Fruit Cake
A facebook friend put some fruitcake facts on the internet. PG saw a chance for some text to put between pictures. He would be nutty as a fruitcake to turn down this chance. This is a repost.
Fruitcakes were buried with the dead in Ancient Egypt. It’s true. Ancient Egyptians used to fill the tombs of the dead with all the supplies that they would need to enjoy the afterlife, including food and water. Fruitcake was often put into the tomb of a deceased person because a fruitcake soaked in a natural preservative like alcohol or fruit juice would last a long time. It was thought that the preserved fruitcake would not spoil on the journey to the afterlife. Fruitcake was a staple food of other ancient Middle Eastern, Southeast Asian and Mediterranean cultures as well
Candied fruits are used in fruitcake because using sugar was the only way to preserve the fruit long enough to get it back to Europe from the Middle East. When the Crusaders began carrying exotic fruits back to their European home the fresh fruit would spoil long before they were able to get it home. Ingenious traders began drying the fruits by candying them with sugar which made them an even more delicious treat and preserved them indefinitely. Once the candied fruits were sent to Europe and to other parts of the world they were baked into cakes so that they could be shared with family and friends on special occasions.
Fruitcakes will last for years without spoiling. It’s true. A fruitcake that is properly preserved with an alcohol soaked cheesecloth that is then wrapped in plastic wrap or foil can be kept unrefrigerated for years without spoiling. In the past, before refrigerators came along, families would make fruitcake for holidays and special occasions months in advance of the actual event and then let the covered fruitcakes sit wrapped in an alcohol soaked cloth until the event happened. As long as the cloth was remoistened with alcohol occasionally the cakes not only didn’t spoil, they actually tasted richer and sweeter because they had been soaking in brandy and rum for a couple of months.
To millions of fruitcake consumers, the town of Claxton GA is very special. This south Georgia town, just down the road from Reidsville, is home to Claxton Fruit Cake . The story of the Claxton Fruit Cake company is a sweet one. Savino Tos founded the Claxton Bakery in 1910. He hired Albert Parker in 1927, and sold him the business in 1945. Mr. Parker decided to sell Fruit Cake to America.
No story about fruitcake is complete without mentioning the “Fruitcake Lady”. Marie Rudisill , an aunt of Truman Capote, wrote a book of fruitcake recipes. She became a tv celebrity, before going to the bakery in the sky November 3, 2006.
The urban dictionary has nine listings for fruit cake. The ones for homosexuals and crazy people are there. UD gets creative with this selection: “The act of releasing green chunky diarrhea onto your partners face then, ejaculating on it, then punching him/her in the nose causing the colors to mix together to form a fruit cake like color.”
If you tire of jokes about fruitcake, you can go to The society for the protection and preservation of fruitcake . (If you click on the “new URL”, you will be invited to join in the green card lottery.) There used to be a link on the society page that enables you to buy Fruitcake Mints. “Keep your breath fruitcake fresh with these festive mints! Turns out, the baked good actually tastes decent in mint form.”
Pictures are from ” The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”
Judy Roasting On An Open Fire
SFFILK (Not his real name) passes along a story about Mel Torme. It seems like Mr.Torme was eating a leisurely breakfast at a food court in Los Angeles, and a quartet appeared singing Christmas songs. They wound up performing “The Christmas Song” for co- author Torme…and the singers had no idea who he was. It is a good story, better told in the link. This is a repost.
According to the inerrant Wikipedia, Torme colloaborated with Robert Wells , until they had a falling out. One afternoon, on the hottest day of July in 1945, Mr.Torme went to visit Mr.Wells, and saw the first four lines of “The Christmas Song” (including “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose”). The lines were on a note pad, and the two agreed to beat the heat of summer by completing the song. Supposedly, Mr. Torme did not like the song very much. After three divorces, he probably didn’t see many of the royalties.
Mel Torme was the music director of the ill fated “Judy Garland Show” in the early sixties. He wrote a book about it… The Other Side of the Rainbow: With Judy Garland on the Dawn Patrol . The story is that Miss Garland would get blasted, call Mr. Torme in the middle of the night, and pour out her troubles. While the show did not last longer, there are some great youtube clips left over.
