Forget Your Troubles, Friend! Dance-Band Fame is Yours!

It's the Great Depression and Japan has yet to bomb Pearl Harbor, sending millions to work, and every magazine is filled with ads selling items or ideas that will help John and Alice Dustbowl make some much-needed cash. You can be a tattoo artist, or learn how to make big money in the promising field of cartooning. You can buy a saw-sharpener and go around sharpening people's saws. Learn to stuff birds. Be a baker. Be a diesel mechanic or get into Air Conditioning, "America's next big industry!" Others are just as vague as can be, and only promise happiness, riches, fame and the ability to get whatever you want if you will only send a dime for the book. The modern counterpart to these ads in our tough economy would be, "Learn to be a Social Media Guru in Your Spare Time!"

I liked this guy. He sells marimbas. Now that's a sure route to happy-land.

Obligatory End of Decade Post - 1909

"You know that history repeats itself.
What you just done so has somebody else."
-S. Tallarico

Man, I can't wait for tomorrow. (Or to be more in tune with the zeitgeist: Jesus God, I can't wait for tomorrow. Or is it "Christ on a corndog?" Or on a Popsicle stick? Or some such phrase that suggests all at once how funny, irreverent and tragically hip you are.)

Tomorrow means we can start to stop recollecting 2000-20009, as if those 10 years were all that ever happened in the History of Earth. Such a bunch of myopic, egocentric, crybaby prima donna bitches we've become. Let's all make a list suggesting that the passing decade was somehow so monumental, momentous and epic, that it will be a long time before we ever experience ten years like the ones we've just been through. Make a list that will become ephemera before you even hit the "publish post" button. Most of these lists are a collection of rehashed scraps anyway; stuff someone heard or read and regurgitated for the amusement of a few readers; and more likely for their own amusement.

Let's travel back in time. Let's only go back 100 years.
Let's recall the years 1900-1909.
(Harp SFX)

Oh, dear readers! What an epoch we have come through! What an era of change! I dare say we are marked for it, and I know not whether we are marked for better or for worse.

Ah, 1900! Remember the promise? The joy of ushering in a new century? We were all so full of hope! And then, on the very first day of this new century, Hawaii asks for a delegate to the Republican Convention! We might've known right then that we were in for a decade of comic disaster. And then! The assassination of Kentucky Governor William Goebel! Things were starting off ever so bleakly. In March the decade was already officially ruined when in France they passed the law making the legal length of a workday for women and children just 11 hours. It seems so long ago now, looking back from the eve of 1910, but that one act would usher in a spiral of decline, perhaps making this the "What in The Name of All That is Good is Happening to Our World" Decade.

Boxer Rebellion, Philippine-American War, King Umberto I of Italy is assassinated, the devastating hurricane that killed 8,000 souls in Galveston! And we were only getting started.

The death of Queen Victoria. New York State requiring license plates on automobiles! (The tyranny!) Stock market crash of '01. The assassination of President McKinley! The Southern violence that erupted after Booker T. Washington was received at the White House. Were we surely not on the precipice of ruin by the end of 1901?

Cuba gains independence from the United States! If you could not sense the end of our nation's Providencially Ordained Dominance by then, my friends, you surely had your heads buried in a sandy San Juan hill! Miners striking, Guatemalan earthquakes. I shudder as I recall it all.

Mudslides in Alberta, the King and Queen of Serbia assassinated, flash floods in Oregon, Paris Metro train fire, theater fire in Chicago kills 600, Orville and Wilbur Wright defy God and all that is natural and fly through the air! The Great Baltimore Fire, Russia declares war on Japan, the Great Toronto Fire, the steamboat fire in the East River kills 1,000, Governor General of Finland assassinated, Moscow tornado, 20,000 killed in Indian earthquake, Norway achieves independence from Sweden, the beginning of the naval arms race, the start of the Russian Revolution AND the murder of Frank Steunenberg, ex-governor of Idaho!

