Mister Ron's Basement Blog

Episode #1500 contest!!! Prize Revealed!

2009-10-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

As you may know, Mister Ron's Basement (http://misterron.libsyn.com) has just published Episode #1500! It is actually in EIGHT parts, and will be posted over eight days.

There is no other Podcast on iTunes that is even close to 1500 Episodes...

Mister Ron is certainly available for interviews. Just send to the email listed below.

While maybe not everything in the Basement may be your cup of tea, some of the humorous stories are perhaps funnier today than they were a hundred or hundred and fifty years ago.

Most of the authors featured on the Podcast were once household names in America, and now are sadly forgotten. The mission of our program is to try to restore some of those writers to the recognition they deserve.

We have something special planned for Episode #1500, and leading up to it, we are having a contest!
Somebody will win a genuine classic book of American Humor that is at least 100 years old. A true collectible!

The prize is a 1906 hardback printing of Ellis Parker Butler's classic "Pigs is Pigs.".

How do you enter? Simple -- send me an email (my address is revry@panix.com) with the subject line "My Favorite Episode." Then tell me which Episode of the Basement is your favorite. You don't have to tell me why, but I would love to hear it anyway. Just give me the name of the story and the author. Please send me an email. You can send me messages on Facebook all you like, but they won't count in the contest.

All the entries will go in a hat after we release Episode #1500 (Part Eight of Eight). The winner will be announced afterward. So go visit the web site, or subscribe in iTunes, and pick out a good one! Feel free to use the Catalog and Individual Author indexes to help make your decision.

Thanks to all my listeners!

-=-Ron-=-

A Vital Message from Ron Evry

2009-04-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

Many of you have enjoyed my daily podcast, “Mister Ron’s Basement” (http://slapcast.com/users/revry) for years now. It began in March of 2005 and currently has over 1350 Episodes, more than any other Podcast on iTunes. The podcast receives anywhere from 25,000 to 35,000 downloads every single day, and uses around 200 to 250 Gigabytes of bandwidth daily.

While some may not find my voice or delivery style to their tastes, there is no denying that the many humorous stories by mostly forgotten authors that I have rescued from oblivion are restoring a vital American Treasure to the world.

Most people’s view of early American humor begins and ends with Mark Twain or O Henry. Yet authors such as Fanny Fern, Max Adeler, George Ade, Edgar Wilson (“Bill”) Nye, M. Quad, George W. Peck, Philander Doesticks, and Stanley Huntley, are highly significant in the development of the uniquely American attitude of not taking everything seriously.

To the world at large, American humor, represented by film, television, comic books and strips, and stand-up comedians, is the pinnacle of comedy. A good portion of our entertainment exports (always in the very top ranks of our Gross National Product) is descending from the works of these mostly forgotten writers, who were once household names.

Utilizing researching techniques that simply weren’t available a few years ago, I am uncovering the stories that our ancestors used to laugh at, and have discovered that a great deal of it is still extremely funny today. The podcasts, in recent months, have been fully indexed, and can be accessed at:

http://ronevry.com/Mister_Rons_Full_Catalog.html

But now Mister Ron’s Basement is facing a major hitch in its operation. Roger Strickland, the proprietor of Slapcast.com, my Podcast host for the last four years, will be closing up shop at the end of July. He has attempted over this period to make an economical platform for podcasters, charging five dollars a month for unlimited bandwidth. To accomplish this, he has needed a steady stream of new customers, and the current bad economy has reduced this figure drastically. Undoubtedly, the very success of Mister Ron’s Basement may have put a strain on his resources as well, with its ever-growing need for bandwidth.

Looking through what is available in hosting services out in the real world, I have discovered that most of the surviving hosts out there want $300 to $400 a month from me to continue my operation. One hosting service told me that I “don’t have to be a millionaire” to use their servers. Just $50 a month and thirty cents a Gigabyte for bandwidth. Last month alone I used up Five Terabytes of bandwidth. This works out to $1500 a month. Sorry. Don’t have it.

I have apparently negotiated a deal with a major hosting company to pay a one-time fee for archiving all my back episodes, and continuing with my daily podcasts. Essentially, this is going to work out to about a thousand dollars for the first year. They also will split ad revenue with me, giving me the larger share if I come up with the sponsor.

So far, I have not found any sponsor, but anyone reading this who thinks they can put me in contact with one, please write!

To make Mister Ron’s Basement’s valuable archive and continued podcasts available, I am asking for donations. Ideally, I would like to find a thousand people with a dollar each to help me carry on this work.

If any of these stories have made you laugh, please drop a dollar into my virtual hat. You can get to the donation button at:

http://ronevry.com/Mister_Ron_Donate.html

This is being done through Paypal, and you don’t have to be a member of Paypal to use the service.

If you prefer, please drop a dollar or more (or a check) into an envelope and send it to:

Ron Evry

2880 Cedar Crest Ct

Woodbridge, VA 22192

Of course, I am desperately looking for any and all publicity to ensure the survival of this National Treasure. Anybody reading this from print, radio, or web media that would like a fascinating article, please contact me at revry@panix.com.

Keep Laughing!

-=-Ron-=-

An Edgar Allan Poe Oddity

2009-01-15T20:03:00.000-08:00

Listeners to the Basement might notice that we are celebrating Edgar Allan Poe's Bicentennial Birthday with readings of his funniest stories and poems. Poe is not really appreciated by the public for his humor, but he could write some knee-slappers now and then. Poe himself seemed to consider some of his horror tales a laugh riot, but even so, we have found some good stuff that is okay for the squeamish...

One of the stories we have read is called Diddling -- Considered as One of the Exact Sciences from 1843. You can listen to it at http://misterron.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=507870. A diddler, in case you didn't know it, was a 19th Century term for a con artist. When I read this piece, something struck me as familiar, and then I remembered that way back in Basement Episode number 438, found at http://misterron.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=501884, I had read an 1830 Seba Smith story called My First Visit to Portland. In this tale, country boy Jack Downing comes to the big town and outsmarts the city slickers.

The two stories each feature scenes which resemble each other very much. Here's the scene from the Smith 1830 story:

Well, then, says I to myself, I have a pesky good mind to go in and have a try with one of these chaps and see if they can twist my eye- teeth out. If they can get the best end of the bargain out of me they can do what there ain't a man in our place can do; and I should just like to know what sort of stuff these ere Portland chaps are made of. So in I goes into the best-looking store among 'em. And I see some biscuit lying on the shelf, and says I:

"Mister, how much do you ax apiece for them ere biscuits?"

"A cent apiece," says he.

"Well," says I, "I shan't give you that, but if you've a mind to, I'll give you two cents for three of them, for I begin to feel a little as tho' I would like to take a bite."

"Well," says he, "I wouldn't sell 'em to anybody else so, but seeing it's you I don't care if you take 'em."

I knew he lied, for he never seen me before in his life. Well, he handed down the biscuits, and I took 'em, and walked round the store awhile, to see what else he had to sell. At last says I:

"Mister, have you got any good cider?"

Says he, "Yes, as good as ever you see."

"Well," says I, "what do you ax a glass for it?"

"Two cents," says he.

"Well," says I, "seems to me I feel more dry than I do hungry now. Ain't you a mind to take these ere biscuits again and give me a glass of cider?" and says he:

"I don't care if I do."

So he took and laid 'em on the shelf again and poured out a glass of cider. I took the glass of cider and drinkt it down, and, to tell you the truth about it, it was capital good cider. Then says I:

"I guess it's about time for me to be a-going," and so I stept along toward the door; but he ups and says, says he:

"Stop, mister, I believe you haven't paid me for the cider."

"Not paid you for the cider!" says I; "what do you mean by that? Didn't the biscuits that I give you just come to the cider?"

"Oh, ah, right!" says he.

So I started to go again, but before I had reached the door he says, says he:

"But stop, mister, you didn't pay me for the biscuits."

"What!" says I, "do you mean to impose upon me? Do you think I am going to pay you for the biscuits, and let you keep them, too? Ain't they there now on your shelf? What more do you want? I guess, sir, you don't whittle me in that way."

So I turned about and marched off and left the feller staring and scratching his head as tho' he was struck with a dunderment.

Now here is the similar paragraph from Poe's piece:

Rather a small, but still a scientific diddle is this. The diddler approaches the bar of a tavern, and demands a couple of twists of tobacco. These are handed to him, when, having slightly examined them, he says:

"I don't much like this tobacco. Here, take it back, and give me a glass of brandy and water in its place."

The brandy and water is furnished and imbibed, and the diddler makes his way to the door. But the voice of the tavern-keeper arrests him.

"I believe, sir, you have forgotten to pay for your brandy and water."

"Pay for my brandy and water! — didn't I give you the tobacco for the brandy and water? What more would you have?"