Big Hair Melt Down
It was six am on tuesday morning. Many say that tuesday is worse than monday, but PG is not a statistician. He feels the urge to contribute to the collective wisdom, but does not have an original thought. It is time to look in the archives, and find something to repost. A feature with the lurid title “Big Hair” is on the list.
It seems as though BH was written for trifecta writing challenge. Evidently, PG has been contributing for a year now. This might be the first totally recycled entry. What can be said to melt the hearts and minds of those judging this week? A winning entry would make a nice holiday present.
This monday morning post is written in response to the Trifecta Writing Challenge. The mission for today: “This weekend we’re asking you to write 33 words that will make us laugh or smile. Even a chuckle will do. We look forward to the communal spirit lifting. Good luck!”
Before thinking of what to say, PG put the pictures together. They are from “The Special Collections and Archives,Georgia State University Library”. The 33 words are about one of the pictures.
Buck Owens looked at the woman with big, black hair. She held onto her pocketbook with both hands. You don’t mean that. The man in the checkered suit looked ahead, but saw nothing.
Turn Turn Turn
The word Ecclesiastes has a poetic tingle. It’s place in the Old Testament is between the poetry of Proverbs, and the enticements of the Song of Soloman. Richard Brautigan counted the punctuation marks in Ecclesiastes, and found no errors. Ecclesiastes 3 was even the lyrics for a top forty song.
Turn Turn Turn is taken almost verbatim from the book of Ecclesiastes. Pete Seeger wrote a melody, and added a line. “There is a time for peace, I swear its not too late”. TTT became a hit for the Byrds in 1965, as the escalation of the Vietnam war was in full bloom.
TTT is about the dualities of life, and how there is a place for all these things. When PG was collecting rocks from destroyed houses, it was a time to gather stones together. TTT can serve as a companion to the vibrations of day to day living.
Pete Seeger is still alive, at the age of 94. PG first heard of him when he was on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It was during Vietnam, and Mr. Seeger did a song…”Waist deep in the big muddy”… about how “The big fool said to push on, push on”. The CBS censors did not allow this the first time he appeared. Many thought he was talking about Lyndon Johnson.
“Pete Bowers” was a stage name for a young Pete Seeger. This was to avoid making trouble for his father. The band he played in, the Weavers, popularized a gullah spiritual, “Kumbaya”. This is a repost, edited for inclusion in the trifecta writing challenge. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Mick Jagger
There was a book at the Chamblee Library, Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger. The work is credited to a man named Christopher Anderson, who has a slew of best sellers to his credit. The copyright was issued to “Anderson Productions.”
When you write about Mickie, you have to post a few videos. One of the first to come up is “Waiting on a friend.” This was the first video that PG saw on MTV. One night in early 1982, PG rode his bike to an apartment on Buford Hiway. While he was there, someone said hey watch this, music television. The video was a favorite that first winter of MTV, even though it wasn’t really that good.
Mick Jagger has been a part of many lives the last fifty years. The stones were conceded to be number two to the beatles, but stayed together longer. The era of rock concert as megaevent coincided with the reinvention of the stones, after the demise of Brian Jones. He did after all start the band. Mr. Jones had become too much of a druggie to be relied on, and was fired. The book says that Mr. Jones was drowned, by a construction worker.
Ok, we are three paragraphs in, and we have not discussed Mr. Jagger’s pecker. Most of the book is about this instrument of undetermined size. The book says Mick stuffed a sock in his pants before shows. Mick has screwed thousands of women, and more than a few men. Whether Mick is a top, or a bottom, is left to the imagination.
The phrase “fuck Mick Jagger” is seminal. One night, the B52s were playing at a toilet on Ponce De Leon Avenue called the Big Dipper. The venue was later torn down, the ground decontaminated, and an animal clinic built on it’s site. After the show, one of the girls (either Kate or Cindy, or maybe neither, since this story is possibly an urban legend) was hanging out in the parking lot. “Beulah” was running his mouth, as he liked to do, talking about his hero Mick Jagger. Finally, the B52girl had heard enough. “Fuck Mick Jagger, one day Mick Jagger will come see me.”
