1.2.3. Which year was this wishful thinking nonsenseput into circulation?4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12. Buy a few cakes and lose weight?13.14.15.16.17.18.19.20.21.22.
Tris…….I’ve never read “St. Joan,” and her story is not nearly as big here in the states, even in “New” Orleans, than it seems to be over there. I heard the Joan of Arc story back in the day (maybe high school), but often have trouble remembering which King she was trying to get crowned, and which country she was fighting for, in which war and against whom. I do recall that it seemed to take a long time before the Catholic Church decided that she was a saint. (Military command is not a common prerequisite for sainthood these days I’d say.) 😉
My wife and I spent a week in Rouen. It is the ‘centre’ of the Joan of Arc ‘heritage’ because it is where she was burned at the stake. It also contains the tower in which she was imprisoned by the English. She had, in fact recanted, in front of the religious inquisition, following torture. However, subsequently, she withdrew her recantation and, by the grim logic of religion at the time, had to be burned as a witch. The lead inquisitor had reservations about her ‘guilt’, but feared for his own flesh. My wife, who is fluent in French, and read some of the documents, thinks that in the tower, she was probably being raped repeatedly and fearing that this was to be the experience of the rest of her life, chose death.
This is not to detract from the huge importance of the myth of St Joan to a sense of France.
The only woman, Elizabeth Johnston, whose name appears in any of the FirstWorld War Memorials in Scotland (in Fife) died in Rouen, shortly after the War. She had worked in intelligence based in Rouen. Shortly before he planned return home, she visited St Joan’s Tower and, sadly, leaned too far out and fell to her death.
Rouen Cathedral is well worth a visit.
The botanic garden in the city was part of the estate of John Law, a Scot, a former master of the Treasury of France.
We chose to go on a whim and were hugely impressed. There is a good relationship rail service to and from Paris and along the Normandy coast. Monet’s Garden is a short train ride away, as is the Bayeux Tapestry.
It was at Bayeux that I realised that the Norman Conquest was only of England and, subsequently, Wales and Ireland. Scotland was not conquered, because William had no dynastic claim on Scotland, which, of course, was an independent country at the time and for the next 641 years.
Well worth a visit. Looking at parts they are so familiar because we have seen the paintings! Apparently, he had cataracts and it is thought that was why he painted in the impressionistic way he did and with the ever present hints of yellow.
First again, but well and truly stumped by most of them.
Pic 23 is Dean Martin, and
Pic 24 is prime minister Harold Wilson. My mother called him “Buggerlugs”, which I don’t think is a term of endearment. At least he kept us out of Vietnam.
#13…..Modern science has done wonders with the miniaturization of vacuum cleaners.
#16……..Maybe unsweetened Baker’s chocolate is the reason that chocolate cake doesn’t really taste very good. (Not sweet like a Cadbury chocolate bar.)
Chocolate ice cream is not that great tasting either, IMHO.
The bus in no. 10 is Norwegian. Its owners name is H. Kjøstad and it comes from Mostadmark, which is just east of Trondhjem. I’m sure some of the bus nerds can tell us its maker and model.
On my first visit to Norway we went to visit a friend in Aalesund but had an ambition to get to the Arctic Circle. Some hope! But we compromised by visiting Hell so we could claim to have ‘to Hell and back’.
LOL. You could have just gone to the Tory party “disco” or given your location, you could have popped along and seen Gove dancing at your local nightery!
To be fair, you did say and back… and im not sure there is a way back from this:
17 Daimler Majestic (Major ?) or even a Conquest size exaggerated by camera angle. Splendid cars which went for peanuts mid 60’s unless lovingly maintained by eg funeral directors. Once went to see one described as “a good Daimler” by chancer in Dundee but since all its tyres were flat, had reason to doubt the sales pitch !
19 A1, longest lived of the numerous small independent bus companies around Ayrshire.
243 Dean Martin alias Dino Crochetti, straight man to Jerry Lewis in series of films I liked as a youngster- but we all grow up. Biggest hit – “Memories are made of this”. Was never quite sure if his alcoholic persona was laid on, given his reported shrewdness.
23 Harold Wilson flummoxed Krushchev by telling latter he supported Huddersfield Town. Mike Yarwood did brilliant impression of HW – “It’s the way I tell them” punchline.
Pet C;lark worked with Dean Martin on numerous occasions. She says he didn’t drink much.
He liked to play golf and he didn’t like to work much.
He was offered a tv series The Deann Marin Show” and tried to turn it down, but in the end they offered him so much money to do it he really couldn’t refuse.
However, he spent all day on the golf course while the rest of the people on the show (and they were all big stars) worked really hard rehearsing.
Then he would come in for the dress rehearsal and taping.
Of course he usually didn’t have a clue what was going on and there were idiot boards all over the place showing him where to go. As a rule he only ever sang songs he had already recorded and knew the words and arrangements.