"But, sir, if you please, I don't remember that you paid me for the tobacco."

"What do you mean by that, you scoundrel? — Didn't I give you back your tobacco? Isn't that your tobacco lying there? Do you expect me to pay for what I did not take?"

"But, sir," says the publican, now rather at a loss what to say, "but sir —"

"But me no buts, sir," interrupts the diddler, apparently in very high dudgeon, and slamming the door after him, as he makes his escape. — "But me no buts, sir, and none of your tricks upon travellers."

Now there is a significant difference in the details, but the two are quite close. Investigating further, I discovered that Poe was indeed quite familiar with Seba Smith's work, and had written a scathing review of Smith's poetry, stating that the author would be better off sticking to humor.

So what do you think? Your comments and emails are welcome...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button & other items of interest

2008-12-29T17:18:00.001-08:00

It has been awhile since I've updated the Basement Blog, so I thought this might be an opportune time. Long time listeners to the Basement may have noticed that I have not been following my usual schedule of posting a new Episode every single day. Essentially, there are a lot of technical issues at the moment preventing this, as the Podcast Server I use, http://slapcast.com, is being updated and tweaked to handle the huge amounts of traffic the client podcasts generate (in actuality, Mister Ron's Basement has been grabbing incredible amounts of bandwidth, with an average of twenty-thousand downloads a day).

Anyway, I did manage to get in a couple of wonderful Episodes before the uploading door shut for a while, and you are highly encouraged to download these and give a listen.

The first was posted on Christmas Eve. It was a truly rare Spoopendyke Christmas story that was apparently written for the Washington Post. I have not been able to find it in the Brooklyn Eagle archives at all. It's called 'Mrs. Spoopendyke's Christmas Gift.' You'll find it at:

http://slapcast.com/users/revry/6975

or you can directly download the audio file at:

http://m2.slapcast.com/mp3/revry/revry-2008-12-24-1.mp3

What really makes this exceptional is that I absolutely was positive that there were no more Spoopendyke stories to be found anywhere. So far, I have read over ninety different Spoopendyke tales by Stanley Huntley on the Basement podcast, and this may be most comprehensive collection of these works anyone has ever put together. Huntley's career as a humorist was cut short by debilitating illness and an early death, and he apparently sent these stories out to a number of publications besides the Brooklyn Eagle.

Once we get new Basement episodes going again, I have another Spoopendyke story ready, that appeared in The Washington Post late in 1884, long after Huntley was replaced at the Eagle by Robert J. Burdette.

Meanwhile here's a short, intriguing item the Post reprinted in 1882 from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

American Humor

It is a sad fact that American humorists, as a class, resemble precocious children, Let them do one thing at which the world laughs, and they will repeat the performance over again with a persistence and a mad hankering to please which makes justifiable homicide a relaxation as well as a duty. Stanley Huntley's "Spoopendyke Papers" were good at first, but anybody could write them now. The humor is strictly machine work, but "Mr. Spoopendyke" grinds at his comparison mill with a fresh and breezy conviction that his fund does not pall upon repetition. Mark Twain's jokes are the result of a plain, chemical formula; given a man's chair, a dark night and a tumble, and a grammar school boy could construct a witticism which Mr. Clements (sic) would swear was his own. Bill Nye has little receipt for humor just as George W. Peck has his, and Peck could write Nye's stuff just as Nye could write Eugene Field's, or Aleck Swart write Josh Billings's. What we complain of is that there is no spontaneity about recent humorous writers. These amusing gentlemen would as soon think of tampering with the Lord's prayer as altering the form made or expression of their wit. They seem to think that that when they have a good thing they should stick to it. A patented style of humor may, as the country grows older, pass as an heirloom in certain families, and it would be no surprise to us were we to revisit the pale glimpses of the moon five centuries hence, discover a descendant of Stanley Huntley writing that all "Mrs. Spoopendyke" needed to be Eve was to add a few years to her age.

While there is certainly much that can be taken issue with in this article, at the least with its comments on Mark Twain's work, I kind of like the idea of the inheritors of Huntley's mantle on the moon, well, four centuries from now, attempting to crank out tales of the Spoopendykes.

Anyway, the second Christmas Episode I managed to post was number 1246, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." This is complete, original, lengthy short story as published in Collier's Magazine in 1921. Christmas Day also saw the public opening of the movie somewhat based on this story featuring Brad Pitt as the title character, and Cate Blanchett in a terrific role that was not in the original tale.

The movie is terrific, and I recommend seeing it, at the least, for the wonderful set and costume designs. But as fine as the movie is, the story is a work of genius, a rare indulgence in pure fantasy for F. Scott Fitzgerald. I had a lot of fun reading it, and attempted to make it lively and interesting to hear. It is almost an hour long and can be found at:

http://slapcast.com/users/revry/6979

If you want to download the sound file directly, point your browser to:

http://m2.slapcast.com/mp3/revry/revry-2008-12-25.mp3

Your comments are more than welcome.

1905 Ghostbusters story

2008-11-01T06:28:00.001-07:00

Back in 1905, Gellet Burgess (most well known today for his poem Purple Cow) published a little tale called The Ghost-Extinguisher, about a scientist who discovers a Japanese technique for disabling ghosts and putting them in jars. The scientist refines the process a bit:

Such elusive spirits are able to pass through walls and elude pursuit with ease. It became necessary for me to obtain some instrument by which their capture could be conveniently effected. The ordinary fire-extinguisher of commerce gave me the hint as to how the problem could be solved. One of these portable hand-instruments I filled with the proper chemicals. When inverted, the ingredients were commingled in vacuo and a vast volume of gas was liberated. This was collected in the reservoir provided with a rubber tube having a nozzle at the end. The whole apparatus being strapped upon my back, I was enabled to direct a stream of powerful precipitating gas in any desired direction, the flow being under control through the agency of a small stopcock. By means of this ghost-extinguisher I was enabled to pursue my experiments as far as I desired.

Yeah, it sure sounds like the devices Bill Murray & pals were using in the film Ghostbusters. There's some other interesting similarities to the movie as well, although the story is obviously different. So let's just call it inspirational and enjoy.

Since the story is in the public domain, I Bowlderized it just a tad -- my apologies to purists who feel this thing shouldn't be done, and to people who are sensitive to the 1905 language that wouldn't be tolerated today. In the story, Burgess uses the term "Japs" much more than the designation "Japanese," so I changed them all to Japanese (the nationality is kind of crucial to the story). He also utilized racist dialogue like:

“You hully up, bling me one pair bellows pletty quick!” he commanded.

That I tried to change as much as possible in my reading. I hope I succeeded.

I welcome your comments on this discovery. It is Mister Ron's Basement Episode Number 1189, and can be found at:

http://slapcast.com/users/revry/6834

Counterfeit Spoopendyke Stories?

2008-09-21T15:21:00.000-07:00

Mister Ron's Basement Episode # 1157 features some very funny Stanley Huntley stories and two Spoopendyke curiosities from 1882. The first one is called Spoopendyke at the Telephone, which we found in the Brooklyn Eagle, but not in the regular Sunday Salad column, and credited to the Portland, Oregon Welcome. This piece is obviously not a real Spoopendyke story (it doesn't even try to sound like one), and nobody back then would have confused it with the real thing.

The second oddity is called Spoopendyke Starts a Fire, and it presents a bit of a conundrum. This tale almost sounds like an authentic Huntley piece, and the North Carolina newspaper I found it in claims to have gotten it from the Brooklyn Eagle. Yet, there is something...wrong with it!

First of all, diligent searching has not turned the piece up in the Brooklyn Eagle archives. Secondly, the story is simply too short, and really does not make any point. Mr. Spoopendyke's sarcasm is not as sharply biting (or as clever) as usual. The author calls the characters "Mr. S." and "Mrs S." which Huntley simply did not do. There is a reference to the story taking place "the morning after the sardines had been disposed of," referring to the famous Opening Sardines story from the previous year. Yes, Huntley did sometimes refer to previous events in older stories, but this reference seems uncharacteristic.

There are other parts of the story that don't quite make it either.

The question, then, is why would the Raleigh News and Observer create a fake Spoopendyke tale? Well, these stories were immensely popular, and they sold newspapers. Copyright laws were not too rigidly enforced back in the 1880s, and in fact, most newspapers reprinted from each other on a widespread basis without payment. Almost every newspaper of the period had a scissors man on staff. Huntley certainly engaged in this practice as did many other well-known writers of the 19th Century, including Mark Twain.

An 1880 story, Mr. Spoopendyke's Free Seats, had Huntley himself as a character (The Salad Man), complaining how his creations were being stolen by a long list of newspapers. So, at least IMHO, it is a good possibilty that Spoopendyke Starts a Fire was a fake, written by someone on staff at the Raleigh News and Observer to generate circulation during one of Huntley's many dry spells.

