but I am educated and I can communicate well when I want to. Where I live, everybody understands me just fine when I say, “Whatchadoon? I’d ‘druther ya not go ’bout it that way. Lemme show ya sumpin. Thadded be better, doncha think?” That’s Southern English and it works well in person-to-person communication.
Try that shit over the phone when you’re talking to a yankee. I doesn’t work. The yankee gets all nasal, I talk Southern and the next thing you know, we may as well be from foreign countries. That’s why I would prefer to write to someone I don’t know. I can appear to be halfway intelligent on paper.
I’ve done a lot of thinking about this communication gap. I COULD be like the BC and talk like a yankee at work and sound like the biggest hayseed on the farm at Quinton’s football games, but I’m not a chameleon, able to change my skin color and blend into the scenery the way she can. Everything that woman does is an act and she wears many masks. I’m not built that way. Like Popeye, I am what I am and that’s all that I am.
Sometimes, that’s not the right way to be. Honesty is not always the best policy.
David Owen Russell (born August 20, 1958) is an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and received his seventh Golden Globe nomination for the semi-biographical comedy-drama Joy (2015).
I think today I’d like to discuss with all of you a couple of terms that we all hear a lot of and never give much thought to when we do. The terms are dumb and stupid. Many people seem to think that these two terms are interchangeable and mean the same thing, but I disagree completely. I can’t tell you how many times in the course of my life that I’ve been called a dummy, a dumb shit, and a dumb ass. Many times, those words were used to describe me by some of my best friends and family members and were meant to be funny and sarcastic, and they were. I never took offense because I called many of them the same thing as well.
The term stupid was more derogatory than calling them dumb in my opinion. I save the word stupid for people who are no longer dumb but have moved into the stupidity ranks based on things they’ve said and actions that they’ve taken. Here are a few quotes from some relatively famous people who were anything but dumb but were exceedingly stupid if only for a moment.
“The day of the battleship has not passed, and it is highly unlikely that an airplane, or a fleet of them, could ever successfully sink a fleet of Navy vessels under battle conditions.”This statement was made by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1922
“Atomic energy might be as good as our present-day explosives, but it is unlikely to produce anything very much more dangerous.” Statement made by Sir Winston Churchill, 1939
“That is the biggest fool thing we have ever done . . . The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.” Statement made by Adm. William Leahy to President Harry S. Truman regarding the atomic bomb 1945
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. Statement by Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1972
I think I’ve made some kind of point here, but I’m not quite sure what it is. I guess it just means that incredibly smart and intelligent people caught at the proper moment can make dumb statements. I think calling them stupid would be unfair to most of them. Always remember though that in a pile of dumb people there could be a few sneaky stupid people just waiting to impress you.
everyuselessthing.com 