Celebrity hair jam--er, yum?

Jam made from Princess Diana's hair

JAM made from one of Princess Diana's hairs has been selling well at an art exhibition in London.
Sam Bompas, who founded catering company Bompas and Parr, says a tiny speck of the late Princess of Wales' hair has been infused with gin, then combined with milk and sugar to make the preserve, which tastes like condensed milk.

Mr Bompas says he bought the hair off eBay for $US10 ($12) from a US dealer who collects celebrity hair.

This works more as surrealism than food for a variety of reasons. First, the mention of jam with hair in it creates an unpleasant image of something not sanitary (I recall Davy Jones in The Monkees' film Head jokingly requesting a "glass of cold gravy with a hair in it", which made me viscerally grimace the same way--unclean!). But in this case--the hair in the jam is the point. It's supposed to be a minuscule amount, but this leads to a number of interesting cultural questions--

Is any hair the right amount to have in one's jam? And of course, does it matter that the person whose hair it was was a celebrity?

It's infused with gin (might I add, a very English spirit)--so does the alcohol sterilize the weirdness of it being "hair jam"?

And finally--just who is buying this? Because there are some definitely strange and intense people in this peculiar old world, some you might even say have stalkerly-intensity. Are there cults of Diana-worshippers, whose literal renderings of certain archetypes have poetically apotheosized Prince Charles' ex-wife into a goddess-figure whose very hair preserved in a jam (whose ingredient list actually seems a bit easily perishable) would serve as an agreeable sacrament for? Or are they just carefree memorabilia hounds snapping up the jars to sit next to the Royal Wedding hand-painted plates and other Anglophile tourist tat?

(At my darkest imaginings, I envision a solitary paparazzo, gutted with guilt, purchasing jar after jar through proxies and spending sad nights remembering the night she died while slathering the jam on stale crumpets and numbly swallowing each gobby mouthful part in penance and part in some sympathetic-magic urge to incorporate some of her nous into his own corpus and carry her like a cross of fat about his middle for the rest of his life.)

Or, you know, the the usual jam-fetishists. Gooseberries. Poblano chiles. Hair of deceased royalty. All in a day's collections.

It also works more as art because, of course, it's obviously going to depreciate in value once you pry the lid off. There is very little market for used jam. And I can't say I know of any market for used jam with hair in it.

The real down-side though, is with appraisal. All things considered, is it worth anyone's while to DNA-test a batch to see if it really has her hair? (Although this is pointless without a follicle tip I understand. Naturally, one can't expect that from hair purchased at auction and subsequently infused with gin. What a perfect crime for forgers! One could bootleg celebrity-hair jam from Fido's brush for a very profitable period of time.)

It's not exactly something that goes with my decor, personally, as I prefer more traditional objets d'art. Your purloined finger-bones assembled into bird-cages, and miniature books bound wholly in mouse ears. You know the sort of thing.

Jingle-riffic! I just want to go on about jingles.

Some of them are really good pieces of music--and some are just capricious, burrowing ear-worms. I thought I'd litter the brain of my casual wanderer-in with some memorable jingles.


First, I have to single out the work of Barry Manilow. There is not a single jingle-writer on this planet, to my mind, who was better or more influential. You can take or leave "Mandy". But you can not deny the influence of these:

State Farm:



(The "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there" is his--iconic. Used for years.)

Band-aid:

Like so many of these things, you can't find the good, original ad--the one with a very young John Travolta. Here's an '80's version:


Same song, basically.

I think it's actually disputed whether he was the Dr. Pepper jingle-writer on the internets--Wikipedia says Jake Holmes wrote the actual song. Anyway, it was a kick-ass jingle, so enough about Manilow:



He also didn't do the "You Deserve a Break Today" McDonalds' jingle, but it's still interesting:




how just the "You deserve a break" bit could be inserted in differently-themed jingles.

Here's just a really neat iconic ad:



Now, it pre-imagines the "Real thing" campaign, it's multi-national, it's hippie-riffic, and in a way, it tingles the same "universality bone" that this Youtube thingie "Where the Hell is Matt?" did. It's water with caramel coloring, sugar, citric acid, caffeine and flavoring, and just incidentally tastes awesome with rum or whiskey. It's not going to give us world peace. But still, nice ads.

Here's one that always gets to me:



Aaron Neville, give me back those sentimental tears you jerked out of me over undie-fabric! This jingle is the equivalent of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof. It makes me unaccountably misty.

