by Grania
Good morning!
In 1964 the Beatles pulled of something of a coup occupying the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100, a feat yet to be matched.
No. 1, “Can’t Buy Me Love”
No. 2, “Twist and Shout”
No. 3, “She Loves You”
No. 4, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”
No. 5, “Please Please Me”
Four years later in 1968 civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis.
Today is the birthday of Anthony Perkins (1932), the man who terrified with his performance as Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho. My Irish parish priest back in the day admitted years later that the scene where the mummified mother is revealed literally made his hair stand on end. (Oops, spoilers.)
Legendary Blues musician Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) was also born today in 1913.
In Dobrzyn Hili is having very specific visions. Or something.
A: What do you see up there?
Hili: Virgin of Guadalupe. She is sitting by the chimney.
In Polish:
Ja: Coś tam zobaczyła?
Hili: Matkę Boską z Gwadelupy, siedzi na dachu koło komina.
The staff of Gus has sent on some new pictures of him investigating his domain.
Twist and Shout — What a bright bit of cheer this politically depressing morning!
Yes. Twist and Shout rocks.
The Cramps’ Twist And Shout is also brilliant. It’s one of those song titles which seems to inspire multiple excellent songs by different artists. See also Come Together..
The Isley Brothers had the original hit with it, as I recall. Their version was pretty cool, too.
Gus and Hili are looking sharp today. Grania takes me back all the way to my youth, 50s & 60s. Leads to that question, why is it wasted on the young?
for those Dan Dennett fans he was on radio 4’s Life Scientific today – all episodes available to download by the way –
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39482345
Repeated later at 2030 GMT.
Waking to the Beatles and Hili is a pleasure. What a kick! Virgin of Guadalupe indeed!
It’s now 1:25 AM in Wellington.
Gus is looking a little startled in that first picture. It calls out for a caption.
“Aack, a ghost! Oh, wait, that’s a mirror.”
The weird thing about that scene from Psycho is that it terrified me as a child, and yet to this day I still haven’t seen Psycho. My dad, considerate parent that he was, described in delighted detail the scene with the skeleton mother in the rocking chair, and just from his words he managed to implant an image in my head that’s frightened me ever since I heard it. I think this was when I was seven, the same year he rented the original Alien out for us both and thus established the general subject matter of all my subsequent nightmares.
That mummified mommy scene is pretty hokey by today’s standards in my opinion.
The true tension and horror of the movie is in the viewer’s growing realisation that Norman Bates is not just sexually repressed with severe mommy issues, but also certifiably insane.
/Grania
I learned long ago, when showering with a woman, to announce one’s presence in advance from a safe distance, rather than to enter suddenly and by surprise. 🙂
There’s actually a second movie from 1960 with Anthony Perkins in a shower with a woman, the light comedy “Tall Story” (with a very young Jane Fonda) but in that they are both clothed and are trying to see of both of them can fit in such a small shower together.
Still the scene is a bit weird knowing it came out just a few months before Psycho. The scene is on YouTube, but here I just post a movie poster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_Story#/media/File:Tall_Story_poster.jpg
Hmmm. That didn’t work
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTg1NDM3NTczNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwNjI2NjQyMQ@@._V1_UY1200_CR12,0,630,1200_AL_.jpg
Yeah, Tall Story was a “late show” staple when I was a kid. I’ve seen it several times, though not in recent decades. 🙂
Perkins played a psycho of a different sort in another sports flick, Fear Strikes Out — the biopic of Jimmy Piersall, one of baseball’s great flakes, famous for having once run the bases backwards.
I tend to sound my special ‘shower air-horn’ upon approaching.
All my knowledge of Psycho comes from pop-culture references, like Principal Seymour Skinner repeatedly referring to ‘mother’, and staring out the classroom window at the house on the hill.
I really should get around to watching it.
Inevitably, they did a TV show spin-off a few years ago, Bates Hotel. I don’t know if it’s still going.
Since the matter of fright causing people’s hair to stand on end (piloerection) has been brought up, I want to know if this is is actually possible? I’m highly skeptical, but willing to be convinced, and await a convincing explanation. Sure, some animals’ hair (such as cats) will stand up when they’re frightened or angry, but we’re not cats. Though I frequently read reports that the hair on the back of someone’s neck or head stood up out of fear, I take it to be figurative. I’ve never experienced anything like that. . Static electricity and goose bumps will cause the hairs on my arms to rise but that’s not due to fear, but only the hair on my arms, and I’ve never gotten goose bumps out of fear or some other emotional response, but only when I’ve been cold, and I’ve never felt like the hair at the back of my neck or on my head is going to rise. Maybe this phenomenon is one of those things on the order of people who can wiggle their ears — some can and some can’t and there’s a genetic explanation.
I doubt hair on one’s head could ever stand up – or at least not enough to be visible, it’s probably too heavy. But on the arms, sure.
It’s the same reflex whether cats or humans. Well, that’s to the best of my non-biologist knowledge.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3061318/
/Grania
Thanks for this link, Grania. I’m reading it now. And it’s the full study, not an abstract. I’m sure to learn a lot about the matter. Also, a number of citations and sidebar articles sound tantalizing.
The closest thing to the Beatles “coup occupying the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100” is that in 1968(or 67?) all five nominations for the Hugo award for best science-fiction drama were Star Trek episodes.
Happy Senegalese Independence Day.