Deep Thoughts By Oppie

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.

~J. Robert Oppenheimer

Those Horny Italians!

My parents had a vinyl LP as old as me (1960) called Louis Prima Digs Keely Smith.  One of the songs, Zooma Zooma Baccala, amused me and my brother to no end growing up, but we had no clue what the song was really about. It's really the same song in the wedding scene from The Godfather:



The original lyrics aren't even in Italian; they're in a Sicilian (or Neopolitan) dialect. The wonders of the Internets led me to track down the meaning of the words to the Louis Prima song one night. I was very amused by what I found. I converted my inherited vinyl to digital and translated the lyrics in the first link.

The mezzogiorno polka song tells about a young woman choosing a man to be her husband. She is confused and asks her mother to decide. Her mother describes each man and his "job," giving her the same comical answer for each one, indicating for instance, that if you marry a butcher, he will "sausage" you; if you marry a carpenter, he will "hammer" you; if you marry a farmer, he will "plough" you. Obviously, the song is one big double entendre. Here's the best translation that I found: link

In many ways, the 1960's and earlier times were not more innocent times--people just had better imaginations.

Imagination Sufficed (again)

Due to unforeseen circumstances, I caught the 4th quarter of Super Bowl XLV on AM radio driving home from a party which had had a wide screen HD TV. After my initial hesitance, I found the radio sportscasting actually exciting, and realized that the art of creating excitement and buzz at a live event was not lost. Of course my kids were clueless about this appreciation because they simply could not visualize a game, even with the help of a good radio sportscaster. For them, such things must be as explicit as possible.

How appropriate to hear a live radio sportscaster on the centenary of Ronald Reagan's birth. Reagan was a natural talent able to narrate a period of history. He was not the first nor the last to have this talent.

Oh, Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers!!!!

Imagination Sufficed

Click twice to magnify & to read the text about Titanic

That drawing is from Logan Marshall's The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters and has intrigued me since I was kid, especially the little stick figures tumbling off the stern. It affected me the same way the jumpers from the Twin Towers affected some people. But as a kid I didn't need such graphic "reality" footage.  Imagination alone sufficed to horrify.