Butter My Buns And Call Me A Biscuit #socs

Never once in my life have I uttered the expression "golly gee," so you’ll excuse me if I did a little research before at least attempting this little missive. Our friends at The Urban Dictionary tell us it’s "used in a satirical statement when somebody is treating you like a child."

Maybe not so much as a child as an idiot, and there are better expressions for that…

  • Thank you, Captain Obvious!
  • Duh!
  • No shit, Batman! (Or "No shit, Sherlock!" if you were born in one of those jurisdictions)

Do you ever make yourself laugh so hard that you forget what you ewre going to say? Somehow seeing the words "No shit, Batman!" sent me into gales of laughter.

Learned something else: "Golly," "gosh," and "gee" are all substitute words for God (or in the case of "gee," Jesus). I think I knew that somehow. "Geez" is another one. My little buddy Blake, who’s starring in the story I’m writing and will probably neither finish nor get published (I think I’m doing it mostly for my own amusement) uses "geez" a lot.

The title, by the way, is an expression a friend of mine used to use a lot.

Linda Hill runs Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Now here’s Vikki Lawrence for Carnation Instant lowfat milk.

Song of the Day: Eddie Rabbitt, “I Love A Rainy Night”

Country singer and songwriter Eddie Rabbitt would be 80 years old today (he died from lung cancer in 1998). Eddie was born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrant parents and raised in East Orange, New Jersey. He started out as a songwriter, writing such hits as "Kentucky Rain" for Elvis Presley and "Pure Love" by Ronnie Milsap. "I Love A Rainy Night" reached #1 on the Hot 100, the Country chart, and the Adult Contemporary chart in the US, #4 on the Country chart in Canada, #6 in Australia and #8 in New Zealand in 1980.

Five For Friday: Radical Gipsy

After my most recent Battle of the Bands, Birgit commented that she’d like to hear more of Radical Gipsy, who were shut out in the battle and (in my opinion, anyway) deserved to be featured, because they were also very good.

According to their YouTube page (and thanks to Google Translate),

The Radical Gipsy, or Gabriele Giovannini and Daniele Gai on guitars with Giulio Ciani on double bass, formed in Rome in 2012, with a precise orientation towards the sounds of traditional Manouche jazz inaugurated by Django Reinhardt. Their path has developed between Roman clubs and festivals, with important collaborations among which the one with the French accordionist Ludovic Beier and participation in the XXVI edition of Paolo Fresu’s Time in Jazz festival stands out. Along with original compositions and traditional pieces, the trio also brings to the stage some modern pieces rigorously arranged in a gipsy jazz key

  1. "Minor Swing": Django Reinhardt’s signature piece.

  2. "Jingles": A Wes Montgomery tune, given the Manouche touch.

  3. "Bossa Dorado": With Ludovic Beier on accordion. Written by Dorado Schmitt (another artist in the gipsy jazz genre).

  4. "Swing Gitan": A traditional song given a swing treatment.

  5. "For Sephora": A song by Stochelo Rosenberg of the Rosenberg Trio (another gipsy jazz artist).

You can find more Radical Gipsy on YouTube and Spotify.

That’s Five For Friday for November 26, 2021.

Song of the Day: Vince Guaraldi, “Linus and Lucy”

Cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, the creator of, and for almost 50 years the artist behind, the comic strip Peanuts, would be 99 years old today. He passed away on Frbruary 12, 2000 after a long battle with colon cancer; the final original strip of the series was published the next day. In 1965 Schulz created the Christmas special A Charlie Brown Christmas, featuring the music of jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi. One of the songs written for the special was "Linus and Lucy," which was used in most subsequent Peanuts specials. As the Christmas season begins today (at least in the United States), I thought it was an appropriate song.

Writer’s Workshop: Silly Me…

Image by P Tate from Pixabay

I managed to break my right arm twice before I turned 10, and I was to blame both times.

We lived in Indianapolis in the late ’50’s, so I would have been around 3 at the time. Half of our basement was finished: It had some tall cabinets (about 8 feet) at one end, with a shorter (about 6 feet) cabinet in the middle, and the floor was finished in hexagonal tile. I used to climb up on the shorter cabinet and from there up to the top of one of the taller ones and stay up there for a while before climbing back down.

Now, before you ask: I don’t remember exactly how I was able to do this. When you’re 3 years old, you do a lot of things and can’t explain how (and more importantly, why) you did them. Anyway…

One day I was in the basement with one of the kids in the neighborhood, and we were climbing the cabinets. I got to the top first, and when he tried to get up on the cabinet himself, he knocked me off. (I’m sure it was an accident, though there’s an apocryphal story that I stood up there and declared "I’M SUPERMAN!" and my friend wanted to see if I could fly.) Anyway, I fell 8 feet, landed on my right arm and broke it. I spent a couple of months in a cast.

The second time, I was in first grade. Jim, Kip, and I were horsing around shortly before bed, which involved running around the apartment. We were told on several occasions not to run around the apartment, and of course we ignored it, because we were kids and thus very stupid. On one of the trips, I slipped on a throw rug and went down on my arm. Hard.

My parents were, of course, very angry with me, not only because I had disobeyed them and maimed myself in the process, but because they had better things to do than sit at the Emergency Room at St. Francis Hospital on a Tuesday night, which, as everybody knows, was when The Red Skelton Show was on TV.

I loike to think that was the reason my parents never had any more kids…