I love those moments on Wikipedia where you go to look up something relatively innocuous and you end up stumbling across something else entirely. Such was the case for me tonight, where I went to look up what exactly a "malamute" looked like and ended up reading up on pets owned by U.S. presidents down through the years.

Ever since Franklin Roosevelt, it's been a fairly bland assortment of dogs, leavened by the occasional cat (and apparently the Clinton cat Socks finally kicked the bucket this year!) and assorted miscellanea (Kennedy's kids had a couple hamsters and a parakeet).

Ah, but go back a bit further and we start to see some really...interesting choices.

For one thing, you get a real reminder of the the rural nature of 19th century America as nearly every president from that time owned some kind of barnyard animal. Lincoln owned a turkey named Jack and two goats, Nanny and Nanko.

That's another thing--the names! I think George Washington takes the prize for best overall names; he had a staghound named Sweetlips, a pack of coonhounds named Drunkard, Taster, Tipler, and Tipsy, and a donkey named Royal Gift. Take that George III!

Teddy Roosevelt takes the prize for best individual name, or in this case names, for a set of guinea pigs (probably belonging to one of his kids): Dr. Johnson, Bishop Doane, Fighting Bob Evans, and Father O'Grady. Oh my god, Fighting Bob Evans is the best name for a guinea pig pretty much EVER.

Some other bizarre presidential pets:

John Adams had a dog named Satan ("Satan! C'mere boy!")

Thomas Jefferson owned two bear cubs at one point

John Quincy Adams owned an alligator(!) and raised silkworms

Andrew Jackson, aka "The First Redneck President," owned a parrot he taught to swear and fighting cocks

Martin Van Buren "briefly owned two tiger cubs"

U. S. Grant had a way with naming horses: he owned one named Butcher Boy, another named Cincinnatus, and his mount during the Civil War was named Jeff Davis

Chester A. Arthur is the only President on the list with no record of having owned pets

Benjamin Harrison owned a pair of 'possums named Mr. Reciprocity and Mr. Protection

In addition to his illustriously-named guinea pigs, Theodore Roosevelt hosted a veritable menagerie at the White House: four terriers, a Pekingese, a Saint Bernard, a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, two cats, a garter snake named Emily Spinach, two ponies, a pig, a badger named Josiah, a rat, a hen named Baron Spreckle, a macaw, a couple more dogs (breed not stated), and...a one-legged rooster.

Not to be outdone was Calvin Coolidge, perhaps the last of the great "menagerie Presidents" as we must now call them. Observe: two white collies named Rob Roy and Prudence Prim, nine other dogs of various breeds, two raccoons named Rebecca and Horace, a donkey named Ebeneezer, a goose named Enoch, a cat, a bobcat, two lion cubs named Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau, a pygmy hippo named Billy, a wallaby, a duiker, and, to round it all out, a black bear. And why not?

Desiree has refused to watch Return of the King for nearly a year now because she's convinced that she'll turn into a pile of blubbering tears at the end.* She says she gets antsy just thinking about the scene where Frodo and Gandalf sail off to the Undying Lands, never to be seen again.

She'd never let me film her--she has enough of an issue with crying just in front of me--so I must commend this woman for allowing her own Lord of the Rings meltdown to be recorded and posted for the whole world to see:



Wait...it looks like the end of the Star Wars trilogy makes her a bit weepy too:



And who doesn't dissolve in tears at the end of the...Back to Future trilogy???



Wow.

---
*Desiree also cries at the end of Smoke Signals, My Neighbor Totoro, Anne of Green Gables, and Spirited Away. I still maintain that we should just do a back-to-back viewing of all five movies one day as the ULTIMATE CATHARTIC EXPERIENCE. If she survives, she'll be set for life!

I've long loved the girl group era, so you can imagine my joy when I spotted a four-disc collection of "Girl Group Sounds" at the library the other day. Des and I have been listening to the goodness for the last few days and having a lot of fun with the music. And the lyrics! It's funny to hear Des make these random exclamations at the tales of betrayal, abuse, heartache, and general mind-fuckery that the girls sang about. You really can't ask for a balder portrait of patriarchy than in the lyrics of girl group songs.

