The Hooverville Hexagon: It Has a Beat and You Can Dance to It

 

  

Oh, Brave New World…

AI Report

by Caiman Raptor Elk

I just had a close encounter with AI-enabled google search I'd like to share.

 

I entered: 'Invite Van Helsing to all stakeholder meetings.' Just to see if anyone else on the internet had thought of that joke. Upon which the AI function replied: 'Van Helsing has been added to all upcoming stakeholder meetings in your calendar.'

 

I replied: 'I was joking, please don't!'

It answered: 'Haha...Van Helsing has been removed from all upcoming stakeholder meetings and will return to Transylvania.'

 

Phew.

Editor: This is an alarming trend.

 

Featured Cat

by Paigetheoracle

According to Paige, this kitty is on mouse-watch.

(Actually, before that he said: I know you like cats. Here is one.)

 

 

The Worm Dance (Video)

by SashaQ

SashaQ shows us a herring gull doing the Worm Dance. Its friend the crow is providing backup.

 

 

It Started with a Record

by DG

 

Yesterday I stumbled across this delightful recording on Mark Pollock's Youtube channel. It's called, amazingly, 'You Put a Smear on the Bathroom Mirror, and Now My Face Is Distorted'.

 

Speculation in the comments indicates that it is believed to be a joyful group effort by some happy camp counsellors. But who? And when?

 

The record label indicates that the record was made by the Colorado Recording Company, Robert N Wilkinson, 1305 Spruce Street, Boulder, Colorado.

 

This was an invitation to research, so off I went. The only thing I could offer to begin with was based on the names of the 'artists' listed: Cursin' Flagstaff (Traumatic Soprano), Hepzibah Heartburn (Almost Alto), and Gwendolyn Belch (Basso). All I knew off the top of my head was that Kirsten Flagstad made her Wagnerian debut at the Met in 1935. A friend and colleague of mine was a Benedictine monk who told me when his time came, he hoped Kirsten would arrive to carry him off to Valhalla, and I believe she did. RIP, Father Lawrence.

 

I started looking. Robert N. Wilkinson turns out to have been a Boulder, Colorado radio station owner and collector of old radios and phonographs. This much I found out from the Smithsonian – he'd donated some rare wax cylinder recordings to them which he'd acquired along with some vintage equipment (which he kept, I guess). Armed with this knowledge, I found out:

 

Robert Neil Wilkinson graduated from Colorado University in Boulder. He became a radio engineer and disc jockey. In 1955 he started Boulder's first FM radio station, KRNW-FM. The studio was at 1305 Spruce Street. He was described as 'eccentric'.

 

He couldn't make his classical/jazz FM station pay at first, so he lived with his parents and used the income from his Colorado Recording Company to pay the bills. He was going under because – as anybody knows these days – you can't make longhair music pay off. I suspect that puts this record in the mid-1950s, which sounds about right given the musical choices.

 

After that is when Wilkinson became a counter-culture icon. He rented time on his radio station to creative types with all sorts of content in return for volunteer work. After he sold the station he took up driving around in a motor home and doing volunteer work himself. He died in 2003.

 

Here are some happy memories of the hippie broadcasters who volunteered at Bob's station. I can identify: I used to work part-time at a college-run radio station in the 90s. I was an instructor at the college and even did some on-air teaching. The equipment was pretty vintage.  I suspect from photos that it was the same sort of stuff Wilkinson and friends were working on.

 

Robert N Wilkinson left his collection of Big Band recordings to the University of Colorado Boulder Libraries, too. 

 

All that from a Youtube.

 

cul8ter, Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor