Earth's ONLY website.
Hi kids!
This month your Dardanella is from a group I’ve never heard of called Papa Joe’s Jazzmen, playing in a club in Germany. According to the notes on YouTube, the band is from Cologne, and these fellas do their Dardanella-ing in authentic Dixieland style. They’ve got their own website, too, which lists the band members’ names as Didi, Klaus, Wiel, Wolfgang, Reiner, and Michael.
Watch for Klaus on the clarinet — this guy can really shred.
Click to play, dummy!
Gather ’round, children, while I tell you a story.
Long ago, in the dim ages before the Internet, we had this thing called “television.” It was a lot like YouTube, but you had to watch whatever happened to be on, and shut up and like it. There were only four channels, one of which was “good for you,” and everything was in black and white. If you wanted a cartoon, you had to wait until Saturday morning. And you never had a thought that things could ever be any different.
But then there was Tom Terrific, which ran occasionally on the daily Captain Kangaroo show, perhaps the best children’s show of the era. Tom was what he was: a boy with no apparent adult supervision who wore a funnel for a hat. Where he came from, or how he got the hat, was never explained. The funnel imbued him with the magic power to change into any object he could imagine, which stood him well in difficult situations. Thus equipped, Tom sought adventure with his “faithful companion,” Manfred, a talking dog who mostly wanted to stay home and sleep.
Tom had a winning enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur, and was drawn as simply as possible, probably due to a constrained budget. I, too, am drawn with a constrained budget, and that accounts for my featureless countenance and underdeveloped personality. One does not get the impression that there was much money backing the Tom Terrific production, but the show had a palpable charm nonetheless.
There does not seem to be much available of the Terrific oeuvre online, but YouTube does provide a sampling. Watch it now and get an idea of what I was watching then. There are some unfortunate characterizations of Native Americans herein, but such was the time.
Click to play, dummy!
And part two:
JESSE KATSOPOLIS: John Stamos
JOEY GLADSTONE: Dave Coulier
DANNY TANNER: Bob Saget
DJ TANNER: Candace Cameron
STEPH TANNER: Jodie Sweetin
MICHELLE TANNER: Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen
GILLIGAN: Tommy Lee Jones
THE SKIPPER: Andy Dick
THE MILLIONAIRE: William Shatner
HIS WIFE: Leonard Nimoy
THE MOVIE STAR: Kathy Bates
THE PROFESSOR: Noam Chomsky
MARY ANN: Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
Could be worse, I guess. Or could it? Leave a comment to suggest any even scarier ideas.
HAMLET, Prince of Denmark: Wallace Shawn
CLAUDIUS, the King: Adam Sandler
LATIFAH, the Queen: Kenneth Branagh
OPHELIA: Courtney Love
HAMLET’S GHOST: Stephen Hawking
POLONIUS: Larry the Cable Guy
HORATIO: Sir Mix-A-Lot
GRISWOLD: Chevy Chase
LAERTES: Dustin “Screech” Diamond
CATWOMAN: Julie Newmar
ROSENCRANTZ: Otto
GUILDENSTERN: George
YOUR BARTENDER: Ted Lange
PLAYER KING: Donny Most
MARCELLUS: Carlos Mencia
BARNARDO: also Dustin “Screech” Diamond
FORTINBRAS: A Department Store Mannequin Dressed Like A Norwegian
GRAVEDIGGER: Billy Crystal
LORDS, LADIES, OFFICERS, SOLDIERS, TELEMARKETERS, SCIENTOLOGISTS, LOUNGE SINGERS
Since we’re talkin’ stop motion video (see my previous post about Neighbours, an innovative short artsy film made over 50 years ago), and since Kenny just mentioned it in the comments to that post, let’s look at Poop Today, a very short stop-motion viddie made a couple of years ago. It went semi-viral a couple of years ago and boasts some 69,032 YouTube views as of this writing. The soundtrack includes a cryptic song with an offensive lyric, but the Internet is unexpurgated and you deal with it, yes? Here you go:
I find it endlessly fascinating how these ideas ping around, and how people make their own versions on the same concept. I guess this is whatcha call a “meme,” meme being a word I find beyond annoying, but I don’t know a shorter way of expressing the thought in this case. Here’s an answer to the “Poop Today” video above, called “Poop Tomorrow.” Just some teenagers goofing around in a basement, but still:
That being said, it would appear that the undisputed YouTube Champion of this business is a vid called “Tony vs. Paul,” with over 4.5 million YouTube views. Maybe you’ve already seen it. It doesn’t try to achieve as much as “Neighbours” did, but it’s fun nevertheless:
There are a lot of people on YouTube trying this stuff. The means of production are in our hands, people. Can the Revolution be near?