What do you think? Your comments are welcome...

Indexing Blues

2008-09-17T19:19:00.000-07:00

Yes, Mister Ron is still alive, but hasn't updated this blog for months (the podcast is still being updated daily, and the stories are as good as ever!).

We are working on building a complete Index of all the episodes, and it is coming slowly. Nevertheless, we are well over halfway finished, encoding the thing in raw html. Once it is done, you will be able to click on lots of individual author indexes, such as the one we have built for Stanley Huntley.

So hang in there!

Comments are always welcome...

The Spoopendyke Index!

2008-07-29T03:36:00.000-07:00

While awaiting the August switch to a new server and the resumption of new episodes of Mister Ron's Basement, we have put together a menu of ALL Stanley Huntley/Spoopendyke episodes!

If you haven't heard these, you owe it to yourself to discover the writings of the funniest, most brilliant of 19th Century American Humorists! You can read more about Huntley in some of the earlier entries in this blog, but your best bet is to jump to the index and start listening to these stories in any order.

Through diligent research we have found over eighty Spoopendyke stories, and have included many other classic funny gems that appeared in newspapers and magazines around the planet in the early 1880s. The menu is easily accessible at: http://ronevry.com/Spoopendyke_Stories.html

Don't miss them!

Somewhat fixed -- taking a short vacation!

2008-07-13T08:11:00.000-07:00

Okay! The Mister Ron's Basement web page is back up, BUT please note -- as a temporary fix for some technical problems, only the most recent 100 episodes will appear on the web page for a while. All 1100 plus episodes are still available via iTunes using the "Subscribe" button. Also, the George Ade and Fortunate Island indexes still work. We will hold off on posting new episodes after this for just a while as we wait for the repairs...

UPDATE (7-15-08) -- Actually, at this point, the 100+ episodes are only available if you already subscribed while they were up on the web site. If you subscribe now, you can only get the last 100 episodes. The indexes of older episodes and links to specific episodes from, say, Wikipedia entries, still work! With a bit of luck, this will all be fixed ASAP. If there's a particular episode you need a direct link to, let me know.

Confused yet?

Podcast Host Down (sort of)

2008-07-12T12:27:00.000-07:00

Most of the listeners to Mister Ron's Basement know that I have performed the podcast episodes daily, as in seven days a week, for most of the last three years.

The hosting service I have used is slapcast.com, and it has been incredibly reliable for most of this time, and the most amazing bargain in all of podcasting. The owner of the service is currently dealing with some technical difficulties that are making things just a little flaky, and they probably won't be solved for a couple more weeks.

This is understandable. Things happen. Running a podcast server is only slightly less difficult than running a national television broadcast network. maybe more so, because he is doing it without the help of hundreds of highly paid engineers.

Okay. So I am asking Basement listeners to be patient. I will post new episodes when I can, but it may take a while.

However (this gets interesting), the server's XML feed still works like a charm. This is where the actual episodes are stored. For example, the most recent episode can still be heard by clicking here.

The only problem is with the web site that you normally go to if you want to read about and get the episodes. That is fried right now. If you do manage to get in (sometimes it comes up for air for a few minutes), you can leave it up in your browser, and click on the "Listen" links in a new window or tab.

Also, you can go to iTunes by clicking here, and you can get any of the existing episodes there. The most recent 300 episodes are on that main menu page, and all of the 1100 plus episodes are available by clicking on the "subscribe" button.

So unless you've heard every episode so far, there's still plenty to listen to until things get back to normal.

By the way, the above image of Mister Ron was drawn by the extraordinarily talented veteran comics artist Jose Delbo. I've been a huge fan of his for ages. Thanks Jose!

Peck's Bad Boy

2008-07-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

We have been featuring stories about Peck's Bad Boy by George W. Peck in the Basement. They're pretty funny and worth a listen. Of all Peck's humorous writing, the Bad Boy stories, first appearing in the 1880s, were the most popular, staying in print for over a century. The Bad Boy wasn't the first character of that sort, and certainly not the last. Mischievous kids have been a staple of television and comic strips for a long time. But Peck's nasty kid was probably the nastiest of them all. He played truly mean pranks on his father and others, such as the Grocery Man, but they were always clever and imaginative.

In 1921, a feature film was made of Peck's Bad Boy, starring Jackie Coogan, fresh from his co-starring role in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. Coogan later achieved fame as an adult, playing the role of Uncle Fester on the TV series, The Addams Family. The silent film, directed by Sam Wood, who would later achieve lasting fame as the director of the Marx Bros. movie A Night at the Opera, was full of great gags. Coogan was marvelously full of spunk and nastiness.

Ten years later, another version of the story was filmed starring young Jackie Cooper as the Bad Boy, but it was marred with too much sentimentality and toned-down pranks.

No doubt, Peck's Bad Boy could easily be updated to modern times in a new movie, and if properly handled, would be extremely funny, and outrage stuffed shirts around the nation again.

Stephen Leacock

2008-06-28T07:34:00.000-07:00

From time to time, we feature stories by Stephen Leacock in the Basement. This week, we've spotlighted four stories written very early in his career (from the 1890s), including one that was not reprinted in his 1910 collection, Literary Lapses.

While Mister Ron's Basement primarily focuses on American authors, Leacock is a great big Exception To The Rule. Much too simplistically, people refer to him as "the Canadian Mark Twain," yet there is some truth to that generalization. Even though he began his humorous writing career decades before, his fame really began to spread dramatically in 1910, right about the time of Twain's passing.

Much of his writing centers on Canadian culture and people, especially his 1912 masterpiece, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, dealing with the inhabitants of a fictional rural place he called Mariposa. Some day we may serialize the story in the Basement. Meanwhile, there is a spoken word version of Sunshine Sketches produced by Librivox here. Since 1947, the most prestigious award for Canadian humorists has been the Leacock Award. Generally speaking though, many of his humorous tales strike a Universal Chord, and hold up remarkably well, almost a century after they were written.

Of course, Leacock was once as popular in the U.S. as any American humorist. His work appeared in American newspapers and magazines, and his books sold like hotcakes. Somehow or other, his fame in the U.S. slipped over the years. I first learned of him decades ago, when I discovered that he was a huge influence on Groucho Marx and Jack Benny. I found dusty, unread volumes of his in the public library, checked them out and became a fan. Mister Ron's Basement Episode Number One is a Leacock story.

Most Canadians will talk about Leacock as an old friend when you bring him up. Most Americans today say, "Who?" when you bring up his name. This is a shame. This guy needs to be taught in American schools right along with Twain.

Rube Goldberg

2008-06-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

The Basement is featuring some extremely short, but sometimes very funny recipes from the 1922 collection The Stag Cook Book -- Written for Men by Men. The recipe in episode number 1096 is for Hash, written by cartoonist Rube Goldberg -- if ever a Rube Goldberg contraption could be put in a recipe this is the man who could do it. Give it a listen, and if you'd like some more Goldberg, there's a copy of his 1912 sheet music for the song I'm the Guy over here. You can hear the song as recorded by Billy Murray around 1913 at this link.

Bill Nye

2008-05-31T18:28:00.000-07:00

No, not "Bill Nye, the Science Guy," but the original, whom I like to call "Bill Nye, the Nineteenth Century Guy."

His real name was Edgar Wilson Nye, and he was one of America's most popular humorists until he died at the age of forty-six in 1896.

His pen name was actually taken from a character in one of Bret Harte's most famous (or infamous, if you will) poems, "Plain Language from Truthful James," published in the Overland Monthly in 1870, and later on widely reprinted for decades as "The Heathen Chinee." Harte himself said it was "the worst poem I ever wrote, possibly the worst poem anybody ever wrote." The poem is about a Chinese card sharp pretending to be totally ignorant of the game, and a cowboy named Bill Nye, whom he tries to trick. Here is the poem, for better or worse:

Which I wish to remark,

And my language is plain,

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar,

Which the same I would rise to explain.

Ah Sin was his name;

And I shall not deny,

In regard to the same,

What that name might imply;

But his smile it was pensive and childlike,

As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye.

It was August the third,

And quite soft was the skies;

Which it might be inferred

That Ah Sin was likewise;

Yet he played it that day upon William

And me in a way I despise.

Which we had a small game,

And Ah Sin took a hand:

It was Euchre. The same

He did not understand;

But he smiled as he sat by the table,

With the smile that was childlike and bland.

Yet the cards they were stocked

In a way that I grieve,

And my feelings were shocked

At the state of Nye's sleeve,

Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers,

And the same with intent to deceive.