The book goes into excruciating detail about the stones story. Mick grew up middle class, and was close to his parents. He bit the end of his lip playing basketball, and sounded different. While going to the London School of Economics, he connected with Keith Richard, and found that they both liked Chuck Berry. The Glimmer Twins started to hang out together, and played a few gigs at a nightclub owned by Alexis Korner. (Mr. Korner opened for Humble Pie and Edgar Winter at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium in 1972. He was ignored by the festive crowd.)
At this time, Mick had been introduced to sex by the other boys at his school. The first time with a woman was when Mick was an orderly at Bexley Mental Hospital. A nurse “yanked him into the linen closet where, surrounded by sheets, mops, and bedpans, Mick lost his virginity standing up”.
At some point Brian Jones came into the picture. Mick moved into a flat with Brian and Keith, and lived in picturesque squalor. At some point Mick and Brian bumped gooberheads, which left Mick confused. It is not known whether the lads could afford drugs at this point.
The story goes on and on. There are ugly moments, pretty moments, good songs written, lots of drugs, lots of sex. As Mick said in “Shattered,” “sex and sex and sex and sex and sex and sex and sex.” A few begin to wonder if he is capable of a one on one relationship, but those opinions don’t count.
One afternoon in 1978, PG was driving a truck in Decatur. He worked for a lady who did sampling projects, which means giving out samples to consumers. The product this time was Playtex Plus deodorant tampons. The truck was the rag wagon. There was an announcement on the last am rock and roll station in Atlanta. The stones were going to play the Fox Theater, and tickets were on sale now. The signal of the am station faded out at this point, with a gospel station preacher blocking out the rock and roll announcement. PG did not hear the location of the ticket sales. It turns out the tickets went on sale at the box office of the Municipal Auditorium, which was two blocks away from the rental facility of the rag wagon. Such is life.
In 1991, PG was walking to work and noticed an army of movie trucks. Mr. Jagger was appearing in a film, “Free Jack.” PG saw a scene filmed from his perch in the Healey Building, and stood behind a chair with the name “Mick Jagger” stenciled on. There were reports of a van rocking in Cabbagetown. On January 12, 1992, Georgia May Ayeesha Jagger was born.
Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger is not a bad book. It is easy to read, and does not skimp on slime. The phrase “cringe inducing” is used several times, which may be the result of a focus group. It is not worth $27.00, or $29.99 Canadian. The publisher is Simon&Schuster. The dalliance between Mr. Jagger and Carly Simon is dutifully noted.
Pictures are from The Library of Congress. This ia a repost.
Lou Reed
It was the last sunday in October. For party people, it is time to get the glitter out of your head before it corrodes the medulla oblongata. For sober PG, it was the last day of freedom before another job assignment. For Lou Reed, today did not happen.
There are many things you could say about Mr. Reed. At a key point in his solo career, he issued Metal Machine Music, ninety four minutes of unlistenable noise. There was a model, of uncertain gender, on the back of his first solo album. A banana, wrapped in aluminum foil, decorated a strategic location. The album gave the world “take a walk on the wild side”, “satellite of love”, and “perfect day”.
Heroin was a friend of Mr. Reed for a while. Did anyone decide to try smack after listening to that song? Who knows. It is not known what substances he was recreating with the last forty years.
After a while, Lou Reed got married to Laurie Anderson. They gave a concert for dogs.
The story is that Mr. Reed was tough to interview. Since he outlived Edie Sedgwick by forty two years, Mr. Reed figured he didn’t need to be nice. One journalist reports “Lou Reed … was the most terrifying rock star I have ever interviewed. Partly it was his look that was so unsettling: all those amphetamines in his rock n roll years had taken their toll. His sunken cheeks, intense staring eyes and perpetually macerating jaw gave him the look of a malevolent praying mantis in a poodle fright wig.”
On May Day 1993, PG was asked to sing at a beauty pageant. He chose “take a walk on the wild side”. There are fifteen rounds of doo doo repeated four times. These groups of eight doos were known as a crock. New York City was changed to Ponce De Leon. Elvis was the MC. Since PG has a loud voice, he got Elvis to turn the amplifier down to one before his song. Pictures are from The Library of Congress.
Moon Zappa
The current WTF Podcast features Moon Zappa. At no time does she say grody, gag me with a spoon, or boofoos. Today, she is the divorced mother of an eight year old, and buys quality apple butter.
