Boil that cabbage down

Home again for one final (I hope) day of recovery from this flu. I worked yesterday but it was a really bad idea.

Some vintage Smothers Brothers, my favorite:

All my eggs in one basket

YouTube won't let me embed this one, so I've just got to link to the best dance number in all the Astaire/Rogers movies. So there.

Hotel a la Swing

Roughly one half of our household is down with the stomach/intestinal flu. Well, NTS is not exactly down, he's just puking about once a day and nursing a whole lot. I'm the one who is more affected by it. Went in to work yesterday anyway, just to grade tests and get my progress reports done, and when I came home the House Bean was about to put on an Astaire/Rogers movie, Swing Time, for NOD. That fit in perfectly with my idea of how to spend a sick, flu-buggy afternoon, so I settled down, draped in children, to watch as well.

Afterwards, we did a bit of exploring on the DVD. They've included, on the DVD, a cartoon and a short feature, the other things you'd be expecting to see if you actually attended the theatre in the 1930's (there's no newsreel, unfortunately). The short feature was Hotel a la Swing, which had some cute musical numbers in it. There's this weirdly-conceived dance number called "Holiday in Hades" which starts out with a bunch of dancer-starlet types in cheesy satin "devil" outfits dancing around with pitchforks...who then give way to some guy in what looks like bondage gear doing a modern dance with this Frank-n-Furter-looking woman (hair and eye makeup!) in this really flowy too-long dress. That modern dance interlude featured some amazing moves, and was really a highlight to the whole thing. But then the starlets crowd in again, and finish the tap-dance finale to "Holiday in Hades" while the two modern dancers pose in the background. Very strange.


NTS wishes to add this: v c

J Friends

I've been watching Classic Sesame Street with the daughter.

I posted the above, which then reminded me of this one:


Notice that they're letting those kids jump WITHOUT HELMETS!!!!!!!!! OMG!!! Probably one of the reasons why the DVD set carries a disclaimer that the vintage episodes are NOT SUITABLE FOR TODAY'S CHILDREN.

Propaganda

Donald Duck in a WWII propaganda cartoon:

Makes you wonder, don't it? Especially since these days we are told that we need to "spend, spend, spend!" in order to do our part.

Easy Reader

Automobubbling

Katie posted a cartoon, and it reminded me to post one of my favorites. My grandmother used to sing what she could remember of this song pretty often, which was the part that goes, "You can go as far as you like with me, in my merry Oldsmobile!" Must have reminded her of something. Or someone?

Found it!

YouTube has *everything*.
\

What a rotten week

...which I won't go into the details of. But here's what I found this morning as "comfort viewing." Bobby Burgess and Barbara Boyland dancing to "Calcutta" on the Lawrence Welk show in 1961.

Take a trip in the Way Back Machine

Sean has been posting a bit on his blog about Punk and getting all cerebral about it. I say WHATEVER...