He acted drunk and people laughed at his disorganised performance, but he was sober and grossly under rehearsed.
As fine a singer as Dean was, he was lazy and had a don’t give a damn attitude. Totally unlike his old partner Jerry! As the nightclub act first developed, Jerry would write the material, and then track down Dean on the golf course to try to teach it to him for the evening performance.
No one could ever get along with Jerry, so of course they split. I’ve seen reruns and clips of Dean’s TV show, and for me the humor and charm of his unrehearsed, disorganized attitude wears off really fast, since it doesn’t work with the material written on the idiot cards. He looks away from the camera and haltingly (sounding drunk) reads the material from the cards (which he’s never before seen) without a trace of comedic inflection or performance art. I can’t figure out how his TV show was so popular for so long.
Nor me really, but I understand that they wanted him badly… and he kept refusing (because by that time he wanted nothing more than to play golf). So they kept offering more and more money, and he eventually said, well Ok, but I have to have the VERY best guests…
And again, they said yes.
And he had people like Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald and other expensive acts… sometimes 4 or 5 acts on one show (which reduced Dean’s contributions. (You can see loads of extracts from his shows with massive stars of the day on Youtube).
And it went on for years and years and years…. and they paid a fortune and presumably made a fortune in advertising out of it.
He’s a good singer of country pop type songs but you’re right, on the tv he’s a bit lacklustre.
Because he had to be hauled around by his guests.
The funny thing was that, as Pet tells it, the guests had to rehearse and rehearse…
She couldn’t because she was so often flying in from Europe or Canada or the East coast or Australia, and she got a dispensation (as she was a super quick learner and Dean was a bit mad about her), but they insisted that even people like Lena Horne and Peggy Lee rehearse till they knew his part as well as their own… and again, everyone wanted to do his show. because it had a massive audience, and it paid well.
Tris……I’ve seen many of his shows’ YouTube clips, including some of Petula’s appearances. She was very good with Dean, but I’ve heard comedians (for whom timing with a straight man is everything for example) say that trying to rehearse a comedy bit with only a camera……and Dean not even present for rehearsal ……was nearly impossible for them.
Jerry’s story about trying to track Dean down on the golf course to learn the material for the evening’s cabaret performance certainly rang true. Jerry (for all his personality flaws) was a hard driving perfectionist, and so it’s easy to see how Jerry drove Dean crazy…….AND how Dean, with his don’t care attitude, drove Jerry crazy.
I saw this funny sketch from one of the TV shows, with Foster Brooks. Dean had some good lines that would have improved the performance, but he throws them away as he looks to the side and reads unfamiliar words without a trace of comedic inflection. The idiot cards are located on the right (his left), and had he known the material, he could have helped along the timing. Anyway, Foster Brooks took a well-deserved bow. 🙂 (Also amazing that there were performers like Dean back in the day who couldn’t put down a cigarette long enough to do a TV show.)
19 – Park Royal bodied AEC Regent III, operating presumably on the Ardrossan to kilmarnock route.
It was new to London transport in May 1950, then acquired by A1 (Ayrshire Bus Owners Co-operative) who subsequently sold out to Stagecoach (?) around 1995.
According to Wikipedia ‘anorak’ is a British (?) slang term for someone with a strong – possibly obsessive? –
interest in a niche subject. 😂
Nerd, on the other hand, apparently carries negative social connotations… a person seen as overly intellectual, obsessive, introverted or lacking social skills.
There’s also ‘geek’ which also carries socially inept connotations, “to engage in or discuss computer-related tasks obsessively or with great attention to technical detail”.
I’ll settle for being an anorak 😂
No-one seems to have mentioned no 1 – which appears to be an air-cooled Franklin Sedan manufactured in NY, very lightweight and hand-built.
Like many ‘craft’ producers they failed to adapt to mass-production & mechanisation, the company went bust in the 1930’s.
It’s very beautiful, but I guess that if it was craft built, it would be far too expensive (given its size) to compete in a mass production line market.
Given the date (1920s) the prices would have made them pretty exclusive:
Brilliant as ever, Professor.
I remember the old Regents and the single-decker Regals as a lad. Never had a clue who built them…
The other vehicles in the shot (L-R), Bedford TK box van, Ford Anglia 105E, a 15cwt. minibus which looks like a Commer FC but hard to be sure from this angle, Austin/Morris 1100 ADO16, first-generation Singer Vogue, another 1100, and last but far from least a Vauxhall Victor FB complete with roof-rack.
You seldom see roof-racks now since cars no longer have gutters – to reduce drag and wind noise. People would fit them to go to Rothesay for the holidays and just never take them off for years afterwards…
I’ve been friends with a couple for several years. The wife was born in Sweden and grew up in Norway. She’s lived almost all of her adult life in the USA, while retaining her Norwegian passport and citizenship, and more or less constantly complaining about how everything is better in Europe. 😉 Their cars are ALWAYS Audis, and for years, when they took long road trips across America, they had one of those weird looking storage carriers mounted on top.
