gogogopher's Profile
gogogopher's real name is Thurl Ravenscroft. Thurl is 48 years old and has been a SingSnap member since July 18, 2007. So far Thurl has made a total of 491 recordings.
"Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's carrying a very beautiful painting with his feet. And also, you're drunk."
Here are a few of my least egregious recordings:
Immigrant Song
The Boys Of Summer
Madman Across The Water
American Tune
Peg
Big-Legged Women Are Back In Style Again
Super Chicken
The Day I Saw Bo Diddley In Washington Square
Israelites
I'm Shipping Off To Boston
Nessun Dorma
American Anthem
Rock The Casbah
If you did not like those, then you will also certainly not enjoy:
Ragin' Eyes
Life Is A Highway
Flowers On The Wall
Early In The Morning
Baby Blue
Stay A Little Longer
Shelter From The Storm
Institutionalized
Devil May Care
Particle Man
The Tender Trap
OUR FOUNDER
Here are some links to interesting music and music-related stuff:
Jo Stafford Goofin' Around
Harmonica Madness
Subways
Robeson
Monken!
Hey Jude
Nick Lowe
GIANT STEPS
Weezer -- I appear at 00:18 see if you can spot me!
PARKER THE DOG
THE CHARMS
THE RAVEONETTES
DOG SONG
ANTHEM
MONSTER HOSPITAL
HOT TUBS
PARTING GLASS
MYSTERY
OF
THE
BULGARIAN
VOICES
REGINA SPEKTOR - BETTER
THE NEW YORK DOLLS
SIMPLE
NAIROBI TRIO
REGINA SPEKTOR - US
FIELDS OF GOLD
AIMEE MANN
SPIKE JONES
THE DONNAS
BETTER
PETULA
THE CASTAWAYS
KAKI KING
PUNK ROCKER
SANDI THOM
RED INGLE AND THE NATURAL 7
FEIST
MY PAL FOOT FOOT
ARETHA
INGRID MICHAELSON
THE BOBS - WHITE ROOM
ROSCOE HOLCOMB
WE HAD IT RIGHT
WANDA JACKSON
RAYMOND SCOTT, MAD SCIENTIST OF SWING
DUSTY
POWERHOUSE
BECAUSE I'M AWESOME
TOM LEHRER
SAMSON
CHRIS POTTER
JUDY COLLINS 1969
THE GREAT BLOSSOM DEARIE
BLOSSOM DEARIE FIGURE 8 SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK
GLENN GOULD
GILLIAN WELCH
THE SWINGLE SINGERS
MORE COWBELL!
MYSTERIOUS MOSE
JOANNA NEWSOM
RIGHT ON
STEPPING STONE
FLY
PIPETTES
EMILY REMLER
NELLIE MCKAY
BRAVE COMBO
MUMBLES
JOANNA NEWSOM
ERNIE KOVACS
DOLLYROTS
HELL YES
FUSUN ONAL
BUT IS IT ART?
THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM
BOB
WIERD AL, BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS
THE WHITEST BOY ALIVE
LITTLE STEVEN'S UNDERGROUND GARAGE
THE INCREDIBLE TAD TADLOCK 1956
DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK!
MORE CHICKEN STUFF
NERDS ONLY
THESE GO TO 11
END OF SAFE SECTION
IF YOU ARE FRIGHTENED BY COOLNESS AND/OR BEAUTY,
PLEASE PROCEED NO FURTHER
“Bullet in the Brain”
by Tobias Wolff
Anders couldn’t get to the bank until just before it closed, so of course the line was endless and he got stuck behind two women whose loud, stupid conversation put him in a murderous temper. He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders — a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.
With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the bank tellers stuck a “POSITION CLOSED” sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. The women in front of Anders broke off their conversation and watched the teller with hatred. “Oh, that’s nice,” one of them said. She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, “One of those little human touches that keep us coming back for more.”
Anders had conceived his own towering hatred of the teller, but he immediately turned it on the presumptuous crybaby in front of him. “Damned unfair,” he said, “Tragic, really. If their not chopping off the wrong leg, or bombing your ancestral village, they’re closing their positions.”
She stood her ground. “I didn’t say it was tragic,” she said, “I just think it’s a pretty lousy way to treat your customers.”
“Unforgivable,” Anders said, “Heaven will take note.”