But the hands that were played

By that heathen Chinee,

And the points that he made,

Were quite frightful to see, --

Till at last he put down a right bower,

Which the same Nye had dealt unto me.

Then I looked up at Nye,

And he gazed upon me;

And he rose with a sigh,

And said, "Can this be?

We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor," --

And he went for that heathen Chinee.

In the scene that ensued

I did not take a hand,

But the floor it was strewed

Like the leaves on the strand

With the cards that Ah Sin had been hiding,

In the game "he did not understand."

In his sleeves, which were long,

He had twenty-four packs, --

Which was coming it strong,

Yet I state but the facts;

And we found on his nails, which were taper,

What is frequent in tapers, -- that's wax.

Which is why I remark,

And my language is plain,

That for ways that are dark

And for tricks that are vain,

The heathen Chinee is peculiar, --

Which the same I am free to maintain.

The nickname stuck to Edgar Wilson Nye like glue for the rest of his life. He was an educated man, born in Maine, who spent a good number of years in Wisconsin, and after migrating to the wilderness of Laramie, Wyoming, set up shop as postmaster and the proprietor of a weekly newspaper called "The Laramie Boomerang" in 1881 (which is still being published to this day).

The Boomerang catapulted Nye to fame. It was filled with witty stories, and rough and tumble crude frontier humor. The stories were often reprinted in other newspapers around the world. and circulation of the Boomerang rose to record levels.

Nye went on tour, often with poet James Whitcomb Riley, and eventually moved to New York and North Carolina, where he died of meningitis (there were some contemporaries who claimed he drank himself to death after a string of disappointing stage performances).

We will go into more detail here regarding Nye in the future, but it really is worth going to the Basement podcast web site and searching out his many fun stories that I have read. As ever, your comments are welcome.

Running Out of Spoopendykes

2008-05-19T18:07:00.000-07:00

I think the count may be close to about eighty now, but it seems that we are fast running out of Stanley Huntley's Spoopendyke stories! Huntley only did these things for the last five years of his life, and many of them did not appear in the Brooklyn Eagle, but in the extremely hard-to-find Drake's Traveller's Magazine. We have managed to get some Spoopendyke stories that were reprinted from Drake's in contemporary newspapers, in New York and New Zealand, but there aren't many of those left to read.

Still, Huntley wrote lots of funny stuff besides tales of Mr. and Mrs. Spoopendyke, and we usually try to feature some of those pieces in the Basement's Sunday Salad feature. These include his tales of cowboys, miners, and other wild and wooly folk from out west, stories of con men, gamblers, crooked politicians and preachers, nutty inventors, and other loonies from Brooklyn. He also did a handful of stories of Mr. and Mrs. Breezy -- not as well-defined as the Spoopendykes, but generally making fun of modern life and manners. And of course, there are lots of spoofs of popular authors of his day, such as the "Jules Verne, Jr." story we read a while back.

So the big question to you, the listeners of Mister Ron's Basement, is whether we should continue with Sunday Salad without the Spoopendykes (except when we stumble into an undiscovered story), or should we put the series on the shelf, and replace it with something else -- maybe the poetry of Eugene Field?

Please post your reply here, or send an email to revry@panix.com. We'd love to know what you think!

Podfinder UK!

2008-05-11T07:51:00.000-07:00

Well, Mister Ron's Basement has become the subject of review in a fun British video podcast called Podfinder UK. It's one of five programs covered in Episode #45, which can be found at http://podfinderuk.btpodshow.com. The program is pretty entertaining and is well worth watching lots of episodes...

Once A Week is BACK!

2008-05-02T19:42:00.001-07:00

Our companion podcast, Mister Ron's Once A Week, after a hiatus of almost two years, is now back with a new format that ought to work! The earlier episodes each featured multiple items, reviews of books, comics, movies, television shows, music, and included fiction. This got to be too much for me, and never was practical to do on a weekly basis (especially while doing the Basement podcast seven days a week).

Nevertheless, the nine episodes done in 2006 remained posted, and surprisingly pulled in 200-300 downloads a day up through the present!

Our new format will offer one item or so per episode. The first one with this format is episode number 10, featuring a review of the IRON MAN movie. Our next one will cover a graphic novel or two, and so on...

Please drop by http://slapcast.com/users/ron and check it out. Your comments are welcome.

Ready, Set, Start Your Research!

2008-04-20T17:47:00.000-07:00

Once in a while I like to give away secrets, and this is one of those times. To your left, you will see a bunch of links called Research Sources for Public Domain Writing. Some of these took years for me to find, and here they are for you to use all wrapped up neatly like a birthday present! These are not, by a long shot, all of my sources for Public Domain material, but they are a real good starting point. You'll find plenty there to get you started, at least, and bit by bit, I will be adding more to this resource list.

Enjoy!

A Strange Coincidence in Mister Ron's Basement

2008-04-16T10:46:00.000-07:00

This one is just plain odd. If you take a look at the Basement episode featuring the second part of Stanley Huntley's Jules Verne spoof, A Trip to the South Pole, you might notice that was posted on the evening of April 15th, and just happens to be Episode Number 1040!

Wow!

Another Rarity Found!

2008-04-12T20:52:00.000-07:00

Back on March 9th, I wrote about a Stanley Huntley story that I had been searching for unsuccessfully:

The other rarity that has so far been beyond my reach is his science fiction story, A Trip to the South Pole, which was collected in the 1973 book At the Mountains of Murkiness and Other Parodies, edited by George Locke. The book claims the story was originally published back in 1899, fourteen years after Huntley died, so it may be something that Florence dug out of his papers and published somewhere to raise money, or it may have been reprinted in 1899 from someplace else, or may have been by someone else named Stanley Huntley! In any event, I have found copies of this book on some dealers lists for outrageous amounts of money, so I will probably have to wait a long time to see it.

Well, it has turned up! The Brooklyn Daily Eagle archive never showed it in a search, but I stumbled into it. Apparently, even though the story (presented over the course of three Sunday editions in 1880) was put into Huntley's Sunday Salad feature, the author was credited as "Jules Verne, Jr."

A Trip to the South Pole is a great spoof of the French Science Fiction master's works from a contemporary satirist of the first rank! Keep an eye out for it to begin on April 15th!

Mr. Bowser

2008-04-11T18:58:00.000-07:00

We have been presenting stories about Mr. Bowser since August of 2006 every Saturday, and it seems that we will continue to do so for quite a while longer. Created by Charles Bertrand Lewis for the Detroit Free Press back in 1886, Lewis, writing under the pen name of 'M. Quad,' continued relating the old grouch's adventures every week until his death in 1924! Afterward, his son continued writing Bowser tales (and stories about other M. Quad characters) for a while longer under the name of "M. Quad Jr." Of all the humorists we have featured on Mister Ron's Basement, Lewis's career was among the longest lived (other funny folks vying for that title include George Ade and Stephen Leacock).

Lewis was not a genius by any account. He fell back on formula writing for much of his career. In 1903, H. L. Mencken was mystified that he had to keep running the M. Quad weekly feature due to reader demand, even though he thought it was old fashioned even then. He also noted that Lewis provided extra work for freelance ghost writers to crank out his material, much like many comic strip artists have done over the years.

You can read a bit more about M. Quad in a previous post on this blog here. While he began his long humor writing career by barely surviving a tragic explosion, he became wealthy and admired, lived a long and happy life, and raised a family who aided his efforts into his old age.

For the past few weeks, we have been featuring the very first Mr. Bowser stories ever written, starting in 1886. Many of them are actually quite funny and fresh, undoubtedly because Lewis was writing them himself, and for the first time. They began with Basement episode #1022, and get funnier every week. Check them out!

Fan Mail from some flounder?

2008-04-06T17:35:00.000-07:00

As Bullwinkle would ask, of course. Yes indeed, we do get the occasional bit of fan mail, and a review here and there as well.

For example, Maria Lectrix, whose charming podcast (not on iTunes) covering public domain novels, epic poetry, and Catholic religious books, hit the one thousand mark long before we did, wrote this on her web site:

Mr. Ron’s Basement, for those unlucky enough not to know it and fortunate enough to have it all before them, is one of the earliest and best literary podcasts. Its mission is simple: to read forgotten short stories. The Basement is mostly full of funny tales, but there are also a good many serious ones. Occasionally Mr. Ron branches into novels. He adorns each podcast with good public domain or podcast-safe music, and discusses his unknown authors’ biographies. Mostly, though, he appears to have a lot of fun.

Maria Lectrix is not, to be honest, a podcast in what has come to be the full meaning of the word. I use podcasting as a method of distribution, not an artform; what I provide is something like a serialized audiobook service. That’s not a bad thing, but that’s all it is.

Mr. Ron has been creating something quite a bit more artistic, civilized, and difficult.