Brings to mind an odd-looking automobile appendage I’ve seen pictures of, that in the days before automobile air conditioning would let you identify a car that had been equipped to carry a family on the ever-popular summer vacation road trip to California. You had two choices for the great trip west, the “northern route” along US 40 and US 30, across the Great Plains and the mountains of Colorado or Wyoming (to end up in San Francisco), or (if you lived in Missouri for example,) you more likely took the “southern route” down US 66 (the “Mother Road”) from Chicago to L.A., across New Mexico and Arizona…….the desert Southwest, across the Mojave Desert. I’m told there were various plans on how to make the trip in the heat of summer. You were of course advised to get water and gas at one of the many “last gas/last water” places before venturing into the dreaded Mojave. One approach was to plan the multi-day trip so that you drove the Mojave at night. In any event, lots of people would buy and mount an evaporative cooler……a sure sign (in Missouri at least) that a car was headed for California via the southern route.
Derek…..I’ve heard of the Chevrolet Corvair, but didn’t realize that the substitution of “air” in the previous Chevrolet name “Corvette” referred to an air-cooled rear-mounted engine. In fact, I had no idea that such a car was ever mass produced in America.
I have to say I’d not like to drive through that desert in the daytime heat, but these things are seriously ugly appendages to a car (and must, presumably, make it less aerodynamic).
Yes….really odd looking appendages! The coming of automobile air conditioning transformed motor travel.
I love this picture. I’ve seen it captioned “Route 66, Mojave Desert, 1943.” I wonder about that actually. The old car could have been on the road in 1943, and lots of early Route 66 was unpaved in the West. But by 1943, the Southern Route to California was well traveled, and would likely have been paved by then, even through the desert. Anyway……nice picture!
Yes Tris, paved or not, it’s certainly a well maintained highway. Exactly what any “unimproved” section of a numbered US highway would look like before paving. When the US Highway system was established and numbered in 1926, vast stretches of the system……especially in the sparsely populated and traveled West……..was unimproved (unpaved.) Whether any of US 66 would still have been unimproved in 1943 I don’t know, but as a part of the US highway system, it would certainly have been well maintained.
This has the look of an Ansel Adams photograph. Adams was a famous photographer (early to mid last century) who only worked in black and white. He would often use a red filter with the panchromatic film of the time to create dark skies and brilliant white clouds. His pictures of Yosemite are iconic in the history of photography, and they almost all have dark skies like that.
I don’t know where the splendid neo-classical pediment in No2 is, but I can imagine the conversation –
Paw – “That’s ma boay! Gaun yersel, wee man!”
Maw – “Get that wean aff the windae sill, ya eejit – he’s goat nae nappy oan!”
#20……looks American, and from the cars, I’d say ca. 1970’s. So a Google search for “Rickshaw Charlie’s” identifies it as a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, Portland, Oregon, in 1979.
An article and picture gallery (including the picture) is titled: “1970s Portland was smutty, corrupt, dance-crazed — and led to the city you know today”
Sounds like a description of San Francisco in the 1960’s and 70’s. Unlike conservative Los Angeles, San Francisco, the city by the bay, was always a city of scoundrels, misfits, and eccentrics of all types. In those years, the hippies took over the Haight-Ashbury district, and next to Chinatown, down near Fisherman’s Wharf, was “North Beach,” the place you could go to see naked ladies….”dancing.”
Tris……Clearly the west coast hippie/go-go disco scene of the 1970’s was alive and well in Portland. The “topless” craze of the era……which ultimately involved (by the late 1970’s) even less clothing than “topless”…….famously began at the time of the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco, at Carol Doda’s place in North Beach. Seems ironic to waste such a thing on Republicans, who met in the Cow Palace and famously nominated for president the conservative Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater. The GOP delegates flocked to North Beach that week to see Carol Doda’s topless dancing, which thus gained huge national attention. The New York Times ran an obituary when she died in 2015.
Yes, the west coast counterculture is at home in Oregon as much as in San Francisco. In Utah…….not so much. 😉
It seems a shame to have wasted San Francisco on the GOP in 1964. Ironically, the delegates who nominated Barry Goldwater for president were the same ones who flocked to North Beach to see Carol Doda. As badly as Goldwater was beaten in the Lyndon Johnson landslide in the general election that year, his nomination is sometimes considered to have been the beginning of western conservatism in the modern GOP. Presumably it inspired Ronald Reagan, who campaigned for Goldwater and entered politics himself just two years later in 1966, when he was elected to the first of his two terms as Governor of California. The rest is right wing GOP history.