Moon is the daughter of the late Frank Zappa. FZ did not do drugs, smoked Winston cigarettes, and spent all his time working on music. The four children, Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva, called the parents Frank and Gail. Mrs. Zappa stays busy these days selling her husbands music.
Once, Moon broke a finger in school. She called Gail, and waited. Eventually, the family Rolls Royce pulled up. Gail was driving, with Frank in the passenger seat. Frank quit driving when his first drivers license expired. Before taking Moon to the ER, they stopped to get Frank a burrito.
Gail and Moon were walking to the store one day, when Moon was very little. A car stopped, and tried to pick up Gail. Moon screamed “Fuck off pervert.”
Captain Beefheart was at the Zappa house one time. He had made a hole in the side of his nose with a pencil. When a finger was put over the other nostril, the nose became a whistle.
While listening to this show, PG was editing pictures from The Library of Congress. Some of these images appear with this feature.
Duane Allman And The Coricidin Bottle
Gregg Allman appeared on Live Talks LA, selling a book, My Cross to Bear. Yes, he was coherent. Mr.Allman says something about going through rehab seventeen times. No one argues disputes that he has had an interesting life.
The chat has a few parts left out. Dicky Betts and Cher are not mentioned. The title of “strangest dude I ever met” goes to Jai Johanny “Jaimoe” Johanson, aka the black guy in the group. Gregg says he used to listen to stuff by Roland Kirk.
The story of Duane Allman learning to play slide guitar is good. Duane was sick. Gregg came to see his brother, who was playing the guitar in a new way. It seems the doctor had given him some pills called Coricidin. You take the pills out of the glass bottle, soak the label off, and you have a guitar slider.
When PG was a kid, his uncle was a representative for the company that sold Coriciden. There were boxes of samples in the house, which all came in the glass bottle. PG had not heard that name for forty eight years. The spell check suggestion is Coincidence.
Not everyone at amazon was impressed by the book. “the book was so damged the binding and jacket were ripped that a did not read the book and will not buy an more nick malick.”
The visual multitasking element for this repost was pictures from The Library of Congress. There are two group shots, broken down into smaller images. One is a graduating class of a nursing school at Georgetown University. The photographer lists the date as between 1905 and 1945.
The other image is a line of people waiting to vote. The well dressed citizens are in Clarenden VA. The date is November 4, 1924. Several carry signs for the democratic presidential candidate, John W. Davis. He was nominated on the 103rd ballot of the democratic convention, and lost to Calvin Coolidge.
Brookhaven Arts Festival
It was a lovely Sunday afternoon. The air was cool. The Falcons won. Before you knew it four o’clock arrived. It was too late to go the festival downtown. PG threw a few layers on, put air in his tires, and took off to downtown Brookhaven.
The Brookhaven Arts Festival is not that big. PG chained his bike to a telephone pole, and took off on foot. Before long, he heard the band, GLOW. They were playing “Joy to the world”. A few nights before, PG met someone named Jeremiah at a party. “You don’t look like a bullfrog”.
The stage was the site of a pre-Marta recording studio. A phantom mirrored ball spun overhead as the band played “Boogie Oogie Oogie”. GLOW is a gaggle of singers, backed by guitar, bass, and keyboards. The third number was “Bohemian Rhapsody”. The lady singer got higher than Freddie Mercury ever dared. Mama, life has just begun.
GLOW finished playing. The MC said the festival was over. PG started to ride down Peachtree View, past the site of the purple house. A parking garage is under construction now. The purple house had a purple van in front, with big green letters that said “Greedy Developers Suck”.
Dinner, at the Swallow and Suffer, followed the festival. There was an unexpected twist. PG got veal parmesan, instead of chicken fingers. Sometimes, you need to try new things. Uzi said the next step would be signing up for cable television.
PG had looked for the health department paperwork on the way in, and found an open Bible instead. The HD score was behind the cash register. You don’t see it until you are ready to leave. The score, eighty one, should have been ninety. The cook was wearing a watch. Nine points were taken off.
