My Grandad was a fake blacksmith you know.
He worked in a forgery!
Tag: funny
January 24, 2012
January 23, 2012
Really funny jokes-Squeeze a lemon
The local bar was so sure that its bartender was the strongest man around that they offered a standing $1000 bet. The bartender would squeeze a lemon until all the juice ran into a glass, and hand the lemon to a patron. Anyone who could squeeze one more drop of juice out would win the money. Many people had tried over time (weight-lifters, longshoremen, etc.) but nobody could do it.
One day this scrawny little man came into the bar, wearing thick glasses and a polyester suit, and said in a tiny squeaky voice “I’d like to try the bet”
After the laughter had died down, the bartender said OK, grabbed a lemon, and squeezed away. Then he handed the wrinkled remains of the rind to the little man. But the crowd’s laughter turned to total silence as the man clenched his fist around the lemon and six drops fell into the glass!! As the crowd cheered, the bartender paid the $1000, and asked the little man “what do you do for a living? Are you a lumberjack, a weight-lifter, or what?”
The scrawny little man replied “I work for the IRS.”
January 22, 2012
Really funny jokes-Carnival truck
A carnival truck and a revival preacher’s truck collide head-on, and everyone is killed. The next thing anyone knows, Saint Peter is interrogating the revival preacher very thoroughly. Suddenly, the carnival crew arrives at the Pearly Gates reeking of beer and reefer, and Saint Peter continues waves them all through as he continues questioning the preacher. The Reverend splutters indignantly and asks, “How can you let those filthy, unrighteous hooligans into heaven while you give me the third degree?”
“Take it easy,” Saint Peter says. “They’re only going to be here a week.”
January 21, 2012
"I Had Sex with Hitler and then Almost Fed His Brain to a Condor"
If you’re like most dolts produced by the American education system, you probably actually believe Adolph Hitler died in his bunker in 1945 when the Russian Army reached Berlin. Such ignorance is understandable, given how important it was, then and now, to protect the world from the terrifying REALITY of the situation, namely this: At the end of WWII, Adolph Hitler’s brain was surgically removed, placed in stasis, and then transplanted into a willing new host! Most likely, “Hitler” is still somewhere on the planet today, scheming, ever scheming, to return and complete his plans for world domination. My money says the brain is now in Rick Perry. Every Texas yahoo talks about secession now and then, but Perry’s recent campaign pledge to annex the Sudetenland is troubling to say the least.
They Saved Hitler’s Brain (aka The Madman of Mandoras) (1963) dared speak this truth in the tortured logic of Z-cinema some fifty years ago. Legend has it that the film began shooting in the late fifties–only to be shut down by Nazi agents in Hollywood looking to suppress its startling revelations. It took the courage of a rag-tag band of UCLA students in the early sixties to shoot some additional framing footage, thereby padding out the original film by ten or fifteen minutes so that it might get distribution and thus see the light of day. But it turns out the Nazis had nothing to worry about. The temporal rift created by grafting together the film stock and styles of the late fifties and early sixties was so jarring that the movie elicited only jeers and ridicule. For years it played in the post-fringe graveyard of late-night television, leaving an astonished few to admire the stamina of the actor forced to kneel for hours at a time behind an old ham radio set and under a bell jar in order to “sell” the illusion of functional decapitation.
Happily for lovers of historical drama, the saga of Hitler’s itinerant brain did not die with that noble, yet failed cinematic experiment. In 1973, novelist Roland Puccetti tried once again to alert the world to the ongoing hazard presented by allowing Hitler’s brain to remain at liberty, giving us the sublime revisionism of The Death of the Führer (Arrow Books-1973).
I have now read Puccetti’s book. Before recounting its alternative history of the years after the Second World War (absolute and total spoiler alert), let me say this: The Death of the Führer MUST be adapted for the screen as soon as possible. How it hasn’t already ended up as a major motion picture is a true mystery, one that makes me suspect Nazi sympathizers are once again pressuring Hollywood to ignore the R-rated bombshells contained in this book. The Death of the Führer is everything Inglourious Basterds hoped to be–but done with such economy and ease that it utterly shames Tarantino’s lumbering attempt to pass off what are essentially five interminably long dialog scenes as some kind of fast-paced caper film. If you want brutal and stunning Nazisploitative action, then Puccetti is your man.
