Where, oh, where did people get the idea that animals can sing?  We’re not talking about birdsong here or even the mournful yodel of the coyote.  This is not about the sounds of nature with all their bizarre effluvia, from whale song to chittering grasshoppers.  If it floats your boat to buy from those soundscape kiosks that always seem to be waiting innocently enough until some poor unsuspecting passer-by triggers their sensor, then please pursue your need.  And, let me point out for the unenlightened, Alvin and his fellow chipmunks were not really chipmunks.  We can leave it to your imagination how the vocal effect was achieved, but castrati were not employed according to an official Capitol representative.  I’m talking the Singing Dogs, the Jingle Cats, and whatever other heinous animals feel moved to semi-melodious vocalizing.

The original Singing Dogs (Caesar, King, Pearl, and Dolly- Pussy rounded out the group on later recordings) started in Copenhagen in 1955 when Danish sound engineer Carl Weismann spliced together tapes which had been ruined by nearby dogs barking.  Eureka!  I have created… Jingle Bells!  Bwa-ha-ha-ha!  The recording was a huge hit for RCA/Victor, managing to resurface periodically and sell again to the next generation of entranced listeners.  As if people will listen to any heavily altered animal sounds, the Singing Dogs have had to face many attempts to knock them from their pedestal.

The Jingle Cats have lately ruled the den, selling a disturbing two million copies worldwide. Mike Spalla, musician and owner of nineteen cats, decided to record his freeloaders.  Binky is the lead.  We have their success (and our own dollars) to thank for the emergence of the Jingle Dogs, spawned from their cameos on Jingle Cats recordings.  Their newest album, King of the Woof, will be out in 2006.  May Santa’s reindeer leave something special on your roof next Christmas if you buy it.

December, 2005

Between Adam Weishaupt and Dan Brown at the conspiracy banquet table sits Robert Anton Wilson, keeping the conversation lively.  He and Umberto Eco provide the best banter all night long.  In the wake of the Da Vinci Code, you might think that a few of the conspiracy classics could creep onto the bestseller lists, but we are a fickle people.  Wilson is responsible for some of the most engaging entries in the secret societies library: The Illuminatus Trilogy (co-authored with Robert Shea), along with a shelf worth of related tomes (The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy).  As opposed to Brown, Wilson was never satisfied with one or two hidden puppet masters.  His work tries to find the synchronicity between every bit of vaguely believable real-world idiocy (Casanova and Watergate, for instance), those edge-of-vision unbelievable facts (North American Vikings, Nazi occult research), and the full-blown manic wah-wahhs (Area 51 aliens, Templars in space).  Despite the weight of all this combined weirdness, Wilson succeeds where so many have failed because he uses levity to significantly lighten the load born by his prose.

If his name otherwise sounds familiar, Robert A. Wilson was a quasi-celebrity a few years ago when the officials in Santa Cruz, California, made him their first citizen to receive medical cannabis, which had been recently legalized.  That was a short-lived experiment for Wilson once the federal government intervened.  Sometimes the conspiracies are large and thoughtless.

Sometimes the conspiracies are miraculous and blessed.  Nowadays, Wilson is in the process of dying from post-polio syndrome.  Word went out a few weeks ago that he had been reduced to destitution.  A community of Internet angels conspired to let one of the good guys die at home in peace by raising funds for his continued care.  Fnord.

October, 2006

I did not know what “larrupin’” meant five minutes ago.

Nicknames, like secret handshakes, have always been a way to say that you’re one of us.  Yet, baseball monikers once felt like a nationwide hug shared between fans and athletes.  And everyone was a fan to some degree.  The sports pages may have been the best-written and most accurate part of the newspaper.  You could argue with anyone anywhere about the Yankee Clipper without worrying that the words “sails” or “DiMaggio” would creep into the conversation.

In the days of radio play-by-play, glorious baseball nicknames were woven from situation and alliteration.  Often granted by sportswriters to meritorious rookies, the practice seems to have fallen out of favor (otherwise we’d be talking about “The Big Syringe” and “The Baltimore Cuckold”).  The golden era of baseball nicknames gave us the Sultan of Swat, the Georgia Peach, the Big Train, Three-Fingered Brown, Cool Papa, Yogi, Stan the Man, Dizzy, Daffy, Charlie Hustle, the Bird, Space Man, and the Human Rain Delay.  Often, parental given names were lost to common usage- who refers to Laurence Berra?

In the twilight of the nickname era, the best-known handle of an active player likely belongs to Roger “the Rocket” Clemens who’s been plying his trade for over two decades, though fans will know the Big Unit (Randy Johnson) and the Big Hurt (Frank Thomas), who have also been around for eons.

Perhaps we are simply too sophisticated nowadays to make sport of our sports.  Who is no longer on first and we have only ourselves to blame.  Apropos of Larrupin’ Lou Gehrig, it means “a blow, especially one delivered with a lot of force,” which I had intuited as a child, though adulthood required definition.

July, 2006