When I heard about British diver Tom Daley knitting and crocheting in the stands at the Tokyo Olympics, I did what I suspect a lot of people did as the story has gone viral. I clap laughed. That is, I enjoyed the story and thought so much I was clapping while I was laughing, like applauding him for it while getting enough of a kick from it I was laughing. Except there was one little problem. “Clap laugh” isn’t a proper term, apparently! A DuckDuckGo search for “clap laugh” with quotations to show results of those exact words and spacing, as well as that for “claplaugh” as one word, showed nothing! A Google search showed a few GIFs under the term, some as “laugh clap”. But you know what, for the unofficiality that this is, I’ll stake claim to it!
origin
The Smith Cloud is our Galaxy’s Fart Coming Back to Us
I learned about the Smith Cloud today via the video below from NASA. It’s a gas cloud the mass of about 2 million Suns (not much astronomically), moving at a high velocity of about 700,000 miles per hour. It’s one of many circling the Milky Way, but one that is coming back to collide with the Milky Way. When it does, it’ll just kind of merge in and cause a lot of new stars to form from all the gas and energy it carries, not much more. Boring, with a slightly mysterious history likely unraveled, unless you look at it in a different way with a scientifically apt metaphor…
Superheroes or Super Villains Who Got Powers from Vaccines? Bad or Good Idea Today?
I was getting a series of vaccination shots today in preparation for travel abroad when I had a thought. Are there any superheroes or super villains who got their powers from vaccines?
There must be! I’m just not geeky enough to know it! Billions of people having dead and/or weakened viruses pumped into their systems, sometimes mixed or given closely enough to mix, mostly at a young age when their bodies are still developing. There’s zero chance of anything ever go wrong in a fictional universe to give somebody superpowers, right? 😉
A Dirty Song Called All That Meat and No Potatoes? (and Lyrics)
There once was a time when you could take a dirty phrase to make a classy hit song out of it. I don’t know when it ended, but it was certainly alive in the 1940s when this song came about! This is the Louis Armstrong version, with Velma Middleton and the Louis Armstrong Orchestra, not the original Fats Waller version (at the end) that wasn’t nearly as good.
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Hey Pops! What’s wrong Daddy?
You look like somethin’ botherin’ you
Ain’t nothin’ botherin’ me honey
That a piece of roast beef can’t fix up
A man works hard then comes on home
Expects to find stew with that fine ham bone
He opens the door, then start to lookin’
Say, Woman, what’s this stuff you cookin’?
Now all that meat and no potatoes
I just ain’t right, dey like da green tomatoes
Here I’m waitin’
Palpitatin’
With all that meat and no potatoes
All that meat and no potatoes
All that food to the alligators
Now hold me steady
I’m really ready
Now all that meat and no potatoes
I don’t think that peas are bad
With meat most anything goes
Yes, I look into the pot
I’m fit to fight
‘Cause, woman, you know that mess just ain’t right
Oh, Pops!
All that meat and no potatoes
Just ain’t right, like green tomatoes
Woman, I’m steamin’, yeah!
I’m really screamin’
All that meat and no potatoes
Say, I don’t think that beans are bad
With meat most anything goes
I look into the pot
And what a sight!
Oh, woman, you know that without rice
Beans just ain’t right
Oh, Pops!
All that meat and no potatoes
Just ain’t right, like green tomatoes
Now woman, I’m steamin’
And I’m really screamin’
All that meat and no potatoes
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Louis Armstrong & Velma Middleton
When I first heard this song, I found it really groovy, and I still do, but I thought to myself, why would someone write such a great song about meat and potatoes?
Well, after some researching, I found out.
The title of this song, All That Meat and No Potatoes, was a slur from the early 1940s that was used to described a big figured attractive woman with small breasts. Gee, don’t you wish English was still that classy these days?
Hey, some people will never be classy, but you could help them by giving them language like this rather than, well, you use your own choice words.
Anyhoo, the story regarding how this song came about was that Fats Waller liked some female vocalist he was working with, except that she was all that meat and no potatoes. So he wrote a song about it.
Awww. Wasn’t that romantic? 🙂
But you’ve got to give credits to Fats, and his manager Ed Kirkeby. They wrote a good song on the literal end of things, expressing discontent with cooking that had a lot of meat and no potatoes, as a metaphor for Fats’ feelings towards this woman.
Then Louis came along and just took it to another level. Compare the version above to the version below.
It might be jazz, but I’ll tell ya, can Louis rock it or what???
The Louis Armstrong version of this song goes on my list for Best Songs I Heard for the First Time in 2010. I make a list every year. Please click here for links to other songs I have put on this list so far.
Digital Citizen 