12 – When I was young it was always cakes of soap, never a bar of soap. I wonder how many actually believed the advert and were very disappointed at the results and saw their money go down the drain and be too embarrassed to demand their money back.
Except that Gordon Brown had a job with the UN while being an MPO from 2012 -2015. So I’m not sure that will fly.
I think what happened was the Africans said W H A T?
You chose for us a man who has overseen the very worst results for pandemic in the whole of Europe, but who, along the way made a pot of money for his mates and his family, until he was sacked for breaking his own rules about close contacts … as it goes VERY close, with his girl friend, in the office, on taxpayers’ money.
No, thanks a lot. Think again and find us someone who can do the job!
Love the pics. Woman with dog? Looks familiar, hmm.
The streets look cleaner than they do now, especially with loads of masks discarded and polystyrene rubbish from takeaways. The hoover looks like it could go to space! A dustpan and brush would be easier! Though not to go to space 😀
Fur, grrrrrr! 😭 Far too many beautiful beings were murdered for that horrible fashion, sad, it still happens. Love the cocktail poster! There were throngs of people going into a cocktail festival tent in Edinburgh yesterday, the last thing I’d want to be doing right now!
Joan of arc, why did they murder her? Humans can be very evil.
Cars, I’m always in awe of planet earth for allowing humans to take stuff to build planet wrecking things, I suppose my bicycle and fridge and hoover and even my printing presses, are all planet wrecking too though. Hmm.
Better go before I say more rubbish, why do our cats always cry loudest at 6am to be let outside? Just as well ours knows to do his cute pose and give kisses! 😀
Ours is a late riser, 6:15. I suppose she thinks I should be doubly grateful. I get to feed her, clean her litter tray and be thankful of the long lie. Oops, triply grateful.
It’s the litter tray event that kicks it off. “Oi, this needs emptied, pronto and while you’re up and about, you can fix me some breakfast.”
Does Munguin run classes on how to deal with servants?
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passion_of_Joan_of_Arc
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Something I wrote earlier, the second of “Thrie Vaiges”:
Orléans til Rouen
At Orléans, a hantle sojers, French an Scots baith,
Gart an airmy rin awa. The vyces tellt her whit ti dae.
At Reims, they crouned the dauphin King o France.
And a prood nation raised its heid aince mair.
At Rouen, they brocht her til the mercat-cross,
An brunt her for a wutch. Or a saunt.
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That’s a corker!
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Have you read St Joan?
I spent a few weeks in Orleans which was twinned, back in the day, with our region. The whole town is about her!
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tris, are you referring to the play by George Bernard Shaw ? I think i did read that, a long time ago.
There are statues to her all over France. Rouen has a particularly good one.
Curiously, she was not canonized until 1919, as a reward for France’s suffering in the Great War.
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Yes I read it at school. And later I was in Orleans for a while and learned so much about her.
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Tris…….I’ve never read “St. Joan,” and her story is not nearly as big here in the states, even in “New” Orleans, than it seems to be over there. I heard the Joan of Arc story back in the day (maybe high school), but often have trouble remembering which King she was trying to get crowned, and which country she was fighting for, in which war and against whom. I do recall that it seemed to take a long time before the Catholic Church decided that she was a saint. (Military command is not a common prerequisite for sainthood these days I’d say.) 😉
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My wife and I spent a week in Rouen. It is the ‘centre’ of the Joan of Arc ‘heritage’ because it is where she was burned at the stake. It also contains the tower in which she was imprisoned by the English. She had, in fact recanted, in front of the religious inquisition, following torture. However, subsequently, she withdrew her recantation and, by the grim logic of religion at the time, had to be burned as a witch. The lead inquisitor had reservations about her ‘guilt’, but feared for his own flesh. My wife, who is fluent in French, and read some of the documents, thinks that in the tower, she was probably being raped repeatedly and fearing that this was to be the experience of the rest of her life, chose death.
This is not to detract from the huge importance of the myth of St Joan to a sense of France.
The only woman, Elizabeth Johnston, whose name appears in any of the FirstWorld War Memorials in Scotland (in Fife) died in Rouen, shortly after the War. She had worked in intelligence based in Rouen. Shortly before he planned return home, she visited St Joan’s Tower and, sadly, leaned too far out and fell to her death.
Rouen Cathedral is well worth a visit.
The botanic garden in the city was part of the estate of John Law, a Scot, a former master of the Treasury of France.
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So sad, Alasdair.
If we can ever travel again, I would like to go there. I have a friend who comes from Rouen.
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We chose to go on a whim and were hugely impressed. There is a good relationship rail service to and from Paris and along the Normandy coast. Monet’s Garden is a short train ride away, as is the Bayeux Tapestry.
It was at Bayeux that I realised that the Norman Conquest was only of England and, subsequently, Wales and Ireland. Scotland was not conquered, because William had no dynastic claim on Scotland, which, of course, was an independent country at the time and for the next 641 years.
