Louie Louie: This really IS a dirty song!

You know, not every day is a good day. Some days are crap-ass, and this is one of those days. Not that anything bad has happened. It's just that nothing has happened AT ALL.

So I look around for things to post, but mostly they look around for me, because I'm always bumping into stuff. I found a great photo, from the 1940s I think, with a modern-day time traveller in it. No doubt a masterpiece of photoshopping, but I've seen that sort of thing before, even in films, and have posted on it (see Time Traveller on Blackfriars Bridge).

time-traveller-on-blackfriars-bridge.html

This, well. If you lived through this, and let's hope you didn't, there was a great to-do about "obscene" lyrics in the song (because the words were basically indecipherable). We used to say there was a "dirty" version and a "clean" version of  Louie Louie, but I doubt that because no one ever found any evidence. I think the whole thing was a sublime example of the mondegreen, or misheard lyric, which I recently posted about. It's possible to see things, hear things, and probably even taste and touch and smell things that aren't really there: thus Finding Bigfoot and all those ridiculous ghost-hunting TV shows. But for some reason, this seems to be particularly true of hearing things.

The urban myth that the FBI spent years pursuing an investigation of the song is true. They played it forwards and backwards, upside-down and sideways, and couldn't find anything obscene (though the Kingsmen still turned out to be one-hit wonders. Just a coincidence? I. . . DON'T. . . THINK. . . SO!) I was going to post all of the FBI's smudgy, blacked-out typewritten correspondence about this, but it bored the piss out of me, so I didn't. It's even more boring than all that blacked-out shit about Roswell.

BUT! Listen to this again, and at exactly 0:55, the drummer (having fumbled his drumstick) yells "FUCK!"

Well, it might be fuck, or it might be something else. But it's Thursday, the week is dragging ass, and it should be Friday, so here it is at last, proof that Louis Lou-EYE really IS an obscene song.

POST-IT-SCRIPT: In 1972 The Kingsmen were found at the bottom of the Hudson river wearing cement overshoes, right next to Jimmy Hoffa. Just a coincidence?

You decide.

POST-POST. Oh all right. This thing would be incomplete without at least SOME examples of the kind of bullshit that went on with the FBI or the CIA or whatever (because obviously, Louie Louie posed a serious threat to national security). The reproductions of these documents are so plug-ugly that I tried to find a way to dress them up a little, paste flowers on or turn them pink or something, but it just didn't work.

This one is obviously a complaint from a citizen sent to the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover got a lot of fan mail back then, which he enjoyed reading while dressed in women's clothing. (See related post: Was Herman Goering a Transvestite?): 

was-hermann-goering-a-transvestite-you-decide

Can y'all read this? It makes for some boring reading. But this was the kind of dirty-minded thinking that led to the fracas around Louie Louie. People were hearing whatever they wanted to hear, and whatever they wanted to hear was filthy, I tell you. . . filthy!

This is sort of like, kinda-like, what they thought they heard, or maybe some people thought they heard. I can only imagine the salacious delight of these FBI agents as they listened to the thing 500 times while drinking martinis, carefully deciphering those filthy, dirty lyrics which included such words as "girl" and "park" and "awaiting". 

But as usually happens (eventually), sanity prevailed. The FBI had to admit they couldn't make out a damn thing in those lyrics, that it was just one big mush-mouthed jumble.

We could have told them that, right from the beginning! But no, J. Edgar was having a slow day and needed a project. Should've gone out and bought a hat with a veil and a new pair of heels.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Midlothian Man: an evolutionary throwback

Midlothian Man sees Donald Trump in bathroom floor tile

POSTED 2:24 PM, JUNE 8, 2016, BY SCOTT WISE, UPDATED AT 06:26PM, JUNE 8, 2016


MIDLOTHIAN, Va. -- Clayton Litten was sitting on his toilet, admiring his newly tiled bathroom floor when he first saw it.

"This cannot be. There's no way," Litten said when he saw the image -- "clear as day."

An image of presidential candidate Donald Trump, standing with arms folded, emerged from the tile floor.

 

VIEW GALLERY (4 IMAGES)

"What are the odds?" Litten asked. "One in a trillion?"

When Litten asked the workers remodeling his bathroom if they too saw Trump in the tile, he said they all agreed -- they saw the Donald.

"It's a perfect image of him!" Litten said.

Litten, a Republican who planned to vote for Trump this fall, said he sent the image of his floor to the Trump campaign.

He said he hoped the man himself would stop by for a visit when he arrived in town to campaign Friday.

"I have not yet heard from anyone yet," Litten said.

Workers for the company that installed the floor said people can see all sorts of images in tile, "sort of like when people see objects in clouds."

We sent the photo to the company for further analysis and will update this post when we hear back.

In the meantime, Litten, who said he was dying of lung cancer, is holding out hope that Donald Trump would see this story and pay him a visit.

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Do you see @realDonaldTrump in the floor tile?

I can't unsee it, thanks

No, I can't "magic eye"

No, I see Hillary

Whatever happened to that Blue's Clues guy?

