The SwimLawsuit's Price Is Right

As I'm sure most of you know, this Friday is the 20th anniversary of Barker's Beauty Janice Pennington getting knocked off the stage and knocked unconscious during a taping of The Price Is Right. Bob Barker, that dog, of course had a rep as a lech with the models on the show, which makes sense since the marketing demographic need for cheesecake on a daytime gameshow is sort of like imagining Comedy Central running Jimmy Choo shoe ads during the heyday of The Man Show, although it might be fun to see Jimmy Kimmel in a pair of Jimmy Choo's--and lord knows, Sarah Silverman has probably already made him strap some on, if only so she could make a joke about it. (Don't tell me comedians make things up.) (Yes, I meant to get strap on in there.) (So to speak.) Oh yeah, this was about poor Pennington, who in addition to this horrible meeting with a tv camera, also believed her first husband, mountain climber Fritz Stamberger, was dead, only to get remarried and then find out Fritz was with the CIA and helping fight the Russkies in Afghanistan. Indeed, that means The Price Is Right is a few steps away from Osama Bin Laden. Alas, terrorist cells know the price of your liberty without going over. And since Pennington, like so many Barker's Beauties, posed for Playboy, it's entirely possible that Bin Laden in hiding in the Playboy Mansion. After all, there are places there not even special ops wouldn't dare breach.

Burn This!

Here's hoping this doesn't get too titillating, but to keep abreast of history we must recognize the supposed 119th anniversary of the brassiere. Invented by the same person who created the Lays Potato Chip, the original ad line was "Bet You Can't Support Just One!" Sorry, just being a boob, there. Many different over the top stories about the origin of said undergarment exist, but few hold up; trying to determine when the corset morphed into a girdle and bra is as difficult as trying to figure out exactly how and why Uncle Tupelo became Wilco and Son Volt, not to mention trying to figure out if Jay Farrar is the bra and Jeff Tweedy is the girdle or vice versa is just plain weird, an area into which I prefer not to plunge. I do want to warn you to watch the possible confusion between brassiere and brasserie, and I don't just mean the words. So without padding this any further, let's just say today's comments flopped and I just can't stop it.

A Clean Well-Lit Cliffs

According to the any-day-in-history list I use to do these, Friday is the 55th anniversary of the day Cliffs Notes first got used in schools, just in time for the end of a school year when students panicked to discover they didn't have time to read the tale of one city. Rumor has it that John McCain, having gone to school in an era prior to the printing press, I mean Cliffs Notes, only had time to read part of Tolstoy, and therefore knows the book, and the world, as only War. But I digress, something those handy yellow jackets buzzing with summary and commentary never do. Even better, now Cliffs Notes are on line, turning literature to twitter before your very eyes. For instance we learn "Sylvia Plath, a precocious enigma of the 1960s, battled perfectionism and precipitous mood swings while pursuing a career as a teacher and poet." We do not learn, however, that Plath would really rather ralph than write a run of ridiculous alliteration like the one Cliffs serves up. Luckily Cliffs does want us to think--if by think we mean proffer enough bull to please Miss Beasley on that final--as with this discussion and research topic: "Analyze the success of confessional modes in Plath’s The Bell Jar and poems from Ariel. Account for severe criticisms of self-indulgent neurosis." I account for it by attempting to ignore all severe criticism and be positive. Not to mention my neurosis tends to be very other-directed--I am simply fascinated by what makes everyone else wrong and me right. But enough about me.

A Can for May If I May

Friday is the 43rd birthday of Spaghetti-O's, and no doubt the original can is somewhere singing a toothless version of the advertising jingle that somehow is even more annoying than the food itself. That song was created by Jimmie Rodgers of "Honeycomb" fame--it seems he can only sing about food or perhaps I should say "food." It's also crucial to note that this Jimmie Rodgers is to Jimmie "Father of Country Music" Rodgers, as Spaghetti-O's is to real pasta. Indeed, in the early 70s that was a frequent analogy on the SAT. Less often asked is the question why did a company named Franco-American make pasta, but in Santa Barbara there was for a long time a store called Bonjour Bagels, so what do I know--I wanted to open the Shalom Crossanterie across the street. Of course Franco-American sold out to Campbell's after a string of failures trying to replicate their greatest success. Indeed, few remember Foie Gras-O's ("the neat new goose liver you can eat with a spoon!"), Sushi-O's ("now with that fresh fish taste!"), Donut-O's ("the folks working on the wheel are still in the shop!"), and the barely remembered Edsel-O's ("it s a car in a can!").

This Could Get Pflugly

Jo Ann Pflug turns 61 Friday, or should I say Pfriday. That means 1948 is the cut-off for when Hollywood realized some names had to change to be marquee-worthy (as opposed to Scrabble-worthy). And what a career the now motivational speaker has had--indeed the 1970s & early 80s might not have existed without her. Sure there's the film of M*A*S*H, but also Operation Petticoat, Dukes of Hazard, Love American Style, Charlie's Angels, Love Boat, Fantasy Island. It's little wonder those of us who came of age in that era are somewhat stunted, and Jo Ann had her Pflugs all over us (you can dust for pflugs, you know). Indeed, in some ways she's Fannie Flagg without the books, as both starred (if I may insult real nebulae for a moment) on Match Game and Candid Camera, too. It's a shame we couldn't merge them into one Fannie Pflug. I don't want to pull the woolery over your eyes on this one (uber-game-show host Chuck Woolery was her husband, sadly prior to his Love Connection days--Love Busy Signal? Love Dial Tone?), so instead I'll pull the pflug.

Impatient to Mount and Ride

It was 233 years ago this Friday night-Saturday morning that left us still today polishing the copper bottoms of pots and pans. Yes, we learned to revere Paul this day, as Paul Revere made his famous midnight ride (without the Raiders, too). [Interesting side note: while Mark Linsdsay was lead singer of Paul Revere & the Raiders, they were founded by organist Paul Revere Dick. Can't imagine why he shortened his name. And one of Paul Revere's co-riders in 1775 was Samuel Prescott, yes, of Prescott Bush lineage. So there's dicks all over this story.] The Paul Revere tale wears thin when you realize much of it is made up by Longfellow's famous poem. To make a longfellow story short, Revere wasn't a sole rider (he met Samuel Prescott along the way at 1 am after Prescott left his fiancee--go Samuel!), the "two if by sea" part was really "two if by Charles River," which isn't much of a sea and I can't quite make the reach to a "two if buck Chuck" joke, and of course he stopped along the way for dalliances with women (wait, that's the Harpo Marx version, but I don't mean to blow my own horn by getting too allusive, that just makes everything too soupy and you'd duck out of reading this). Revere always felt sour grapes about not making it to Concord, where the Minute Men were in a jam. But he did help preserve the nascent revolutionary fervor, teasing the Red Coats not by yelling, "The British are coming!" but yelling, "The British are breathing heavy, but their tax on Viagra leaves their muskets swinging low."

An Arm and Oleg

Friday would be the 95th birthday of famed fashion designer Oleg Cassini (not to be confused with clams cassini). During WW II, Cassini served in the U.S. Army as a cavalry officer because he found the idea of cavalry service a bit more glamorous. And war is all about the glamor. Ask any horse and it will tell you it's glad it's in the cavalry. The few unfortunate ones in the Navy just don't do as well (in water, no one can hear you whinny). Sorry, I was just pulling your Oleg there. Of course he is most famous for designing a 1974 AMC Matador, bitter he didn't get to upscale the Gremlin, instead. Seriously (yes, I can be serious!), he's most famous for being Jackie O's designer, although the great irony is years earlier he was married to Gene Tierney and she alleged had affairs with JFK. So Cassini dressed Jacqueline Kennedy while his wife undressed John Kennedy. You have to like that symmetry. Especially if you're a divorce lawyer.

