• South Carolina is the shredded tire capital of ‘Merka;
• Dixie Chicken by Little Feat, the live version, is one of the all-time great driving tunes. Eight times in a row was overkill;
• How did I upload 10,000 tunes and forget Frank Zappa???
Michigan seems like a dream to me now. Canton? A nightmare.
Here’s what I learned today:
• A smartphone is useless if the Starbucks finder doesn’t work;
• Sixteen hours of tunes and only one clunker;
• There are some really shitty drivers out there;
• I can’t drive forever.
Taking a rest break for some shut eye.
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| A thread from Johnny Dollar’s CABLE NEWS TRUTH sewer on my birthday |
The Flying Monkey Squad™ is at it again.
The Flying Monkey Squad™ has, once again, started with an observation and, working backwards, created another Bogus Conspiracy Theory™. Then Johnny Dollar, aka Mark Koldys, allows the use of his sewer about CABLE NEWS TRUTH to disseminate their bullshit.
Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s the same old pattern I’ve put up with for the last year of obsessive cyber-stalking by The Flying Monkey Squad™.
It’s so nice that The Flying Monkey Squad thinks I am important enough to continue to cyber-stalk. You’d have thought li’l ol’ me wouldn’t be worth their time, but they just can’t quit me.
Who is obsessed? They claim it’s me. I say it’s them. Who you gonna believe?
Take a look: Ashley Graham, aka Grayhammy, is quoting my emails from 10 years ago and making unfounded assumptions about it. He also quotes an exchange from somewhere with Johnny Dollar, aka Mark Koldys, from 2011. Check out that obsession!!! The NSA could use a few pointers from Ashley Graham on obsessive cyber-stalking.
Yet, this is his latest feeble attempt to discredit me.
That MoFo Grayhammy has proven once again that he simply doesn’t understand how a nom de plume works. I created the character of Aunty Em Ericann SEVERAL YEARS before I was approached to write for NewsHounds. When I started writing for NewsHounds, I simply kept the nom de plume. Using a nom de plume to write under is not a lie, just ask A.A. Fair. In fact, in today’s political climate it might be wise to use a nom de plume, right (he asks of the piece of shit hiding behind the sock puppet) Grayhammy?
Case in point: Ashley Graham and Mark Koldys tried to discredit me as a NewsHound writer by exposing my sex life. They sweep that inconvenient fact under the carpet. Exposing my sex life and Aunty Em’s nom de plume proves why a political writer would need a nom de plume in this age of personal destruction, a tactic at which The Flying Monkey Squad™ excels.
Grayhammy claims, without proof, that I lied to my family and friends when I created the performance artist I named Aunty Em. Several hundred people knew I was Aunty Em, including my family, my friends, and Flo and Eddie, among many others. How much of a secret could it really be? Whenever I called up contacts for NewsHound research I’d introduce myself as “Headly Westerfield, writing for NewsHounds under the name of Aunty Em.” AGAIN: How much of a secret could it really be?
The Flying Monkey Squads™ conspiracy theory falls apart right there. They know that, of course. Which is why they know they are lying about me when they continue to bring it up.
Having said all that: Johnny Dollar continues to prove that he is the enabler, and often instigator, of the The Flying Monkey Squad™. I cut enablers no slack. I wonder why a grown man — a former Michigan prosecutor — would act that way. I’m sure his parents taught him better than that.
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| Above: a mother’s adoring eyes. Far left, Grumpy Cat, aka Mark Koldys, aka Johnny Dollar, the fearless leader of The Flying Monkey Squad. You’d have thought his mother (pictured here with Brother Bruce and brother Ken) and father would have taught him to not be such a mendacious piece of shit. |
I need to point out that Grayhammy also drags Patrick into his discussion.
What’s so HIGH-LARRY-US about that is for the longest time The Flying Monkey Squad™ kept
accusing Aunty Em of being this person named Patrick, along with dozens of other sock
puppets, even tho’ the only name I was using online at that point was Aunty Em. When The Flying Monkey Squad™ finally exposed Aunty Em’s identity they also proved I
wasn’t Patrick. Or have they? Bwah-ha-ha!!!
Regardless, now I am being
accused of directing this Patrick — telling him what to say. Aside from a few exchanges on various
forums on the innertubes, I don’t know Patrick. Nor do I tell him what
to tweet. From what I have seen of Patrick’s tweets, nobody tells him what to tweet. He tweets what he wants to tweet
and much of it is unpleasant. But, I have no connection to Patrick. I
never have. Nor do I feel a need to denounce someone I do not know. However, The Flying Monkey Squad™ loves to play guilt by
association.