Who cares? But he was pretty creepy. I only remember this vaguely from when my grandkids were toddlers, which I call the Poop n' Pampers years. Later, the Poop n' Pull-ups, then the go-sit-on-the-potty-or-I'll-kill-you years, or - etc. etc. The Blues Clues Guy drove me crazy because he shoved his face right into the camera with these big, blank, staring eyes. He's no different now, but I'll spare you the six-minute YouTube update from which I made this gif. The significant thing about the gif is the Amazing Self-Erasing Windowpane! Look closely, and you'll notice the pawprint is actually coming off BEFORE the Blue's Clues guy takes the rag to it. He should have patented this instead of going on to a failed career as a rock musician. Still, he lives in a penthouse in New York, and my guess is some very rich guy is keeping him, and they "do it" to reruns of Blue's Clues. Oh, sorry - that was a really horrible joke, but then, that was a really horrible show. Except for the self-erasing windowpane.

Didn't quite turn out the way I had hoped

 

This gif is made up of TWENTY separate images which I photoshopped onto paper, then ran as a gif sequence. Hmmm. I thought the facial  expressions would be more graduated, but they aren't. I really couldn't tell.  It took a while to do this, it was absorbing, but as with all these animations, I have no idea how they will turn out until I actually see them. 

I will admit I like the slower one better, but since these can run at any speed I want, I also did one double-time.

And here are the images! I want to post them one at a time to try to impress you with how much work this was, but the reaction would probably be, "what a stupid thing to spend your time on", or (the same thing, really) "Jeez, I wish I had time to do that sort of stuff." Waste my time on it.

Don't understand TED talks? Just watch this!

They Cut My Beard and Forced Me to Eat It Remix

Niki Hoeky: get hip to the cogitation, ASSHOLES!

Way down Louisiana

Down in Cajun land

Folks got something goin'

Goes something like

Care folk a-t-tootsie

I wants to t'tie ya puppe'tame me

Dim ya on a scoobydoo

I dig you on'a scuba-die
I oh boo-ga-foo you

You ooh boog-a-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

Golly, squally miss Molly

Everything's copesetic now

Loog-a-boo, look at you

What I'd like to do to you girl

You woka-b-boo-you

You oh boog-a-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee
Mmmmm

Niki, Niki, Niki Hoeky

Pappy's doing time in the pokey

Your sister's on a trip

Your momma got hip

Little girl you're lookin' ok

You ooh boog-a-boo you

You ooh boog-a-boo you

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

(musical interlude with humming)

You oh boo-ka-boo you

You oh boo-ka-boo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

Listen to me now
Niki, Niki, Niki Hoeky

Your pappy's doing time in the pokey

Your sister's on a trip

Your momma got hip

Little girl you're lookin' ok

You oh boog-a-boo you

You oh boog-a-foo you, little girl

Get hip to the cogitation of the boolawee

I talk about you boo-la
(mm-mm-mm)
Come on I talk about you wisssh.
I talk about you boo-la
Talk about you wisssh.

NOTE. I sort of get this. And I'm sort of upset about it. It's the usual thing. When I try to find the lyrics to any popular song, then compare it to the actual (recorded) song, the internet version is always wildly wrong.

Well, no. Lamely wrong. The most unimaginitive reduction of a spicy pun into a plodding non-metaphor, because, gee, we just don't GET what he was trying to say here! It doesn't make sense, see. So this is sort of what he might of/ought to have said.

The weird thing is, these mondegreens (misheard lyrics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen) are exactly the same on every lyric site. They do not come from the original, published sheet music. They can't. Someone listens to the song and transcribes it and writes down what they think it might be. If it doesn't make sense to them, they make something up.

This dulls down the brilliance or at least the spark of the original song, irons out any irony and removes all those pesky puns.

How this-all started was with something I saw on Facebook - I barely pay attention on Facebook any more, it's like filing my nails or eating a Popsicle, just something to do. It was a post that was sort of  like "do you like new ideas? Do you love baking, walking dogs, picking your nose?" It was supposed to be a satiric take on those old ads to recruit dazzling original thinkers. A line jumped into my head, something I had not thought about since I was thirteen years old:

Get hip to the cogitation.

It came from a song, of course. From way back. But I could only remember bits of it, and not the title.

I followed it backwards by googling just that line, and got nothing at first. Then I added "your father's doing time in the pokey." Slowly it began to resolve into a recognizable song.

I found the lyrics on umpteen lyric sites, in fact, and they all said the same thing.

Niki, niki, niki, hoeky. Pappy's doing time in the pokey. Your mama died hip, your sister's on a trip.

Etc. etc., then the line:

Get hip to the CONSULTATION.

I couldn't believe it was consultation. Had I been wrong all those years? I found the original recording by P. J. Proby on YouTube, and listened for it.

NO

NO

NO

NO, the word was not, never was, never would be, no matter WHO recorded it (and a lot of people did after P. J. Proby), "consultation". Though it was hard to make out, there was no "s" sound anywhere in the word. It was repeated several times. It was "cogitation". It was, and it is.

So why  -

Every site you go on will say the same thing. Consultation. These things multiply, they divide, they seethe like gunky slimy pools of frog's eggs. Identical, WRONG tadpoles hatch out and turn into WRONG frogs who then lay the WRONG eggs.