We begin at a Bavarian ski lodge some time in the 1960s. A young man–his name is unimportant, call him Mr. Framing-Device if you like–has twisted his leg and must stay off the slopes. An old man sitting on a bench nearby accurately diagnoses the skier’s condition from afar–for you see, this old man is a doctor: Karl Giesvius. As so often happens when strangers meet in the Bavarian Alps, their conversation soon turns to Hitler. Karl, it turns out, knows the REAL story, which he proceeds to tell us:
Ten or so years after the end of WWII, Karl had been sitting in a Parisian cafe when suddenly a local rushed in and begged him to attend to a dying man elsewhere in the city, a dying man who claimed to have information about the whereabouts of….Hitler! Understandably intrigued, Karl rushed to the man’s bedside to hear a startling confession: “I assisted in the removal and transplantation of Hitler’s brain!” Later, after the man dies, Karl looks through some old photos and verifies that the dying man had indeed been a member of the Führer’s personal medical team. He decides to fly to Berlin and begin his investigation.
First task: get inside the Führerbunker and see if any clues are still there. Now, you might think the Führerbunker would have been picked over for just about any and all items of historical import, and that accessing it would be difficult if not impossible. But this turns out not to the be the case. Consulting a map of the compound, Karl figures out where the ventilation shaft should be, and after moving a few well-placed rocks, he’s unearthed the entrance. After shimmying down the vent, he’s the first person to stand in the Führerbunker since the Russians collapsed the entrances at the end of the war. What’s down there? Junk, mostly. It would also appear a Russian soldier took a retributive shit on Hitler’s bed, an extremely resilient shit considering it somehow survived for a decade before Karl descended into the bunker to witness it. He checks out the conference room. Nothing. Eva Braun’s bedroom. Nothing. He’s just about to give up and/or suffocate from a lack of oxygen when finally Karl discovers a hidden passageway connecting Hitler’s bedroom to… a secret surgical theater!
Looking around the tiled room with his flashlight, Karl discovers a bloody operating table and scalpels that still have hair on them (the hair of Hitler!). Strangely, though the Nazis had apparently pioneered the art of brain transplantation, they still didn’t quite understand that one should shave a surgical area before operating. Karl continues his search for evidence. His flashlight illuminates a strange object on the floor. Bingo! It’s a brain!
Hitler’s brain? Well, no, actually–Karl quickly reasons it is the brain of the poor schmuck who donated his body so that Hitler could have a new ride. This was some particularly good writing, I thought. Here Puccetti captures the urgency of the situation back in 1945. With the allies advancing, Nazi doctors had no time to wash down the operating theater nor throw away the old brain–a point Puccetti emphasizes by revealing that the floor-brain is still in the steely clutches of the forceps used so many years ago to wrench it from its skull! There’s also a bucket of congealed blood nearby, but Puccetti does not speculate as to why the brain didn’t end up there rather than on the floor. Also, we are left to wonder how this brain tissue, much like the enduring pile of Russian infantry crap in the next room, could survive more or less in tact for over a decade.
Karl’s investigation continues. He finds a plaque bearing the name of the surgical genius responsible for all this brain shuffling: Dr. Wilhelm Tager. Karl is flabbergasted. Tager, as it turns out, was his buddy from medical school before the war, his old fencing partner, and a genius of neurology who finished at the top of their class. That just about seals it. Find Tager find Hitler’s brain, he reasons. And then he can kill them both!
