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 Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 9:52 am Post subject: Unusual Bets |
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WELCOME!
Unusual Bets:
The Works of Anton Chekhov
One Volume Edition
Walter J. Black, Inc.
The Wager
Hardcover
| Quote: | The discussion became very animated. The banker, who was younger then and more impulsive, suddenly lost control of himself, and striking the table, he turned to the young jurist and exclaimed:
"That is not true! I bet you two million roubles that you would not be able to stand solitary confinement in a cell for even five years."
"If you are serious," the jurist answered, "I will accept your wager. I bet that I will remain in solitary confinement not only five but fifteen years."
"Fifteen! I accept it," the banker cried. "Gentlemen, bear witness, I stake two millions."
"Done," said the jurist; "you stake millions and I stake my liberty." (-- p. 363) |
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| Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 10:20 am Post subject: |
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Hot Water
The Autograph Edition
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | Mr. Carlisle regarded *the human python feverishly. Questions rained from him. But when the other finally spoke, which was only when the coffee had arrived and he had drained his fifth cup, it was not to reply to any of these but merely to put into words a dream, a sort of opalescent vision, which had come to him in the silent watches of the night.
"All I ask," said **Mr. Slattery with feeling, "is that some day -- I don't care when it is -- just some day-- I meet ***that white-haired bird down a dark alley with no cops in sight."
A shudder of reminiscent horror passed through him.
"Putting a fellow out on a window-sill!" he continued with growing vehemence. "I ask you, is that nice? Cheese! And me scared of heights ever since a girl I knew betted me I wouldn't lean over the edge of the Woolworth Building and spit into Broadway. If I get over this by the time I'm a hundred, it'll be soon." (-- p. 142) |
*Oily Gordon Carlisle, Confidence Trickster supreme
**Soup Slattery, expert safe-blower
***Senator Opal, secret gin swiller elected on the Prohibition ticket
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| Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2006 11:35 am Post subject: |
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Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
Students of the Game
When the Aztec and Maya played it 500 to 1,000 years ago, the losers sometimes lost their heads - literally. Today scholars are visiting remote Mexican villages to study the oldest sport in the Americas, Ulama, now on the verge of extinction.
By John Fox
April, 2006
| Quote: | Sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers of the New World, most of them Franciscan friars bent on spreading the Christian faith, described with awe their first encounters with this peculiar sport, played with a solid ball that appeared to have magical properties. Hernando Cortes was so impressed with the game that he brought a team of players back to Spain in 1528 to perform in the royal court. But the friars soon learned that for the Aztec and other Mesoamericans, ullamaliztli was as much religious rite as sandlot sport. In their codices, or sacred books, the Aztec compared the bouncing ball to the cosmic journey of the sun into and out of the underworld. Highly ritualized ballgames enacted at key religious festivals helped to ensure the continuous cycles of nature and the cosmos. Ball courts in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital (in what is now Mexico City), were adorned with scultptures depicting local gods and other supernatural beings. Priests initiated important games with offerings of incense in nearby temples.
At least some of the games saw human sacrifice. The losing players - or unlucky stand-ins captured in battle - could literally lose their heads in post-game ceremonies. In one graphic depiction on the walls of the mopnumental ninth-century Maya ball court at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, serpents and squash plants sprout from the neck of a kneeling, decapitated player, bestowing fertility on the land and the living. A rival player wields a stone knife and the freshly severed head as his grisly trophy.
... Not that the game was ever entirely spiritual. In an early account of the sport's dark side, chronicler Diego Duran describes how some players "gambled their homes, their fields, their corn granaries, their maguey plants. They sold their children in order to bet and even staked themselves and became slaves, to be sacrificed later if they were not ransomed." (-- pgs. 115-116) |
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| Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2006 11:22 am Post subject: |
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The Ultimate Collection
By Hank Williams
CD Audio
| Quote: | I'll Never Get Out of this World Alive
By Hank Williams and Fred Rose
Now you’re [f] lookin’ at a man that’s gettin’ kind-a mad
I had lot’s of luck but it’s all been bad
No [c7] matter how I struggle and strive
I’ll never get out of this world a-[f] live.
My fishin’ pole’s broke the creek is full of sand
My woman run away with another man
No matter how I struggle and strive
I’ll never get out of this world alive.
