believe it or not won’t find it so hot if you ain’t got that do re mi …
Walked in the office the other day singing:
Hilton Head is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see; But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot If you ain’t got the do re mi.
Everyone once they got past the singing part thought it was pretty good.
A guy can go far today on nothing but Grouch Marx, Mark Twain and Woody Guthrie as most folks have never heard of these guys and think your humor is original.
Here are the real and complete lyrics to Woody Guthrie’s Do Re Mi.
Lots of folks back East, they say, is leavin’ home every day, Beatin’ the hot old dusty way to the California line. ‘Cross the desert sands they roll, gettin’ out of that old dust bowl, They think they’re goin’ to a sugar bowl, but here’s what they find Now, the police at the port of entry say, “You’re number fourteen thousand for today.”
Oh, if you ain’t got the do re mi, folks, you ain’t got the do re mi, Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee. California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see; But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot If you ain’t got the do re mi.
You want to buy you a home or a farm, that can’t deal nobody harm, Or take your vacation by the mountains or sea. Don’t swap your old cow for a car, you better stay right where you are, Better take this little tip from me. ‘Cause I look through the want ads every day But the headlines on the papers always say:
If you ain’t got the do re mi, boys, you ain’t got the do re mi, Why, you better go back to beautiful Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Georgia, Tennessee. California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see; But believe it or not, you won’t find it so hot If you ain’t got the do re mi.
dark material with a bright impasto of playful irony
Reviewers, whether for food, restaurants, books or movies, seem to get the best words and word play into their writing.
In his review of How Tyrants Fall by Marcel Dirsus, Pratinav Anil writes:
Since the second world war, 23% of the world’s rulers have ended up exiled, imprisoned or killed after leaving office. For dictators, though, the figure rises to 69%.
This was impressed on Robert Mugabe not through statistics but by seeing what happened to his friend Taylor.
Subsequently, he let it be known there was only one way he was going to leave Zimbabwe – “in a coffin”.
How Tyrants Fall arguably belongs to the genre known as “mirrors for princes” – manuals for monarchs – whose exponents include Al-Ghazali and Machiavelli.
Dirsus is a worthy heir to that tradition.
He wears his research lightly and ranges widely, lathering his dark material with a bright impasto of playful irony.
If, back in the day, one Professor had written your wear your research lightly and ranges widely, lathering your dark material with a bright impasto of playful irony on anything I wrote (well, I guess one Professor DID say that but that’s another story and it was another story, a love story I wrote for a creative writing class for my Jimmy Carter era Senior Writing Requirement not a research paper) I would have rolled up and died a happy person.
I recall the story told by Stephen Ambrose (and yes I am aware of the danger of even bringing Mr. Ambrose into a story today) as a student at the Univ of Wisconsin.
Mr. Ambrose tells how he went to see one of his Professors and low and behold, one of Mr. Ambrose’s papers was tacked to the Professors day.
Mr. Ambrose writes that he was about to bust and walked into the Professor’s office all aglow.
Instead of papers, the Professor asked Mr. Ambrose if he knew about rattlesnakes and the western culture.
“Out west,” the Professor said, “Folks will kill a rattlesnake, skin it and nail the skin to door to keep out other snakes.”
Then the Professor stared at Mr. Ambrose for a good long time until Mr. Ambrose pieced it all together and figured out WHY his paper was tacked to the door.
I would say that that Professor wore his messages about research lightly and ranges widely, lathering dark material with a bright impasto of playful irony.
imagination … reconcile raw emotive power of the past
In his book, Walk About (Published in America as Notes from a Sunburned Country), Bill Bryson writes about Australia:
One of the more cherishable peculiarities of Australians is that they like to build big things in the shape of other things. Give them a bale of chicken wire, some fibreglass and a couple of pots of paint and they will make you, say, an enormous pineapple or strawberry or, as here, a lobster. Then they put a café and a gift shop inside, erect a big sign beside the highway (for the benefit of people whose acuity evidently does not extend to spotting a fifty-foot-high piece of fruit standing beside an otherwise empty highway), then sit back and wait for the money to roll in.
