Accept no substitutes

Category: Amusements (Page 31 of 31)

Things that are amusing

Hooray for Santy Claus; First Noel

Hooray for Santy Claus
From Italy comes the best of bad Christmas music — and it’s free! Senor Tonto has recorded the wonderful song “Hooray for Santy Claus” (from the American Christmas classic “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians” which was also released as a comic book, a Dell Classic). The song is downloadable in mp3 format in two versions. One with a delightful vocal and one instrumental so that you can sing it at Christmas karaoke parties. Yes, there is a lyric sheet and even a 50s style pinup cover suitable for printing and enclosing with a CD gift. If you are thinking of buying the movie on video, be sure to read the Amazon reviews.

For those of you in a more religious and less humorous mood, Roger McGuinn offers “The First Noel” also free but of a distinctly different quality and taste. Roger writes:

One of my fondest childhood memories is of standing around the piano with my mother and father at my grandparents’ house in Chicago. My grandfather and grandmother sat at the keyboard. Every Christmas we would go through the small book of carols. The tree in the next room was decorated with lots of nineteenth century ornaments, and tin toys from Germany were abundantly scattered around the blanket of white material made to look like snow. This is one of the prettiest carols I remember from that time. An English Carol from before 1823.

Post-structural Breakfast Comix

Reconnected with old friend, poet, book designer and friend of many beatniks, David Southern, through a request for help in finding an open source replacement for the late Dyna-web SGML search engine. David is working on the Carlyle Letters project at Duke University Press. The solution and the connection is close at hand. I believe that Nassib Nassar‘s Amberfish will do all that Dyna-web did and much more.
In a kind of intellectual barter, David pointed me to “Breakfast Comix” by Tom Raworth who I met years ago at David’s digs out in the county. Loaded with post-structuralist and poetic humor. Even more post-beatnik visual humor on Tom’s site.

Sevens Rule

Patrick mentions is a comment below about the powers of 1, 3 and 7 — and so 13, 37, and 137. Sevens definitely rule as there are so many rules of seven. In poetry, I use the Welsh seven syllable line of Dafydd ap Gwilym (14th century) as a basic building block. The idea is that the odd syllable count adds drama in that you never quite get a series of iambs going unless you emjamb to get there. If you do — you being the poet, but the reader is of course taken on the same ride — your rhyme hits in ways that break the Frankenstein tendencies of the iamb to modern ears while still keeping the expectations alive and occassionally even fulfilled.
Two other poems I’ve built this way are “Dividing Waters” and “Lent 2003”. The last was written for the Poets Against the War and is not build on seven lines and seven verses as “Birds and Fishes” and “Dividing Waters” are. “Birds” and “Waters” have other brothers in their set which I will make available later (or after they are publishing or abandoned).

Unchained Cheney

Not Dick Cheney, but Lynne has talents the evidence of which might have vanished had not certain fans of her novel, “Sisters,” transcribed the entire rare and difficult to find book into a blog on Live Journal. You can now read this great erotic and historic work. And you can comment on it chapter by chapter.

UPDATEThe Live Journal has been killed (as a commenter here has noticed). Copies of the book are selling for $500 and up on Amazon. But the fine people at Whitehouse.org have copies of the covers and excerpts up for you to enjoy if you don’t want to spent your entire year’s movie allowance including several giant popcorns per flick on the book itself.

Lesseningly Mysterious East

Enter any URL into the field on this page from Excite Japan and that page will appear translated into Japanese. Just like this. Then in true Babblefish fashion, we translate it back to Engish of a sort.
But Google is not to be left behind. Korean, Japanese and Chinese are all in beta at http://translate.google.com/
Here’s the Google/Babblefish version of the same thing going to Japanese.
And back to English of a sort. [still trying to get this automated]
Starting from Excite to Japanese then back to English via Google, we get this.
You be the judge.

実際のポール・ジョーンズ from Excite
実質のポールジョーンズ from Google/Babblefish
実質のポールジョーンズ from WorldLingo Translator (thanks id)

Thanks to Nassib for making me aware of the Excite translator.

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