A [bb] distant uncle passed away [bb7] and [f] left me quite a batch [f7]
And [bb] I was livin’g high until that fatal [bb7] day
A lawyer [c7] proved I wasn’t born
I was only hatched.---[f]
Ev’rything’s agin’ me and it’s got me down
If I jumped in the river I would prob’ly drown
No matter how I struggle and strive
I’ll never get out of this world alive.
These shabby shoes I’m wearin’ all the time
Are full of holes and nails
And brother if I stepped on a worn out dime
I bet a nickel I could tell you if it was heads or tails.
I’m not gonna worry wrinkles in my brow
’cause nothin’s ever gonna be alright nohow
No matter how I struggle and strive
I’ll never get out of this world alive.
(additional verses)
I could buy a sunday suit and it would leave me broke
If it had two pair of pants I would burn the coat
No matter how I struggle and strive
I’ll never get out of this world alive.
If it was rainin’ gold I wouldn’t stand a chance
I wouldn’t have a pocket in my patched up pants
No matter how I struggle and strive
I’ll never get out of this world alive. |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Sat Apr 15, 2006 11:33 am Post subject: |
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Koba the Dread:
Laughter and the Twenty Million
Paperback
By Martin Amis
| Quote: | It was on board the ships that the "politicals" -- a.k.a. "the 58s" (after Article 58 of the Ciminal Codex), "the counters" (counter-revolutionaries), and "the fascists" -- would usually receive their introduction to another integral feature of the archipelago: the urkas. Like so many elements in the story of the gulag, the urkas constituted a torment wthin a torment. Mrs. Ginzburg sits in the floating dungeon of the Dzhurma: "When it seemed as though there was no room left for even a kitten, down through the hatchway poured another few hundred human beings...[a] half-naked, tattoed, apelike horde..." And they were only the women. The urkas: this class, or caste, a highly developed underground culture, "had survived," writes Conquest, "with its own traditions and laws, since the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and had greatly increased in numbers by recruiting orphans and broken men of the revolutionary and collectivation periods." Individually grotesque, and, en masse, an utterly lethal force, the urkas were circus cutthroats, devoted to gambling, plunder, mulilation and rape.
In the gulag, as a matter of policy, the urkas were accorded the status of trusties, and they had complete power over the politicals, the fascists -- always the most scornedand defenseless population in the camp system. The 58s were permanently exposed to the urkas on principle, to increase their pain. And one can see, also, that the policy looked good ideologically. It would be very Leninist to have one class exterminating another, higher class. How Lenin had longed for the poorer peasants to start lynching all the kulaks...Imprisoned theirves were amnestied under Lenin, as part of his "loot the looters" campaign in the period of War Communism. As Solzhenitsyn says, the theft of state property became and remained a capital crime, while urka-bourgeois theft became and remained little more than a misdemeanor. Apart from the new privilegentsia and a few "hereditary proletarians," the urkas were the only class to benefit from Bolshevik policies. The urkas, who played cards for each other's eyes, who tattoed themselves with images of masturbating monkeys, who had their women assist them in their rapes of nuns and politicals. In Life and Fate Vasily Grossman writes almost casually of an urka "who had once knifed a family of six." The gulag officially designated the urkas as Socially Friendly Elements. (- p. 67) |
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| Posted: Tue Apr 18, 2006 10:23 am Post subject: |
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A Few Quick Ones
Vintage Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | Although he had never mentioned it to anybody, feeling that it was but an idle daydream and not whithin the sphere of practical politics, the idea of having a Fat Uncles sweepstake at the Drones Club had long been in Freddie Widgeon's mind, such as it was. Himself the possessor of one of the fattest uncles in London - Rodney, Lord Blicester - he had noticed how many of his fellow members had fat uncles, too, and he felt it a sad waste of good material not to make these the basis of a sporting contest similar, though on a smaller scale, to those in operation in Ireland and Calcutta.
Perfectly simple, the mechanics of the thing. Put the names of the uncles in a hat, put the names of the punters in another hat, draw a name from the first hat, draw a name from the second hat, and the holder of the fattest uncle scooped the jackpot. No difficulty there.
