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Intro. song: Great White Way Orchestra “Yes! We Have No Bananas”
Outro song: Oliver Naylor’s Orchestra “Roaring Twenties”
Notes:
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Intro. song: “The John Scopes Trial”
Outro song: Vernon Dalhart “The Prisoner’s Song”
Notes: Someone just wrote me the following interesting note…
Have you read the book Panzram: A Journal of Murder? I just got done reading it and thought you might find one of my notes interesting which has to do with Mencken…
*Henry Lesser (Jewish prison guard) sent panzram’s written material to H. L. Mencken who wrote him a letter in return saying “This is one of the most amazing documents I have ever read.”
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Intro. song: Bernard Ette “Yes! We Have No Bananas”
Outro song:
Notes: “I realize what life must have been in Judea 1925 years ago. No wonder the Romans finally bumped off the son of Joseph. After an hour on the main street, listening to the bawling, I feel like loading a cannon with the rejecta of the adjacent hogs (Sus scrofa) and letting fly. The thing is genuinely fabulous.
I have stored up enough material to last me 20 years.”
-From a letter my HLM regarding the Scopes Trail
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Intro. song: Paul Godwin “Yes! We Have No Bananas”
Outro song: Art Landry “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue”
Notes: No notes that I can think of at the moment. Help spread the word about these podcasts, will ya?
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Intro. song: The Pied Pipers “Yes! We Have No Bananas”
Outro song: Chick Straun “Don’t Bring Lulu!”
Notes: I’m least satisfied with the recording of the Mencken piece in this episode. I’d recorded it entirely 3 separate times and the 3rd was shortly before I posted it (the first episode to not be posted right after midnight the day of). I had to record it hastily because I’d blown out the levels on all the prior recordings, but this one suffers from plosive problems (the mic picking up the breath of air when you make “p” sounds, etc.) and various “mouth noises”. Because this is one of my favorite reports, I may rerecord it at a later date and update the file, but this’ll have to do for now.
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Intro. song: “Can’t Make a Monkey Out of Me”
Outro song: Sippie Wallace “Devil Dance Blues”
Notes: In the intro to the Mencken piece, the joke is that the book became a huge success, and the film is completely lost. Nerdy, yes, but the jokes just go downhill from here.
The two songs featured in this episode were supposed to be on the next one, but in all my arranging it seems I’ve switched them around. Not that you’d know that without me mentioning it here.
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Intro. song: Sam Lanin “Yes! We Have No Bananas”
Outro song: Eddie Cantor “If You Knew Suzie”
Notes: Starting with this episode, I have “jokes” about corrections for the local newspaper. All of them are pulled from the paperback “Press Boners”, edited by Earle Temple. It was printed in 1967, a paperback original from Pocket Books.
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Intro. song: Green Bros. Novelty Orchestra “Yes! We Have No Bananas”
Outro song: Lee Morse “Yes, Sir! That’s My Baby!”
Notes: Thanks to AmSci, ChristianChildAbuse, Diabologue and Cosmodromium and everyone on facebook who “shared” the show link for the support. Please blog, tweet, “share” and digg these shows.
I haven’t given historical background info in the blog posts because I’m working under the assumption that visitors/listeners will at least have a basic understanding of the event. If not, or if you wanted to know more, they just recently invented a research tool called “the internet”, it’s cool, I’m on it.
I do want to make one additional note though. I just obtained the first 5 issues of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s “The American Mercury” (Jan. – Mar. 1924) . In Vol.1 No. 2 there is an article debunking osteopathy, and it began with the following quote:
Despite our remarkable advance of knowledge, nonsense is ever becoming bolder and more rampant: it is pre-eminently a time of fads and crazes, and the question as to how people are to be brought to their senses grows urgent. - W. Duncan McKim
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Welcome to the first installation of an ongoing series of reports on the Scopes Trial in Dayton Tennesee in 1925, exactly 85 years ago! The trial was the first in the US to be broadcast on the radio. Those recordings no longer exist, but we will be releasing a podcast every day that Mencken published an article in the Baltimore Sun. Relive the trial in real time through the words of one of America’s greatest and most prolific writers.
Intro. song: Coon-Sanders Nighthawks “Hong Kong Dream Girl”
Outro song: Ted Weems “Somebody Stole My Gal”
Notes: The radio was a new medium. I’ve had a hard time finding examples of radio shows from the time, but these podcasts aren’t created to be true to the period. All of the music was from 1925 or prior, and were popular hits. The trial itself was broadcast live, an historical first, but no recordings of it exist.
June 29th – Homo Neanderthalensis
July 9th – Sickening Doubts About Publicity
July 10th – Impossibility of Obtaining Fair Jury
July 11th – Trial as Religious Orgy
July 13th – Souls Need Reconversion Nightly
July 14th – Darrow’s Eloquent Appeal
July 15th – Law and Freedom
July 16th – Fair Trial Beyond Ken
July 17th – Malone the Victor
July 18th – Genesis Triumphant
July 20th – Tennessee in the Frying Pan
July 27th – Bryan
Sept. 14th* - Aftermath
*Will be released by July 30th.
The full text of the report after the fold!
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John Derbyshire, author of the new book We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, sat down for a discussion of atheism and conservatism, math cranks and more in our first proper episode. Your host Kevin I. Slaughter discusses the post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy and touches on the myth of the noble savage by way of a quote from an author stolen from an interview on the Skepticality Podcast and by lifting a passage from Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. We also hear an archival recording of HL Mencken discussion his philosophy of drinking, and a plug for the new UA release Laffs & Juggs.
John Derbyshire has previously released the novels Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream: A Novel (1997), a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”, Fire From the Sun (2000) a storyline written in an astounding 76 chapers in 3 volumes. His non-fiction books Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics (2003), Unknown Quantity: A Real and Imaginary History of Algebra (2006) and now We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism (2009).
In addition to the books, he has over three and a half decades of journalism and reportage under his proverbial belt. A selection of the magazines and newspapers he’s written for: Nat. Review, NYT, Boston Globe, Weekly Standard, Mathematics Magazine, Wall Street Journal and many others. He’s contributed to National Review Online, V-Dare.com and the New English Review websites.
The Underworld Amusements Variety Hour is a podcast covering an eclectic mix of subjects, guided by the interests of its host. This is the first episode proper, but so far there have already been multiple special episodes, short format extras and pdf files of free materials. Underworld Amusements is a small media company focusing on publishing books of forgotten and marginalized works, our podcast and other products and even events.