Happy birthday to me!
Cartoon by Charles M. Schulz, 1957
It is, of course, also my twin sister Jean’s birthday. No, we’re not identical. 😉
Category: Life with Pratts
Blog Stats
It was two years ago today that I started blogging. DogRat presently has 1234 posts and averages over 100,000 hits/month from over 5,000 different addresses. In the past year I have realized a 100% increase in blogging years. Next year at this time there will have been only a 50% increase compared to now. So it goes.
Virtual India ink
This is my big sister Leslie, the doctor, who just got back from a trip to India with her daughter.
Meet Joe Motocross
Monte Schulz pointed out here on DogRat last year, that his brother Craig — and only Craig — was a dirt bike rider. Once again I refer you to the Coffee Lane portion of the documentary “Good Ol’ Charles Schulz,” where you can see both Craig and Monte.
Craig has an article in the October ’08 Racer X Illustrated, and he tells about riding dirt bikes.
The sound would travel for miles, and like a mating call, it would summon my buddies to head on over to my place to practice. My parents must have received plenty of phone calls, but I never heard of any complaints.
I’m struck by the fact there is something of a similarity in the contrast between Monte and his brother Craig, and me with my brother Jeff, who also rode dirt bikes. This picture of Craig could almost be one of my brother from that same period of time. Maybe I can get him to send one so you can see what I mean.
Labor Day Par-tay
The new washer and dryer are in, the replacement Bose Wave is on the porch and, so far, working. It’s the long weekend, and I intend to enjoy it.
The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine
There is precious little about humorist Jackson Paine available on the Internet. In fact, there’s nothing at all. Everything that I know about him is on the back of his 1961 LP, “The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Humor in its Newest Form.”
My dad got this record when he bought a stereo in 1963, a big GE tabletop console. The turntable had an automatic changer that swung down on a hinge, and it included stereo FM, which was quite new at the time. In fact, my father first brought home a GE stereo radio without a record player, but exchanged it. A wise move.
“The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine” is one part comedy record, one part sound effects record, and one part stereo demonstration record. I have very fond memories of listening to it when I was a kid, along with the Audio Fidelity Stereo Spectacular record that I featured over a year ago.
I think a lot of the humor holds up pretty well. It’s a real artifact of its time, created by a New York ad man working in the JFK era, as depicted in Mad Men. Each side is about ten minutes long.
Side 1
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Jan/JacksonPaine1.mp3|titles=The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Side 1]
Side 2
[audio:https://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Jan/JacksonPaine2.mp3|titles=The Explosive Sounds of Jackson Paine: Side 2]