But there was a catch, and a very serious one - to wit, the problem of how to do the weighing. He could not, for instance, go to Lord Blicester and say "Would you mind just stepping on this try-your-weight machine for a moment, Uncle Rodney? It is essential to satisfy the judges that you are fatter than the Duke of Dunstable." At least, he could, but there woud be questions asked, and explanations would lead to pique, bad feeling and possibly the stopping of a much-needed allowance. It was, in short, an impasse, and he had come to look on the scheme as just another of those things which, though good, cannot be pushed along, when, coming into the bar one morning, he found an animated group assembled there and as he entered heard McGarry, the man behind the counter, say "Ten stone three". Upon which, there was a burst of hearty cheering and, enquiring the reason for this enthusiasm, he was informed that McGarry had revealed an unsuspected talent. He was able to tell the weight of anything from a vegetable marrow to a Covent Garden tenor just by looking at it. (From The Fat of the Land, p. 1) |
Stories trip off the page like smooth, flat stones skipping merrily across a pond, barely disturbing the lilies or the few quietly dozing frogs.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu May 04, 2006 3:09 pm Post subject: |
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Mohawk Saint
Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits
Hardcover
By Allan Greer
| Quote: | Passing through once-thriving native villages suddenly transformed into sick wards and charnel houses, the missionaries were desperate to baptize the dying. They sometimes tried to cure the ill, distributing sugar, raisins, and other medicinal substances, but their motives were frankly strategic, a matter of gaining the Indians' confidence and beating the devil-worshiping shamans at their own game. What really mattered was the harvest of souls. Every gravely ill Indian was, to a Jesuit, the prize in a contest with the highest possible stakes: either she would die outside the church and suffer eternal torment, or she would confess her sins, enter the fold, and live forever in perfect happiness. Because they knew from experience that healthy converts often strayed from the Christian path after they had been baptized, an outcome more deplorable than simple refusal of baptism, the Jesuits took special satisfaction in baptizing the moribund. Early in the history of the New France mission, Jean de Brebeuf spoke of feelings that would be echoed by other seventeenth-century Jesuits: "The joy that one feels when he has baptized an Indian who dies soon afterwards, and flies directly to Heaven to become an angel, certainly is a joy that surpasses anything that can be imagined...One would like to have the suffering of ten thousand tempests that he might help save one soul, since Jesus Christ for one soul would have willingly shed all his precious blood."
If dying adults were especially prized, dying infants were even more so, for unlike their pagan parents, they were too young to have sinned. "This is the most certain fruit that we gather in this country," wrote a Jesuit among the unconverted Iroquois, "where it is desirable that the children should die before obtaining the use of their reason." Sick babies exercised an irresistible attraction over these missionaries, who sought them out wherever they went. However, the non-Christian parents of Tekakwitha's homeland were determined to keep them at bay. Unlike the Hurons, who were evangelized a generation earlier, the Iroquois did not necessarily believe that baptism caused death, but they did have the feeling that the missionaries wished to steal their children's souls. Perhaps they could sense something of the attitude of men who could write a sentence containing the chilling phrase, "It is desirable that the children should die." (Footnotes omitted)...(From the chapter entitled aptly enough, Beautiful Death, at pgs. 6-7) |
A fascinating, respectful account of Mohawks in early Kahnawake by a Frostback history prof from the University of Toronto who seems to knows his stuff and like it.
More First Nations gambles and gamblers.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri May 26, 2006 3:16 pm Post subject: |
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A Few Quick Ones
Paperback
By the incomparable Prune Gnasher Steelschack at his finest
| Quote: | "You say you're judging this Bonny Babies thing?"
"Yes, but that doesn't get me anywhere. I can't ask Purkiss for another fiver."
"You don't have to. As I see it, the matter is quite simple. Your primary object is to divert your wife's mind from gold cuff links and pawn shops - to give her, in other words, something else to think about. Very well. Enter that little gargoyle of yours and award hinm the first prize, and she will be so delighted that gold cuff links will fade out of her mind. I guarantee this. I am not a mother myself, but I understand a mother's heart from soup to nuts. In her pride at the young plugugly's triumph everything else will be forgotten."
Bingo stared. It seemed to him that the other's brain, that brain whose subtle scheming had so often chiselled fellow members of the Drones out of half-crowns and even larger sums, must have blown a fuse.