After a little more detective work, Karl tracks Tager down to a remote castle somewhere in Spain. Next obstacle: How to infiltrate a well-guarded compound full of evil Nazi scientists? Here Karl decides for an elegantly direct approach–he simply floors his motorcycle and breaks through the front gate (as seen on the action-packed cover above). That might seem crazy, but Karl’s plan is actually a bit more complicated. After taking a few Nazi bullets and wrecking his bike into a tree, it is Karl’s hope that Dr. Tager will attend to him and then recognize him from their college days. And this is precisely what happens. After surgery, Karl wakes up and tells his “old friend” that he just happened to be vacationing in Spain and that the throttle on his motorcycle just happened to get stuck–that’s why he crashed through the gate uncontrollably.
One might think that the Nazi brain trust (those entrusted with the Nazi brain, that is) hiding out in Spain would be the most paranoid gated-community on the planet–but no one seems to question the fact that Karl, unseen by Tager since before the war, has suddenly and seemingly coincidentally arrived on their doorstep. Before you know it, all the Nazis have welcomed Karl into their little clique, probably because Karl wastes no time fishing for Hitler leads by constantly bemoaning the fate of the Third Reich.
Later, once he’s completely healed from his injuries, Karl is invited to a big party hosted by the owner of the castle, the beautiful Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny. The party goes well as Karl learns a few new tidbits by eavesdropping. But still no sign of Hitler’s noodle.
Things really heat up later that night when a guard knocks on Karl’s door. The Baroness has requested a private audience. Well, one thing leads to another, and before you know it Karl and the Baroness are in her bedroom ripping off each other’s clothes. And then this happens:
Her fingers dug into my arms with sharp nails, her back arched spasmodically, she started to pull me down deep into a bottomless pit. Somewhere within my body a train of cold liquid left its station with relentless fury and plunged on to its destination.
Here Puccetti is telling us, as artfully as he can, that Karl is about to ejaculate into the Baroness. The story continues.
Gerda’s eyes opened widely now. The pupils looked dark in the fire glow, much darker than before, and somehow beyond them and behind them there was a deep rustling of Teutonic forests, of shadowy predators roaming in the night…Only then did I raise my trembling, terribly tired fingers to her head, slide them under the golden hair and feel the bony ridge across her skull. Only then did her lips part to give the fateful cry.
‘ICH BIN DER FUHRER.’
Yes, friends, our intrepid hero and narrator has just enjoyed a simultaneous orgasm with Adolph Hitler– a drop-dead gorgeous Hitler, mind you, but Hitler nonetheless (an alternate cover for the book foregrounds this reveal a bit more forcefully). 
Some might be thinking this was surprisingly enlightened on Hitler’s part, this willingness to have his brain transplanted into a woman. Funny thing about that–it was actually a complete surprise for the Führer. Later we learn that Tager and his team had a young, strapping Aryan male all ready to host Hitler’s brain, but the kid died during surgery from an unforeseen complication. The original Baroness Gerda Bach-Wisliceny, a loyalist if ever there was one, stepped right up and volunteered her body. Man, was Hitler ever mad when he woke up. But we are told that the Führer eventually warmed up to and even embraced the idea of being a sexy Baroness. Realizing it made for a good hiding place, the brain decided to stay put.
But back to the post-coital revelation that our narrator just had some manner of queerly heteronormative gay sex with Hitler. “What would I do,” wonders the reader, “under such circumstances?” Given that Karl is dedicated above all else to his mission, he loses no time recovering from this quite literal “mindfuck” and stabs Baroness Hitler-brain straight through the heart, leaving her for dead.
For the next twenty or so pages, Karl is on the run trying to evade capture in the compound. He jumps a guard and steals his uniform, which buys him a little more time to wander around the castle in search of a way out. Eventually he finds another series of hidden passageways leading deeper and deeper into the castle’s foundations. Finally he stumbles upon, wouldn’t you know it, another goddamn secret operating theater! No sooner have you killed Hitler’s host body than his evil surgical team is right back at it putting his brain in yet another body. Actually, Karl probably should have seen this coming. After all, as narrator, he of all people should understand the basic premise of his own story. Caught off guard indulging in some well-deserved self-recrimination, Karl is taken into custody and whisked away to a holding cell.