My thousandth segment was a mere matter of endurance. His thousandth episode will be a milepost of rare beauty and joy. Be sure to be there.

To Mr. Ron’s Basement, and to Mr. Ron! Ars longa!

Maria Lectrix's podcast can be found at http://marialectrix.wordpress.com/.

Pete Anderson, known as Pete Lit, from Chicago, writes fine fiction, and writes about fiction on his blog (http://www.petelit.com/), and has commented on Mister Ron's Basement a couple of times in the past. His comment on The Best of Mister Ron's Basement three CD set was music to my eyes anyway:

I was quite pleased to see that the collection includes Ade's "The Fable of the Author Who Was Sorry for What He Did to Willie", which is quite possibly the most laugh-out-loud-funny story I've ever heard, in terms of both Ade's brilliant writing and Evry's impeccable delivery.

Thanks Pete!

Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Most Famous Man in America (a gripping and remarkable book about Henry Ward Beecher -- a must read!) wrote to me:

These people, the forgotten popular writers of the mid-century, were a centerpiece of my Ph.D. dissertation so I am, perhaps, your ideal listener. It's really neat! I wish I'd known about this when I was writing the book....

Her web site is located at http://www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com/

and you can read a sample chapter of her book there and order one afterwards if you like.

I have received many other emails from both academics and listeners who download the podcasts just to enjoy them. Last month the Basement averaged around 3500 downloads a day, seven days a week. So far this month (it's still early), we're pulling in 4000-5000 downloads a day. Somebody is listening!

Mister Ron's Basement was recently reviewed by Greg and Clea in their podcast about podcasts (and other things) called Upon Further Review. It is episode number 57, and can be found at http://www.furtherreview.net/. They had an interesting take on the Basement, and they do make some valid points. It is true that the Mister Ron web site is something of an unorganized mess, the result of popping one episode after another on the page for over three years. This does indeed make it hard to find things a listener may be looking for without resorting to using a browser's "find" command. Sorry. I would love to fix this up and index everything. One of these days, if I get enough time, I will get around to it.

Meanwhile, my suggestion is for new listeners to just randomly browse around, much as they might glance through a crammed old bookstore, and see what strikes their fancy. If you're looking for, say, stories by Stephen Leacock, you will need to press "Control-F" on a Windows machine or "Command-F" on a Mac and dig up the episodes that way. Chances are good, that most casual listeners will not have heard of most of these authors, so a bit of exploration may be in order.

One thing mentioned in the Upon Further Review podcast that I may take issue with is their claim that most of these authors are not remembered today because they weren't as good as, say Charles Dickens, to use their example. This is hardly the case. In fact, all too many of Dickens's works would be met with total confusion by the average American today, and only the most persistent of academics make the effort to read everything he has written. There is no doubt in my mind that film and television versions of his stories have made it likely that more Americans are familiar with and comprehend the Mr. Magoo cartoon of A Christmas Carol than such dialogue as:

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy One. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever.

Still, there is no doubt that some of the language in many of the stories read in the Basement is old-fashioned, but they are, by and large, English. And it should be just as likely to find something funny in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1846 tale of women cramming below deck on a slow riverboat, or George Ade's turn of the century Fables in Slang, or Stanley Huntley's eminently satirical Salad pieces, as it would be to laugh at Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, in its original form.

Many of these authors have become forgotten for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they fall out of fashion and nobody is left alive with a financial interest to bother keeping the works in print. As an example, even though Stanley Huntley died in 1885, his Spoopendyke stories remained in print and were quite popular until about the time his wife Florence died in 1912. She died childless, and there was nobody to handle the legacy. George Horatio Derby died in 1861, and he never received a dime for the books of his newspaper writings during his lifetime, yet they remained in print continuously to this day! The average reader may not have heard of the guy, but his writing is still funny.

In 1906, Ellis Parker Butler (whose Perkins of Portland stories could have been written last week, as far as topicality goes), wrote this about Brick Pomeroy, an author we featured in the Basement last week:

"In the field of pure nonsense I know nothing funnier than "Brick" Pomeroy's introduction to his book, 'Nonsense.' It is too long to quote, but the desired effect is gained by keeping up the nonsense at great length."

So here is the introduction he mentions, from 1868. I think it's a scream:

My father determined to bind me out as an apprentice to a fine old gentleman whose daughter was in love with a young man who lived with his father down the river which in the spring time was so swollen by the rains that it was important not to cross it except in a skiff tied to a buttonwood tree by a chain which cost five dollars at the hardware store on the corner of the street in the village where each Sabbath morning the minister told his many congregation which would have been larger had it not been for the habit so many people had of staying away from all places of good instruction without which not a single person in the village would have been safe for a moment from the members of a band of desperadoes whose retreat was in the bowels of a huge mountain, on whose healthy sides the birds sang all the day long as if to remind the weary passer-by that in all well-regulated families there exists a cause for the effect be it great like the late war which was a fearful struggle on both sides for the original position held by the covered wagon of my father.

Who can wonder at the infatuation of the youth when he saw his own true love in the power of the Indian whose scalping-knife hung suspended from a tree over the grave where a small picket fence had been erected by a boy who saw the fire burst forth devouring in an hour the fruit of a lifetime of toil which unrewarded leaves no recompense to strengthen the soul of man as he wars with evils that beset the path which led to the trysting-tree which had by this time been cut down to make room for a large hotel where the sound of revelry by night was heard booming over the still waters of the lake as the moon shone down upon the sailor-boy stood on a burning deck!

At this moment the breeching gave way and the horse plunged over the precipice, which at this point ran nearly a thousand cubic feet into the cave where the serpent had taken refuge from the coming storm which threatened to burst forth and destroy the entire plan of the temple on which if the workmen had been employed to save the child ere it struck, the bottom of the well down which the bucket descended bringing up the purest ice-water rivalling the alabaster neck of the wounded sufferer whose death happened to plunge the entire city in mourning.

So, yep, they don't write 'em like that anymore. To which I say (and maybe a few thousand other listeners), too bad they don't.

Anyway, thanks for the review, Greg and Clea. I wish you success with your podcast. I found it fun to listen too, and I do appreciate the positive and negative comments you made, and I do urge all my listeners to check out their show. Greg did mention that he might want to get back to commenting about The Basement when he's heard 150 or so episodes. I hope he does get that far.

Of course, comments are always welcome here in the blog, or via email at revry@panix.com.

The Secret of Max Adeler's Name

2008-03-28T03:37:00.000-07:00

Regular listeners to Mister Ron's Basement are probably quite familiar now with the humorous stories of Max Adeler, who wrote some of the most outrageously funny stories of all time in the 1870s. Adeler's real name was Charles Heber Clark. In 1995, Professor David Ketterer issued a beautiful book called "Charles Heber Clark; A Family Memoir," containing Clark's autobiography, which he had written for his family between 1906 and 1912, and also included various notes and annotations by Ketterer, as well as a reproduction of of the novelette "Fortunate Island" (which we have read on the Basement). The edition is well worth owning, long out-of-print, and usually costs more on the used market than original 1870s editions of Adeler's books.

When Clark first started writing humor for newspapers, he used the silly punnish pen name of "Quill." Later he adopted a better pen name. In the autobiography, Clark states:

"I wrote under the name of "Max Adeler," which belonged to a character in a little story book I was fond of when I was a boy."

In the footnotes, Ketterer wrote:

"I have not been able to identify the "little story book" containing the "Max Adeler" character."

Well, I found it!

The book is called "Island Home Castaways" by Christopher Romaunt, who was actually James F. Bowman. It was first published in the US in 1852 (right about the time Clark was eleven years old). A British edition of the book can be found on Google Books for free download as a pdf file at this site.

The raw text that was used in preparation for a Gutenberg edition can be found (at least for a while) at:

http://www.athelstane.co.uk/r_archer/islehome/islehome.htm

Essentially, the story concerns six castaway youths on an island. One of them is named "Max Adeler." Here is a revealing quote from the book:

"That now, is positively diabolical!" exclaimed Max, from his covert among the creepers, where he was completely invisible, except his heels, which were kicking in the air; "I wouldn't have believed, Arthur, that you were such a methodical, cold-blooded creature! I suppose now, that if I had tumbled overboard during that hideous time, and been gulped down by a shark, or if Shakespeare had starved to death, you would have made a regular memorandum of the event, in business-like style, and wound up your watch as usual. I think I see the entry in your pocket-book, thus: '1839, June 3rd-Mem. Max Adeler fell overboard this day, and was devoured by a shark-an amiable and interesting youth, though too much given to levity, and not prepared, I fear, for so unexpected a summons. June 5th-Mem. My worthy and estimable friend, John Browne, late of Glasgow, Scotland, died this day, from lack of necessary food. Threw him overboard. What startling monitions of the uncertainty of life!'"

