Whimsy: February 2019 Archives
1968 BANANA SPLITS CLUB OFFICIAL CHARTER MEMBER MEMBERSHIP KIT Complete | eBay
I sent off for this (coupon from the back of a Kellogg's cereal box) when I was small -- would have been 1969, after we moved to the Tulsa area. The thing I loved most about it was the secret decoder. I tried organizing a chapter of the Banana Splits Club on our street. We had one meeting and elected officers, but I think that was probably all. The other kids didn't have the intensity of interest to sustain it. (Wikipedia has a comprehensive article about the Saturday morning TV show, the Banana Splits Adventure Hour.)
Smoots | Lambda Chi Alpha | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Harvard Bridge is an almost-half-mile span across the Charles River linking the MIT campus in Cambridge with Boston's Back Bay, where MIT was first located and where many of its fraternities are still housed. It is a windy and miserable walk in Boston's long winter. This article tells the story of how, in 1958, the bridge was measured by fraternity Lambda Chi Alpha in lengths of the shortest pledge, 5' 7" Oliver Smoot. The bridge is 364.4 smoots long, +/- one ear. The markings (every 10 smoots, plus a "Halfway to Hell" marker) are repainted each year by the fraternity and are used as locators by local law enforcement. Smoot went on to serve as chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization of Standards (ISO), possibly the only time in history that a unit of measure has overseen the standardization of units of measure.
Radio Show Archives - bennewsam.co.uk
Extensive (and in some cases complete) archives of these classic British radio comedies and comedic panel shows:
Time for a Grammar Lesson | bonneamieknits
Bug: "A octopus did got him? Is that grammatiwackle?"
Pogo; "As grammacklewak as rain -- 'is got' is the present aloofable tense an' 'did got' is the part particuticle."
Bug: "Mighty strange! My teachers allus learnt me that the past inconquerable tense had a li'l' more body to it."
Owl: "Octopockles got me!"
Bug: "There he go makin' those ungrammatipickle outcries an incries- who but a iggerant uncouth type boor could unnderstand such slovenlike English?"
"'Course what he ought to holler is Octopatamus is got me!"
Pogo: "He could of hollered Octopots did got me!"
Bug: "That'd be more the past invokable tense-only for use 'gainst elephant an' other dry type game."
Carol Burnett: 'Cleverness' in Entertainment is Becoming Extinct | Intellectual Takeout
"Funny is funny. I dare anyone to look at Tim Conway and Harvey Korman doing the dentist sketch, which is more than 40 years old, and not scream with laughter. But I am kind of bored of producers saying, 'It's got to be edgy.' Edgy is fine -- I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination -- but what's wrong with a good ol' belly laugh? I miss that. A lot of comedy today is so fast -- it's like: "Boom! Boom! Boom!" -- because they think people can't pay enough attention. Barry Levinson [who wrote for The Carol Burnett Show before becoming a director] and Rudy De Luca wrote one of my favorite sketches. It was called "The Pail," and in it, Harvey is my psychiatrist and I'm having a session with him. It takes about five or six minutes into the sketch until we got our first laugh, but it built and built and built, and the punch line was great. It's about a girl who was traumatized by a bully in the sandbox when she was 6 years old, and he stole her little pail -- and it turns out the psychiatrist was the bully. It is absolutely hysterical, but it took all that time to build. Today the suits say, 'It's got to be fast.' So I think some of the writing isn't good anymore. Now sitcoms sound like they've been written by teenage boys in a locker room."