You’re probably thinking at this point that Karl himself is destined to be the new donor body for Hitler’s brain. Makes sense. Hitler needs the body and the Nazis no longer need Karl–that’s certainly what a lesser writer would settle for here. But Puccetti has other and much more incredible ambitions. Karl is wheeled into surgery alright, but finds that his nemesis Dr. Tager instead plans to implant a type of experimental electrode “harness” in Karl’s brain. In fact, he forces Karl to remain awake as he cuts off the top of his skull and inserts the electrodes one by one. Later, in post-op, we discover that Tager and his assistants can now control Karl’s actions simply by pushing the appropriate buttons: THIRST, HUNGER, LUST, etc. This is the sort of thing Nazi doctors live for, apparently. Bouncing Hitler’s brain from body to body is a neat trick and all, but Tager’s real ambition is to rule the world by implanting electrodes in every human skull! We also discover here that Tager has no real investment in Nazi ideology–he chose to ride Hitler’s coattails only because Hitler seemed–at the time at least– the most likely to make his dream of global brain control come true. He would just as easily have cast his lot with the Americans or Russians, if need be. That’s just how evil Tager is–the pure evil of pure science.
After some pleasure/pain interrogation from Tager and his buttons, Karl is taken back to his cell, which it so happens is a glass cube. There he devises a brilliant plan. He will break the glass by ramming his head into the wall, which will also probably disable the brain-electrode stuff at the top of his brain. At the very least, he reasons, it will interfere with its optimal operation. Gathering his strength and courage, he runs headlong into the glass–so hard that he blacks out. When he comes to, however, he finds the plan has indeed worked–there is nothing but shattered glass all around him (and no guards, apparently). Karl quickly runs back to the lab and pulls all the wiring out of the control-console so that Tager cannot send any more brain signals.
But the console can be quickly repaired, Karl reasons. No, there is simply no way around it, the electrode net in his brain must come out. But how? Who will do the delicate surgery? Karl. Karl will do the surgery. Karl will do the surgery on himself. Brain surgery. Karl will perform brain surgery on his own brain.
Are you beginning to understand why this novel must be committed to film as soon as possible? I already have Scarlett Johansson down for the role of the Baroness. As for Karl…well, who cares really? I just want to see the scene wherein Scarlett Johansson reveals that she is actually a busty receptacle for Hitler’s devious brain. I would trade you any number of Final Destinations and/or Centipede units for such a moment to be captured on film.
Back to the brain surgery. Karl sets up a mirror to see the top of his head. “The scalp was easy,” Karl tells us. Then the skull bone. Then the membrane covering the brain. Underneath are the electrodes. Though delicately inserted only hours earlier by Dr. Tager, Karl finds he is able to simply rip them out of his brain with no real consequences. But the suspense isn’t over:
There I was, nude and exhausted, unarmed and with the whole top of my brain exposed to raw air. If I so much as leaned forward, the cerebrospinal fluid encasing my brain would spill out; I could imagine the sticky liquid dripping over into my face and blinding me.
To make matters worse, a guard suddenly appears and interrupts the operation. Luckily, Karl still has the presence (and fluid) of mind to dispatch him with a nearby bone saw. But there he remains, his brain still exposed to “raw air” and all of his brain juice about to spill out. He decides he has no time to stitch the membrane and just goes for wiring the skull back in place. After that he’s so tired that he just kind of flops his scalp back over the bone, figuring he’ll deal with that after he’s finished killing Tager and finding Hitler’s new cranial hideaway.
Eventually he corners Tager and forces him at gunpoint to the “vault”–the most secret of secret chambers in the bottom floors of the castle. Inside is the requisite vat with Hitler’s pulsating brain floating inside, awaiting its new host. As an incidental detail, we are also told there are two crossed sabers on the wall as part of the castle’s Coat of Arms. Almost immediately, however, this proves not to be incidental as Tager calls Karl’s bluff on the number of bullets in the gun, which leads directly to the two men retrieving those very same sabers and reliving their days as college fencing opponents (remember? I told you about that earlier). Karl is worried, for he never beat Tager in their university matches, but it remains his only hope. Thrust and parry. Thrust and parry. And then Karl spies an “Auto-Destruction” button on the wall. It’s true. He really does. A big red button that will blow everything up. Even if Karl can’t escape, he can blow up the entire castle, Hitler’s brain, and all the remaining Nazis at the same time!