Wrong.

All I can think of is that someone mondegreened the lyrics decades ago, then they somehow got glommed on to everyone's lyric site so that they would all be wrong in exactly the same (obnoxious, insulting, STUPID) way.

But we fixed it, I think. Not that anybody cares! The transcribed lyric for this was just so riddled with mistakes that I had to go over it line by line, playing the recording 8 or 9 times to make "corrections" to some sort of unintelligible patios, and then giving up.

I can't find anything about the provenance of this song. I can't, and I don't want to look at it any more. These could be Cajun-isms, they could, because Cajun is a language unto itself, but if it were Cajun I think I'd see more French mixed in with it. It's not unlike Acadian, the Canadian version, and at one point Cajuns and Acadians were one people. One went north, one went south, one went over the cuckoo's nest.

But I happen to know - I'd stake my very life on it - that no one has ever been hip to the CONSULTATION. That idea is now gasping its last breath while it writhes in the dust.

POST-BLOG COGITATION (NOT consultation), or at least a comparison. I tried to find an "authentic Cajun song", that is, without knocking my brains out, and thought of Doug Kershaw, who really was (is?) Cajun and had a few hits. I don't remember much about those songs, so googled the lyrics for the best-known one, looking for either French or the sort of gibberish that appeared in Niki Niki Hoeky.

Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo
Fell in love at the Fais Do Do
The pop was cold and the coffee chaud
For Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo

Diggy Diggy La and Diggy Diggy Lo
Everyone knows he was her beau
No other girl could ever show
So much love for Diggy Diggy Lo

That's the place they find romance
Where they do the Cajun dance
Steal a kiss with every chance
Show their love with every glance

Ah, yeah, no, I don't see any. The only "Cajunisms" are Fais Do Do (which is literally translated, if I remember my Grade 7 French, as "go to sleep"), "chaud" to rhyme with "do do", and "pop", the Canadian version of "soda". This might have some dim, far-gone Acadian origin, but I doubt it because there was no pop back in 1743.

Not much frazzlin' Cajun spice THERE, is there, boys and girls?

So on to that other one, the one Hank Williams did:

Well, goodbye Joe, me gotta go, me oh my oh
Me gotta go to pole the pirogue down the bayou
My Yvonne, the sweetest one, me oh my oh
I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

Yeah, jambalaya and a crawfish pie and filé gumbo
'Cause tonight, I'm gonna see my ma cher amio
You pick guitar, you fill fruit jar and be gay-o
'Cause I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

Well, Thibadaux, well, Fontaineaux, the place is buzzin'
And kinfolks come to see Yvonne by the dozen
You dress in style, you go hog wild and be gay-o
'Cause I am a son of a gun, we gonna have big fun on the bayou

It's a little bit Cajun/Acadian. "Pole the pirogue" sounds like some Polish guy eating perogies, but then I could have my ethnicity wrong. More likely, it refers to a sort of pole barge, like a gondola. Yvonne, yeah, she's French. File gumbo, cher amio, all the other family names - and that's about it, no fancy stuff, no verbal yodelling or Golly, squally, miss Molly. So maybe Niki Hoeky is just a sort of nonsense rhyme, the sort of thing we clapped to in school, the cum-la, cum-la, cum-la feast-a that I was astonished to find on YouTube.

P. S. There are even more versions. I just found out. Burton Cummings pronounces it "condensation", whereas various Motown versions sound more like "conversation", and I've also heard "consolation". But NOBODY says "consultation".

(next day) OH WAIT! There's more.

Another contender for this mystery word is "conflagration", a supposed reference to lighting a joint. So now we've got it down to SIX choices, one of which is definitely wrong:

Cogitation
Condensation
Conversation
Consolation
Conflagration
(and, the ever-wrong) Consultation

Pick one. You might as well do it blindfolded. But when I hear it, I STILL hear "cogitation".

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

Wobbly: the Muybridge weenie study

Part of the charm, or frustration, or Muybridge-ness of these stop-motion thingies is how wobbly it all is. Because these were NOT taken with a movie camera, because movie cameras did not even exist back then, perspective would change with each photograph, the grid would move jerkily, framing would tilt around crazily, and it all seemed to take place with an earthquake in the background.

I pasted this guy up merely to show that Muybridge was interested in the male organ. Or in the man with no clothes on, at least. There were not nearly as many weenie sketches, of course, as nubile young women with their breasts bouncing up and down. "That's it! Skip-a-rope, ladies, skip-a-rope!" I can't see him cheering on the weenie guy in quite the same way. 

One interesting thing Muybridge did, and I'm not going to make an animation of it even though I love Victorian gowns with corsets, is compare locomotion in fully-dressed women with that of nude women. The corset does not just "make the waist smaller", as people think. It makes the spine ramrod-straight, pushes back the shoulders, forces the breasts upwards and the hips down, while ruthlessly squeezing the middle, reducing it by several (or many) inches. It's impossible to slouch in a corset - in fact, it can't be done - and almost as impossible to bend down to pick something up. That was why they had to have servants back then.