"But Oofy, old man, reflect. If I judge a Bonny Babies contest and raise the hand of my personal baby with the words 'The winnah!', I shall be roughly handled, if not lynched. These mothers are tough stuff. You were there when Freddie Wigeon was telling us about what happened to him at Cannes."
Oofy clicked his tongue impatiently. (From Leave it to Algy at pgs. 135-135) |
Heavens! Surely no bookie would give odds on babies?
| Quote: | | You think not? Well, think again. |
| Quote: | "Mr. McAlpin?"
"Speaking."
"This is Mr. Prosser."
"Oh, yes?"
"Listen, Mr. McAlpin, I'm down at Bramley-on-Sea, and they are having a Bonny Babies contest tomorrow. I'm entering my little nephew."
"Oh, yes?"
"And I thought it would add to the interest of the proceedings if I had a small bet on. Do your activities as a turf accountant extend to accepting wagers on seaside Bonny Baby competitions?"
"Certainly. We cover all sporting events."
"What odds will you give against the Prosser colt?"
""Your nephew, you say?"
"That's right."
"Does he look like you?"
"There is quite a resemblance."
"Then you can have fifty to one."
"Right. In tenners." (Ibid., pgs. 136-7) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Jun 16, 2006 11:20 am Post subject: |
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A Few Quick Ones
Paperback
By the incomparable Prune Gnasher Steelschack at his finest
| Quote: | In a corner of the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest a rather heated dispute had arisen between a Small Bass and a Light Lager. Their voices rose angrily.
"Old," said the Small Bass.
"Ol'," said the Light Lager.
"Bet you a million pounds it's Old."
"Bet you a million trillion pounds it's Ol'."
Mr. Mulliner looked up indulgently from his hot Scotch and lemon. On occasions like this he is usually called in to arbitrate.
"What is the argument, gentlemen?"
"It's about that song Old Man River," said the Small Bass.
"Ol' Man River," insisted the Light Lager. "He says it's Old Man River, I say it's Ol' Man River. Who's right?"
"In my opinion," said Mr. Mulliner, "both of you. Mr. Oscar Hammerstein, who wrote that best of all lyrics, preferred Ol', but I believe the two readings are considered equally correct. My nephew sometimes employed one, sometimes the other, according to the whim of the moment."
(Thus opens the tale, Big Businessat p. 110) |
Listen to Paul Robeson make it his theme song in Showboat, the 1936 version of the hit musical celebrating, among other things, the riverboat gambler.
More of the American South.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed Jun 21, 2006 10:09 am Post subject: |
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Tales From the Drones Club
Hardcover
By Sir Prune Steelschack
| Quote: | 'What's all this?' he asked of Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, who was hovering on the outskirts of the group.
'It's Barmy Phipps's cousin Egbert from Harrow,' said Catsmeat. 'Most remarkable chap. You see that catapult he's showing those birds. Well, he puts a Brazil nut in it and whangs off at things and hits them every time. It's a great gift, and you might think it would make him conceited. But no, success has not spoiled him. He is still quite simple and unaffected. Would you like his autograph?'
Freddie frankly did not believe the story. The whole nature of a Brazil nut, it being nobbly and a rummy semicircular shape, unfits it to act as a projectile. The thing, he felt, might be just barely credible, perhaps, of one who was receiving his education at Eton, but Catsmeat had specifically stated that this lad was at Harrow, and his reason revolted at the idea of a Harrovian being capable of such a feat.
'What rot,' he said.
'It isn't rot,' said Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, stung. 'Only just now he picked off a passing errand-boy as clean as a whistle.'
'Pure fluke.'
'Well, what'll you bet he can't do it again?'
A thrill ran through Freddie. He had found the way.
'A fiver!' he cried.
Well, of course, Catsmeat hadn't got a fiver, but he swiftly formed a syndicate to cover Freddie's money, and the stakes were deposited with the chap behind the bar and a Brazil not provided for the boy Egbert at the club's expense. And it was as he fitted nut to elastic that Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright said 'Look.'
'Look,' said Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright. 'There's a taxi just drawing up with a stout buffer in it. Will you make this stout buffer the test? Will you bet that Egbert here doesn't knock off his topper as he pays the cabby?'
'Certainly,' said Freddie.
The cab stopped. The buffer alighted, his top hat gleaming in the sunshine. The child Egbert with incredible nonchalance drew his bead. The Brazil nut sang through the air. And the next moment Freddie was staggering back with his hands to his eyes, a broken man. For the hat, struck squarely abaft the binnacle, had leaped heavenwards and he was down five quid. (From The Masked Troubadour, p. 145) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Mon Aug 07, 2006 11:42 am Post subject: |
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The Globe and Mail
Canada's once great national daily beaten
down to rubble by chain ownership
Refugee pair were slaves at sea, board says
Held and badly abused for two years,
Ecuadoreans jumped ship in Vancouver
By Mark Hume
Aug. 4/06
| Quote: | As the subject of a bet on whether sharks would attack him, Paulo Romero Cedeno was stripped naked, washed in fish blood and thrown into the ocean.
There in the dark water, in the black of night, the young man heard the crew of the fishing vessel laughing at him. Then the captain snapped on a light and, after a few moments, dragged him aboard. He was later beaten by crew members wo'd lost money betting he would die.
His younger brother, Cristhian Romer Cedeno, was subject to the same game - as well as to rape. Both men were routinely beaten and forced to sleep on the open deck.
Such was life aboard the Dolphin Free, a deep-sea fishing vessel from Ecuador that roamed the high seas - visiting Samoa, Fiji, the Marshall Islands and Tahiti - with the two brothers held against their will for about two years in what the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada has described as a modern-day case of slavery at sea. (Excerpt from the story on Canada p. A7) |
More on the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, which recently granted the brothers refugee status.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 9:32 am Post subject: |
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In Cold Blood
Paperback
By PokerPulse Top Pick Truman Capote
| Quote: | Dewey had watched them die, for he had been among the twenty-odd witnesses invited to the ceremony. He had never attended an execution, and when on the midnight past he entered the cold warehouse, the scenery had surprised him: he had anticipated a setting of suitable dignity, not this bleakly lighted cavern cluttered with lumber and other debris. But the gallows itself, with its two pale nooses attached to a crossbeam, was imposing enough; and so, in an unexpected style was the hangman, who cast a long shadow from his perch on the platform at the top of the wooden instrument's thirteen steps. The hangman, an anonymous, leathery gentleman who had been imported from Missouri for the event, for which he was paid six hundred dollars, was attired in an aged double-breasted pin-striped suit overly commodious for the narrow figure inside it - the coat came nearly to his knees; and on his head he wore a cowboy hat which, when first bought, had perhaps been bright green, but was now a weathered, sweat-stained oddity.
Also, Dewey found the self-consciously casual conversation of his fellow witnesses, as they stood awaiting the start of what one witness termed "the festivities" disconcerting.
"What I heard was, they was gonna let them draw straws to see who dropped first. Or flip a coin. But Smith says why not do it alphabetically. Guess 'cause S comes after H. Ha!" (From Part IV, The Corner, at pgs. 337-338) |
In Cold Blood
CD Audio
Narrated by Scott Brick
Poor Brick might have sought coaching for the opening lines by 15th c. French poet Francois Villon but an otherwise easy read.
In Cold Blood
DVD
Chillingly faithful to the author's groundbreaking text documenting the grisly murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas during a failed robbery in which the killers netted less than $40.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Aug 18, 2006 11:12 am Post subject: |
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Jeeves Takes Charge
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | 'If you ask me, Aunt Dahlia,' I said, 'I think Angela is well out of it. This Glossop is a tough baby. One of London's toughest. I was trying to tell you just now what he did to me one night at the Drones. First having got me in a sporting mood with a bottle of the ripest, he betted I wouldn't swing myself across the swimming bath by the ropes and rings. I knew I could do it on my head so I took him on, exulting in the fun, so to speak. And when I'd done half the trip and was going as strong as dammit, I found he had looped the last rope back against the rail, leaving me no alternative but to drop into the depths and swim ashore in correct evening costume.'
'He did?'
'He certainly did. It was months ago, and I haven't got really dry yet. You wouldn't want your daughter to marry a man capapble of a thing like that?'
'On the contrary, you restore my faith in the young hound. I see that there must be lots of good in him, after all. And I want this Bellinger business broken up, Bertie.' (From Jeeves and the Song of Songs at p. 98) |
Yes, and a little later on:
Very Good, Jeeves!