The set, by the way, is from Rhino. If and when I find myself back in some money, I might have to splurge and get the set just for its sheer gimmicky opulence: it comes boxed in a hat box, the booklet is made to look like a diary, the CDs are housed in oversized makeup compacts, and the discs themselves look like powder puffs. Fantastic!

As the AMG review rightly points out, the set is strengthened by the fact that it skips the obvious songs, going for B-sides, rarities, and lesser-known hits. This is a big beef I have with oldies and classic rock-style radio programming: there's such a rich heritage of great music from the three decades you're picking your playlists, why go with the same 50 songs over and over?

To whit, here's a few selections of my personal favorites:

Hey, it's also been a while since I flooded your Friends page with a bunch of YouTube videos that you probably won't watch. I will not only be embedding videos, but linking to yet more! Here we go!

I posted this vid over on my Facebook too. Halloween is a great time to invoke Lightning Bolt--



--no! Not that kind of Lightning Bolt! This kind:



I love that pan at the end where you suddenly see somebody literally swinging from the rafters. Looks like quite the show.

###

From the life imitating art files, here are a couple videos of bands playing their effing hearts out despite what I think few would argue are less than rockin' surroundings.

First, we have seminal 80s doom pioneers Saint Vitus kicking ass at...the Palm Desert Community Center.



I love how the lead singer has this standoff about shilling for Cokes before grudgingly acquiescing.

It's all strangely reminiscent of when Spinal Tap winds up playing at an Air Force base.

Second, legendary Swedish hardcore punk band Refused playing...an Irish pub??? WTF!?



Playing their hearts out, tight as all hell, trying SO hard. And you've got these typical Saturday night bar-goers just...sitting there. Christ. I immediately thought of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

Much like Hedwig, Refused wasn't long for the world thanks to bookings like that one. Just too damn depressing, I guess.

It's reassuring to know that in this day and age, what with all our modern ideas--and products--that good old American nativist paranoia is still alive and well:

One thing [G20 protesters] won't likely encounter are citizens. Fear of protesters is the talk of grocery and bank lines. At one point, local media was filled with reports of surreptitious foreigners training in a vacant building (they turned out to be a Swedish punk band on tour).

Sauce.

I've outed myself in the past as a pigeon watcher. No, I am not 82 years old. But what can I say, I like watching pigeons while I'm waiting for a bus or walking from Point A to Point B.

I like to watch their lives play out amid the hustle and bustle of the city. Nobody pays them any attention, yet even just a couple minutes' casual observation reveals personalities and drama and (in the springtime) romance. I wonder about pigeons living in different neighborhoods--do the filthy gutter pigeons that hang out at Hayes and Divis realize they could just fly a few blocks west and hang out at Golden Gate Park? What keeps them living amongst the grease and squalor outside Popeye's?

I'm also attracted to the fact that pigeons get no respect. Like a typical American, I'm prone to rooting for the underdog, I guess. It was while reflecting on the ubiquity of pigeons, and the ubiquitous lack of respect they get, that I started wondering where they came from. I mean, pigeons had to have an "origin story" of some kind, right?

Turns out, it's a rather interesting one.

Pigeons, it would seem, originally hail from Egypt. Their ancestors were cliff-dwelling doves. How differently would we regard pigeons if they were called Egyptian cliff doves instead? Sounds much more exotic.

So how did pigeons find their way into cities around the world? It's a bit of a convoluted story. The original wild cliff doves were domesticated by the Egyptians to use as food and pets. Domesticated pigeons spread throughout the Mediterranean world. Over the course of centuries, as the fortunes of Mediterranean civilizations rose and fell, certain pigeon populations reverted to a feral state. Being located in population centers, far from their native Nile Valley cliffsides, they made do with the sides of buildings and other such mandmade "cliffs". It's sort of the equivalent of a future society being infested with wild chickens or parakeets.

