Episode #1500 contest!!! Prize Revealed!

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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!

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!

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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!

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!