His Hind Was Golden

It was on April 4 1581 that Francis Drake completed his circumnavigation of the world. Before circumnavigation, men had to wash more, but as this was a long time ago before bathing was invented, they didn't, hence the term the Dark Ages. Drake is a controversial figure--a hero in England, but a slave trader to Africans and a pirate to the Spanish. Which just goes to show everyone has their good sides and bad sides. Perspective and balance is important, but when riding the teeter-totter of truth, always sit on the side with the heaviest people. Many of the heaviest people became that way by eating Drake's Cakes, but that's nothing to yodel about (I can hear you non-North Easterners ho-ho-ing over that one). If you're wondering, Drake died of dysentery (known as the more descriptive "bloody flux," as they didn't bathe their language back then, either), but history is silent about if he got it from a Ring Ding or a Devil Dog.

Oh, and for a nostalgic bonus....



Why yes, I am old enough to remember this on television, back in the days when the tube had no you before it.

Have You Driven a Commissioner Lately?

It's not every week that I could give a Frick, so I guess I can't pass up the chance. For it seems March 7 is the 33rd anniversary of then baseball commissioner Ford Frick claiming he favored legalization of the spitball. (Yes, it's a slow news day. I could try to make a joke about how I want to wish Willard Scott a happy birthday--you're only 26 years away from wishing yourself a big Today Show HB!--but that's not really funny.) Of course, making this claim was easy for Frick as he wasn't a catcher or Ray Chapman (hope that joke isn't too soon, Chapman family, or too old, everyone else). Still, you have to feel for Frick, as the commish before him was named Happy Chandler, and it's hard to come after happy, especially when your name rhymes with prick and dick and your first name is a car whose last name is Edsel. And be thankful I did not make the joke: of course Frick had to legalize the spitter, as he legalized the swallow the year prior. That joke would just suck.

Dear Dairy

It was on February 29, 1848 that Neufchatel declared its independence of Switzerland, and boy were the Swiss cheesed.

You know, I really can't go on with this one or I'd been spreading it on too thick and that's not my way. I'd like to be curd of the problem, but I'll even resort to misspellings to milk a joke. So before you all have a cow about my pun run, I'm going to send it out to pasture.

I Invented a Cosmology and All I Got for It Was This Lousy Public Execution

Friday is the 408th anniversary of a very bad day for Giordano Bruno. After all, few of us have had a day that means nine days later you're dragged into the town square, naked, your tongue in a gag, only to be burned at the stake. (The church likes its heretics well-done, it turns out.) It was embarrassing enough to be naked in the town square with a gag in my mouth, but that was in my impetuous youth and I simply trusted the wrong people (they said they were a frat but turned out to be gypsies). Poor Bruno, instead, messed with the Roman Catholic church (much scarier than Ryan Church, as the Mets will learn), and to top it off, denied the virginity of Mary. You call the church's mom a whore, you're just asking for it. He didn't even wait for the seventeenth century to do that and in the sweet sixteenth century, the Church was all about the Inquisition. Hold an erroneous opinion about Christ--perhaps suggest the Canaan wedding wine he created from water was plonk--and there'd be hell to pay. In a heavenly, Catholic, painful way, of course.

Imagine the USC Marching Band Accompanies this Entry

It's 104 years ago today that poor Topsy went turvy and thereby made execution and film history (you can go watch the film at YouTube, but I don't really want it on my blog). Thomas Edison always thought big, so figured if you're going to make the first snuff film, don't waste the celluloid on a butterfly. (That's why he invented collagen before filming his earlier historic film "The Kiss.") Although it is unclear if Edison was a Democrat, he decided to fry an elephant (it was eight years too early to go for a Bull Moose, after all, and there's no point in executing someone like Fred Thompson now as he'd just sleep through it). Yes, it all had something to do with arguing for safer DC versus scarier, easier-to-electrocute-giant things AC, and for beating out Westinghouse, and making money, but my guess is nobody asked Topsy how she felt about that. One day you're rumbling along Luna Park in Coney Island without a care in the world except where your next peanut is coming from, and the next day they're shooting 6600 volts through you. After all, you didn't mean to kill your trainer any more than he meant to try to feed you a lit cigarette. I'm sure it was all in good fun both ways. If nothing else, Topsy has a monument and made the list of famous elephants on Wikipedia. The trainer didn't even make the list of mean and stupid humans. Of course, that's a mighty long list.

