Etc. and Bullshit

It figures the tabloid report of Jackie O. claiming on tape LBJ had something to do with her husband's assassination is a bunch of bullshit.

The Kennedy family always accepted the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald alone killed the president. All the evidence points to it, after all.
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Another Elvis Presley mystery has been solved:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's a good clip.

News

The pedestrian/cyclist bridge being built over Barnett Road in Medford, Oregon, will be done in July. It will be great to be able to bicycle almost nonstop from Central Point to southern Ashland, a total of 21 miles one way.

Eventually the bike path will be extended north, but that'll take years.
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Elvis Presley has been gone nearly 34 years, but the love affair Las Vegas has had with him still continues, even as Las Vegas appears to be dying on the vine.

It's a really good article, published on Valentine's Day:

Greene remembers the Elvis of those first shows as a nice, lovable kid who simply wasn’t in his element with the dressed-up nightclub crowd.

Wearing “a baseball jacket,” Presley looked like he had just wandered in “from the parking lot,” Greene recalls. Greene told Presley’s manager, Col. Tom Parker, that Elvis needed to dress to impress Las Vegas.

Greene even made fun of his opening act, drawing loud laughter from the audience. Presley laughed along with them.

But not everyone who saw the show thought Elvis was joke fodder.

“Bing Crosby was in the audience, and he told me Elvis would be the biggest star in show business,” Greene says. “Evidently, he saw something I didn’t see.”

When Elvis Met Nixon

It was a very special day in the Oval Office 39 years ago when Elvis Presley met Richard Nixon. The above is a video report about the meeting. This is the link to the story.

Egil Krogh wrote a good book about this meeting called The Day Elvis Met Nixon. I have a copy of this book somewhere among my thousand-plus books in my library.

For years the USPS sold the 24 black-and-white, 8X10 glossies of the meeting. The photos are from the National Archives. I have 18 of the 24. I bought what I believed were the best ones of the meeting.

An online exhibit of the meeting is at this link from the National Archives.

Miscellaneous News

Singer Tony Martin, 96, is still going strong and is still performing, while the author of the piece shits on Elvis on Elvis's birthday in order to build up Martin.

As some of the commenters to the piece noted, Presley's voice was NOT "shot"; his voice was great right up to the end.
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So what happened to the late mobster John Gotti's neighbor a few months after the neighbor accidentally killed Gotti's 12-year-old son?
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Neil Diamond, Eat Your Heart Out

Elvis did "Sweet Caroline" better:

Breakfast of Champions

By now everybody knows the outrageously huge amount of food Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps eats when he is in training. It would make a normal person gag:

— three fried egg sandwiches with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions, and mayo
— one five-egg omelets
— a bowl of grits
— three slices of French toast with powdered sugar
— three chocolate chip pancakes
— two cups of coffee

Of course he burns all of that off.

And since it is Elvis Day and the end of Elvis Week, I thought I'd pass along his diet (article is from 2007).

Speaking of Dirtbag Goldman,

here is yet another YouTube of Goldman, this one of a British 1989 broadcast shortly after the publication of the paperback edition of his trashy The Lives of John Lennon:







God, what a dirtbag he was. As for Hunter Davies, he was the author of the only authorized Beatles biography. He is 72 years old now.

Another clip, made around 1990 or so, is one where he gets the shit kicked out of him by a hostile audience:



Here is an old New York Times article about Goldman right after publication of his shitty Lennon book and here is his obituary.

Miscellaneous News

I went to Great Basin National Park last year and posted some pictures of Lehmann Cave, which was a great tour; the person was very knowledgeable. If I ever get the conversion equipment to digitalize the video 8 of the tour, I'd like to post it here.

Here are some pictures of the park.

The remoteness of the park, just a few miles from the Utah border and some 70 or so miles east of Ely, makes it one of the least visited of all the national parks. But it's really pretty.

I hope to be back in the near future.
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Note to trolls: If you start giving me a rash of shit about the Sinclair story, you will have your posts deleted, and deleted, and deleted. I won't take that bullying shit here.

I have said I am on the fence about his allegations, but the over-the-top, illegal antics of so-called Obama supporters against him are pushing me to believe his original allegations.
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Man, it is sure fun and games to ridicule the so-called "fat."

Can you imagine somebody putting a computer game up bashing blacks or Jews? Or even the disabled?

