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Hep the Hepcat (December 1946)

From the Library of Congress: Caption from Down Beat: Probably no dance band ever has played to so many empty tables consistently as the Sam Donahue ork [orchestra] during the recent double booking with Lionel Hampton at the Aquarium. The operators decreed that Sam should play afternoons, and the place isn’t open in the afternoon!…

The Media’s ‘Post-Advertising’ Future

Nationally and locally, the media (whether profit or non-profit) continue their significant transformation: the decline of print, the rise of (interactive) digital media, and the collapse of a middle-of-the-road partnership of boosterism between mediocre newspapers and middling officials. Print’s doomed, and so is digital that merely repeats the same banal style of contemporary print. Traditional…

Friday Catblogging: Cat Mummies

Amanda Erickson reports Archaeologists have discovered dozens of cat mummies in an ancient Egyptian tomb: On Saturday, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities announced that a team of archaeologists had uncovered dozens of mummified cats, along with 100 wooden cat statues and a bronze bust of Bastet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of cats. The artifacts, found in a tomb…

We’re Going to Need a Bigger Cartoon

In 1865, cartoonist Oscar Harpel drew A Proper Family Re-Union, depicting notorious American traitors Benedict Arnold and Jefferson Davis drinking a treason toddy of Satan’s creation. I’ll not presume to make the theological claim that Trump will, in fact, one day find himself in the company of those three, but as a political matter, America’s going…

Happy Independence Day

In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the…

Martin Luther King, Jr. on Jazz

  God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations. Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s…