She sucked in her cheeks but stared past him and said nothing. Anders saw that the other woman, her friend, was looking in the same direction. And then the tellers stopped what they were doing, and the customers slowly turned, and silence came over the bank. Two man wearing black ski masks and blue business suits were standing to the side of the door. One of them had a pistol pressed against the guard’s neck. The guard’s eyes were closed, and his lips were moving. The other man had a sawed-off shotgun. “Keep your big mouth shut!” the man with the pistol said, though no one had spoken a word. “One of you tellers hits the alarm, you’re all dead meat. Got it?”
The tellers nodded.
“Oh, bravo,” Anders said. “Dead meat.” He turned to the woman in front of him. “Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.”
She looked at him with drowning eyes.
The man with the shotgun pushed the guard to his knees. He handed the shotgun to his partner and yanked the guard’s wrists up behind his back and locked them together with a pair of handcuffs. He toppled him onto the floor with a kick between the shoulder blades. Then he took his shotgun back and went over to the security gate at the end of the counter. He was short and heavy and moved with peculiar slowness, even torper. “Buzz him in,” his partner said. The man with the shotgun opened the gate and sauntered along the line of tellers, handing each of them a Hefty bag. When he came to the empty position he looked over at the man with the pistol, who said, “Whose slot is that?”
Anders watched the teller. She put her hand to her throat and turned to the man she’d been talking to. He nodded. “Mine,” she said.
“Then get your ugly ass in gear and fill that bag.”
“There you go,” Anders said to the woman in front of him. “Justice is done.”
“Hey! Bright boy! Did I tell you to talk?”
“No,” Anders said.
“Then shut your trap.”
“Did you hear that?” Anders said. “‘Bright boy.’ Right out of ‘The Killers.’”
“Please be quiet,” the woman said.
“Hey, you deaf or what?” The man with the pistol walked over to Anders. He poked the weapon into Anders’ gut. “You think I’m playing games?”
“No,” Anders said, but the barrel tickled like a stiff finger and he had to fight back the titters. He did this by making himself stare into the man’s eyes, which were clearly visible behind the holes in the mask: pale blue and rawly red-rimmed. The man’s left eyelid kept twitching. He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything that had happened, and he was beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded him again with the pistol.
“You like me, bright boy!” he said. “You want to suck my dick!”
“No,” Anders said.
“Then stop looking at me.”
Anders fixed his gaze on the man’s shiny wing-tip shoes.
“Not down there. Up there.” He stuck the pistol under Anders’ chin and pushed it upwards until Anders was looking at the ceiling.
Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars, and gilt scrollwork over the tellers’ cages. The domed ceiling had been decorated with mythological figures whose fleshy, toga-draped ugliness Anders had taken in at a glance years earlier and afterward declined to notice. Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work. It was even worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity. The artist had a few tricks up his sleeve and used them again and again — a certain rosy blush on the underside of the clouds, a coy backwards glance on the faces of the cupids and fauns. The ceiling was crowded with various drama, but the one that caught Anders’ eye was Zeus and Europa — portrayed, in this rendition, as a bull ogling a cow from behind a haystack. To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome. The bull wore a smirk and his eyebrows were arched. If there’d been a bubble coming out of his mouth, it would have said, “Hubba hubba.”
“What’s so funny, bright boy?”
“Nothing.”
“You think I’m comical? You think I’m some kind of clown?”
“No.”
“Fuck with me again, you’re history. Capiche?“
Anders burst out laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, “Capiche–oh, God–capiche,” and at that the man with the pistol raised the pistol and shot Anders right in the head.
The bullet smashed Anders’ skull and ploughed through his brain and exited behind his right ear, scattering shards of bone into the cerebral cortex, the corpus callosum, back toward the basal ganglia, and down into the thalamus. But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of iron transports and neuro-transmissions. Because of their peculiar origin these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling into life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory. After striking the cranium the bullet was moving at 900 feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared to the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, “passed before his eyes.”
It is worth noting what Anders did not remember, given what he did remember. He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him–her unembarrassed carnality, and especially the cordial way she had with his unit, which she called Mr. Mole, as in, “Uh-oh, looks like Mr. Mole wants to play,” and, “let’s hide Mr. Mole!” Anders did not remember his wife, whom he had also loved before she exhausted him with her predictability, or his daughter, now a sullen professor of economics at Dartmouth. He did not remember standing just outside his daughter’s door as she lectured her bear about his naughtiness and described the truly appalling punishment Paws would receive unless he changed his ways. He did not remember a single line of the hundreds of poems he committed to memory in his youth so that he could give himself the shivers at will–not “Silent, upon a peak in Darien,” or “My God, I heard this day,” or “All my pretty ones? Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?” None of these did he remember; not one. Anders did not remember his dying mother saying of his father, “I should have stabbed him in his sleep.”