Sure, people should find it funny.
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Add running into pedestrians to Bob Novak's list of sins.
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One of my favorite blogs out there is one devoted to classic television, Classic Television Showbiz. I thought I'd post the link to a series of YouTubes of an old Tom Snyder Tomorrow Show broadcast featuring one of the sleaziest biographers of all time, the late, ungreat Albert Goldman (1927-1994). This interview came out at the time Goldman published his absolutely shitty biography of Elvis Presley, and the sleazeball insisted the audience had to leave the studio when he came on. He was a total shitbag. Slime just drips off of him. The viewer needs to take a shower after watching him. Goldman had a thinly-veiled envy for Presley. He claimed Presley had a low I.Q., which was just a stupid comment on its face. What his remark did was disguise his contempt for Elvis, who, with just a high school education, did more in his life than 99.9999999999...percent of all of the people in the world who had far greater education. That's what pissed off this useless shitbag Goldman. Furthermore, Elvis was from the South, and how dare a poor southerner actually have a huge influence on popular culture. Goldman had much the same regional contempt for Elvis as the Beltway media mob had for Bill Clinton. Elvis had no pretensions, yet he was one of the few people who actually made this world a better place. This was just too much for somebody like Goldman, who made his living leeching off the dead, since he couldn't cut it as an academic.

I remember an interview he gave I believe on KGO radio at around this time shitting all over Elvis Presley. At that point he was working on a biography of John Lennon, and as I remember it, Goldman was actually bragging up Lennon while continuing to shit all over Elvis. He made a contrast between how good Lennon was and how shitty Elvis was.

Well, we know how all of THAT turned out. Goldman's 1988 book about John Lennon was even worse than his sleaze job on Elvis. Goldman was hard at work on a hit job on Jim Morrison, but the Lizard King got his revenge and was spared as Goldman died en route to London. The book was never finished.

According to Wikipedia, Goldman had a daughter but never married the mother. A great guy all around.
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"My Way"

From Aloha from Hawaii, of course.

Obituaries.

I thought I'd include a somewhat brief (for the NYT) obituary of singer Robert Goulet, who died yesterday.

In addition to third wife Vera and his three children, he had two grandkids.

For those curious about my previous posts about the late singer, here you will find them, including the post with the famous passage from Elvis: What Happened?

I thought it was worth repeating.

This writer didn't overlook the Elvis story:

He earned a footnote in the saga of Elvis Presley: Mr. Goulet was performing on television when Presley famously blasted his TV screen with a handgun.

A possible explanation for Elvis's negative opinion of Goulet is here.

Supposedly this is the gun in question.

Apparently Goulet himself was puzzled over the incident:

To some music fans he was best known for a performance in which he did not participate: Elvis Presley once put a bullet through a TV broadcast of a Goulet performance.

Goulet always professed bewilderment over the incident, saying he and Presley got on so well that Presley gave him a ring.

Go figure.

When Singer Janis Martin Died

the other day, I thought about the 1950s record release of her and Elvis. They didn't sing together, of course, as Elvis almost never did duets. It remains one of the world's rarest records:





Here is what she said about it:

"When I left RCA, supposedly I owed them $3 300. Back then when you signed the contract they paid for your sessions and expenses. But when the royalties started comin' in, they took everything off the top. I wasn't even aware that this Janis and Elvis record even existed until I was contacted by Edward Bayes from Millersville, Maryland. He had looked me up and invited me to his house to be on the Larry Angelo show, a local show in Baltimore. That was the first time I had seen the disc. I started makin' inquiries and the way I understand it, they released this disc in South Africa to try to recoup the money. It was released on a Friday and by Saturday afternoon, Colonel Tom had somehow gotten word and called RCA and made 'em pull it. Because #1: NOBODY performs with Elvis. #2. It was called "Janis and Elvis" and not "Elvis and Janis". I met a man in Hamburg, Germany who paid $2 700 for a mint copy. It's so rare because it was only on the market Friday and maybe half a day on Saturday (in South Africa only). That's the only ones that exist. RCA has re-released it legitimately in France a few years ago. It was bootlegged here in the States" [Janis Martin]

From this link.

As the World Turns.

This woman had a hell of a 60th birthday present, and she couldn't return it for a refund:

A PET camel that killed a 60-year-old woman in a bizarre attack in Queensland's outback had been given to her as a birthday present from her family.

The 10-month-old animal knocked the woman to the ground, stomped on her head and then lay on top of her yesterday at her sheep and cattle property near Mitchell, about 600km west of Brisbane.

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I thought I'd post this link to photos of Elvis.

Just because I feel like it.
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If you're poor and neglect your kids, you get in trouble with the law, but if you're a zillionaire CEO, you're considered a credit to your corporation.
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This Week

is you-know-what, and it's hard to believe it's been thirty years.

Larry King Live has an interview with Priscilla Presley at Graceland. She is talking about what a great sense of humor Elvis had.

That was one of the things that made him so great. He never took himself too seriously.

He'd be amazed the fuss over him has continued 30 years after he died. He'd laugh, and then he'd sneer that sneer.

I can remember when I heard the news of his death. I was returning home from work at the summer job I had at a motel in Medford, Oregon, when I heard it on the radio. It was a shock, just like losing a member of one's family.