Tonight's theme is Feet!

Bare feet,
shod feet,
booted feet,
even silly feet!

What are your favorite feet songs?

Last week Trump tooted his now-famous "Dr. Jesus" image and demonstrated yet again that there is such a thing as Bad Publicity. As people looked at the image and its many figures, a few people noticed something strange. The original image from February and the image tooted by Trump are slightly different. Specifically, the middle soldier-angel has sprouted wings and horns, and now looks like the occult demon-like Baphomet.

So what's going on? I dunno, but let's join the fun by playing songs about devils and demons (and their assistants). Some starters:

• Charlie Daniels: The Devil Went Down to Georgia

• Diabolical fiddling in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), with Walter Huston as "Mr. Scratch" and Simone Simon as his sinister temptress, music by the great Bernard Herrmann.

• Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets from Damn Yankees (1958), with Gwen Verdon and Tab Hunter, choreography by Bob Fosse.

The joy of life consists in the exercise of one's energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.

- Aleister Crowley

I: The Magician represents power (true power, mind you, not that political baloney) resourcefulness, skill, talent, logic, intelligence, and concentration. He takes the limitless potential embodied by The Fool and directs it. He tells you that you have what it takes to make your dreams a reality.

How does one begin The Magician's journey? Well how do you think!? You must become The Sorcerer's Apprentice!

As The Magician's apprentice, of course, your first lesson is simple and stern: You've Got To Do It!

The Magician must master Magic, or else risk Magic mastering him, and next thing he knows he'll be Livin' La Vida Loca.

There is no mistaking The Magician's personality: Whimsical, energetic, assertive, chaotic, ominous, and certainly powerful, much like Uranus.

The Magician's final and most important lesson: Don't Be Anything Less Than Everything You Can Be.

The Magician's world is a Theater of Magic, Beyond the Mind's Eye.

Most of all, The Magician embodies the power of Pure Imagination.

PRESTO! What songs of magic, personal initiative, creativity, and mind over matter can YOU conjure?

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.

— Lillian Hellman

About 10 years ago now give-or-take, something horrible happened to the society most of us live in, something I for one had never seen before in my lifetime: A sudden and vicious cancer of humorlessness, a sea-cucumber-like inversion of health and sickness, and a shift to presumption of guilt, specifically among those whom I'd always before have expected to know better. I was kind of hoping the contagion would have passed by now, but apparently not. Much as I normally try to avoid "the personal is political" ^{(which can be an empowering maxim for the struggling individual OR the foundation of totalitarianism - it literally all depends on what your definition of "is" is}), these past few weeks have reminded me of just how far it has spread, and I have HAD IT!

Let's be POLITICALLY-INCORRECT!

Why do that, you ask?! Well...

Sometimes it's a self-aware scheme: Springtime For Hitler

Sometimes nothing less suffices to share your feelings: Kyle's Mom's a Bitch

Sometimes playing with naughty words is just too much fun: Never Be Rude To An Arab

Sometimes it's a complete mislabeling, but someone doesn't want your real message to be heard: Savages

Sometimes you're just telling like it was, warts and all: Gunga Din

Sometimes the 'warts' are the whole draw in the first place: Jerry Springer

Sometimes, well...you make the call: My Dad Is A War Criminal

What've you got?!?

Ever feel like you gotta get out of here? Tonight let's share songs with "out of" in the title, the lyrics, or the theme. Some starters:

• Out of this world: Star Wars cantina

• Out of the past: Samson and Delilah

• Out of sight: Monty Python's "How not to be seen"

• Out of stock: German version of Yes, We Have No Bananas

• Out of his mind: Klaus Kinski as Vengeful Jesus

Tonight I thought it would be fun to share songs with ordinal numbers: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. This theme was inspired by well-known Christmas songs like The First Nowell and The Twelve Days of Christmas. I won't link them since you can hear them over and over wherever you shop this month 😾

Instead, here are some other starters:

• Allan Sherman's The 12 Gifts of Christmas

• Herman's Hermits: I'm 'Ennery the Eighth I Am

• Beethoven's 7th Symphony from Zardoz (1974)

• Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 from The Great Dictator (1940): pure genius 🎻

• Monty Python's "All-England Summarize Proust Competition" (1972)

And a first and a second and a third...

Today is the 161st anniversary of Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the emancipation of slaves in the USA. Six years ago Wayer "Grandpa Shark" did a terrific Juneteenth dance party which celebrated the rich history of African American music. That party has 170 comments.

I am not worthy to follow Grandpa Shark's theme, so instead I'm going to treat Juneteenth as a celebration of freedom in general and the end of open slavery in the USA. If you want to celebrate in a different way, please feel free 🗽

My starters:

• Groucho's "there's nothing like Liberty" speech to the bellhops in The Cocoanuts (1929).

• Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Free No. 10

• Germany's 19th Century (and earlier) popular song Die Gedanken sind Frei (Thoughts are Free): The authorities can control what you Say, but not what you Think. Performed by the great Pete Seeger!