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I did a PGD in French and had to give a talk on a random subject from a list provided. I chose Monet’s Garden…
I’d love to visit it some day and relive that terrifying experience!!!
Scotland and France have always had good relations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auld_Alliance
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Well worth a visit. Looking at parts they are so familiar because we have seen the paintings! Apparently, he had cataracts and it is thought that was why he painted in the impressionistic way he did and with the ever present hints of yellow.
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Another thing I learned today… 🙂
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Always fancied a train trip to Rouen on the 70’s turbotrains, ahead of their time at that point. Never got organised to do it.
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Love French trains!
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First again, but well and truly stumped by most of them.
Pic 23 is Dean Martin, and
Pic 24 is prime minister Harold Wilson. My mother called him “Buggerlugs”, which I don’t think is a term of endearment. At least he kept us out of Vietnam.
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Yep Deano. And Harold Wilson who was always more at home in the Scilly isles than in England
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Harold Wilson at a Labour Conference being heckled about Vietnam.
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The piece above was from the 1966 election and not a Labour Conference. Here is a gem from 1966 election called Hecklers.
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He he… Can you image the current holder of the post…
Where’s uh um Vietnam? Is it in the uh North?
Um er I I I I can I can uh assure you ah uh um, that we uh, have no plan for em expenditure uh in the north
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He knew Barbara Castle quite well, I believe.
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So they say and his secretary … She was ennobled, if I’m not mistaken!
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#13…..Modern science has done wonders with the miniaturization of vacuum cleaners.
#16……..Maybe unsweetened Baker’s chocolate is the reason that chocolate cake doesn’t really taste very good. (Not sweet like a Cadbury chocolate bar.)
Chocolate ice cream is not that great tasting either, IMHO.
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It’s just as well, at least in the UK.
Most houses these days are smaller that that vacuum.
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The bus in no. 10 is Norwegian. Its owners name is H. Kjøstad and it comes from Mostadmark, which is just east of Trondhjem. I’m sure some of the bus nerds can tell us its maker and model.
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“anorak” if you please! 😃
A Volvo Viking (model L389) introduced in the early fifties.
Almost all our buses are now Volvos.
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Professor Anorak.
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Oh dear, I humbly apologise. It’s not good to call expertise by the wrong name.
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LOL… I once spelt it wrongly. Jeeez, who would have thought an errant “c” could cause so much bother. 🙂
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I’m impressed. Have you signed up to private bus tuition from Roddy?
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No, I know nothing about buses, but I speak Norwegia (bokmål anyway) and know Norway quite well.
Just for fun, Mostadmark’s neighbouring village is called Hell. I had to fill up with petrol there a couple of years ago.
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A bit like trying to fill up with petrol in England now… hellish!!! 🙂
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On my first visit to Norway we went to visit a friend in Aalesund but had an ambition to get to the Arctic Circle. Some hope! But we compromised by visiting Hell so we could claim to have ‘to Hell and back’.
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I should point out that the Hell I went to is not the Hell mentioned by Jim. There’s another one near Trondheim.
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Seems there’s a lot of Hell in Norway… and there was me thinking it was a nice place (if a tad expensive!)
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Well Paradis is a suburb of Bergen.
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LOL
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We watch train journeys online, the Norway ones are my favourite, one train even goes to Hell. They do have some strange but cool names in Norway.
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I used to love these old train journey programmes.
Swiss Railways were my favourite, but there were some great ones in South America too.
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LOL. You could have just gone to the Tory party “disco” or given your location, you could have popped along and seen Gove dancing at your local nightery!
To be fair, you did say and back… and im not sure there is a way back from this:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/06/government-promises-profitable-farming-post-brexit
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No. 9 – this years christmas in ‘UK’?
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LOL.
It made me a bit sad, that pic.
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Very sad, some would have things go back to that disgraceful era though.
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The Tories “Levelling Up” poster campaign?
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LOL Brilliant!
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17 Daimler Majestic (Major ?) or even a Conquest size exaggerated by camera angle. Splendid cars which went for peanuts mid 60’s unless lovingly maintained by eg funeral directors. Once went to see one described as “a good Daimler” by chancer in Dundee but since all its tyres were flat, had reason to doubt the sales pitch !
19 A1, longest lived of the numerous small independent bus companies around Ayrshire.
243 Dean Martin alias Dino Crochetti, straight man to Jerry Lewis in series of films I liked as a youngster- but we all grow up. Biggest hit – “Memories are made of this”. Was never quite sure if his alcoholic persona was laid on, given his reported shrewdness.
23 Harold Wilson flummoxed Krushchev by telling latter he supported Huddersfield Town. Mike Yarwood did brilliant impression of HW – “It’s the way I tell them” punchline.