I still have yet to find details on when the first pigeons came over the Atlantic to the Americas, but I love the mental image of pigeons stowing away on a ship, perhaps quite by accident (I imagine a pigeon innocently building a nest in a nook aboard a ship sitting at a European dock, then the next thing it knows it's off to the New World!). At any rate, needless to say, pigeons have proven remarkably adaptable to the urban environment precisely because our buildings mirror their native cliffs so well.

So there you have it. Next time you see pigeons going about their daily business, take a moment to reflect on their rather bizarre journey from the cliffs of Egypt to a gutter outside Popeye's.

So this teenager apparently got up to some pipe bomb-related mischief at a Bay Area high school yesterday, so the local news this morning is all over the story. Other than the fact that the lad seems to have shown up at his former high school armed with a chainsaw and sword (this kid's been playing too many video games!), the only thing that really lept out at me from the news reports was what this one woman said when she was interviewed by the news crew out at the apartment complex where the teenager lived (with or without his parents, I'm not sure).

At any rate, she basically said that, on finding out that the kid had been making highly unstable explosives in his room for the past year, she felt a great sense of relief that nothing had gone wrong. Her reasoning? "Because everyone around here has kids, and if there had been an explosion it could have been really bad for all the children."

So...if it was a complex full of childless adults, that would have been OK? Or if there had been an explosion, only the children would have been hurt, but the adults would have been fine?

Bah, I say!

Thursday really threw me off. I've been trying to tap back into the groove I was in before all that rigamarole. How could I forget about this gem?



Sufficiently cranked up, The Barbarians make everything A-OK.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Reform Madness - White Minority
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Spinal Tap Performance

Actually, Black Flag called it 30 years ago:

Gonna be a white minority
Dont believe theres a possibility?
Well, just wait and see
We're gonna be white minority

--why is everyone acting all surprised? ;)

So 5-6 years ago, we had liberal protesters disrupting town hall meetings...over war.

"Boo! War is unbelievably costly in money, misery, and human lives! Boo!"

This year, we have conservative protesters disrupting town hall meetings...over providing health care to all Americans.

"Boo! Giving everyone access to basic medical care is...somehow...wrong...and stuff. BOO!"

::sigh::

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words (more or less) that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

These are the words delicata77 gave me...a couple weeks ago...heh...

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David Bowie on Saturday Night Live with back-up singers Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias. Back when, you know, crazy shit like this was allowed to air on broadcast television.



"OK," you're saying, "a little weird maybe, but so what?" Ah, let's check out the second performance from that evening, shall we?



I know the Internet has largely supplanted TV as a format for weirdness and creativity, but it's so much more fragmented an experience I think something's really been lost.

Spotted on a church marquee while driving through Millbrae today:

"Give God a Tweet--Pray!"

From Wikipedia:

Dave Allen Mather (August 10, 1851, date of death unknown, most probably May 1886, but nothing confirmed), known as Mysterious Dave, or sometimes as New York Dave, was an American lawman and gunfighter in the American Old West.

I wouldn't have been able to choose between "Mysterious Dave" and "New York Dave" either.

Having been recently reminded of the song, I've once again stumbled over a lyric in Ice Cube's "It Was a Good Day" that's always troubled me. To whit:

No barking from the dog, no smog
And momma cooked a breakfast with no hog

No barking, check. No smog, amazing! But cooking the breakfast with no hog? C'mon Cube, you can't be serious! That would straight up ruin my day, starting it out without some wholesome bacon or perhaps sizzling ham shanks. I don't know about you.

Is there something I'm not aware of at work here? Is Ice Cube a member of the Nation of Islam? Is he trying to watch his cholesterol? Some bit of arcane slang from "teh ghettoe" that I don't know about? Fifteen years later, I still can't figure that line out.

001: Anyone who looks at this entry has to post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
002: Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper.
003: Don't change your wallpaper before doing this. The point is to see what you had on.

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I found this on film_stills. It's from a collection of 70s grindhouse movie trailers. Do I have to explain why this is totally awesome? As my AP English teacher would say, "Juxtaposition!" Plus the look on the dude's face.