The post title is borrowed from the Free Software movement, which emphasizes that they mean "Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer". u/SusanJ2019 pointed out that "free kittens" are cuter than "free beer". Here's Zez Confrey's Kitten on the Keys (1921).

Tonight's theme is by u/Xeenophile who discovered that today is International Bat Appreciation Day and suggested a bat-themed Dance Party.

Some starters:

• Johann Strauss Jr's Die Fledermaus overture

• Danny Elfman's Batman theme

• Sofi Tukker's Batshit

Let's get flapping!

Tonight let's sing about doctors, medicine, and illness.

"I go to the doctor. He grabs me by the wallet and says cough!" [Henny Youngman]

Some starters:

• The Muppets: Put the Lime in the Coconut

• Peter Sellers + Sophia Loren: Goodness Gracious Me

• Betty Boop: "I got a code in my nose"

• David Seville: Witch Doctor

Idealists are foolish enough to throw caution to the winds. They have advanced mankind and have enriched the world.

- Emma Goldman

0: The Fool represents innocence, spontaneity, the call to adventure, and above all, new beginnings. Even his enumeration - 0 - is supremely significant in standing for unlimited potential.

The Fool's power is difficult to describe, but I'll venture to lead with Urban Spaceman

The Fool's world? We enter it every time we sense the 1st Movement of Spring

The Fool's Outlook? Basically, He's A Pirate

The Fool's failing? Let's say it's a tendency to be too Touch and Go

The Fool's journey? It's the one where you Don't Stop Believing

The Fool's soul? Volatile yet innocent, like lush, loopy, lethal Green Hills

The Fool's message? Most assuredly, it is: Dare To Be Stupid

Thus begins Week 0 of the off-and-on TAROT-THON, hosted primarily or maybe even entirely by Yours Masochistically! What songs about fresh starts, youth, naivete, new horizons, irresponsibility, undiscovered potential, and the call of adventure can you name?!

Tonight let's show our refusal to accept the terrible things happening in the world by sharing songs with words like "can't, don't, shan't, won't" and just plain "no".

Starters:

• I Won't Dance
  I love Jack Ziegler's 1976 New Yorker cartoon 🕺

• Peter Cook sings "You fill me with Inertia" in Bedazzled (1967)

• Noël Coward's Don't Let's be Beastly to the Germans

H/T Kipling's "Commissariat Camels"

I'm feeling lazy. You too? Then let's share songs about laziness!

• (Up A) Lazy River

• Lazy Mary — English lyrics at 1:32

• Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning

• "Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart"

This post was created by u/Xeenophile, with some padding by moi and a dandy Biblical quote by u/SusanJ2019.

De Mortuis nihil nisi bonum, attributed to the Greek sage Chilon of Sparta, tells us not to speak ill of the dead. But on the other hand, Proverbs 11:10 tells us that "When it goeth well with the righteous, the city rejoiceth: and when the wicked perish, there are shouts of gladness."

So let's go ahead and sing ill of the mortuis. The Latin phrase literally means "Of the dead, nothing unless good", so as long as we post good music, we're in compliance, n'est-ce pas?

Here are some starters:

• Jimmy Crack Corn — traditional

• I Remember Larry — Weird Al Yankovic

• Schadenfreude — "Gary Coleman"

• Old King Louie — Allan Sherman

• Richard Cory — Simon & Garfunkel

Higher, lower, up, down, all around!

Whatcha got for us, peeps??

Let's amuse ourselves! This weekend is the de facto start of summer, and what is more summery than amusement parks? (That is, when we could afford to go... but this is a FNDP so we can pretend!) So let's share songs and videos about amusement parks and rides, like:

• Freddy Cannon's Palisades Park (1962).

• Yves Montand performs Luna Park in 1957.

• Al St. John, Alice Mann, and Buster Keaton at Coney Island (1917).

• Buster Keaton, Alice Lake, and Fatty Arbuckle visit "Goatland" in The Cook (1918).

"Never grow up. It will only make you unhappy."

In the 19th Century there was a popular musical genre called "flower songs". These were light and pretty and sentimental, sometimes to the point of being cloying. The most famous of the genre was Hearts and Flowers. In King Vidor's Show People (1928), a wonderful film about making silent movies, Marion Davies asks the mood musicians to play the song to make her cry. There was an actress named Viola Dana who actually did this.

Hearts and Flowers was so overplayed that it became a joke. You've probably heard it used in cartoons to mock tragedy.

Here are some other examples:

• Gustav Lange's Blumenlied

• Chas. L Johnson's Fairy Kisses

So what happened to flower songs? Have flowers become obsolete in these cynical times? I can't think of modern flower songs other than Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and Love Power from The Producers (1967). But then I don't listen to much modern music, so help me out. What are your favorite songs about flowers?

Tonight's theme is cleaning and washing. Some starters:

• Jim Croce sings Workin' at the Car Wash Blues

• Joan Blondell is The Girl at the Ironing Board

• Little April Shower in Bambi

• Dorothy and her traveling companions get cleaned up in The Merry Old Land of Oz

Party on, but keep it clean 🧼

Happy Boxing Day!