LAUGH OF THE DAY: “You’ve inspired a hammytweet.” And, sure enough, as if on cue, there was a hammytweet tweet about Chicolinis:
Remember when Headly Westerfield use 2refer2others as Chicolini? It was back when he called himself Anti-American..oops, Aunty Em Ericann
— Ashley Graham (@Grayhammy) June 8, 2013
* h/t to my innertube tipster. You know who you are.
Not Now Silly celebrates the birth of the man that made it all possible: Lester William Polsfuss, better known as Les Paul.
Les Paul didn’t invent the guitar, which falls into the family of chordophones.Those go back several thousands of years to India and China. Modern descendants include the lute and violin, not to mention the guitar as we now know it.
Les Paul didn’t even invent the electric guitar. That happened in 1931 when George Beauchamp invented a magnetic pick-up for the Ro-Pat “Frying Pan” lap steel guitar. Les Paul didn’t get around to inventing his solid body electric guitar until 10 years later and even then it was just a 2×4 with the electronics hidden inside. It was so ugly, and Les received so many negative comments on it, he disguised it by hiding it in a dummy guitar.
Les Paul didn’t even invent overdubbing, although he perfected it and popularized the technique.
Yet, Les Paul is often credited with inventing all three. The New York Times 2009 obituary stated:
Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer.
He played guitar alongside leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby.
In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by
1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric
guitar, although there are other claimants. With his guitar and the
vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording
and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.Mr.
Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic
richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his
technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose
main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.
Nothing I could write would explain it any better than the wonderful documentary “Chasing Sound,” which intercuts contemporary footage of Les Paul performing at the Iridium Jazz Club — which he did right up to his death at the age of 94 — with historic footage and music telling Les Paul’s life story. Watch:
Dateline June 8, 1867 – Frank Lloyd Wright is born in Wisconsin. By the time he died at the age of 92, he would be considered the greatest architect that ever lived.
By 1956 Wright was so famous that the What’s My Line panel had to be blindfolded when he Wright appeared before them. And, as usual, Dorothy Kilgallen was the smartest person in the room.
Wright built Taliesin and restarted his career, reaching new heights. Then one tragic day in 1914, while Wright was off working on a building, a male servant set fire to Taliesin during a lunch Mameh was hosting. As people fled the smoke-filled dining room, Julian Carlton hacked seven people to death with an axe. Among the dead was Mameh Cheney and her two children. Wright was shattered.
But, it’s all about the buildings. It didn’t hurt that Wright was a consummate salesman and his #1 product was Frank Lloyd Wright.
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| John Lennon and Yoko One perform with Frank Zappa and The Mothers |
Dateline June 6, 1971 – Frank Zappa and his newly formed Mothers play a notorious gig at the Fillmore East. This was the second night of a two night stand. As he had done previously, Zappa had a surprise for the audience: an encore set backing up John Lennon and Yoko Ono, just beginning their sojourn in NYC that ended so tragically.
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| The inner-sleeve from Lennon’s release |
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| The minimalist cover as released by Zappa |
Zappa had arranged for the night to be recorded, as he increasingly did for all live performances. He came to release the night’s performance by The Mothers as “Fillmore East – June 1971.” It was the latest chapter in the band’s “Touring can make you crazy” phase, which culminated in the movie 200 Motels. During the evening’s entertainment Flo and Eddie, alternatively playing both groupies and Pop Stars, document Vanilla Fudge having sex with a mudshark at the Edgewater Motel, meet Bwana Dik, reprise a few classic Zappa tunes, and eventually agree to sing their big hit song — WITH A BULLET!!! — “Happy Together.”
Then Zappa sprung John and Yoko on the audience instead of the encore:
Frank Zappa turned the portion of John and Yoko’s performance over to him after the show. As was his wont, Lennon turned the tapes over to Phil Spector, who remixed the tapes and released it in 1972 as Side 4 of the “Some Time In New York City” double-record set. Frank Zappa was extremely unhappy with the results and lawsuits were threatened before it all got settled to everyone’s satisfaction. Frank Zappa tells that story:
If our first Fillmore show […] was wonderful, our second was transcendent. When the concert ended and the audience stood, waiting for their encore, it felt as if a herd of elephants had entered the auditorium as the world’s most famous couple walked onstage. The resulting jam was recorded by both Frank and the Fillmore and was released on two different albums. John released it as the 4th LP [sic] in his Some Times In New Your City compilation on Apple, although he took writing credit on every song, including Frank’s iconic “King Kong,” which h renamed and tried to publish. Frank’s lawyers had to sue John’s lawyers to straighten the entire thing out, and it really wasn’t all that great anyway, but at least I can say that I am among a handful of people, right alongside Paul McCartney, to ever share a writing credit with the immortal John Lennon. So there.