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LOL… Love the story of the Dundee chancer!
Pet C;lark worked with Dean Martin on numerous occasions. She says he didn’t drink much.
He liked to play golf and he didn’t like to work much.
He was offered a tv series The Deann Marin Show” and tried to turn it down, but in the end they offered him so much money to do it he really couldn’t refuse.
However, he spent all day on the golf course while the rest of the people on the show (and they were all big stars) worked really hard rehearsing.
Then he would come in for the dress rehearsal and taping.
Of course he usually didn’t have a clue what was going on and there were idiot boards all over the place showing him where to go. As a rule he only ever sang songs he had already recorded and knew the words and arrangements.
He acted drunk and people laughed at his disorganised performance, but he was sober and grossly under rehearsed.
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As fine a singer as Dean was, he was lazy and had a don’t give a damn attitude. Totally unlike his old partner Jerry! As the nightclub act first developed, Jerry would write the material, and then track down Dean on the golf course to try to teach it to him for the evening performance.
No one could ever get along with Jerry, so of course they split. I’ve seen reruns and clips of Dean’s TV show, and for me the humor and charm of his unrehearsed, disorganized attitude wears off really fast, since it doesn’t work with the material written on the idiot cards. He looks away from the camera and haltingly (sounding drunk) reads the material from the cards (which he’s never before seen) without a trace of comedic inflection or performance art. I can’t figure out how his TV show was so popular for so long.
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Nor me really, but I understand that they wanted him badly… and he kept refusing (because by that time he wanted nothing more than to play golf). So they kept offering more and more money, and he eventually said, well Ok, but I have to have the VERY best guests…
And again, they said yes.
And he had people like Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald and other expensive acts… sometimes 4 or 5 acts on one show (which reduced Dean’s contributions. (You can see loads of extracts from his shows with massive stars of the day on Youtube).
And it went on for years and years and years…. and they paid a fortune and presumably made a fortune in advertising out of it.
He’s a good singer of country pop type songs but you’re right, on the tv he’s a bit lacklustre.
Because he had to be hauled around by his guests.
The funny thing was that, as Pet tells it, the guests had to rehearse and rehearse…
She couldn’t because she was so often flying in from Europe or Canada or the East coast or Australia, and she got a dispensation (as she was a super quick learner and Dean was a bit mad about her), but they insisted that even people like Lena Horne and Peggy Lee rehearse till they knew his part as well as their own… and again, everyone wanted to do his show. because it had a massive audience, and it paid well.
All very strange.
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Tris……I’ve seen many of his shows’ YouTube clips, including some of Petula’s appearances. She was very good with Dean, but I’ve heard comedians (for whom timing with a straight man is everything for example) say that trying to rehearse a comedy bit with only a camera……and Dean not even present for rehearsal ……was nearly impossible for them.
Jerry’s story about trying to track Dean down on the golf course to learn the material for the evening’s cabaret performance certainly rang true. Jerry (for all his personality flaws) was a hard driving perfectionist, and so it’s easy to see how Jerry drove Dean crazy…….AND how Dean, with his don’t care attitude, drove Jerry crazy.
I saw this funny sketch from one of the TV shows, with Foster Brooks. Dean had some good lines that would have improved the performance, but he throws them away as he looks to the side and reads unfamiliar words without a trace of comedic inflection. The idiot cards are located on the right (his left), and had he known the material, he could have helped along the timing. Anyway, Foster Brooks took a well-deserved bow. 🙂 (Also amazing that there were performers like Dean back in the day who couldn’t put down a cigarette long enough to do a TV show.)
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LOL. Yeah… he can’t stop laughing at the script there, probably because it’s the first time he’s seen it…
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Exactly what occurred to me! Very funny at first reading. 🙂
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3 – is last year, 2020. The ruling elite never practice what they preach.
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Hilarious I though…. Bang on… not that old but utterly delusional.
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19 – Park Royal bodied AEC Regent III, operating presumably on the Ardrossan to kilmarnock route.
It was new to London transport in May 1950, then acquired by A1 (Ayrshire Bus Owners Co-operative) who subsequently sold out to Stagecoach (?) around 1995.
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Wow. You never cease to amaze.!
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Anorak sounds much better than today’s term, nerd.
I remember rain coats were called anoraks, I must be getting on!
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Much nicer than Nerd.
I could never call Roddy a “nerd”.
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According to Wikipedia ‘anorak’ is a British (?) slang term for someone with a strong – possibly obsessive? –
interest in a niche subject. 😂
Nerd, on the other hand, apparently carries negative social connotations… a person seen as overly intellectual, obsessive, introverted or lacking social skills.
There’s also ‘geek’ which also carries socially inept connotations, “to engage in or discuss computer-related tasks obsessively or with great attention to technical detail”.