Yeah, Richie Havens, you too:



Are we selling the brotherhood of man, or clothes that you will totally "f" up in the laundry inside of five washings, amirite?

One more:



The fabric of my life is spandex. Let's just keep that straight. Lots of elastic and spandex.

Anyway, let's devolve to the obvious:



Have you ever seen a Weinermobile on the road? I have! It makes one so weirdly satisfied: I have seen a Weinermobile. Now I can die, fulfilled. You wouldn't actually die right then. But still. It's like a four-leaf clover or something. You wish you could make a Polaroid of the Weinermobile just to have it wash out in thirty years like many of my baby pictures did. It's a big f'ing deal.

Anyway--that was me, reminiscing about jingles. One of the things that occupy my brain.

The Other, Other White Meat

Strangely enough isn't "Baby!" Actually, it's a beast that actually doesn't exist. And the brilliant advert for unicorn meat from ThinkGeek shouldn't have led to cease and desist notices....from the pork guys.

But apparently, this is a thing that happened in the real world. And also, just about the time pork was going to shed the "other white meat" slogan, anyway.

IRL there is no unicorn meat. And considering the similarity to horses, it would probably be red meat, anyway. So the whole thing is a bit foolish, no?

More miserable earworm t.v. themes--

Seems I must have mentally blocked-out a few!



Did you know that you can sing the lyrics to Gilligans Island to the song "Ghost Riders in the Sky"? Go ahead, try it. Now that you know that, your brain won't ever stop trying to do that. You're welcome. Also, almost all Emily Dickinson poems fit "The Yellow Rose of Texas". (You know you want to--"I like to see it lap the miles and lick the valleys up...." I learned that from the post-WKRP Howard Hesseman show Head of the Class.)

Oh--here's a song I had in my head like, a couple weeks ago:



Someone brought up the show Small Wonder in conversation at work because we have a co-worker named Vicki. The theme is so weirdly retro and Lawrence-Welk-ish to be matched with a show whose premise was basically that artificial intelligence in the form of a small girl could eventually pass a Turing test. I don't think the show ever really acknowledged that the idea of a very life-like small child was kind of creepy in an "uncanny valley" kind of way. Also, the idea of a super-strong child-like intelligence was usually used to accentuate the ironic physical strength of a robotic construct diguised as a child for comedic purposes, while more fascinating questions regarding what really is a sentient being were left unsatisfactorally answered--also, Vicky usually wore the same dress all the time. That's very like a robot, especially if she never had BO. A dead giveaway, if you ask me.



What is worse than having the TMNT theme in your head?

I'll tell you what--you could have Oshikuru in your head. "Oh oh oh oh--Oshikuru!" Yeah. You can't unhear that. That isn't even a real theme song to a real show. Damn you, Two and a Half Men! Damn your stupid souls to hell!


Oh, this video leads to a whole jukebox--


I Dream of Jeannie is not a rerun I often watch--but I've had it stuck in my head after watching "Ferris Bueller" (which is the first movie in which I ever saw Charlie Sheen, who is in Two and A Half Men--he's at the end, as a juvenile delinquent who the Jennifer Grey character meets in the police station. Everything flows. Everything.) I like this link because it leads to some eighties-ishness.

Okay--next thing I post is retro, and well, this is the words to the Andy Griffith Show:



You can't unhear that, either. Again, you're welcome. Isn't that better than just whistling? And won't that be stuck in your head, too?



A lot of my generation drifted aimlessly through life, taking drugs, binge-drinking, never really fitting in anywhere. It's because of Saturday morning programming, and stuff like this in our heads. Will Ferrell is a very talented comedian who nonetheless felt compelled to do movies based on Bewitched and Land of the Lost. Both movies sucked--I blame the brainwashing from the evil movie themes.

For what it's worth, I'm glad I don't have access to the Star Trek Theme with words. That would probably wreck me.

Check out this fanny pack--

Okay--I have a fashionista bent to me, which is why I needed to link to this picture of Louis Vuitton's version of the fanny pack. I copped the pic from here. There's a lot of bad things happening here--from the typical LV status-bag pattern, to the multi-colored touches here and there to add "interest--to the fact that this thing is mostly brown and pink, which means the designer of this bag hasn't the slightest idea what people wear fanny packs with.