Hardcover
By P.G. Wodehouse
| Quote: | All these things counted with me, but what really drew me to Bleaching Court like a magnet was the knowledge that young Tuppy Glossop would be among those present.
I feel sure I have told you before about this black-hearted bird, but I will give you the strength of it once again, just to keep the records straight. He was the fellow, if you remember, who, ignoring a lifelong friendship in the course of which he had frequently eaten my bread and salt, betted me one night at the Drones that I wouldn't swing myself across the swimming-bath by the ropes and rings and then, with almost inconceivable treachery, went and looped back the last ring, causing me to drop into the fluid and ruin one of the nattiest suits of dress-clothes in London.
To execute a fitting vengeance on this bloke had been the ruling passion of my life ever since. (From The Ordeal of Young Tuppy, pgs. 203-204) |
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Fri Aug 25, 2006 10:10 am Post subject: |
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Jeeves Takes Charge
Paperback
By P.G. Wodehouse
A price differential that would make Plum blush:
| Quote: | "It's like this, Bertie," said Eustace, settling down cosily. "As I told you in my letter, there are nine of us marooned in this desert spot, reading with old Heppenstall. Well, of course, nothing is jollier than sweating up the Classics when it's a hundred in the shade, but there does come a time when you begin to feel the need of a little relaxation; and, by Jove, there are absolutely no facilities for relaxation in this place whatever. And then Steggles got this idea. Steggles is one of our reading-party, and, between ourselves, rather a worm as a general thing. Still, you have to give him credit for getting this idea."
"What idea?"
"Well, you know how many parsons there are round about here. There are about a dozen hamlets within a radius of six miles, and each hamlet has a church and each church has a parson and each parson preaches a sermon every Sunday. Tomorrow week - Sunday the twenty-third - we're running off the great Sermon Handicap. Steggles is making the book. Each parson is to be clocked by a reliable steward of the course, and the one that preaches the longest sermon wins. Did you study the race-card I sent you?"
"I couldn't understand what it was all about."
"Why, you chump, it gives the handicaps and the current odds on each starter. I've got another one here, in case you've lost yours. Take a careful look at it. It gives you the thing in a nutshell. Jeeves, old son, do you want a sporting flutter?" (From The Great Sermon Handicap at pgs. 168-169) |
Link to this entry
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Last edited by editor on Thu Jan 08, 2009 12:13 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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editor
Site Admin
Joined: 09 Nov 2003
Posts: 2940
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| Posted: Mon Aug 28, 2006 10:50 am Post subject: |
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A Damsel in Distress
Paperback
Another gem by that cheerful old punter,
Pelham Plum Grenville Wodehouse
| Quote: | George was still puzzled.
'But I don't understand. How do you mean you drew me in a sweepstake - I mean a sweepstake? What sweepstake?'
'Down in the servants' 'all. Keggs, the butler, started it. I 'eard 'im say he always 'ad one every place 'e was in as a butler - leastways, whenever there was any dorters of the 'ouse. There's always a chance, when there's a 'ouse party, of one of the dorters of the 'ouse gettin' married to one of the gents in the party, so Keggs 'e puts all of the gents' names in an 'at, and you pay five shillings for a chance, and the one that draws the winning name gets the money. And if the dorter of the 'ouse don't get married that time, the money's put away and added to the pool for the next 'ouse-party.'
George gasped. This revelation of life below stairs in the stately homes of England took his breath away. Then astonishment gave way to indignation.
'Do you mean to tell me that you - you worms - made Lady Maud the - the prize of a sweepstake!'
Albert was hurt.
'Who're yer calling worms?' (-- p. 109) |
A Damsel in Distress
VHS
Featuring two Gershwin classics,
Nice Work If You Can Get It and
A Foggy Day.
Might've been Something! with real punters, though George Burns and his otherwise tiresome sidekick do some very credible hoofing with the homely but ever smiling Fred Astaire as Jerry Halliday.
Mel Torme Sings Fred Astaire
CD Audio
Should be called ...Sings Fred Astaire way-y
better than Dead Fred.
Proof once again by the much missed 'Velvet Fog' that today's so-called jazz singers need way-y-y more lessons and practice.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2577#2577
Last edited by editor on Fri Oct 19, 2007 12:11 pm; edited 4 times in total |
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