I’ll settle for being an anorak 😂
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No-one seems to have mentioned no 1 – which appears to be an air-cooled Franklin Sedan manufactured in NY, very lightweight and hand-built.
Like many ‘craft’ producers they failed to adapt to mass-production & mechanisation, the company went bust in the 1930’s.
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It’s very beautiful, but I guess that if it was craft built, it would be far too expensive (given its size) to compete in a mass production line market.
Given the date (1920s) the prices would have made them pretty exclusive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Sedan
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LOL Sounds like it suits you best.
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Brilliant as ever, Professor.
I remember the old Regents and the single-decker Regals as a lad. Never had a clue who built them…
The other vehicles in the shot (L-R), Bedford TK box van, Ford Anglia 105E, a 15cwt. minibus which looks like a Commer FC but hard to be sure from this angle, Austin/Morris 1100 ADO16, first-generation Singer Vogue, another 1100, and last but far from least a Vauxhall Victor FB complete with roof-rack.
You seldom see roof-racks now since cars no longer have gutters – to reduce drag and wind noise. People would fit them to go to Rothesay for the holidays and just never take them off for years afterwards…
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YOu see these boxes instead… they look like little boats but I’m assuming they are storage space.
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In Finland they are known as the mother in law seat.
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Ha ha ha ha ha …. I love that!
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I’ve been friends with a couple for several years. The wife was born in Sweden and grew up in Norway. She’s lived almost all of her adult life in the USA, while retaining her Norwegian passport and citizenship, and more or less constantly complaining about how everything is better in Europe. 😉 Their cars are ALWAYS Audis, and for years, when they took long road trips across America, they had one of those weird looking storage carriers mounted on top.
Brings to mind an odd-looking automobile appendage I’ve seen pictures of, that in the days before automobile air conditioning would let you identify a car that had been equipped to carry a family on the ever-popular summer vacation road trip to California. You had two choices for the great trip west, the “northern route” along US 40 and US 30, across the Great Plains and the mountains of Colorado or Wyoming (to end up in San Francisco), or (if you lived in Missouri for example,) you more likely took the “southern route” down US 66 (the “Mother Road”) from Chicago to L.A., across New Mexico and Arizona…….the desert Southwest, across the Mojave Desert. I’m told there were various plans on how to make the trip in the heat of summer. You were of course advised to get water and gas at one of the many “last gas/last water” places before venturing into the dreaded Mojave. One approach was to plan the multi-day trip so that you drove the Mojave at night. In any event, lots of people would buy and mount an evaporative cooler……a sure sign (in Missouri at least) that a car was headed for California via the southern route.
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oooOOOooo, nice Corvair… D.
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Derek…..I’ve heard of the Chevrolet Corvair, but didn’t realize that the substitution of “air” in the previous Chevrolet name “Corvette” referred to an air-cooled rear-mounted engine. In fact, I had no idea that such a car was ever mass produced in America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Corvair
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He he…
I have to say I’d not like to drive through that desert in the daytime heat, but these things are seriously ugly appendages to a car (and must, presumably, make it less aerodynamic).
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Yes….really odd looking appendages! The coming of automobile air conditioning transformed motor travel.
I love this picture. I’ve seen it captioned “Route 66, Mojave Desert, 1943.” I wonder about that actually. The old car could have been on the road in 1943, and lots of early Route 66 was unpaved in the West. But by 1943, the Southern Route to California was well traveled, and would likely have been paved by then, even through the desert. Anyway……nice picture!
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It is a good pic. Very atmospheric, Danny.
But are you sure that road isn’t paved. It looks very flat and bump free if not.
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Yes Tris, paved or not, it’s certainly a well maintained highway. Exactly what any “unimproved” section of a numbered US highway would look like before paving. When the US Highway system was established and numbered in 1926, vast stretches of the system……especially in the sparsely populated and traveled West……..was unimproved (unpaved.) Whether any of US 66 would still have been unimproved in 1943 I don’t know, but as a part of the US highway system, it would certainly have been well maintained.
This has the look of an Ansel Adams photograph. Adams was a famous photographer (early to mid last century) who only worked in black and white. He would often use a red filter with the panchromatic film of the time to create dark skies and brilliant white clouds. His pictures of Yosemite are iconic in the history of photography, and they almost all have dark skies like that.
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LOL!
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(Responding to Ronald’s “mother in law seat.”)
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Ha ha …with apologies to mothers in law everywhere.
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I don’t know where the splendid neo-classical pediment in No2 is, but I can imagine the conversation –
Paw – “That’s ma boay! Gaun yersel, wee man!”
Maw – “Get that wean aff the windae sill, ya eejit – he’s goat nae nappy oan!”
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LOL, Andi.
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It’s a piece of your Hanover king’s garden, it’s from the the garden shed, no cheap Ikea stuff.