Clark adopted the name of "an amiable and interesting youth, though too much given to levity."

Additionally, there are many instances of Clark's characters getting shipwrecked or abandoned on an island. I found three or four in "Random Shots," for example, and of course, there is the Professor and his daughter in "Fortunate Island."

The feeling I got when I discovered this was quite strange -- it was like reaching into the mind of someone 150 years ago, and for a few minutes at least, I had the experience of probably being the only person on the planet who knew this (and one of the few that cared).

The way I discovered this is kind of complex, but suffice it to say that a decade ago it would have been almost impossible to do. The power of the internet to find things long dormant and forgotten is amazing. In many ways, I am using twenty-first century technology to open up the lives and thoughts of people from the nineteenth in ways that are new and wonderful.

Your comments are welcome.

Thirty-One Years

2008-03-27T05:12:00.000-07:00

Thirty-one years ago today (March 27), for some strange reason I’ll never figure out, Karen said “I Do” and she’s been stuck with me ever since. As I flitter through life, doing strange and quirky things like seven-days-a-week podcasts, she’s the one who keeps me down to earth.

Nevertheless, I simply couldn’t do any of this without her. While she often claims to want routine day-to-day events that she can count on, Karen can display a sense of wonder and exhibit total enthusiasm for driving ten hours to search through 150 year old boxes of Fanny Fern memoribalia, or spending all day at Podcamps in strange cities, or scrounging around antique bookshops in small towns up and down the East Coast, or going to visit Emily Dickinson’s house in the pouring rain, or discovering someplace new and different.

Karen complains that I’m down in the Basement recording until midnight, yet she loves hearing me read fan mail to her. She has her hands full every day teaching eighth graders how to read, and comes home weary and exhausted, but is usually ready to hop up at a moment’s notice if we’ve won movie tickets, or we’re invited to an opening, or a cartoonists’ get-together, or something of that nature.

After all those years there’s plenty that she does that I am not involved in directly on a day-to-day basis, and vice-versa. Nevertheless, I couldn’t do anything I’ve been doing without her. We’re partners, after all. She’s my partner in everything I do, and vice-versa.

Happy Anniversary, Karen! I'm still head over heels in love with you. The best is (hopefully) yet to come...

Old-Time Story Censorship?

2008-03-23T14:44:00.000-07:00

On a Comics History email list I am on, there has been discussion on whether "many academics are intentionally perpetuating racism" or whether "some academics are un-intentionally perpetuating racism," by reprinting and even writing admiringly about some old comics that would be interpreted as racist by today's audiences. This is a difficult subject, because historical accuracy may demand that those hurtful images be included in scholarly studies, but common decency may require that they be left out. Well, this does not just apply to comics scholarship, to be sure.

I posted this message to my email group, and present it here, more or less as it appeared:

When I go through old stories to read in Mister Ron's Basement, there are quite a few that may have seemed harmless a hundred and fifty years ago or so, but I simply can't bring myself to present them. The odd things are stories that inadvertently include hurtful words or expressions that are not crucial to the stories. I myself feel that it really is not academically incorrect to remove or slightly change those references if it manages to bring a forgotten old storyteller to life in modern times.

Examples might include more than one George Ade story where he used the term "c--n songs" to refer to popular music that is not "high-brow." In those cases, I simply call them "songs." Is this academically reprehensible? I don't think so; not if the alternative is to leave otherwise delightful stories dead and forgotten.

I ran into some particularly difficult times reading stories by William Tappan Thompson, a great southern writer whose tales often featured slaves and black servants referred to with the "N" word. Usually those characters were incidental to the story, so once again, I saw no problem using the term "servant" or something like that.

If I was reading something like "Huckleberry Finn," or perhaps "The Weeping Time" by Philander Doesticks, where the use of certain words were intrinsic to the story line and the characters were treated with absolute respect, then I would have no problem using those terms.

Do I have the right to make those judgement calls? Well, legally, yes. The stories are in the public domain, and I can do whatever I want with them. Morally and ethically, some might argue that I do not have the right, but to me, the overriding concern is to make these long buried treasures palatable to a modern audience.

One that same note, I have so far refrained from reading M. Quad's "Lime Kiln Club" stories, and anything by Joel Chandler Harris because they may be misinterpreted. Oddly enough, some of Harris's stories, presented in what he considered "authentic southern Negro speech" at the time were actually derived from Cherokee Indian legends.

On a cartooning note, something similar happened about twenty years ago, when a popular book of old-time cartoons of cats was published, and it featured A. B. Frost's "A Fatal Mistake," the panel showing the black butler being scared with his hair standing on end by the dying cat was left out. Was this proper? Maybe. Although I have an 1888 edition of "Stuff and Nonsense" with that picture and it doesn't seem demeaning to my sensibilities, when the Butler is compared to the other characters.

How do you feel? Am I being "unscholarly"? Your opinions are welcome...

Metta Victoria Victor

2008-03-17T20:37:00.000-07:00

Celebrating Women's History Month, we lead off with a short piece by Metta Victoria Victor from her hilarious book "A Good Boy's Diary." We have read from Mrs. Victor's works before, most notably, one of her "Miss Slimmens" stories (Episode #265, January 29, 2006). Eventually, we will serialize "Miss Slimmens' Window," one of the funniest books ever written. It's rough doing her voice though, so it may have to wait a while.

In Kate Sanborn's 1885 book "The Wit of Women" she writes, "Mrs. Metta Victoria Victor, who died recently, has written an immense amount of humorous sketches. Her 'Miss Slimmens,' the boarding-house keeper, is a marked character, and will be remembered by many."

Mrs. Victor wrote under an assortment of pen names, male and female, as well as her own. The Miss Slimmens books were originally published with the pen name of "Mrs. Mark Peabody." She wrote adventure stories, mysteries, romances, and anything else she could crank out. Her husband, Orville J. Victor, was the General Editor of Beadle and Adams, the major Dime Novel publishing house in the U. S. and England. Perhaps the most significant effort of her career was a novel called "Maum Guinea," a story of slavery that was only surpassed by Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in stirring up abolitionist feelings. Abe Lincoln was reported to have said, "It is as absorbing as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

Oddly enough, there is a tenuous connection between Mrs. Victor's novel and the Beecher family. When it was published in England, the book caused quite a stir, and sold tens of thousands of copies there, along with Mr. Victor's "The American Rebellion,. Some facts and Reflections for the Consideration of the British People," which also dealt with the scourge of slavery. When Henry Ward Beecher toured England as an emissary for Lincoln to (successfully) convince the British people not to recognize the Confederacy or to buy cotton from them, he later told Mr. Victor, "My dear fellow, your little book and Mrs. Victor's novel were a telling series of shots in the right spot."

So listen and enjoy Mrs. Victor's funny story, but realize that her humor was a small part of her accomplishments as a highly influential author of her day.

iTunes redux

2008-03-14T03:20:00.000-07:00

Well, Apple removed a post I placed last night on their discussions board. It was called "Simply Amazing" and in it I essentially complained about their "selection" process for putting podcasts in the "featured" section of iTunes. I'm sorry I didn't save the post so I could place it here, but it was pretty late at night & I was tired.

They sent me a charming form letter:

Your post, "Simply Amazing. " was removed from the Apple forums as it does not follow the guidelines specified in our terms of use. These areas are intended to address technical issues about Apple products. Posts that do not conform to the Apple Discussions Use Agreement are inappropriate.

Reasons that your post was removed may include but are not limited to:

-Off topic or non-technical posts

-Non-constructive rants or complaints

Still, it is their business, and if they don't want to host a discussion of how they pick podcasts for their featured spots, that's their privilege. But the plain fact is that while they are including podcast listings on iTunes for "free," they are also reaping the benefit of having lots of free content for users to attract and keep them.

My big complaint is that Mister Ron's Basement has never -- I mean never -- been featured on the iTunes "New and Notable" or even "Featured" menus, either on the front page or in the Comedy category where the Basement resides.

If being the first podcast on iTunes to reach the One Thousand mark isn't notable, then what is? If creating a well researched (and at times exciting, funny, and fascinating) three part three-hour long audio documentary isn't notable, then what is?

I'm certain that currently featured programs such as "Vomitus Prime" "Air Out My Shorts" and "Lucky ***** Radio" (actually featured twice in the same menu!) are obviously outstanding high-class efforts, and that what I need to do is stop producing family-friendly, well researched programs of classic American humor, and dig around in the gutter some more.

And the excuse I have heard some people give -- that I need to have more "subscribers" (I currently average about three thousand downloads a day and a tad under a hundred subscribers) to get listed -- simply doesn't hold water, as iTunes often highly promotes podcasts that have just been created by major corporations or often something that just strikes their fancy, even though they haven't been around long enough to have any subscribers at all.