Zappa got the last laugh. He eventually released his own, remixed, versions of those recordings on the Playground Psychotics CD. He gave the songwriters the proper credits, but renamed one of the tunes “A Small Eternity with Yoko Ono.”
Dateline June 5, 1956 – Elvis Presley appeared on the Milton Berle Show. Coming during his first brush with national fame, his pelvic gyrations were so suggestive that it became a national scandal. No, really!
In March of ’56 Elvis had released his eponymous debut LP on RCA. The label bought out his contract from Sun Studios the previous year. This LP would go on to become the first #1 Rock and Roll album, topping the Billboard charts for 10 weeks. Some 50 years later it ranked #56 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. However, Elvis was barely known at this point in his career. All that would change within the next six months.
Just a month after the LP’s release, Elvis appeared for the first time on the Milton Berle Show, singing an extremely hot version of Heartbreak Hotel from the deck of the USS Hancock. (Don’t ask.) When the performance finished, Elvis continued his tour. There was no public outcry. Watch:
Elvis was just on the cusp of national and international fame. He had recently signed a 7-year Hollywood contract to star in movies and was still touring extensively. Milton Berle, who was trying to save his show from cancellation (unsuccessfully, as it turned out), booked Elvis for a return visit to his show in June, this time appearing at NBC’s studio in Hollywood. Before the show began Milton Berle, the show biz veteran of Vaudeville, radio, and tee vee, gave Elvis some advice; five words that changed history.
“Let ’em see you, son,” Milton Berle reportedly told Elvis, successfully convincing him to leave his guitar behind when he performed Hound Dog, a song he hadn’t even recorded yet. Without his guitar to hide behind, Elvis’ dancing was more exaggerated than his previous visit. While some girls screamed, much of the audience is confused, laughing and tittering. Clearly, they’ve never seen anything quite like this before:
‘Merka clutched its metaphorical pearls. According to the WikiWackyWoo:
Presley’s gyrations created a storm of controversy. Television critics were outraged: Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. … His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner’s aria in a bathtub. … His one specialty is an accented movement of the body … primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway.” Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music “has reached its lowest depths in the ‘grunt and groin’ antics of one Elvis Presley. … Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos”. Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation’s most popular, declared him “unfit for family viewing”.
Ed Sullivan was brutal in his assessment of Elvis Presley:
Watching clips of the Allen and Berle shows with his producer, Sullivan had opined that Presley “got some kind of device hanging down below the crotch of his pants–so when he moves his legs back and forth you can see the outline of his cock. … I think it’s a Coke bottle. … We just can’t have this on a Sunday night. This is a family show!” Sullivan publicly told TV Guide, “As for his gyrations, the whole thing can be controlled with camera shots.”
Which is exactly what he did.
Sullivan was forced to book Elvis when Steve Allen’s show with Elvis singing Hound Dog to an actual hound dog, beat Sullivan’s show in the ratings. Elvis has called this the most ridiculous performance of his career:
Quickly reversing his principled stand to obtain boffo ratings, Sullivan offered Elvis the unheard of sum of $50,000 for three appearances. In case anything went terribly wrong on the first Sullivan performance, Ed Sullivan made sure that he could not be blamed. He had guest host Charles Laughton filling in while he recuperated from a car accident. Elvis performed Love Me Tender for the 60 million viewers who tuned in.
While his first Sullivan appearance cemented Elvis Presley’s fame, it was his appearance on the Milton Berle Show that earned him the nickname of Elvis the Pelvis. He hated this phrase the rest of his life, calling it, “one of the most childish expressions I ever heard comin’ from an adult.”
The phone needs to be in landscape.
I will be posting to Not Now Silly while on the road. This is how updates from my phone will look.
Today all of ‘Merka is celebrating the 84th birthday of game show producer, Gong Show Host, and paid CIA assassin Chuck Barris.
Barris is often called the Father of Reality Television, a smear he has tried to live down. However, few people realize that long before he launched The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, he wrote Freddie “Boom Boom” Cannon’s greatest hit, “Palisades Park.”
However, no matter how many bad people he’s killed (33 at last report), Chuck Barris will never have been a greater service to his country than he was when he created The Gong Show. Your argument is invalid.