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#20……looks American, and from the cars, I’d say ca. 1970’s. So a Google search for “Rickshaw Charlie’s” identifies it as a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, Portland, Oregon, in 1979.
An article and picture gallery (including the picture) is titled: “1970s Portland was smutty, corrupt, dance-crazed — and led to the city you know today”
https://www.oregonlive.com/history/2017/04/1970s_portland_was_smutty_corr.html
Sounds like a description of San Francisco in the 1960’s and 70’s. Unlike conservative Los Angeles, San Francisco, the city by the bay, was always a city of scoundrels, misfits, and eccentrics of all types. In those years, the hippies took over the Haight-Ashbury district, and next to Chinatown, down near Fisherman’s Wharf, was “North Beach,” the place you could go to see naked ladies….”dancing.”
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Wow… that was pretty smart detective work, Danny.
Portland it is!
As for San Francisco…
Goodness me. Naked ladies?
O la la
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Tris……Clearly the west coast hippie/go-go disco scene of the 1970’s was alive and well in Portland. The “topless” craze of the era……which ultimately involved (by the late 1970’s) even less clothing than “topless”…….famously began at the time of the 1964 Republican Convention in San Francisco, at Carol Doda’s place in North Beach. Seems ironic to waste such a thing on Republicans, who met in the Cow Palace and famously nominated for president the conservative Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater. The GOP delegates flocked to North Beach that week to see Carol Doda’s topless dancing, which thus gained huge national attention. The New York Times ran an obituary when she died in 2015.
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My goodness, Danny. These Oragonians or Beavers, know how to enjoy themselves.
I bet they never did it in Utah!
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Yes, the west coast counterculture is at home in Oregon as much as in San Francisco. In Utah…….not so much. 😉
It seems a shame to have wasted San Francisco on the GOP in 1964. Ironically, the delegates who nominated Barry Goldwater for president were the same ones who flocked to North Beach to see Carol Doda. As badly as Goldwater was beaten in the Lyndon Johnson landslide in the general election that year, his nomination is sometimes considered to have been the beginning of western conservatism in the modern GOP. Presumably it inspired Ronald Reagan, who campaigned for Goldwater and entered politics himself just two years later in 1966, when he was elected to the first of his two terms as Governor of California. The rest is right wing GOP history.
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Up to the arrival of Trump!!!
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Yep…..a long sad story!
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🙂
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12 – When I was young it was always cakes of soap, never a bar of soap. I wonder how many actually believed the advert and were very disappointed at the results and saw their money go down the drain and be too embarrassed to demand their money back.
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My granny always talked about cakes of soap.
But, I’m sure if you had that “cake” after every meal you’d lose weight…
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CAKES of soap, eh?
And I’ll bet your coalman delivered briquettes rather than brickets!
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LOL.
Some fowk are just posh, Jake.
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O/T; hat mancock’s had his job offer withdrawn. As a sitting mp, UN rules forbid him taking it.
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Except that Gordon Brown had a job with the UN while being an MPO from 2012 -2015. So I’m not sure that will fly.
I think what happened was the Africans said W H A T?
You chose for us a man who has overseen the very worst results for pandemic in the whole of Europe, but who, along the way made a pot of money for his mates and his family, until he was sacked for breaking his own rules about close contacts … as it goes VERY close, with his girl friend, in the office, on taxpayers’ money.
No, thanks a lot. Think again and find us someone who can do the job!
But that’s just my opinion 🙂
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That was the radio news’ take on it. It could quite easily be as you suggest!
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Love the pics. Woman with dog? Looks familiar, hmm.
The streets look cleaner than they do now, especially with loads of masks discarded and polystyrene rubbish from takeaways. The hoover looks like it could go to space! A dustpan and brush would be easier! Though not to go to space 😀
Fur, grrrrrr! 😭 Far too many beautiful beings were murdered for that horrible fashion, sad, it still happens. Love the cocktail poster! There were throngs of people going into a cocktail festival tent in Edinburgh yesterday, the last thing I’d want to be doing right now!
Joan of arc, why did they murder her? Humans can be very evil.
Cars, I’m always in awe of planet earth for allowing humans to take stuff to build planet wrecking things, I suppose my bicycle and fridge and hoover and even my printing presses, are all planet wrecking too though. Hmm.
Better go before I say more rubbish, why do our cats always cry loudest at 6am to be let outside? Just as well ours knows to do his cute pose and give kisses! 😀
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It’s probably what cats were invented for Hetty!
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Ours is a late riser, 6:15. I suppose she thinks I should be doubly grateful. I get to feed her, clean her litter tray and be thankful of the long lie. Oops, triply grateful.
It’s the litter tray event that kicks it off. “Oi, this needs emptied, pronto and while you’re up and about, you can fix me some breakfast.”
Does Munguin run classes on how to deal with servants?
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He taught the royals and nobility all they know…
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😊
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