Regretsy is into their second year.

I am a lover of satire, and I came across a great site called “Regretsy“, a parody site of “etsy“, which is a site for people who want to sell their arts and crafts. There are a lot of bad crafts out there sold by people who are often full of themselves (you have to visit the site to get the full effect), which regretsy features and pokes fun of, as well as a lot of goods on Etsy that look manufactured, and possibly done in a sweatshop, and are often sold more cheaply at other websites.

Regretsy, a site led by a media personality well-known in the southwest of United States (April Winchell), has something of a cult following, and has a sharp wit and a gift for writing to be sure. There are now over the past two years a whole host of in-jokes as well as the motto “Club Fuckery For Life” (often abbreviated as “CF4L”) which has now become part of a new subdomain of the Regretsy website.  The CF4L site is password protected, but you must look through the Regretsy site to find the password, which changes from week to week. People who couldn’t figure out the password are given a random insult (such as “fat jealous loser”, poking fun at some of the invective hurled at Regretsy by some Etsy members), along with the incorrect password you entered. My first two guesses were wrong, and I noticed when I logged in I was variously called a Douche Canoe and a Craftard by their random insult bot. Charmed!

Here is April Winchell acting like a craftard on Martha Stewart. This video is in 3GP format, so it may not play on all devices. You can click this link to download the file and play it on a VLC player. Link to install VLC on Windows.

Visits: 110

[Audio] Crappy Album Covers #316 — More Commercial Tie-ins

An example of Commercial Tie-Ins: This is possibly a record given to Michelin Tire salesmen in order to give the salesmen something to say to their customers by way of promoting the tires. Here is a track from their promotional material, from about 1960, though it may not have come from this particular album. Kudos to Bunk Strutts at Tacky Raccoons for bringing this to my attention.
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This is from one of my old posts. I post it again because I have found a soundtrack from such albums courtesy of April Winchell.

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Visits: 193

Crappy Album Covers #272 — Lone Ranger References

I’ve heard it all since my childhood… The Lone Drycleaner, and others. But here is “Metal Rap” from a group called Lone Rager, released no later than 1984.

This is metal, so while it goes against my no-metal policy, it is not a shocking cover as you can see … Just stupid.

A Lone Rager vid appears below.

And here is the Lone Arranger. This 1980 LP by Ernest Gusella must have been where Russell Oliver got his ideas from (see video below).

The 10 tracks of experimental/Jazz music have titles such as “Body Art Disco”, and “Pissin’ in the Snow”. You might want to play this on your second date at the very earliest.

Here is Metal RAPsody by Lone Rager:

Ta da!!! Here is Russell Oliver, the Loan Arranger:

And here is an Air Farce satire on Russell Oliver:

Visits: 112

[Video] The Politics of Dancing I: The Hambone

This video gallery started as a tribute to those talented enough with rhythm to do The Hambone properly. To see most of the performances on YouTube, it would have appeared to be a pasttime of redneck white Southerners, but this is so far from the case, that I have to conclude that everyone is into it.

In the American South, it’s called The Hambone; in the North, it’s called The Hand Jive; in West Africa where it originated, it’s called The Juba Dance, a relative of the tap dance. It is an art involving lots of clapping, body slapping, and other artfully noisy uses of the hands. The Juba Dance, a dance which involves both hand percussion on the body as well as toe tapping, was brought to The States during the antebellum period where slaves were not allowed to use drums or other instruments for fear it would be used as a method of communication.

But once blacks started doing it, it quickly caught on among whites, where it became known as “The Hambone”. NCAA basketball coach Bo Ryan explains how he learned The Hambone while attending grade school in Philadelphia:

Now throw in some vocal noise and hand farting, and you have a comic act by The Hambone Brothers on the popular ’70s TV show “Hee Haw”, seen here with Roy Clarke:

Steve Hickman throws in some mouth popping and seems to slap himself in the head several times, to the amusement of many giggling children and their parents:

I thought I would save the best for last. Samuel Hicks hails from North Carolina and was just doing the hambone in front of a relative’s video camera in the early 90s. He is so fast, one may be led to believe that those aren’t really hands and more like bionic prosthetic devices:

Next in this series: The Hand Jive

Visits: 133