25 Things About Georgia
These daze, there is more media than messages. People need things to write about. One popular theme, at least in itp/otp, is lists about life in Georgia. A web facility that should know better, thought catalog, recently put out 25 Things You Need To Know About Georgia.
25TYNTKAG was written by Jeremy Populus Jones. He seems to be the CEO of something called GAFollowers. (@GAFollowers on twitter) From the fine print: “GAFollowers was created on a “strength in numbers” foundation, finding a creative way to use free online social networking sites to strengthen the “bond” between people in Georgia to help better form this state. … GAFollowers is one of the largest twitter accounts in the state of Georgia that spans nearly every corner of the region.”
These lists about Georgia life usally have a few common comments. There is the heat, the bugs, the traffic, the multiple Peachtrees, and southern accents. They seldom mention the shameless corruption, religious mental illness, rampant obesity, or racial pandemonium. Lets take a look at 25TYNTKAG. Mr. Jones will be in blue, and Chamblee54 in green. The photographs today are from “The Special Collections and Archives, Georgia State University Library”.
1. The weather here is just as inconsistent as your ex-girlfriend. Not really. It gets cold in January, hot in July. Your ex-girlfriend is staying out of this.
2. We call all interstates in Georgia, “The Highway”. Most people use the number.
3. Only in Atlanta is everything named “Peachtree” without a single tree with peaches around. Peachtree is all over OTP.
4. Terio and Honey Boo Boo were born and raised here. You couldn’t do this without google. Terio is a chubby kid who dances. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.
5. “Knuck if you Buck” is the song we will always get hype to no matter the age. Yuck.
6. White girls wear Nike shorts with big t-shirts covering their shorts. (How many can you spot?) Maybe there was a sale on big t-shirts at Walmart.
7. Zaxbys is what you eat. The TC comments said this is not accurate. They mentioned a certain spelling challenged company, that specializes in overpriced chicken sandwiches. At least the son of Mr. Zaxby doesn’t run off potential customers with his big mouth.
8. We call it a “rag” not a “washcloth”. Do people up north say a woman is on the washcloth?
9. Going outside at anytime during the summer instantly guarantees a minimum a 7 bug bites. This is mostly true. Who is counting?
10. In Georgia when someone ask, “Where you from?”, people usually reply with a county not a city. In Atlanta, when you say “Where are you from?” it is almost always somewhere outside of Georgia.
11. The speed limit is 65 mph but if you’re not going at least 80 mph you’ll be ran off the road. This is also true on surface roads. In hilly Atlanta, there are few places to pass on two lane roads.
12. In Georgia it’s not a shopping cart, it’s a buggy. Do people really say shopping cart? At Kroger it is a bascart. The stores have a bascart corral.
13. We get more inches of pollen in a week than inches of snow in a full year. Pollen season hits in early spring. It is rough for many people. The rest of the year gets relatively little pollen. There is a good ice/snow storm every ten years or so. This one is probably true.
14. You say Georgia, we say Jawja. Others say George-ah. To untrained ears they sound the same.
15. Sweet tea is our water. Very few people wash cars with sweet tea.
16. The night has been a success if you ended up at Waffle House. This is especially true if you are scattered, smothered, and covered.
17. In Georgia it’s necessary to look at the weather before picking out an outfit. Items this are a reason not to number lists. Just think of what you have to say, write it down, and hope it is not copyrighted.
18. We pray that we get snow during the winters. The people who pray for winter storms are merchants. They have an inventory of batteries, milk, ice, and eggs to sell.
19. We are the creators of, “Turn Up”. You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.
20. Here in Georgia white girls can twerk. No Miley Cyrus. Ditto reaction to number 17. What was PG thinking of when he decided to do this post?
21. You will usually be 30 minutes away from just about every destination that you’re heading to. 22. There’s a Waffle House in walking distance of every Waffle House. These two have been combined, for obvious reasons. Do people proofread these lists before sending them out?
23. Any dark soda is simply called “Coke”. Many say Cocola, without the second syllable.
24. We pronounce it “Atlanna”. Whatever. Sometimes the second t is audible, sometimes not. It definitely is not the ATL, except to radio shouters.
25. Braves, Falcons & UGA are the teams we really care about. Tech fans may disagree. Ditto taxpayers, who don’t care is Rankin Blank gets a new stadium.
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