I don't actually sport a fanny pack, myself--ever. First, it goes around the waist, and I am not a fancier of belts. But also--fanny? Okay, a fanny-bag doesn't need to drape the fanny (Ugg, why not say tush? Or rear? Or even ass? Arse-pack. Sounds lovelier already, doesn't it?) But where else should it go? The hip? How many ladies want their hips accentuated? Draping the lower abdomen? Who exactly wants a belly "drape?"

Truthfully, the fanny-pack is a functional item generally in use with sport clothing for joggers and speed-walkers, or other casual gear for people getting their "mall" on at low-end shopping venues. It's not really what you think of as a higher-end or status item. It should be understated, neutral, probably black and nylon, if it should even be done at all. This fanny pack is....simply wrong. I think it might be one of those high-heeled sneaker sort of things. You know--expensive irony. I can't really recommend it unless your income is commensurately humorous.

Where do they get these toys?

This was done with LEGO.


PVC Ping-pong ball gun:



Making robots?



Sometimes the best toys are the ones you make yourself:

Like Steampunk IronMan:



And so on.

Most miserable "earworm" t.v. themes.

I get these stuck in my head all of the time. I partially blame repetition--if I've listened to a t.v. theme song a few hundred times, it's no wonder I've worn a groove in my head that coughs up one of these tunes on "instant replay" whenever I hear some key word or phrase. Also I blame age. I'm just not forming synaptic connections at the rate I used to. And then again, these songs are too often deviously crafted with no mere "hooks"--they've got tentacles!

This is the reason I whistle when I work, even when I am not happy.

This is the Three's Company theme performed by Richard Cheese:



"Life is a frolic and laughter is calling for you...."

For many years, the following line "Down at our rendez-vous" was incomprehensible to me. I could not make it out. I suspected there was French involved. But it's a theme song--you don't ask people "Say, um, do you have any idea what they're singing at this point?" This is why I am glad the Internet was invented, so that people would put up whole web-sites with lyrics to even t.v. themes. I truly think kids will learn about the birds and the bees this way, and not just about t.v. theme show lyrics from the '70's. I'm optimistic about our species' survival, now.

The WKRP theme:



Man, I just had this stuck in my head when I wrote about the Big Butter Jesus fire on my other blog--I found a link to the story from WKRC and my head instantly supplied "in Cincinaa--aaa-tiiii". And a persistent earworm was born. I like this theme song because it's kind of a nice soft-rock song, and the "in Cincinaa-aa-tii" bit echoes the kind of call sign jingles that used to be more popular with FM stations.

Now, I haven't had this stuck in my head--lately:



I like this one because it tells the premise of the show in a nice way. John Sebastian, who did this song, is a little better known as a founder of the Lovin' Spoonful if, like me, you are either old or really into '60's rock. You can see him giving an instruction on one of the Spoonful's hits here. I provide this commentary just because, you know, history is good.

The Good Times theme might count as social commentary. But it's also catchy:



Listen to the lyrics. It's about being ripped off and hassled. But it's so bouncy! But no--listen to the lyrics. Why are there some people just getting by? "Temporary lay-offs!" "Easy credit rip-offs!" It also has some history: hangin' in a chow line!

Just saying.



You know, I started watching The Facts of Life right about when I was supposed to be learning them? I also right around then finished Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Whether the show was The Facts of Life, Golden Girls or Designing Women, I found myself trying to figure out who was "the Meg", "the Jo", "the Beth" and "the Amy". This is a stupid game that I invite anyone to play. Obviously, Blair is a shallower "Meg" (consider the "Vanity Fair" chapter of Little Women). Jo is Jo--which makes me think the writers of the show had Little Women in mind, and Natalie is Beth because....um fat? In the '80's you just weren't supposed to be. And Tootie was ebullient and talented, so she was Amy.

Does this theory carry over to Sex in the City? I could never stand that show, but maybe someone else could fit the characters into Little Women for me.



It is so cheesy. So, so, so cheesy. I don't recall either Love Boat or Fantasy Island really ever being so popular in syndication--they owed a lot to being in that one, magical time slot, in a magical time when people watched really amazingly schlocky things. It would be neat to watch Love Boat now for the t.v. history, though. Legendary has-beens found love on the Leto deck.

Let me leave you with a great ear-worm--an actually good piece of music from t.v. themes that is a pretty neat ear-worm:

The Brian Setzer Orchestra does the Hawaii Five O Theme Song:



That's awesome!




Okay--bonus:



Which reminds me that whenever I get around to seeing the A-Team movie, I'll probably put the review here.