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Wednesday: June 7, 2006

World’s Oldest Country Music Fan?

Filed under: — site admin @ 9:18 PM GMT-0500

That would be 110-year-old Jutland veteran, Henry Allingham, “who once attributed his old age to ‘cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women'” (þ Harry’s Place). None of the first dozen or so commenters noticed that that was a direct quotation from the Sons of the Pioneers’ 1947 #5 hit “Cigareets [sic] and Whuskey [sic] and Wild Wild Women”: cf. disc four of Swinging Hollywood: Hillbilly Cowboys (Properbox 75). Perhaps there are other versions.

Pedantic Footnote

Filed under: — site admin @ 9:08 PM GMT-0500

Ann Althouse reminds us of “that famous old lefty line ‘the only position for women . . . is prone'” (Stokely Carmichael, 1964). Of course, righties generally prefer their women supine (face up) rather than prone (face down).

An Unnecessary Gloss?

Filed under: — site admin @ 8:57 PM GMT-0500

In Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), the subtitles quote the maid as telling Priape Boudu “You behave like a Neanderthal”, but the last word is clearly audible as ‘troglodyte’. Was the gloss really necessary? Surely anyone likely to watch a 74-year-old movie in a Criterion edition knows the meaning of the word ‘troglodyte’?