The life of a park squirrel is pretty easy compared to its cousins who are forced to share land with angry homeowners who sometimes own weapons of sciurine destruction. But there is a small price for that city protection… namely, some kind of marking and tracking system that leaves many of the park’s furry denizens with weird looking ears. When I post a photo of a marked squirrel, oftentimes one of my readers will chime in that it must have “earned” its ear notch in a fight with another squirrel. While that happens a lot, these notches I catch in the park squirrels are way too clean and appear to have been deliberately made. I mean…. look at that perfectly rectangular hunk that this squirrel has missing from his left ear! He’d look pretty trendy on the emo scene, but I have a feeling he’s prefer to have not had the Van Gogh job done on him…
It’s time for us to put a little fun and whimsy into your normally dull Monday, as The Nest takes another small step towards the finish line in our Top 30 Novelty Songs Of All Time countdown! DJ Scratchy’s got her smiling face on for this week’s entry, while the Sponkies are checking their makeup and combing their manes. This post will save you 69% off the newsstand price…
#29. “The Cover Of ‘Rolling Stone'” – Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show
If your band name is some monstrosity like Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show, you’re pretty much expected to be some kind of novelty act. And that they were. Formed in the early 70’s, the entirety of Dr. Hook’s first two albums were goofy little curiosities written by Shel Silverstein. The first album spawned the unusual Top 5 hit “Sylvia’s Mother.” But it was the second album, Sloppy Seconds in 1972, that gave us the legendary tune the band will always be known for…
Even at the tender age of five years old, the counterculture bible known as Rolling Stone was a big enough deal to the world of rock and roll, that there was a feeling that one hadn’t truly “made it” until they appeared on its cover. “Cover” was a big enough success to make it up to #6 on the US charts, and as you might expect, with all the buzz it generated for the magazine… they did indeed put Dr. Hook on a future cover. Just maybe not quite how they had dreamed the big moment up…
I’m not sure mama would want five copies of this cartoony dreck…
But as it usually goes in the “what have you done for me lately?” music business… it doesn’t matter how many teenage blue eyed groupies you have, if you can’t stay on the charts, you end up in the discount rack like another can of beans. So after their third album completely bombed, the members of Dr. Hook decided to get out of the novelty song business, drop the silly Medicine Show from its name, and go on to become one of the kings of schlocky love songs in the late 70’s…. making them one of the rare bands that found commercial success under two completely different musical styles and personas.
The disco era needed a hell of a lot of love songs to get anyone in the mood…
Here’s a fun fact for my British readers! If you can’t get the YouTube video to play (as usual) due to petty copyright restrictions, well… it wouldn’t be the first time you couldn’t listen to “The Cover Of ‘Rolling Stone'” in the UK. When the song was originally released, the BBC banned it due to its infamous policy against songs giving free “advertisement” to brand name products. Only when some (ahem) clever BBC deejays decided to shout the name of the broadcaster’s own magazine “Radio Times” over every mention of “Rolling Stone” was it allowed on the air. And I’ll bet that sounded shitty…
Coca…. er, Cherry Cola, he got!
Come back next Monday for #28…. or as it will be known, the oldest song to ever be featured on The Nest’s Music Monday.
In just the two decades I have worked in retail, I have witnessed the holiday decorations category explode into previously unchartered territory that just seems to be consumer overkill. Light strands for Valentines Day? Yep. Patriotic masks for the Fourth of July? Only in America. Want a giant inflatable Jesus to greet the Easter Bunny on his big day? I’ll bet it’s out there. These holiday inflatable characters have been all the rage in recent years… and so it was on this subject that I happened upon these two seemingly mismatched, oversized lawn ornaments last October. Big scary Death and the comparatively tiny Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from the Ghostbusters movie. I don’t think you’d need to cross the streams to defeat that puny little thing. A stray lawn dart would probably save the world…
Not the most exciting photo in the world, is it? But there’s a reason I included it in this countdown… and that’s because I snapped it as a tribute to a beloved picture I took with my old 35mm camera on a trip to Chicago we made in 1989. That photo, which I haven’t seen in years and have no idea if it even exists anymore, was taken from a pedestrian bridge over one of the Chicago interstates near the Lincoln Park Zoo, and I thought the view of cars traveling up and down the highway from the overpass was pretty neat. The view in the photo above is of traffic on Interstate 44 from one of the windows at the World’s Largest McDonald’s in Vinita, Oklahoma… which is a restaurant in an overpass. There will be another photo from this location later in the countdown…
I had a to a lot of digging through my old squirrel photo archives during the process of creating my new countdown… and since due to a lot of shitty weather we’ve had this Spring I haven’t been getting many new squirrel photos at all, I was inspired to look for a few hidden gems from the past that never got their taste of Saturday Squirrel glory before. Like the shot of this cute little guy. My blog’s old timers may remember Foxy, the squirrel that was a common visitor to my yard in late 2013/early 2014. I’ve seen a number of squirrels with blonde tails before, but Foxy’s miscolored wagger was damn near a bright orange that made him absolutely unmistakable from the rest of the critters in my hood…
Cute little fellow, he was. I have a feeling he’ll turn up somewhere in the photo countdown, don’t you?
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