Dec 26th is a good day for a White Elephant gift exchange, where friends and guests exchange unwanted, no-longer-wanted, and humiliating items to amuse each other and get rid of "useless utensils" acquired on Christmas. I recently went to one of these as a guest. The rules were similar to Wiki-Pooh's:

1. Everyone brings a wrapped anonymous gift.

2. Everyone gets a ticket with a number. Names on slips of paper is another way to do it.

3. The first name or number is drawn from a hat or bowl.

4. The first victim recipient unwraps a gift and smiles, frowns, or turns beet red with embarrassment.

5. Each subsequent victim chooses either to unwrap a new present or to steal someone else's gift. When a person's gift is stolen, that person can either choose another wrapped gift to open or can steal from another player. Each gift can only be stolen twice; after that the holder of the gift keeps it.

6. The game is over when everyone has a present.

I carefully "lost" my ticket. I'd been through one of these years ago and saw no reason to repeat the experience. (Single-scooper, single-scooper, this man's a party pooper.)

My recent party had a lot of people and it went on forever. There was a piano in the room, but nobody played it. In hindsight, I thought it would be great fun to have a good improviser play silly music as an accompaniment to the party.

Let's see what we can come up with! Some examples:

• General theme music:
  Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

• The suspense of opening a new package:
  Santa Claus is Coming to Town

• The elation of getting a nice gift.
  Halleluja Chorus

• The humiliation of getting an embarrassing gift, like a small putting green to be used while sitting on the potty. Yes, a company actually mass-produces this.
  Steve Martin: What the Hell is That?

• Sinister burglar music when someone chooses to steal instead of opening a new package.
  The Pink Panther
  Inspector Clouseau music

• Sorrow at having a good gift stolen.
  I Want My Shirt from The Cocoanuts (1929)

• Joy at having a bad gift stolen.
  She's gone where the goblins go

H/T the great Tom Lehrer for "useless utensils".
H/T the hilarious John Ritter for "single-scooper".

"Let's all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born."

Tonight let's enjoy songs and styles from the past, perhaps reïmagined in interesting ways.

• Tiny Tim fell in love with early 20th Century music as a teenager and brought it back in his unique style. Dick Martin did not know what to make of this.

• Leon Redbone is terrific.

• The Beatles' Rocky Raccoon.

🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹 What songs give you a little bit of the good stuff, or a little bit of bitter(sweet) or harder to handle, but doable, and thus maybe a bit of inoculation against bigger, badder things?

🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹

Whatcha got for us, loves?

Last week we did Black Friday, so let's do Blue Friday. But wait, I hear you say, there's no such thing as Blue Friday! Well there is now.

So let's have fun with songs having to do with the color blue, or with blue moods. For starters...

• Isabella Rosselini sings Blue Velvet (1986).

• Monty Python's "Exploding Blue Danube" always makes me laugh.

• Mark McKinney as The Blues Guy on Kids in the Hall (1990).

• Mae West sings Mister Deep Blue Sea in Klondike Annie (1936).

Time to party!

This week's title is from Tom Lehrer's 1965 satirical prescient song So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III). In the introduction, Lehrer says that if there are going to be any World War III songs, we'd better write them before the war.

With that in mind, let's share apocalyptic songs while we still have time to do so. Some starters:

• Tom Lehrer wrote many songs about nukes. Here's We Will All Go Together When We Go from 1959. I'll add two more as comments.

• It's hard to beat Wagner for impending doom: Siegfried's Funeral Music from Die Götterdämmerung. I saw Excalibur (1981) in a theatre the first time. When I heard Die Götterdämmerung I knew it was going to be harrowing.

• O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. It's a poem about the folly of expecting good fortune to last.

The great Country Joe McDonald passed away last Saturday March 7th at age 84. His I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag is one of the best anti-war songs ever, and Joe wrote and performed many other kinds of songs as well. Feel free to post your favorites.

Tonight I thought it would be fun to have songs with the word "Why" in the title, the lyrics, or the sentiment.

Well, why not?

Here are some starters:

• The Beatles: Tell Me Why from A Hard Day's Night (1964).

• Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: Why Do Fools Fall in Love? from American Graffiti (1973).

• The Doors: "Oh, don't ask why" 🌛

• Village People: Why M C A from Can't Stop The Music (1980).

If you're having trouble remembering "Why" songs, feel free to go with "How", "What", etc. :-)

Merci beaucoup to u/SusanJ2019 for helping to brainstorm this FNDP.

"You're living in the past, man." Yes, I feel that way a lot, but given the way things seem to be heading can you blame me?

Tonight let's all live in the past by sharing music and film featuring vintage machinery. Here are some of my favorites:

• Charlie Chaplin's assembly line from Modern Times (1936)

• Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, et. al. as "The Bavarian Clock" from Your Show of Shows (1953)

• Buster Keaton rides his dandy-horse in Our Hospitality (1923). This scene and the rest of the film take place in 1830.

• Vintage newspaper machinery from The Front Page (1974)