Karl pushes the button. No, you fool! screams Tager. Ten minutes to absolute annihilation. Just then Karl sees that the brain vat has become unmoored and is rolling into the periphery of his vision. Two quick ballet leaps and he is standing over the bubbling vat. He then drives his sword directly into the Fuhrer’s brain! Tager screams in horror, and Karl takes advantage of his shock to stab Tager “in the crotch” all the way back to the pelvis. Tager collapses, and in doing so, knocks over the now pinkish red vat of brain and blood. Hitler’s brain slides across the floor where Karl, not wanting to leave anything to chance, scoops it up. 
Karl must escape–the castle is still going to blow at any second. Miraculously, he discovers another secret door leading to some kind of mining-car contraption below. Still clutching the well-stabbed yet still relatively cohesive Hitler brain, he jumps in and releases the brakes. A bloody Tager crawls along the tracks begging for mercy. But no dice. Karl rides the mining-car out of the castle and out into the open air. There he sees a mighty condor flying through the sky, and considers throwing Hitler’s brain on the grass so that the majestic bird might swoop down and carry it away. For that would be a fitting final indignity for Hitler’s stupid evil brain–snatched up by razor-sharp talons and fed to a nest full of baby condors. Just then the earth rocks with the force of the castle exploding. In the end, Karl simply falls on the brain and “collapses” it good and flat.
Victory!
Back to our Bavarian ski-lodge in the present day. The story over, Mr. Framing-Device doesn’t know what to think. Did this old man really have sex with Hitler in a woman’s body, operate on his own brain, and then almost throw Hitler’s brain to a hungry condor? Just then a nurse appears on scene to retrieve Karl–the sun is setting and it’s time to go back home. Mr. Framing-Device takes the nurse aside and asks if he might visit Karl again some day. “Why not?”the nurse responds, “visiting hours at the sanatorium are open to everyone.”
And there we leave it. Karl might be crazy. Then again, he might just have a bad case of tuberculosis. I guess the next generation of historians will have to make the ultimate determination: did Tager somehow get the brain back and put it in Scarlett Johansson, or did it end up in the bellies of a dozen hungry little condor chicks?
January 21, 2012
January 20, 2012
Funny jokes-Blanket
A guy’s going on a business trip and he has to take his secretary with him, and she’s really crazy about him. The first night on the Amtrak, she’s in the top bunk and he’s in the bottom bunk. She says, “Mr. Forsythe! Mr. Forsythe! I’m chilly! I think I need a blanket!”
He says, “Miss Schmitt, how’d you like to pretend you’re Mrs. Forsythe for a little while?
She says, “Oh, I’d like that.”
He says, “Then get you own damn blanket.”
January 19, 2012
Really funny jokes-No menus
A guy goes into a restaurant and asks for a menu, but the waiter tells him, “We don’t have menus here. Our chef can make any dish you desire … in fact, if he can’t, we’ll give you one thousand dollars.”
The man sees a chance to make some money so he thinks of something impossible. “Bring me an order of hummingbird tongues on rye toast,” he tells the waiter, who returns fairly quickly with a plate. “One order of hummingbird tongues on rye toast. Will there be anything else?”
The man thinks for a second, then says, “I’d like a bowl of lo mein made with rutabaga-flavored noodles that were imported from Bolivia by Paul Newman, accompanied by a croissant with exactly 429 caraway seeds and served on aquamarine-colored bone china from the Yuan Dynasty.” The waiter returns in a few minutes with a bowl. “One number eight. Will there be anything else?”
The man thinks another second, then says, “Yes … bring me an elephant ear sandwich.” The waiter says disappears into the kitchen and returns with a thousand dollars in cash. “You did it, sir. You beat us.” With a broad smile, the man pockets the money. “Didn’t have any elephant ears back there, huh?” “Oh no,” the waiter says. “We have plenty of elephant ears. We just ran out of the big rolls.”
