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If you were living in the Mid-Atlantic in the 1970s you probably saw that commercial.

The Joon Rhee martial arts schools started in the Washington D.C. area and I guess we had a D.C.-based channel back in those dark ages of “regional” TV. Still, I will always remember the phone number to Joon Rhee’s school. Always.

Yesterday I was thinking about the commercial and I looked it up on the web, as I am want to do. Its turns out that the great Nils Lofgren wrote that catchy Joon Rhee jingle! Yes, that Nils: E Street Band; Crazy Horse. Nils Freakin’ Lofgren! Its listed on his webpage along with a handful of other T.V. song credits. Who’d-a-guessed that?

Makes me want to call USA-1000

The other day my friend Paul and I got onto the subject of songs with whistling in them (I made a playlist). During my search for songs with whistling I ran across “Whistling Jack Smith”. Ol’ Jack had a hit song in the late 60s in the UK – a song of high quality whistling. Here is Jack whistling his way through the incredibly goofy “I Was Kaiser Bill’s Batman”¹:

We watched this and Paul made the claim that this guy is lip-sync-whistling. Paul is correct… it turns out that this isn’t Whistling Jack Smith! Its an actor. The real Whistling Jack Smith was actually a guy named John O’Neill² who was a “session whistler” and was the guy who whistled in “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”. So now I am on a quest to figure out who this dude dancing and lip-sync-whistling is. Any help would be appreciated.

Update!

My friend John Fleck passed this along to those who read him on twitter and received the following:

After extensive research by lots of people in the TV music business
including people in charge of keeping extensive rock and roll music
clips.

The original whistler is unknown and was apparently a producer of some other artist.
The song became popular.
The production company was asked to have it performed on TV shows
The clip is from the 1960’s German hit show “Beat Club.”
The song producers hired a local German actor who looks sort of like Don Grady from “My Three Sons” but isn’t.
The actor is unknown.
The actor seems to have made up dance steps in the instrumental breaks.
About four different actors were hired around the world to lip sync this song.
There never was an actual ‘Whistling Jack Smith.’

Wow! I mean, wow! The power of curious smart people still amazes me. Thanks to the person who passed that along (whom I will keep anonymous unless told otherwise).

1. a batman is a personal aide to a military officer [↩]
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistling_Jack_Smith [↩]

This morning I was going through my usual start of the day by watching the BBC World Report. On the crawl they had “Rare footage of one of the world’s most strange and elusive mammals has been captured by scientists” and I thought that it was terribly unfair to put such a thing in a crawl and not show it during the actual news show.

Never fear, the internet is here. This is the animal in question – a freakin’ venom-toting mammal named Hispaniolan solenodon. Groovy.

I’d embed the video for your viewing pleasure, with all due credit to the BBC – but they don’t want that so I will honor their system… even though it sucks.

These are the suggested words my spellchecker gives me as a replacement for my friend Mark Hershberger’s last name:

Herbage
Hamburger
Hauberk
Hamburg
Homburg
Horseback
Hatchback
Pushbike
Hitchhiker
Humbug

see more famous faces look-a-likes

The following is the real text a friend received in an “e-vite”. Names have been blocked out to protect the innocent:

Why are we doing this? Well if my math serves me correctly on one warm August evening back in “79, a woman and a man came together and discovered each others bodies. Outcome? After a male sperm exited the man’s (XXXX’s Dad) penis and entered through the woman’s (XXXX’s Mom) vagina the sperm then traveled up the vaginal canal to the uterus where it came together and bonded with a female egg…a little XXXXXXX was created. And as thanks for that sexual exploration of her parents and to honor the subsequent birth on May 25th 1979…I cordially invite each and every one of you to celebrate by tipping your glass to a much older 29 years XXXXXXX. Same great attitude, same great spirit, same great looks. Hurrah! Thanks Mama and Papa XXXX!

The other night while heading on I-40 to a friend’s house we saw this – had to get this grainy shot with the cell phone ’cause how often will I see a hot-rod shopping cart? Take note that the driver actually sits up where a kid would on the little shelf.

I don’t know what it is, but I am quite mesmerized by melting chocolate bunnies.

For those of you who don’t read BoingBoing, it behooves you to go check out the stats of most popular searches on Wikipedia versus Conservapedia.

Let’s call the conservative movement’s interest in homosexuality an obsession for now, if we get more data we can upgrade that I suppose.

The theory here now is that “clickbots” are causing these statistics on conservapedia. Possible, probable even – but it does make me wonder why there are seemingly no clickbot skewed results on wikipedia – surely someone would want some subject “popular” and would make the effort. Interesting, have they figured out how to deal with such things?

I can’t remember where I first saw this photo. Its been sitting on my hard drive for a long time. It is something I can look at over and over again and I cannot explain it.

Update: Right after I posted that I remembered a small nugget of information which lead me to the site I originally found this on. Its from a Dutch museum of military equipment. Its a smaller version of equipment which was used to listen for approaching aircraft in the 1930s. I am sure my unexplained interest in World War One took me on the path to discovering this at some point.