He did not remember Professor Josephs telling his class how Athenian prisoners in Sicily had been released if they could recite Aeschylus, and then reciting Aeschylus himself, right there, in the Greek. Anders did not remember how his eyes had burned at those sounds. He did not remember the surprise of seeing a college classmate’s name on the jacket of a novel not long after they graduated, or the respect he had felt after reading the book. He did not remember the pleasure of giving respect.
Nor did Anders remember seeing a woman leap to her death from the building opposite his own just days after his daughter was born. He did not remember shouting, “Lord have mercy!” He did not remember deliberately crashing his father’s car into a tree, or having his ribs kicked in by three policemen at an anti-war rally, or waking himself up with laughter. He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.
This is what Anders remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders; an oppression, like the heat.
Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle’s cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they’ve chosen sides and someone asks the cousin what position he wants to play. “Shortstop,” the boy says. “Short’s the best position they is.” Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle’s cousin repeat what he’s just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he’s being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn’t it, not at all–it’s that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.
The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall or commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, They is, They is.
Horse Badorties Goes Out
Random stuff that is cool:
I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud,
And I or you, pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye, or show a bean in its pod, confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God;
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.)
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.
Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then;
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropt in the street—and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come forever and ever.
-- Walt Whitman
Consider the following case:
On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley. There
are only two options that the brain can take: the right side of the fork in
the track or the left side of the fork. There is no way in sight of derailing
or stopping the trolley and the brain is aware of this, for the brain knows trolleys.
The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can
determine the course which the trolley will take.
On the right side of the track there is a single railroad worker, Jones, who
will definitely be killed if the brain steers the trolley to the right. If
the railman on the right lives, he will go on to kill five men for the sake
of killing them, but in doing so will inadvertently save the lives of thirty
orphans (one of the five men he will kill is planning to destroy a bridge
that the orphan's bus will be crossing later that night). One of the orphans
that will be killed would grow up to become a tyrant who would make good,
utilitarian men do bad things, another would grow up to become Dick Cheney,
while a third would invent the Segway scooter.
If the brain in the vat chooses the left side of the track, the trolley will
definitely hit and kill a railman on the left side of the track, "Leftie,"
and will hit and destroy ten beating hearts on the track that could (and
would) have been transplanted into ten patients in the local hospital that
will die without donor hearts. These are the only hearts available, and the
brain is aware of this, for the brain knows hearts. If the railman on the
left side of the track lives, he too will kill five men, in fact the same
five that the railman on the right would kill. However, "Leftie" will kill
the five as an unintended consequence of saving ten men: he will
inadvertently run over the five men while rushing the ten hearts to the local hospital
for transplantation. A further result of "Leftie's" act would be that the
busload of orphans will be spared. Among the five men killed by "Leftie" are
both the man responsible for putting the brain at the controls of the trolley,
and the author of this example. If the ten hearts and "Leftie" are killed by
the trolley, the ten prospective heart-transplant patients will die and
their kidneys will be used to save the lives of twenty kidney-transplant
patients, one of whom will grow up to cure cancer and one of whom will grow
up to be Hitler. There are other kidneys and dialysis machines available,
however the brain does not know kidneys, and this is not a factor.
Assume that the brain's choice, whatever it turns out to be, will serve as an
example to other brains-in-vats and so the effects of its decision will be
amplified. Also assume that if the brain chooses the right side of the fork,
an unjust war free of war crimes will ensue, while if the brain chooses the
left fork, a just war fraught with war crimes will result. Furthermore,
there is an intermittently active Cartesian demon deceiving the brain such
that the brain is never sure if it is being deceived.
QUESTION: Ethically speaking, what should the brain do? Justify your answer.
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
-- Wallace Stevens
Robert Williams
Vintage Magazines
Vintage Records
Dammit I’m Mad
A palindromic poem by Demetri Martin
Dammit I’m mad.
Evil is a deed as I live.
God, am I reviled? I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt.
To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss.
Alas, it is so late. Who stops to help?
Man, it is hot. I’m in it. I tell.
I am not a devil. I level “Mad Dog”.
Ah, say burning is, as a deified gulp,
In my halo of a mired rum tin.
I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin.
Is evil in a clam? In a trap?
No. It is open. On it I was stuck.
Rats peed on hope. Elsewhere dips a web.
Be still if I fill its ebb.
Ew, a spider… eh?
We sleep. Oh no!
Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position.
Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name.
Both, one… my names are in it.
Murder? I’m a fool.
A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash.
A Goddam level I lived at.
On mail let it in. I’m it.
Oh, sit in ample hot spots. Oh wet!
A loss it is alas (sip). I’d assign it a name.
Name not one bottle minus an ode by me:
“Sir, I deliver. I’m a dog”
Evil is a deed as I live.
Dammit I’m mad.
Pinup Art
George Petty
What did the Zen master say to the hot dog vendor?
"Make me one with everything."
Gil Elvgren
gogogopher can see you through the computer. Put your pants on.
gogogopher means no harm to your planet.
gogogopher is a lumberjack and he's ok
gogogopher is an anagram for "pogo hogger"
gogogopher is watching top gear
gogogopher is not a real gopher, but he does play one on television
gogogopher is an anagram for "poor hog egg"
gogogopher must make a telephone call immediately, man. That is a MUST.
gogogopher : if it wasnt for disappointment, I wouldnt have any appointments
gogogopher wants a rock to wind a piece of string around
gogogopher is egging you on
gogogopher is beginning to smell, and for a gopher in n.y. that's a handicap
gogogopher is nervous
gogogopher is having ideas of reference
gogogopher is an anagram for "poo hog greg"
gogogopher is barking at the moon
gogogopher is getting his status read at this very second.
gogogopher is a goofy goober
gogogopher: go hang a salami, i'm a lasagna hog!
gogogopher is messin' and gommin'
gogogopher is standing right behind you
gogogopher is eyeball to eyeball with a luna moth
loves new york in june -- how about you?
gogogopher came home a' drinkin with lovin on his mind
gogogopher was never intended for mass production
gogogopher is chasing his tail
gogogopher would shop at a store called unpainted huffheins
gogogopher could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world
gogogopher is bad for business
gogogopher is in tangiers I don't think he'll come back it's sinister
gogogopher will sell you strophes 2500 a piece 500 down on your old strophe
gogogopher : at no time do my paws leave my body
gogogopher ate the lamb stew of the imagination
gogogopher - does anybody know what the hell he is talking about?
gogogopher is as mad as hell and he's not going to take this anymore
gogogopher stopped eating cars and eating bars and now he only eats guitars
gogogopher sees an alien peeking in his window
gogogopher -- could he be america's greatest menace?
gogogopher has come unstuck in time
gogogopher is intransigent
gogogopher panics in a pew
gogogopher : giving you the creeps since 1960
gogogopher should be out buying a dogsled, man
gogogopher took the blue pill
gogogopher took the blue pill. not that blue pill, the one from 'the matrix'
gogogopher is self contained and fairly explanatory
gogogopher wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of
gogogopher can see the color of time it's blue
gogogopher is putting his gopher shoulder to the wheel
gogogopher two dollars and twenty-seven cents january 17, 1956.
gogogopher puts the "odor" in mediocre. wait. huh?
gogogopher is no longer accepting coupons from gogoweasel's
gogogopher is all like, 'read my status, read my status!'
gogogopher how can i write a holy litany in your silly mood?
gogogopher is sick of their insane demands
gogogopher really wants off the hamster wheel now
gogogopher has got red on him
gogogopher has gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish
gogogopher shmogogopher
gogogopher is the happy hunting ground of minds that have lost their balance
gogogopher feels more like he does now than he did when he got here
gogogopher just won't cooperate
gogogopher hopped a space ship for the planet of the slutty cheerleaders
gogogopher harmed several cute furry animals in the making of this song
gogogopher never just tries yodeling right away. he *builds* to that.
gogogopher is a man who screams when the church bells ring
gogogopher is nonplussed
gogogopher wants a flying car. how 'bout it, science?
gogogopher would dive into an icy river to save a solid gold baby
gogogopher has got his tinfoil hat on
gogogopher thinks the laser hat is at least a decade away
gogogopher wonders what the word "dots" looks like in braille
gogogopher is a lost cause
gogogopher can't sleep, clowns will eat him
gogogopher is worried a giant inflatable dog poo might fall on his house
gogogopher is comically overreaching
gogogopher shouts, "keep watching the skies! keep watching the skies!"
gogogopher urges you to spay or neuter your pet if it's not a gopher
gogogopher left the cake out in the rain
gogogopher has no definite color
gogogopher heard the call and he wrote it on the wall
gogogopher will never be welcome here high in the custerdome
gogogopher has seen rock city
"Don't forget to fart!"
What?