Until tonight, I think it’s been something like forty years since I’ve seen this film.
I remember it in black and white, but shazam! Turns out it was in color. Being that I was only slightly more than an embryo when I last saw it, the bits of it I remembered were hazy. But it’s the sort of film that sticks with you, especially if you see it young, and I did see it many, many times.
They used to show it on television a lot, on Sunday mornings. Sunday because, as you’ll see, it presents a rather important moral lesson that you’d best pay attention to, you licentious ninny. We didn’t have a color television (we were Amish, as I recall), so that’s why I remember it being in black and white (I was mistaken). (I was also mistaken about being Amish just now.) It turns a lot more violent than I remembered, too. Mayhem! Havoc! Two thumbs up!
I’ve had vague memories of it ever since, and I didn’t think I’d ever see it again, given that I didn’t know the title, who made it, who was in it, where it came from, or even if it wasn’t something I had dreamt. But, as I’ve pointed out before, we live in an era beyond obscurity. I put four words into the Google-izer (the four words: fence flower fight animation). These represented the few solid details I could recall. Booyah! There it is, right there on the ol’ YooToob.
The film is called “Neighbours.” The director was one Norman McLaren, hero of the National Film Board of Canada. (Canada is a small country near Spokane.) It was made in 1952, and it won an Oscar for Best Short Subject (or something) way back when. It runs about eight minutes. And you can tell it’s authentic Canadian because they spell “neighbor” with that ridiculous and laughably unnecessary “u” in it. Those Canadians with their weirdo orthography — they’re lucky they don’t have oil or we’d force proper spelling on them at gunpoint. No wonder they hate war.
Click to play, Dumstead!
This post may only be of interest to those who are building their own blogs. The study of blogs and blogging has kind of taken over my life lately, to the point where I’m neglecting my own blog as I look in to see what other people are making of theirs. That being said, every day I’m tweaking something, and while it may not be very apparent to anyone who reads this page from week to week, things are slowly changing and my skills keep developing. You maybe can’t tell, but I can.
The weirdest part about having this blog so far is how my traffic keeps trending upward, even as I post some rather, um, eclectic items. Until now the world has been pretty consistent in letting me know that the things that interest me tend to be of little interest to the rest of humanity. But online, things are different. People find you. Tribes sort themselves out. And increasing numbers of people are visiting these pages. The numbers, to be sure, are small, but they are getting bigger, and at a rate that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. It’s not something I’ve expected, but there it is.
Please note: Everything I post here has had some kind of fascination to me (yes, even the Dardanella). I just never expect anyone else to dig the same weirdo stuff. And yet, more and more visits are showing up in the stats. And that’s encouraging.
My new favorite traffic stat is RSS subscribers. If you look above and to the left, you’ll see a little orange icon for those who wish to subscribe to this blog via what is called a “reader.” I only started using one about six months ago and I don’t know how I got along without it. They’re a little tricky figuring out at first, but they makes it much easier to get to web content that you want — “RSS” stands for… actually, I don’t know what exactly, but most people refer to it as “Really Simple Syndication.” Google has a reader — that’s the one I’m using. There’s also a website for reading blogs called bloglines.com. It has another good reader with a friendly interface that’s very easy to read.