Well, that's my rant for today. I do remember that I did end my post by stating that other podcasters should not be discouraged by iTunes' policies. The rewards of podcasting are in the act of creation itself, or as somebody we know once said, "The Journey is the Reward."

Rarities

2008-03-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

Searching deeper and deeper into the realms of early American humor has uncovered the existence of relics that I dream of encountering in one form or another. Some of these I have actually gotten my grubby little hands on; other relics sit and sit in my ebay search list, waiting for somebody to uncover them in their attic and get listed.

A prime example is the St. Jacobs Oil Family Calendar for 1883, and possibly 1884. The 1883 edition, according to reviews I have read in period newspapers, contains at least one Spoopendyke story written especially for the publication by Stanley Huntley, as well as other pieces created for it by the nation's leading humorists of the time. I did actually buy a copy of the 1885 edition (from a book dealer -- not on ebay), from which I read a handful of Bill Nye stories on the Basement. Stanley Huntley's name is listed in the front of the booklet as a contributor, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what he wrote for it. It is possible that he helped edit the Calendar, as he is the only contributor who is credited with being an editor of any sort.

The 1884 edition of the Calendar is a complete mystery to me. Back in the 1880s, the St. Jacobs Oil company of Baltimore gave away millions of these things, either by mail or via participating pharmacies. I have discovered that there are at least a few people out there who collect St. Jacobs Oil bottles, postcards, advertisements, and other ephemera. But so far, I still haven't encountered either the 1883 or 1884 edition.

A couple of other Stanley Huntley treasures that have eluded me include copies of the New York children's newspaper that featured the serialized story "Daddy Hoppler." Huntley wrote the first couple of chapters of this story, then went to sea for his health for a few months. His wife Florence continued and finished the tale under his name, because she needed the money, and the editors were none the wiser. Unfortunately, I have no idea what the name of the children's periodical is, and cannot find a clue to where this story might be found. The other rarity that has so far been beyond my reach is his science fiction story, A Trip to the South Pole, which was collected in the 1973 book At the Mountains of Murkiness and Other Parodies, edited by George Locke. The book claims the story was originally published back in 1899, fourteen years after Huntley died, so it may be something that Florence dug out of his papers and published somewhere to raise money, or it may have been reprinted in 1899 from someplace else, or may have been by someone else named Stanley Huntley! In any event, I have found copies of this book on some dealers lists for outrageous amounts of money, so I will probably have to wait a long time to see it.

Another Huntley rarity, of course, would be the many issues of Drake's Travellers' Magazine (yes, that is how it is spelled) that Huntley edited and wrote many humorous pieces for. I have one issue, and it was a fluke finding it. I am always looking for more.

There are rarities by other authors that I am always looking for. I do need to find a few holes in my Philander Doesticks (Mortimer Thomson) collection, especially his early newspaper pieces that were not reprinted in books. David L. Roath, author of The Five Love Adventures of Solomon Slug, apparently edited a humor periodical in the 1850s called Roath's Monthly Magazine. Boy, would I love to find some of those!

There's a wealth of writing (not in books) by James M. Bailey, Fanny Fern, M. Quad, and Max Adeler that are in (so far) undigitized newspapers. These things are high up on my want list. And speaking of Max Adeler, I have read that Charles Heber Clark adopted that pen name based on a character in a story he read as a child, but no one has ever encountered that story, and it remains a mystery.

As more and more old paper gets digitized, more of these important parts of our humorous heritage will become available to future generations. Let us hope that this happens a lot more than it has so far, because all too much of it disintegrates and vanishes every day.

Episode #1000 - Erratum

2008-02-28T19:12:00.000-08:00

Well, all three parts of Episode #1000 are up -- I've never done anything quite like this. In fact, I doubt if anybody has ever done anything quite like this. Essentially, this is a three hour and ten minute long audio documentary, presented mostly with readings from period pieces of newspaper clippings and book excerpts.

Believe it or not, I left a lot of stuff out that I wanted to include to shave down the running time. Maybe I'll include that stuff in the book. Yeah, there's going to eventually be a book about Huntley, M. Quad, Fanny Fern, Doesticks, and lots of other great 19th Century humorists.

An example of something I left out was any mention of the Morey Letter, although I did infer something about it in the beginning of the first part. Essentially, while James Garfield was running for President in 1880, a newspaper called Truth published what they claimed was a letter from then Senator Garfield to a man named Morey, where he stated that he thought immigration policy should allow lots more Chinese workers into the country. Today, that would be like a Presidential candidate saying there aren't enough Mexican immigrants in the USA.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

Anyway, the weird thing about all this is that Garfield told the press that that he didn't remember writing the letter, but that he might have! It took teams of Republican Party political operatives and spin doctors to pull Garfield's fat out of the fire. They printed up hundreds of thousands of flyers showing the Morey Letter on the left, and an example of Garfield's handwriting on the right, and distributed them all over the nation. Garfield won the election, but didn't serve too long, as he got shot not long afterward. The odd thing here is that Garfield admitted publicly that he possibly could have written the letter, which meant that maybe he did not disagree with it!

An investigation followed, and some detectives told reporters that they believed that Stanley Huntley, a staunch Democrat, in cahoots with Stilson Hutchins, owner of the Washington Post, created the letters as an elaborate election hoax. Huntley denied this vehemently, going as far as to write a special article for the Chicago Tribune pinning the blame on a noted forger named Phillip. But at the height of the Morey investigation hysteria, one week before the 1880 election, he inserted a Spoopendyke story called "Not Altogether Satisfactory" into the Brooklyn Eagle, where Mr. and Mrs. Spoopendyke argue over whether the Morey Letters were real or a hoax. Whether Huntley wrote the letters or not, here he was thumbing his nose at everyone over them.

So, I had all this stuff printed out and was going to read it into the third part of Episode #1000, but simply didn't have enough room for it. I probably will include in in a Basement Sunday Salad Episode real soon.

Meanwhile, while listening to these episodes in my car, I encountered some other glitches and typos. In the first Part, I called Eugene Field Stanley Field by mistake once. Sorry.

I also apparently lost control of the volume in several portions of Part One as well. Really sorry!

In Part Two, I discovered a major error, but a little detective work revealed the source of it. This is fascinating -- When Sitting Bull first confronts Stanley Huntley, he is quoted as greeting him with "How Colonel."

The odd thing I noticed while listening to this is that Huntley was alone. He was not a military man, wore no uniform, and Sitting Bull had no reason to call him "Colonel." But the oddest thing was that the 1879 Chicago Tribune had that line in bold type no less!

So how did this happen? Well, Huntley telegraphed the story from the wilderness to the Tribune. The newspaper made a big deal out of the fact that they spent over a thousand dollars for the telegraph costs alone. Now the article is full of instances of Indians saying to Huntley (and vice-versa) the traditional greeting of "How Cola." No doubt the telegraph operator may have thought the "a" in cola was a period, and the typesetter at the Tribune thought it was "Col." the abbreviation for Colonel, and spelled it out. So there. I caught it. Not that anyone is left alive from 1879 to say, "thanks for catching that, Mister Ron."

Episode #1000 Is Up!

2008-02-25T21:03:00.000-08:00

Well, at least partially...

Episode #1000, 'The Stanley Huntley Story' is so BIG, that it had to be broken up into three parts, which will be uploaded over the course of three days. The first Part is ready for you to download, and is just a tad over an hour long. Please do give it a listen. Huntley is a true American Original, and you'll have fun listening to all three parts.

I have attempted to tell this story by mostly using original sources -- period newspaper articles by and about Huntley, books of the era, and an actual bound volume of the Bismarck Tribune from 1878-79 at the Library of Congress. Much of the research involved simply could not have been accomplished even five years ago. More and more, scanned newspaper runs are becoming available online, and these are generally fully indexed (although it often helps to know what you're looking for and when it appeared).

The drawing at the right may be the only known depiction of Huntley. He is probably the bearded man at the desk. No photographs have turned up yet. It is possible, that having Bright's Disease, which is quite disfiguring, Huntley always refused to be photographed.

Please leave your comments here, or send an email to revry@panix.com.

Enjoy.

Comments

2008-02-16T12:39:00.001-08:00

We have fixed things up so you can now post comments without being a Google member. You can even post anonymously, if you feel the need.
Thanx and a tip o' Mister Ron's Hat...

George W. Peck

2008-02-15T03:53:00.000-08:00

There is something altogether remarkable about George W. Peck -- Will Rogers probably took a few pages out of his book -- his characters are are often just a tad on the mischievous side ("Peck's Bad Boy" more than a tad of course), and he occasionally flirted with the boundaries of good taste, but by and large, Peck's stories left readers feling good about themselves. Harmless joshing with a bit of bite might be a good way to explain them.