January 19, 2012
Historys a Bitch: A Dog Walk Through Time: Hound Dog by Robb Fritz
“Elvis and The Beatles were the death of music.”
— My parents.
- – -
I was always a Beatles man, not Elvis. I remember arguing the Fab Four versus the King with my parochial schoolmate Margaret all the way from St. Joseph’s Elementary to her house, though what the basis for the argument would have been is a mystery to me now. Were we actually arguing the merits of “Here Comes the Sun” versus “Hound Dog” and “Love Me Tender” versus “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”? Or was it more along the lines of “Elvis is cute and he knows how to dance!” (with a hip-shaking demonstration) versus “They float through this dreamland in a yellow submarine, and there’s this weird house with Frankenstein, and there’s this funny little Nowhere Man and the Blue Meanies and they get old and turn into babies and stuff!” I was driven in part I’m sure by mom’s tacit approval of The Beatles. Though she was officially opposed to everything they stood for (see the above quote), I know she secretly liked Paul’s lyrical side since as a piano teacher she never had a problem teaching easy piano versions of “Yesterday” and “Lonely People.” Margaret had posters on her wall of the young, smoky-gazed Elvis. Since a similar poster of John, Paul, George and Ringo did not grace my own, on devotion points alone I conceded defeat.
On June 5, 1956, when Elvis was a rising star nearing the height of his power, he made a soon-to-be-notorious second appearance on The Milton Berle Show, introducing his version of “Hound Dog,” a song that had recently become his standard closer. Elvis had been refining his performance of “Hound Dog” for two months, testing the reaction of his audience with every move, and honing his delivery to a science. For the first time ever he would be performing without a guitar, Berle’s having convinced Elvis to leave it backstage in order to “let ’em see you, son.”
Elvis started the song at a fast clip leading into a sharp, short solo by guitarist Scotty Moore, and free of a guitar, danced all over, gliding over the floor as he spun his leg opened and closed like a screen door banging in a crazy wind. He then cut the song off midway and restarted it as something near a bump and grind crawl paired with a slow occasionally hip-thrusting dance to match. From the song’s fast start to its hothouse finish, each trademark Elvis leg flip and every shrugging, almost diffident hip gyration was accompanied by screams and amazed laughter from the audience. Milton Berle, “Mr. Television,” loved it, and raced onto the stage, clapping a pleased Elvis on the back and mussing his hair saying, “How about my boy?”
The initial reviews were mostly positive, but eventually the moral backlash kicked in. It’s hard to imagine on this side of the ’60s the level of hysteria that ensued after his appearance. Ben Gross in the Daily News raged, “Elvis… gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos. What amazes me is that Berle and NBC-TV should have permitted this affront.” The Catholic weekly America published a full-length diatribe titled simply “Beware Elvis Presley.” And Ed Sullivan declared Elvis “unfit for family viewing,” swearing he would never allow Elvis on his show.
Elvis protested his innocence, insisting, “I’m not trying to be sexy, it’s just my way of expressing how I feel when I move around.” Whether this was true or not there wasn’t a post-pubescent individual with eyes in his or her head who didn’t know what Elvis’s brief but poignant hip thrusts were all about. Regardless of the intended thrust of his thrusts, there was no doubt that they fucked mightily with the moral zeitgeist of TV Land circa 1956. He insisted that he wasn’t trying to be a rebel, something about which he was genuinely sensitive because of his real concern for his much-adored mother’s feelings. What Elvis didn’t grasp was that in 1956 his simple desire to keep it real was itself a revolutionary act.