Some sixty of these objects are scattered across the Australian landscape, like leftover props from a 1950s horror movie. You can, if you have sufficient petrol] money and nothing approaching a real life, visit a Big Prawn, a Big Koala, a Big Oyster (with searchlights for eyes, apparently), a Big Lawnmower, a Big Marlin, a Big Orange and a Big Merino Ram, among many others. The process, I am patriotically proud to tell you, was started by an American named Landy who built a Big Banana at Coff’s Harbour, on the New South Wales coast, which proved so magically attractive to passing vehicles that it made Mr Landy, as it were, the big banana of the business.
As an aside, I love that word cherishable or having the ability to be cherished and I am working on my own list but I digress.
I am happy to report that according to story in the Guardian, one of these big things in on its way back.
After 14 years of big promises, legal battles and a Game of Thrones’ style ownership jostle, the Big Pineapple finally reopened in June. Patsy, too, has returned, at the age of 93, for another ride around the track.
But it is not just over its former workers that this roadside attraction maintains its peculiar hold. In 2006 the National Trust of Queensland unveiled a list of state icons – alongside the Great Barrier Reef and the Gabba was the Big Pineapple. The year after, it was one of five big things celebrated on Australia Post stamps. In 2009 it was heritage listed. Last year the Royal Australian Mint stamped its likeness on a $1 coin.
For generations of Australians the Big Pineapple conjures up memories of road trips to the sunshine state, of birthday parties and weddings, of train rides and ice-cream.
And it got me thinking about things growing up that I experienced like the Giant Pineapple.
What for me taps into that raw emotive power of the past?
One such place for me and my family was the Dutch Village over in Holland, Michigan.
We would make the short trip when my Dad would take a week off.
My family had a cotttage on Lake Michigan where we would go in the summer and when my Dad took a week off, he would celebrate by not shaving.
But at some point during that week, Dad would shave.
There was a small bathroom off the kitchen.
My Dad would have showered and dressed for the day and would open the bathroom door to let out the shower steam.
In the morning the sun would flood through the back window in the bathroom and my Dad would stand in front of the small sink and look in the mirror and, very deliberately, shave.
Shaving cream spread over his face.
Firm use of the razor.
Down the sides of face.
Then up under has chin.
I can smell the scent of the shaving cream drifting in with the steam and sunshine.
I would be sitting at the kitchen table with my brothers and sisters eating breakfast and we would see Dad shaving and know that we would be going somewhere.
Maybe it would be the Coast Guard festival in Grand Haven.
Maybe it would be a longer day trip up to Sleeping Bear Dunes.
Most likely it was a trip to the Dutch Village.
It wasn’t much.
A glorified tourist trap.
But it was our tourist trap!
The then 10 Hoffman’s at Dutch Village – maybe 1966.
There were a few shops and some things to play one, a giant wooden shoe and a Dutch barn with barnyard animals to feed.
All operated by a staff in ‘traditional’ Dutch clothes.
We would first run to the candy store.
I remember one time when all of us Dutch blond kids ran in the sales lady said something like ‘you know they’re Dutch when the coming asking for bobbalars and chocolate Droste’s wooden shoes.’
Once when I worked at a local TV station in Grand Rapids, a team was sent out to cover the Holland Tulip Festival and I wrote a tease for one of news broadcasts along the line of … “The bobbalars are just as sweet …” and the anchor came over to ask what that meant. I then had to pronounce the word phonetically bah bah lars .. which she wrote down.
And there was the zweefmolen or swing carousel with swings that spun you high in the air in circle until you were ready to throw up all your chocolate wooden shoes.
This was a condition we called ‘zweefmolen disease’ and we loved to bring friends and new family members who had just married into the family to Dutch Village just to watch them get zweefmolen disease.
Seeing them stagger around was as much fun as just saying zweefmolen.
It was goofy but we loved it.
I loved taking my kids when we got kids to Dutch Village.