Hey Man, Smell My Blog Post

As we all know, December 7th is a day that will live in infamy. That's because it's the day George Clinton was elected Vice President of the United States. Clinton put the funk in the White House, and a recently released NIE from 1814 proves that he might have been zinging First Lady Dolley Madison and in a passionate moment going up for the down stroke, caused the fire that burned down the White House. This conflagration was later blamed on the British, a bitter irony considering how generally unfunky they are as a people--just try to get one to pronounce You Shouldn't-Nuf Bit Fish properly. Plus they'll ask for malt vinegar. As for George Clinton, oddly enough the Vice President who followed him was Elbridge Gerry of Gerry and the Pacemakers, not to be confused with VP Dick Cheney and his pacemaker; few people know that Cheney was in a death metal band as a teenager--in a preternatural foreboding of his future, he played death.

At the Other End of the Microscope

Everyone but Wikipedia agrees that Friday is the 313th anniversary of the death of Marcello Malpighi, the father of microscopical anatomy, so the mistake is but a small thing. It's difficult to imagine that setting out as a young researcher, Malpighi yearned to have his name attached to corpuscles in the kidney and spleen, let alone a tubule in the excretory system of insects, but we all can't be Thomas Crapper and invent the flush toilet* and in that way go down in history (why, yes, history swirls in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere). Malpighi also was the first person to see capillaries, realize they connected arteries and veins, and not say yuckoso. This discovery was particularly a shock to the frog to whom the capillaries belonged. Malpighi did have a storied academic career, studying at the University of Bologna (I always loved their fight song: "My university has a first name..."), taking a professorship of theoretical medicine--since humans didn't know enough to really have medicine yet--at Pisa, well, he was leaning towards taking that job, and then working at the University of Messina years before it merged with Loggins College.

*OK, he just popularized it. But sometimes being accurate ruins a joke. It's not like I did any Powelling--lying about WMDs--or something.

What a Pill

Friday we celebrate the birth, oddly enough, of a person most responsible for us not celebrating other births, Gregory Pincus. Often called the Father of the Birth Control Pill (AKA Phyllis Schafly's Worst Nightmare), Pincus was indirectly responsible for the Sexual Revolution (which would not be televised, at least until HBO's Tell Me You Love Me), Pamela Des Barres, Cynthia Plaster Caster, and previously unknown levels of early morning regret in college dorms throughout the country. Most don't know that Pincus was a somewhat discredited genius after having created a test-tube rabbit in the 1930s. For if there was anything the world needed, it was more rabbits. To make up for that, he would later help everyone you-know-what like rabbits. No kidding.

Hughes Got the Will

It was 60 years ago this Friday that Howard Hughes got it up for its only time. Of course I'm referring to his massive dream, his infamous creation the Hughes H-4 Hercules, better known as the Spruce Goose. Of course the massive flying boat (it's a boat! it's a plane! it's a goose more than a city block big! imagine the cleanup! it's a multi-million dollar federally funded boondoggle that Halliburton would be proud of!) was made of wood as WWII rationing meant it couldn't be made of important materials like metals or nylon, and while women could paint a stripe on their legs and pretend they were be-hosed, soldiers refused to sit in a drawing of a plane and fly across the ocean (at least they did after a few ill-fated early prototypes of the Cellulose Cygnet). Oddly the Spruce Goose was mostly made of birch, not spruce, but newsmen couldn't come up with a rhyme that seemed belittling enough for birch (Birch Lurch? Birch Perch?), and refused to let the facts stand in the way of their wordsmithing. Till his death Hughes maintained the plane, hoping to fly it if nothing else than to show Ice Station Zebra to a fuselage-filled with 750 captive flyers.

