Work and tomorrow’s move are going to keep me a bit too busy to blog, so how about I point you to Chocolypse Now?
It’s years later, and Charlie Buckett, along with the rest of the
Golden Ticket winners are sent by Slugworth to travel up the river into
Loompaland and find Wonka.
[3.7 MB, Windows Media] of Patrick “Jean-Luc Picard” Stewart doing an
uncharacteristic soft-shoe number. It’s an “easter egg” from Star Trek: The Next Generation’s 5th season DVD set.
[via Waxy] WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has an interesting set of MP3s showing what was probably the only Psychedelic Christian radio show, created and hosted by one Pastor John Rydgren in 1967. Here’s their description:
Radio and Film Department of the American Lutheran Church. Years
before the words “Jesus” and “Freak” became joined at the rib, the
straight-looking Rydgren created a daily radio show called Silhouette in which he became the reassuring, resonant-voiced Hippy for God. Rydgren wrote, announced and programmed Silhouette, taking his musical and cultural cues from The Electric Prunes, Herb Alpert and the cover of Time (Is God Dead?), with a vocal delivery that was straight out of the Tom Donahue / Scott Muni / Ken Nordine
school of breathy baritone radio seduction. Silhouette
dropped
all the counter-cultural codewords of the day into a heady mix of
Peace, Love, Sex, Drugs and Jesus. Not to mention Fuzzy Guitars.
The blog entry has 19 MP3s of segments of the show and has some comic panels illustrating Rydgren’s hippie reinterpretation of Psalm 23.
And yeah, he really does have a Ken Nordine-like delivery!
By the way, for those of you not familiar with the 23rd Psalm, it’s the
one that begins with “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” and
also has the classic bit, “Yea, though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.”
(See, Mom? I was paying attention in Sunday school!)
The King James Bible version:
The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
He leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’ sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me;
Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies;
Thou annointest my head with oil; My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.
Let me know! (Feel free tell me about anyone I should avoid.)
Me and Neal Stephenson at a booksigning for Quicksilver.
I make it a point to check out the Teresa and Patrick Neilsen Hayden’s blog, Making Light, on a fairly regular basis. There’s always something interesting to read there, and my dendrites always feel a little bushier after a visit.
Making Light has an interesting set of quotes at the bottom of its left sidebar, and this one by Neal Stephenson — who probably rolls his eyes at the “dark prince of hacker fiction” that got pinned on him — caught my eye and tickled my brain (and will probably annoy some of my friends with hippie-ish tendencies):
For a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter’s is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you’re trying to breathe liquid methane.
So….hypnotic… [Flash required]
You do read Hugh McLeod’s business card-sized comics on his blog gapingvoid, don’t you?
Click the the comic to see the entry in which it appears.
Click the the comic to see the entry in which it appears.