How things have changed. Just this month the Supreme Court was debating whether they should strike down all “indecency” rules for primetime. Chief Justice Roberts, the father of two young children, said (in more of a desperate plea than a constitutionally defensible position), “All we are asking for is for a few channels” where parents can be confident their children will not hear profanity or see sex scenes. In its way, Elvis’s appearance on The Milton Berle Show was TV’s gateway drug, the ‘50s sensimilla to today’s TV heroin. One wonders what would happen to the brains of the same critics were Lady Gaga to take Marty McFly’s DeLorean back to 1956 and do her thing on the same show. They would no doubt think they’d died and entered the ninth ring of hell.
Ironically, despite the moral outrage over the song’s performance, “Hound Dog” really isn’t even a paean to sex. Written in 1952 by Mike Leiber and Jerry Stoller, two young Jewish kids from Los Angeles with a shared obsession with R&B, it was intended as a musical middle finger to some worthless pond scum who’s done the singer wrong. They’d written it for blues legend Big Mama Thornton, who later described them as a couple of kids with the song “written on the back of a paper bag.” She altered it as she saw fit, made the phrasings her own, and had the members of her band howl like dogs behind her. She recorded the song in early 1953, and it was released in March. Within the first week of its release, based on a rave in Billboard, another singer recorded a country version, and by the year’s end a total of six country recordings of the song had been released. By 1964, 24 recorded versions of the song—including Elvis’—would exist. It was the biggest hit of Big Mama Thornton’s career.
Her version could hardly be more different than Elvis’, a growly rhumba blues that would be completely at home on basically any Tom Waits album from Rain Dogs on. The lyrics—Lieber’s originals—are more straightforwardly bluesy and make more narrative sense. To my taste Thornton’s version is much grittier and more soulful, and has the deeply satisfying feel of being sung with full vitriol to one particular scumbag, as opposed to Elvis’s more impersonally tongue-in-cheek version. In a 1987 interview, Lieber said that the chorus was code for “You ain’t nothin’ but a motherfucker,” and with Thornton’s fiery growl it’s not a difficult substitution in the mind to make.
Elvis would have known Thornton’s original, but he found his pop version during his first time performing in Vegas. Despite the ill fit between his style and the adult, sit-down audience for which he and his band were performing—like Spinal Tap playing for the air force officer’s club—Elvis loved Vegas, blissfully unaware of the central place it would eventually have in his life. He and the band spent their free time seeing other musicians perform around town. He and his band’s favorite was the lounge act for the Sands, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys.
The Bellboys had had a minor hit with their own pop version of “Hound Dog” the year before in 1955. To turn it into a pop song, they had dropped a verse and changed the lyrics—to Lieber’s great annoyance—so that the hound dog in question is no longer “snoopin’ round my door,” but is now “cryin’ all the time” and the phrase “you can wag your tail/but I ain’t gonna feed you no more” was tossed in favor of the rhythmically nimbler if narratively less sensible phrase “you ain’t never caught a rabbit/ and you ain’t no friend o’ mine.” It now served as the Bellboys’ main showstopper, and Elvis his band, drummer D.J. Fontana, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, decided they had to add it to their act. It would quickly become Elvis’ closer for a long time to come.
Lieber and Stoller, ‘50s hipsters to the core, weren’t pleased with the pop direction Freddie and the Bellboys and then Elvis had taken their song. They were dismissive of Elvis’ ability and assumed he was ignorant of his music’s history, probably in nearly exactly the same way I was once dismissive of Justin Bieber. For my part, I assumed Bieber was just some A&R guy’s bubbly commercial product: take cheesy love song, add cute young singer, and stir. Then I humored my daughter, five years old and suffering from, as she then mispronounced it, “Beaver Fever,” and, together with her and my wife, watched the Bieber documentary Never Say Never. While it’s safe to say I’ll never be listening to "Baby " on my way to work, the movie was genuinely fascinating and watching Bieber as a three-year-old playing on his toy drums and then at five on his real set is pretty much a wonder to behold. For Lieber and Stoller, it would be the summer of ’57 when they were hired—largely against their will—to write the songs for Jailhouse Rock, that they finally befriended Elvis and grew to appreciate both his very real talent and his deep love and knowledge of R&B.