Further Fables of Francine Fishpaw

History makes strange bedfellows (unlike, say, the Minneapolis airport, which makes strange stallmates). This Friday would be the birthday of both LaWanda Page and Harris Glenn Milstead. My guess is as many of you are excited about this news as were excited by the Diamondbacks-Rockies NLCS, but that's because you don't know these two intrepid thespians by their names, but by their signature roles. Page played Aunt Esther on "Sanford & Son" while Milstead played Divine, John Water's redoubtable (not to be confused with Mrs. Redoubtablefire, of course) star. So I was thinking (really, it does happen sometimes!) it might be fun to imagine each in the other's role. There's Divine telling Redd Foxx to "Watch it, sucka!" And there's poor Wanda eating dogshit at the end of "Pink Flamingos." OK, only one of these changes is funny. Eating shit is never funny. Life's that way--and by way I mean full of shit-eating and unfunniness--sometimes. Just as it's actually true Page performed with RuPaul in the 1990s, which is just funny odd, not funny ha-ha. What a drag.

He Was No Chicken from Kiev

Friday is the 76th birthday, give or take a trombone, of Pavel Romanovich Popovich. If you say who, that just shows how far the mighty have fallen, and in Popovich's case, that's mighty far, a good 60+ miles from space. For you see Romanovich Popovich did not inspire the thrilling 1970s Milton-Bradley boardgame Which Witch? (or, in Ukrainian, Vich Vich?), but instead was a cosmonaut years before anyone in America even drank cosmos, and therefore he helped create the great cocktail race, which, of course, neither country won as both fell drunk long before the finish line (correct, Mr. Yeltsin?). Alas, some still long for the days when the Cold War referred to who had a better-iced shaker and M.A.D. stood for Mutual Assured Drunkeness, later to be followed by the Reagan innovation S.D.I.--the Shit-faced Drunk Initiative. Of course others long for this blurb to return to its focus. History is messy that way, Popoviching off, and leaving all of us with a a serious carpet cleaning bill.

Hoist Upon His Own Batard

Friday is the anniversary of the day William the Conqueror landed in England. Ever since he was a child he had that weight of his nickname to deal with, his mom would say, "Yes, yes, you're a conqueror, now go clean your room," so he figured he might as well get around to conquering something. After all, peeing in his friend's sandbox when he was 6 seemed like, well, piddling stuff. Alas, England did not listen to those who called for a ban of all Normans, a group led by Lewis D'Obbs and Mike Hellmalkin, and William hastily head to Hastings and gave history books the first great year of the new millennium, easily bumping out 1027--Farmer Brown Shares Same Sores with His Barnyard Animals from the previous top spot. There's a reason we call this period the Dark Ages. Indeed, William was also known as Guillaume le Bâtard for he was an inferior baguette.....wait, this just in, batard does mean bastard too. Sorry William, but you were illegitimate. Good thing you made up for that by marrying a cousin. (It seems Normandy was Alabama minus nine centuries.)

Gibson's Hallowed Body of Work

Friday is the 72nd birthday of Henry Gibson, who did more for poetry on television than anyone since Bullwinkle. Of course, poetry and TV go together like bacon and ice cream, Sanskrit read to a pony, or Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, but that's a different story while here I'm just trying to get laughs in. Rowing even further out into the tenuous sea o' humor, not just marking time, it turns out he was born James Bateman but his career suffered arrested development until he took his "stage name" that is, indeed, based on dramatist Henrik Ibsen's name, and Tony Checkoff and Augie Indberg were already taken. With a secretly highfalutin name like that you'd imagine he'd never have a ghost of a chance to become a master builder of a great career, but somehow it did just go wild, ducky. And here is a Gibson poem:

Dogs Are Better Than Ants

Dogs are better than ants
Because you don't have to bend so far to pet them
In addition, they are sturdy old muzzlers
Who fetch us our slippers, papers, and twig chunks
Twig chunks
But most of all, they stay out of jelly jars and
Never go squish if you happen to step on them.