When Peck took over Brick Pomeroy's LaCrosse Democrat in 1874 and renamed it The Sun, it took a few years for it to really catch on. Peck's humorous paragraphs and stories made up the bulk of the paper, and when he moved the newspaper to Milwaukee and put his own name on the masthead, the circulation rose exponentially. Subscriptions started to pour in from all corners of the nation, and Peck himself set the stage for a highly successful career in politics by the 1890s. Every issue of the paper bore this inscription:

"The funniest newspaper in America. What vaccination is to the smallpox, Peck's Sun is to the Blues,"

We will go into more detail about Peck soon. But treat yourself to a chuckle or two and listen to some of the stories we are reading in the Basement this week and next.

One Thousand Episodes Approaching (part two)

2008-02-10T19:06:00.000-08:00

As of today, we are fifteen episodes away from number 1,000, to be devoted to the life and writing of Stanley Huntley!

In the process, I have gathered more information than anybody else has in the last 100 years on Stanley Huntley. So far, we have posted sixty Spoopendyke stories, and about as many other pieces by Huntley in the Basement. I believe I may be able to come up with at least a dozen more Spoopendykes, many of which have not seen the light of day since the 1800s! There are at least some that were never collected in any of the Spoopendyke books. While Huntley died in 1885, his books remained in print and were popular well into the twentieth century.

His wife Florence died in 1912, and their confused estate probably left no one to care about re-issuing the books, and the characters fell into obscurity. Needless to say, the influence of Huntley on modern comedy is widespread, either directly or indirectly.

If you haven't heard any of his stuff yet, go listen to some of the SUNDAY SALAD episodes in the Basement. You'll be glad you did.

I do want to thank all the thousands of listeners to the Basement. Very soon now, I hope to update the statistics page, which I haven't done since last April. Remarkably enough, I have been averaging close to 3,000 downloads every day, seven days a week, for years now, from listeners in every corner of the globe!

All this has been done with very little publicity -- mostly by word of mouth -- and almost no help from Apple's iTunes. Mister Ron's Basement was picked up by iTunes the day it started carrying podcasts, and has never, as far as I can tell been spotlighted there. I understand that there's just a few overworked people who do all the choosing for the Top Podcasts, and what I have been doing has probably flown over their heads. It's easy to see that what I am doing is not their cup of tea. While Mister Ron's Basement offers (IMHO) unparalleled entertainment and a high degree of scholarship and research, it isn't "explicit" and doesn't offer imitations of the same old stuff you hear every day on television and radio, and doesn't feature modern celebrities hawking their latest piece of pop culture. It is not produced by a major corporation, so there's no need to butter me up.

Additionally, there are ferocious problems with iTunes updating Mister Ron's Basement's main menu. Subscribers get the latest episodes easily every day, but sometimes the main menu will update daily for weeks in a row, then not update at all for weeks in a row.

Undoubtedly, the suggestion of the programmers there would be to stop clogging up their RSS pipes with a thousand episodes. But it has been my intention to create a massive, easily accessible library of timeless classic American humorous writing, and I'm not about to let latecomers to Podcasting dictate what a Podcast is or isn't to me. Their main menu scrolls by the latest 100 episodes, and the subscriber menu makes all of them available. If they can't figure out how to grab my RSS feed in a reliable manner, either they're not too competent at this, or else they figure what I am doing is not worth their effort (I suspect it is the latter that is the case).

Anyway, I don't want to get the iTunes Gods angry at me and have them ban Mister Ron's Basement, so I do want to say that I am actually quite grateful for iTunes for helping to popularize Podcasting, and I hope they continue to do so.

While I am at it, I want to thank Roger Strickland, who runs Mister Ron's Basement's hosting service, Slapcast (http://slapcast.com). He provides a terrific, low-priced podcast hosting service that offers unlimited bandwidth at a remarkable price. You can even post three episodes totally free to try it out. Tell 'em Mister Ron sent you!

M. Quad

2008-02-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

This past week, we have been featuring short fables from M. Quad's 1884 book Sawed Off Sketches. M. Quad's real name was Charles Bertrand Lewis, and long-time listeners of the Basement will be familiar with his Mr. Bowser stories that we have been reading every Saturday for the last year and a half.

Lewis was a newspaper correspondent during the first months of the US Civil War, but later on became an infantryman, and served in almost every major battle until the war's end without receiving a scratch. Afterward, he found work as a typesetter in Detroit, until he accepted an editor's position in Kentucky in 1868. On his journey to that job, the steamboat Magnolia exploded, leaving many passengers dead or wounded. Bloodied, and with a big hole in his head, he was first thought to be another dead body, until his rescuers found him to be hanging on for dear life. After a long recuperation in the hospital, he returned to his typesetter's job in Detroit, having lost the editor job. While there, he wrote up a wildly hilarious account of his adventure called How It Feels to be Blown Up. This story was read in the Basement episode #328 and can be listened to here. It was picked up by newspapers from coast to coast. Lewis chose the pen name of M. Quad, which is a typographer's term for a double-wide letter (an N Quad is a single width letter).

Almost immediately, Lewis's humorous writing went into weekly syndication, and he used his lawsuit award from the steamboat company to buy a substantial interest in the Detroit Free Press. Often, his work was run in other papers with the byline of The Detroit Free Press Man.

His weekly short stories covered every subject under the sun, and many of them stand up well today. Over the years, he created regular characters for his column. Mr. Bowser came into being in the mid-1880s, and was probably inspired by Stanley Huntley's Spoopendyke. A clever series of stories about a fictional newspaper called The Arizona Kicker lasted many years, and also may have been inspired by Huntley's work at the Bismarck Tribune in Dakota Territory. Huntley had run some M. Quad stories in the Tribune during his run there, and Lewis was undoubtedly aware of Huntley's work at the Tribune and the Brooklyn Eagle.

Another popular series in the M. Quad weekly package was Brother Gardner's Lime Kiln Club, which, at first glance seems to be crude stories making fun of negro dialect. But on closer examination, Brother Gardner (or Brudder Gardner in the stories) was of exemplary character, and extremely moral, and most of the humor came from his dealing with the odd characters who were members of the club. The Gardner stories were undoubtedly the inspiration for the old Amos and Andy radio and television programs.

So far I have totally avoided these kinds of stories on the Basement. I really do not find stories that rely on dialect for humor to be very funny. But I suppose if enough listeners demanded it I might read one or two of the better ones someday.

After his brush with near-death in 1868, Lewis continued his career as a humorist until he passed on in 1924! His son continued the column for a short while under the pen name of M. Quad Jr., but the public had grown tired of his style of writing in the age of flappers, speakeasies, and hot jazz.

What do you think? Please post your comments!

National Gorilla Suit Day

2008-01-30T20:46:00.000-08:00

For our second annual National Gorilla Suit Day story, we have chosen "Mr. Columbus Coriander's Gorilla' written by Noah Brooks and published in 1869 in "The Overland Monthly." It was reprinted in an 1891 book without an author credit, and the story that followed was properly credited to Max Adeler. After that, the story appeared in a number of anthologies wrongly attributed to Adeler.

In any event, this story really does tickle my funny bone. I can imagine that post-Civil War readers (who certainly needed a good laugh) really enjoyed this tale, and over the following decades, it was a popular contribution to many humor anthologies.

Noah Brooks was not well known as a humorist. He was a newspaper columnist and journalist, and a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, who often wrote insider stories about the President during the Civil War.

"National Gorilla Suit Day" was created by Mad Magazine cartoonist Don Martin back in 1963, and has become an American tradition. We are, of course, looking for more old Gorilla Suit stories for the upcoming years...

One Thousand Episodes Approaching (part one)

2008-01-29T12:15:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are, just about one month away from being the first Podcast on iTunes to hit the 1,000 episode mark! It has been an enormous amount of fun, and the experience of discovering so many classic American Humorists has really been enriching for me, to say the least.

How about you?

Have you been listening to a lot of these stories? Any favorites? Any suggestions? I would like to make this Blog a place where we can discuss anything and everything that goes on in the Basement, and your comments are most welcome. Keep coming back here for fresh commentary, and an occasional contest with nifty prizes.

Meanwhile, do keep your eyes peeled for Episode #1000, which will be an in-depth look at the life, career, and writing of Stanley Huntley! We have been featuring Huntley's stories every Sunday for over a year now, and have managed to dig up more Spoopendyke stories than we thought existed when we began.

How do you feel about Stanley Huntley's work? Is the humor too cynical? Too mean-spirited? Do you spit out your beverage while listening from unexpectedly laughing?

Please post your comments below.

-=-Ron-=-