Coal mine explosion kills 1,000 in France, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the San Francisco earthquake claims 3,000 lives while 20,000 were killed in the Chilean earthquake and 10,000 by the typhoon and tsunami in Hong Kong AND The Grand Duchy of Finland becomes the first nation to include the right of women to stand as candidates when it adopted universal suffrage!

The invention of the submarine, working class children in Rome get a school! School? For WORKING CLASS Children? Good God, Man! The Wall Street Panic of '07, more mining disasters in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the King of Portugal and his son are murdered in Lisbon, the Young Turk rebellion and the earthquake and tsunami of Messina, Sicily and Calabria that killed over 70,000 people.

And as I write this, more progress, more tragedy, more immense undertakings the likes of which man has never seen continue, including the recent opening of the Manhattan Bridge, meaning the City will soon be teeming with Brooklynites! What hath we wrought, my dear readers?

Here's to a more subdued and genteel 1910. Let us usher in a decade of new promise, of understanding and goodwill. We are surely marked for the time through which we have passed, but let us learn from it and forge on more learned, more reflective, and better for it.

(Harp SFX) Back to the present

Now, see? doesn't your Mark Sanford, iPhone, Obama, 9/11, Janet Jackson showed her tit at the SuperBowl, Bush-Cheney, Wars and Rumors of Wars list look kind of silly?

Get a grip. It's just another year.

Every State Has a Springfield

Dominating the skyline like an Eastern European monument to thoughtless architecture, the Springfield, Illinois Hilton lends an eerie ugliness to a town whose chief qualities are eeriness and ugliness.

Scene of Obama's announcement to run for President (an impressive event) and the home of the Illinois State Capitol (an impressive structure) the town also hosts the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. This is no ordinary museum, and despite its overwhelming fascination with death and ghosts and creepiness (a wax figure of Mary Todd Lincoln sits dressed in black, the window reflecting a gloomy rain as she mourns the death of her son with a bible on her lap; a replica of the rotunda is dark and ominous, where Lincoln's body lies in state) the museum rivals anything Disney could do. Put together by BRC Imagination Arts (WARNING: exceptionally cheese-filled homepage video on their website) the exhibits leave you asking, "How did they do that?" which is a pretty decent takeaway for any museum.

We had a good visit, randomly deciding to stop in (at the compulsion of some roadside signs) as we drove through the very flat and uninspiring middle of Illinois. Springfield has an Arby's. We ate there. I had the French Dip, an inspired sandwich, the au jus of which was "CAUTION: EXTREMELY HOT" so I cannot sue them for a burnt tongue as they warned me ahead of time.

I took a moment to travel back in time to try to talk John Wilkes Boothe out of what he kept referring to as his "destiny," but alas, I was too late. His mind was made up.

If You Don't Laugh, You're Likely Dead

Or maybe your humor is just not as juvenile as mine and about two million other fans of this stuff. If I'm late to this, I blame a coworker who sent it around the office today.

I love weird ideas. This one had to have been hatched spontaneously when some drunk guy was rambling to his buddies about history.

The concept: get people drunk and have them tell you what they know about history, then have the scenes being told acted out hilariously by the moderately famous and the pretty famous. This is the fourth installment from Drunk History, a YouTube creation of Derek Waters. This one has around 55K views after only a week. The first one (uploaded last Christmas) has been viewed nearly 1.7 million times.

Blasphemer!

I thought I'd edit Mr. Jefferson's document a little.

Click for Maximum Offensiveness

Guess this means Sean Hannity won't be inviting me to his picnic.

Of course I "Love My Country." But let's be real for a minute on this day and remember that the "Founding Fathers" would probably not have associated with you unless you wore a powdered wig and banged your slaves. It's fine to celebrate our past, but don't color history in such majestic and glorious shades that you repaint it entirely.

We still have a long way to go as a country. We are just as divided today as we were then. 40-45% of the colonists supported the rebellion. 15-20% of the population remained loyal to the British Crown and the remaining 35-45% attempted to remain neutral.