A month after the hip shake heard ‘round the world, Elvis was scheduled for a July 1st appearance on The Steve Allen Show. Allen, for the benefit of the more prudish members of his audience, had made some public noise about possibly canceling Elvis’s appearance, but with Elvis at the top of all three charts that existed at the time—R&B, pop and country—there was little chance of that actually happening.
Instead, Allen devised a plan for cleaning Elvis up. The night of the show, Allen introduced “the new Elvis Presley,” one dressed in white tie and tails. He opened with his current pop hit, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.” Then Allen wheeled out an actual female basset hound wearing a small top hat strapped to its head. The hound gazed at the audience with a supremely sad, baleful face, refusing to look at Elvis despite his numerous good-humored attempts to turn her head and sing into her doleful eyes. Elvis remains a good sport, but it’s clear from his body language, from the stunted jerks of his head and shoulders, that he is working fiercely to not burst into his now-notorious hip swivel, like a schoolboy trying to restrain a bobbing knee. In the end, Elvis, a dog lover himself and eventually an owner of many, many dogs as well as a menagerie of other animals, gives the hound a genuine hug, and nuzzles it and kisses it on the neck, probably in sympathy as a fellow sufferer.
That night The Steve Allen Show killed The Ed Sullivan Show in the ratings. Sullivan had repeatedly vowed to never have Elvis on his show, but as J-Biebs would say, never say never. Within two weeks Sullivan caved, eventually signing Presley for not one but three appearances, the first slated for September 9. Sullivan blew off criticisms of his reversal, saying he had been going on hearsay, and about Elvis’s Milton Berle Show appearance he did a complete and unapologetic 180, accusing everyone else of overreacting by saying, “I don’t know why everybody picked on Presley, I thought the whole show was dirty and vulgar.”
On July 2nd, the morning after The Steve Allen Show, Elvis and his band would finally commit “Hound Dog” to vinyl. After 31 takes, they had the full two-minute blast complete with Scotty Moore’s jangly guitar solo (Moore would later refer to it as “ancient psychedelia”) and D.J. Fontana’s trademark machine gun drum attack. That afternoon they recorded “Don’t Be Cruel.” The single of “Hound Dog,” with “Don’t Be Cruel” as the nominal A-side, was released on July 13th and would hit the #1 spot slightly over a month later, on August 18th, where it would remain for a record-breaking 11 weeks, replaced only by his own new single “Love Me Tender” on November 3rd. “Hound Dog” would become Elvis’ best-selling single ever, and in 2004 Rolling Stone would place it as #19 on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, the highest rank for any of Elvis’ eleven entries on the list.
January 18, 2012
Funny jokes-Father’s ashes
A guy goes to a girl’s house for the first time, and she shows him into the living room. She excuses herself to go to the kitchen to make them a few drinks, and as he’s standing there alone, he notices a cute little vase on the mantel. He picks it up, and as he’s looking at it, she walks back in. He says “What’s this?”
She says, “Oh, my father’s ashes are in there.”
He goes, “Jeez…oooh….I…”
She says, “Yeah, he’s too lazy to go to the kitchen to get an ashtray.”
January 17, 2012
Really funny jokes-Lion tamers
A circus owner runs an ad for a lion tamer and two young people show up. One is a man in his mid-twenties and the other is a gorgeous blonde woman about the same age. The circus owner tells them, “I’m going to be honest with you, this is one ferocious lion. He ate my last tamer so you guys better be good or you’re history. Here’s your equipment: chair, whip and a gun. Who wants to try out first?”
The girl says, “I’ll go first.” She ignores the chair, the whip and the gun and steps right into the lion’s cage. The lion starts to snarl and pant and begins to charge her. About half way there, she throws open her coat revealing her beautiful naked body. The lion stops dead in his tracks, sheepishly crawls up to her and starts licking her ankles. He continues to lick her calves, kisses them and rests his head at her feet.
The circus owner’s mouth is on the floor. He says, “I’ve never seen a display like that in my life.” He then turns to the young man and asks, “Can you top that?”
The young man replies. “No problem, just get that lion out of the way.”
