I have this love of brass from my upbringing in New Orleans, I guess. I have always loved NOLA style jazz. In keeping with our musical journey of brass, we will take a look this week at the Swing Ninjas with the Speakeasy Three. This is a sound my mom used to call “dirty jazz.”-
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For Big Ruckus D
You say you haven’t heard a good Saxophone Solo in a long time. Not all of the following are Sax work, but being originally from New Orleans, I do appreciate some good horn work. One of the great things about New Orleans is street performances:
Another great piece from that same band is this one:
Growing up in New Orleans means that you learn to appreciate music of all kinds. I still have a special kind of love for all sorts of brass instrumentals. Maybe I will feature more of them in the future, as a reminder that this nation has a lot that is worth saving. There are a lot of talented people out there that we never hear from because the big labels don’t think it’s marketable.
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Pi Day, or Steak and BJ Day
Welcome to March 14. You can celebrate it as Pi Day, 3.14 or you can celebrate it as steak and a BJ day, if you have a woman who will celebrate it with you.
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SWAT team dance
Sung to the tune of “Safety Dance” with apologies to Men Without Hats:
S-s-s-s, W-w-w-w, A-a-a-a, T-t-t-t
SWAT, SWAT, dance!
We can search if we want to
We can inspect your friends’ behind
‘Cause your friends don’t bow and if they don’t scrape,
Well they’re no friends of mine
Say, we can go where we want to
A warrant you’ll never find
And we can rewrite the Constitution
Leave the real one far behind
And we can dance
We can go when we want to
The night is young and so am I
And we can dress real neat from our helmets to our feet
And surprise ’em with the no-knock cry
Say, we can act if we want to
Question us, nobody will
And we can shoot some dude, he’s totally screwed
And I can act like an imbecile
We can dance, we can dance
Totally out of control
We can dance, we can dance
We’re doing it from wall to wall
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody put up your hands
We can dance, we can dance
Everybody takin’ the cha-a-a-ance
We can search if we want to
We have auth-or-i-ty
As long as we abuse it, never gonna lose it
Everything’ll work out right
I say, we can search if we want to
We’re protected by a thin blue line
‘Cause your friends ain’t cops, and if they ain’t cops,
Well they’re no friends of mine
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Day Off for Date Night
My wife and I are going to Orlando today for a nice meal and to see Fluffy’s Stand Up. Here is a sample:
This is likely to be the only post of the day.
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Skidmarks
Miguel posts about the Norwegian military reissuing the used underwear of discharged service members. One memory of my own time in the military makes me cringe to think about having to share skivvies.
When I first reported to the fleet, everyone who was E4 and below had to report for 90 days of “coop cleaning.” The coop was the compartment where about 200 of the sailors in the engineering department lived. There was one E4 and three sailors E3 and below who were assigned as coop cleaners. It was their job to clean the berthing compartment and its attached head.
Inside of that compartment were two laundry receptacles: one for dark clothes, one for whites. Twice a week, the coop cleaners would put the clothes into 60 pound bags and take those 5 or 6 bags down to the laundry to be washed. When those clothes came back clean, the coop cleaners would place them on each person’s rack (bunk). It was rather nasty. Imagine what 300 pounds of laundry that was worn in a hot, humid environment by 200 sweaty guys for a 16 hour workday smelled like after fermenting for three days in a common laundry locker. Yeah, it smelled like a mixture of ammonia, grilled onions, cheese, and farts.
One of the funniest traditions we had was to pin the skivvies with the largest skid mark to the bulletin board that was located next to the laundry bin. Since your name was on the skivvies, you were subject to ridicule. We had one guy, his name was Crenshaw, who regularly had skidmarks that were 6 inches long and two or three inches wide. He didn’t care one whit about the ridicule he was subjected to. Every laundry day, his underwear and its large skidmarks would go on display.
So no, I would rather go commando.
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I need the lift
The world catches up with us. We all need a lift, including me. Lately, all of the talk of our nation’s collapse has gotten to me. So today is going to be a break from that.
One of my favorite things each November is that the holiday music channels begin broadcasting Christmas music. I spend most of November and December listening to old Christmas music from the greats: Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and others. I drive my coworkers nuts with it.
I find it to be uplifting and a great relief from the problems of today’s world. With that message, I leave you with my favorite Christmas song: