Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Continue reading →

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our ongoing celebration of various forms of Pulp Fiction, here is Jack Webb (before his Dragnet days) as Jeff Regan, in The Man With The Key episode of International Detective Bureau, in 1948 (30:18, Real Player). Here are some of Jeff’s notable lines from tonight’s show:

• It had a tired look, like an old lady who had been moving furniture.
• He looked as happy as a sword swallower with the hiccups.
• I put the key in my pocket, but it felt hot, like a dynamite stick with a short fuse.
• I felt about as popular as a bald-headed chorus girl: nobody made a play.
• I began to feel kind of relieved, like a flag-pole sitter when the wind died down.
• I began to get an uneasy feeling, like a bubble-dancer with a slow leak.
• They found him full of bullet holes: I guess he finally got a cure for that cough.
• I had about as much chance as a violin player with no chin.
• I got kind of nervous, like a hula dancer in a forest fire.
• She was taking everything in, like a Hoover vacuum cleaner on a dirty rug.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio.     Tonight for your delectation, here’s an old favourite of ours from our LP collection in the studio: Jazz Blues Fusion, an album that features John Mayall, Freddy Robinson, Larry Taylor, Ron Selico, Blue Mitchell, and Clifford Solomon, and which was recorded during two live concerts in Boston & New York, in 1971.

Jazz Blues Fusion ~ Mayall & al ~ 1971
Boston
1.	Country Road	6:55
2.	Mess Around	2:40
3.	Good Time Boogie	8:20
4.	Change Your Ways	3:25
New York
5.	Dry Throat	6:20
6.	Exercise in C Major for Harmonica &c	8:10
7.	Got To Be This Way	6:15

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) SDA Late Nite Radio.
Anyone who has ever stumbled across MTV – in a restaurant, for example – has heard the sort of music discharged by poodle-haircut-sporting wannabe-Satan types who clearly spend too much time in front of a mirror. Puffing out their lips and sneering like tattooed, cross-dressing derelicts, they wear their uber-coolness like a self-inflicted injury as they blast twenty-thousand watts of dehumanizing noise to drugged-up kids with STDs and nose rings. Oddly, they never seem to take any pleasure in performing their music.
Tonight we take a happy joyride in the opposite direction, and hand the stage over to the enduring one-man phenomenon known as Walter Ostanek, aka Canada’s Polka King. Flying blissfully under, over and around popular music’s radar, this legendary performer has been known throughout his more than fifty-year career for his ability to lift the spirits of his fans, many of whom are of European immigrant stock, with his live performances and his over eighty high-quality records and CDs . His Slovenian-style (sometimes called Cleveland-style) polkas evoke good food and good times with family, friends, and neighbours, and are always delivered with a smile. We’re talking about a man who knows what side his bread is buttered on:

To Walter Ostanek, the title, “Canada’s Polka King” is much more than just a name. It is a special honour that carries with it an obligation to a special dedication and a promise to his fans and followers that wherever and whenever the Walter Ostanek Band appears in public, the band will do their utmost to please the audience and keep them happy.

That they surely do. Here then, performing with his crack band, is three time Grammy Award winner, International Polka Hall of Fame inductee, member of the Order of Canada, and proud owner of Ostanek’s Music Centre in St. Catherines Ontario – which carries a wide range of musical instruments including a selection of quality button and piano accordions, and whose friendly staff will walk you through the process of finding the right accordion for your price range and skill level – Walter Ostanek – he’s the fellow in the white shirt on the left – as he makes three or four generations of folks forget their troubles on the dance floor with the merry musical announcement that yes, indeed, it’s Polka Time!
You are invited to type out your merry Reader Tips in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here are Del Porter, Marshall Smith, Ray Johnson, & Dwight Snyder, as the Foursome, performing There’ll Be Some Changes Made and When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’ ¤ in 1937 (5:17). The Foursome toured with Glenn Miller and recorded with Bing Crosby & Dick Powell, and were often backed on drums by a young Spike Milligan (which helps explain some of the visual items in the montage accompanying this audio).

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the return of our ongoing series of SDA distinguished lecture, documentary & interview symposia. This afternoon, for your delectation and to restart our series, here from the University of California at San Diego’s GuestBook productions is Francis Harry Compton Crick, OM, FRS & 1962 Nobel Laureate in Medicine, in conversation with Nick Spitzer, Professor of Biology at UCSD, on the matter of Investigations of Human Consciousness ¤, in 1999 (26:10). Dr. Crick was, at the time of this conversation, the J. W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Today’s conversation re-establishes a number of the topics we intend to continue exploring in future symposia.
 

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) SDA Late Nite Radio.
Recently there’s been a bit of a behind-the-scenes scandal at the LNR studios: one particular commenter, Loretta, claims that another commenter – let’s call her “Carol” – has been boasting about having an affair with Loretta’s husband. A rather steamed Loretta writes, via email,

“She’s absolutely full of it. When my husband picks up trash, he puts it in a garbage can. And that’s what Carol looks like to me – pitiful trash. If she comes anywhere near me I swear I’m going to grab her by the hair and lift her off of the ground.”

“I’m not saying my husband is a saint – ’cause he ain’t – and that he won’t flirt with other women. What I am saying is that if Carol doesn’t back off I’m going to show her what a real woman is. She thinks she’s hot stuff? Well, if she’s got the guts, she should say to my face all this stuff she’s been saying to other people.”

“She’s been boasting about this supposed mutual attraction between her and my husband; well, mark my word, if she doesn’t shut up she’s going to find herself on a one-way trip to Fist City.”

I felt it was in the interests of public safety to publish the warning. Now, leave me out of it.
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation, here is the oldest symphony orchestra in the world, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, performing Johannes Brahms‘ Symphony N° 3, II, III, & IV, in F Major, Op. 90, Kurt Masur conducting, from the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, in 1991 (33:30). This is, I think, overall, an excellent performance and presentation: audio, video, & production. (It’s also nice to see an audience that knows how to wait for a tune to properly end before applauding.) If you’re short of time, you might like to start reception of this transmission at the beginning of part III, and then, of course, things really take off in part IV.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

For those who have been following our series of photographs about SDA Late Nite Radio, including our studio, transmitter, maintenance shop, and Mrs. Clarence Upton listening to our show in Bueler, Iowa, here’s a photograph of the new equipment we’ve acquired in order to deploy the “boxed apothegm” SDA LNR feature we’ve recently introduced, as shown above. The spittoon in the photograph is, of course, standard equipment.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

Welcome to the Wednesday (EBD) SDA Late Nite Radio.
In The Adventure of English, Melvin Bragg’s fascinating and highly-readable book about the origins of our language, the author describes how an English speaker who hears someone speaking in Frisian, our nearest ancestral language, may get an odd, persistent feeling that he is this close to understanding what’s being said. Many of the words are almost identical (“goose” is goes, “butter” is buter, “sleep” is sliepe, “sea” is see, “cheese” is tsiis, and so on) but are simply pronounced a bit differently, and in that sense, he notes, Frisian is not so very different from England’s regional Geordie dialect, for example, and only slightly less comprehensible.
Stanley Unwin, tonight’s featured performer, was a British comedic actor with a peculiar and artful talent for speaking in a way that left listeners similarly hovering on the edge of comprehension. His unusual word constructions all sounded vaguely familiar, and he was so reassuringly English in his mannerisms and delivery that listeners who – inevitably, and by design, of course – could never quite parse the always convincing-sounding point he was making always felt that the shortfall must be their own fault, and that they would surely understand him if only they listened a bit more closely. Unwin traced the origins of his “strange but strangely comprehensible lexicon” to the day when his mother, who had tripped on the way home from work, told him that she’d “‘falolloped’ in front of a tram and grazed her ‘kneeclappers.'” His own use of language would later show that same sort of Joycean creativity: Elvis “wasp-waist and swivel-hippy” Presley, for example, was “tilty hibbers’n stick out the torso’n wobble both knee-clappers’n singit…”
Tonight’s selection, from the British film Carry On Regardless, is an excerpt of a scene in which Unwin’s baffling argot results in him being mistaken for a job applicant when he is in fact the business’ landlord trying to tell the owners that he has found another tenant. Watch the hilarious facial expressions of Miss Cooling at 2:37, as she hovers in a state of mild, diligence-induced torment: she doesn’t have the first clue as to what Unwin is saying, but his tone and cadence and and intonation are so eloquent-sounding as to leave her troubled by the possibility that he is speaking quite comprehensibly, and that she’s just not picking up on it – a self-doubt surely validated by Kenneth Williams’ character’s casual ability to precisely restate Unwin’s – apparently clear – position.
Here it is then, for your amusement: Stanley Unwin baffles the Carry On Team.
The thread is open for your Reader Tips.