Anyway, my point: A couple of weeks ago, I rigged that RSS link to start counting the numbers of people who are coming to my blog via an RSS reader, and as of today, with my little half-assed blog, I have six (count ‘em) six RSS subscribers. I’m one of them, I know who two of the others are, and that means there are three people I’ve never met out there in Webland who are actually following what happens here. They’re interested to the point where they’re having it delivered to them automatically. And that just knocks me out.
Some blogs have literally tens of thousands of RSS subscribers. But these six are mine.
I recommend that you look into trying out an RSS reader. Like, um, maybe start by clicking MY orange button thingie. It’s up there on the upper left just under the header. It could completely change the way you spend your time online.
In a post at the beginning of June I set up a blogging to-do list. Looking back on it six weeks later I can say that I’m pleased with my progress, even if I haven’t completed every item on it. I haven’t set up a contact page, I haven’t updated my About page. But I have improved the appearance of this blog (I know - lots more to do here) and I’ve done a lot of messing around with social media sites. I’ve more than tripled my list of Facebook friends (okay, the number was pretty low to begin with, but still), and I’ve set up accounts on some of the other social media sites. Frankly, a lot of these have not been very enticing to me (Plurk, Twitter, etc.), but I imagine that as I develop a circle of friends on these sites their charms will become more apparent. For now, I’ll keep checking into them on a regular basis, and let my participation grow at a natural rather than a forced pace. Who knows what wonders wait for me there?
More useful to me have been sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. These are sites where people vote for items they find online, and as the votes are tallied, some good web content finds its way to the top of the list. There is some Wisdom Of The Crowd at work here… stuff that gets voted up the lists tends to have something going for it, even if only turns out to be some kind of crude joke. And perhaps one day I’ll actually produce some content that’s worth Digging. We’ll see.
I’ve also been doing a lot of stuff that isn’t apparent here. I’ve been studying a bit of html, and I’ve been looking at some various page lay-outs for blogs. The current lay-out for this blog is a WordPress theme called Tarski, which I’ve found simple and clean, if not ideal. One day I’ll know enough about this stuff to get things the way I want them. Until then, the world of blogging has endless fascinations, and the written word is only one aspect of it. I’m looking forward to spending a lot more time noodling around with this stuff.
And that’s my report on my progress to date.
Oh, and one last thing: I’ve actually earned some money with this blog. Yes, after three and a half months of heroic effort, I’ve banked a whole $2.71.
This bodes well, yes?
Hey Boys & Girls! It’s July’s Dardanella of the Month! Woo hoo!
One of my ongoing projects, as you know, has been to seek Global Domination by bending Cyberspace to my will. One aspect of this quest has been to explore the various social media sites that have been springing up online. Some (MySpace, FaceBook) have been around quite a bit longer than some of the newer upstarts (Twitter, Plurk), and all of them have their various quirks and idiosyncrasies. I still have a long way to go before I figure it all out, but most of these sites have some compulsive entertainment value if nothing else.
One thing that is true of all of these sites is that they work best when you’ve connected yourself to a significant and growing number of people. While I’ve had Facebook and MySpace accounts for years, my presence on the other sites is only weeks old. In other words: I need friends! I need followers! I need minions!
Below are links to my profiles on some of the sites I have joined. If you are a member of any of these sites, please add me to your friend lists and whatnot, and you can follow my exploits online. Soon, as you find yourself more and more engrossed in the ongoing saga of my life, you may even be finding yourself more interested in my well-being than in your own. And that’s exactly the way the world should be, yes?
So click in and join me everywhere:
In time I’ll be adding these and others to my About page, which still is in serious need of updating. That will happen eventually, and in the meantime, I look forward to connecting with you on any and all of these sites.