I loved watching them get zweefmolen disease.
My kids didn’t look like my brothers and sisters but I told them they were all Dutch anyway.
Nothing gets you odder looks than to live in the south and tell people that you are Dutch and it’s like they can’t imagine anything so exotic.
So for the folks in Australia, the big pineapple is back … ‘but is it a big deal?’, Mr. Hinchliffe asks.
Another case of the ‘You can’t go home again’ syndrome as nothing is like it was but then was anything like it ever was?
When my kids were growing up I watched a lot Nickelodeon and Nick Jr. and I remember that in that cartoon called ‘Rugrats’, the perspective was often drawn from about 1 foot about floor level, the perspective of a toddler.
In the movie Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams dares his students to stand on their desks to gain a new perspective.
I offer that to relive your childhood, sit on the floor, get your head down there and experience life as it used to be.
At the beach, with you head just above the sand, the beach stretches out forever.
At a park, the jungle gym is 5 stories high.
Mr. Hinchliffe closes his article with this:
“Today, the pineapple is a curious site next to a regional road with a serviceable cafe and a train ride. It takes a bit of imagination to reconcile what stands now with the raw emotive power of its past.”
It takes a bit of imagination to reconcile what stands now with the raw emotive power of its past.
I love that.
Embrace your imagination and get as low to the floor as you can go and tap in the raw emotive power of your past.
If nothing else, you will be looking up.
Also, make the trip to West Michigan and visit a little bit of old Holland at the Dutch Village.
sometimes dreadful sense lonely with his burden once buoyancy is gone
For rarely is a man so alone as on the trail, especially under a canoe. He is then shut off completely from his fellow. Tom and I have sat for hours by a camp-fire at night, without a word to each other, each of us thinking his own thoughts, but with a most acute sense of companionship. Meditation is not lonely, even when it is solitary. But on the trail, with a heavy load, and weary, a man is intensely alone. The exertion, the pounding activity, the noise of one’s own heavy breathing, of one’s own heart beating, the implacable insistence of sweat — all these give something of the loneliness of severe pain, and forbid the soothing attunement of the spirit to the universe, which makes communion out of contemplation. In a sometimes dreadful sense, a man is lonely with his burden on the trail, once it has become a burden, once the buoyancy is gone.
From the book, The Incomplete Anglers by John Daniel Robins, Wm. Collins Sons & Co. Canada Ltd,1943.
But on the trail, with a heavy load, and weary, a man is intensely alone.
The exertion, the pounding activity, the noise of one’s own heavy breathing, of one’s own heart beating, the implacable insistence of sweat — all these give something of the loneliness of severe pain, and forbid the soothing attunement of the spirit to the universe, which makes communion out of contemplation.
In a sometimes dreadful sense, a man is lonely with his burden on the trail, once it has become a burden, once the buoyancy is gone.
Once more, the loneliness of severe pain, forbids the soothing attunement of the spirit to the universe, which makes communion out of contemplation.
No wonder sometimes I feel so tired, once that buoyancy is gone.
And once that buoyancy is gone, how do you get it back?
Sometimes no price would be too high for just a solid night of sleep.
happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun
“I have often and often, in the course of the session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President, without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: but now at length, I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
Dr. Franklin is supposed to have said this or wrote this to James Madison or Mr. Madison remembered Dr. Franklin saying this when the United States Constitutional Convention finished their work.
Maybe it was one of those things that was too good for someone not to have said so history decided Dr. Franklin said it.
He was famous for saying things he never said and his autobiography might not have been the way it happened but surely, was the way it should have happened.
BUT I DIGRESS!
Dr. Franklin is supposed to have been looking at the designed carved into the back of the chair of the President of the Constitutional Convention, a feller named George Washington.
Driving to work this morning I new that as I looked east I was seeing the sun rise out of the Atlantic Ocean.
It matched my spirits.
Hopefully, if Dr. Franklin was around today and watching CNN he might once again say, “I have the happiness to know, that it is a rising and not a setting sun.“
No Haiku For You 