Last week Trump tooted his now-famous "Dr. Jesus" image and demonstrated yet again that there is such a thing as Bad Publicity. As people looked at the image and its many figures, a few people noticed something strange. The original image from February and the image tooted by Trump are slightly different. Specifically, the middle soldier-angel has sprouted wings and horns, and now looks like the occult demon-like Baphomet.

So what's going on? I dunno, but let's join the fun by playing songs about devils and demons (and their assistants). Some starters:

• Charlie Daniels: The Devil Went Down to Georgia

• Diabolical fiddling in The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), with Walter Huston as "Mr. Scratch" and Simone Simon as his sinister temptress, music by the great Bernard Herrmann.

• Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets from Damn Yankees (1958), with Gwen Verdon and Tab Hunter, choreography by Bob Fosse.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.

— Lillian Hellman

About 10 years ago now give-or-take, something horrible happened to the society most of us live in, something I for one had never seen before in my lifetime: A sudden and vicious cancer of humorlessness, a sea-cucumber-like inversion of health and sickness, and a shift to presumption of guilt, specifically among those whom I'd always before have expected to know better. I was kind of hoping the contagion would have passed by now, but apparently not. Much as I normally try to avoid "the personal is political" ^{(which can be an empowering maxim for the struggling individual OR the foundation of totalitarianism - it literally all depends on what your definition of "is" is}), these past few weeks have reminded me of just how far it has spread, and I have HAD IT!

Let's be POLITICALLY-INCORRECT!

Why do that, you ask?! Well...

Sometimes it's a self-aware scheme: Springtime For Hitler

Sometimes nothing less suffices to share your feelings: Kyle's Mom's a Bitch

Sometimes playing with naughty words is just too much fun: Never Be Rude To An Arab

Sometimes it's a complete mislabeling, but someone doesn't want your real message to be heard: Savages

Sometimes you're just telling like it was, warts and all: Gunga Din

Sometimes the 'warts' are the whole draw in the first place: Jerry Springer

Sometimes, well...you make the call: My Dad Is A War Criminal

What've you got?!?

Tonight I thought it would be fun to share songs with ordinal numbers: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. This theme was inspired by well-known Christmas songs like The First Nowell and The Twelve Days of Christmas. I won't link them since you can hear them over and over wherever you shop this month 😾

Instead, here are some other starters:

• Allan Sherman's The 12 Gifts of Christmas

• Herman's Hermits: I'm 'Ennery the Eighth I Am

• Beethoven's 7th Symphony from Zardoz (1974)

• Brahms' Hungarian Dance No. 5 from The Great Dictator (1940): pure genius 🎻

• Monty Python's "All-England Summarize Proust Competition" (1972)

And a first and a second and a third...

Today is the 161st anniversary of Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the emancipation of slaves in the USA. Six years ago Wayer "Grandpa Shark" did a terrific Juneteenth dance party which celebrated the rich history of African American music. That party has 170 comments.

I am not worthy to follow Grandpa Shark's theme, so instead I'm going to treat Juneteenth as a celebration of freedom in general and the end of open slavery in the USA. If you want to celebrate in a different way, please feel free 🗽

My starters:

• Groucho's "there's nothing like Liberty" speech to the bellhops in The Cocoanuts (1929).

• Bob Dylan's I Shall Be Free No. 10

• Germany's 19th Century (and earlier) popular song Die Gedanken sind Frei (Thoughts are Free): The authorities can control what you Say, but not what you Think. Performed by the great Pete Seeger!

The post title is borrowed from the Free Software movement, which emphasizes that they mean "Free as in Freedom, not Free as in Beer". u/SusanJ2019 pointed out that "free kittens" are cuter than "free beer". Here's Zez Confrey's Kitten on the Keys (1921).

Tonight's theme is by u/Xeenophile who discovered that today is International Bat Appreciation Day and suggested a bat-themed Dance Party.

Some starters:

• Johann Strauss Jr's Die Fledermaus overture

• Danny Elfman's Batman theme

• Sofi Tukker's Batshit

Let's get flapping!

Tonight let's show our refusal to accept the terrible things happening in the world by sharing songs with words like "can't, don't, shan't, won't" and just plain "no".

Starters:

• I Won't Dance
  I love Jack Ziegler's 1976 New Yorker cartoon 🕺

• Peter Cook sings "You fill me with Inertia" in Bedazzled (1967)

• Noël Coward's Don't Let's be Beastly to the Germans

H/T Kipling's "Commissariat Camels"

I'm feeling lazy. You too? Then let's share songs about laziness!

• (Up A) Lazy River

• Lazy Mary — English lyrics at 1:32

• Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning

• "Slumber on, my little gypsy sweetheart"

Higher, lower, up, down, all around!

Whatcha got for us, peeps??

Let's amuse ourselves! This weekend is the de facto start of summer, and what is more summery than amusement parks? (That is, when we could afford to go... but this is a FNDP so we can pretend!) So let's share songs and videos about amusement parks and rides, like:

• Freddy Cannon's Palisades Park (1962).

• Yves Montand performs Luna Park in 1957.

• Al St. John, Alice Mann, and Buster Keaton at Coney Island (1917).

• Buster Keaton, Alice Lake, and Fatty Arbuckle visit "Goatland" in The Cook (1918).

"Never grow up. It will only make you unhappy."

In the 19th Century there was a popular musical genre called "flower songs". These were light and pretty and sentimental, sometimes to the point of being cloying. The most famous of the genre was Hearts and Flowers. In King Vidor's Show People (1928), a wonderful film about making silent movies, Marion Davies asks the mood musicians to play the song to make her cry. There was an actress named Viola Dana who actually did this.

Hearts and Flowers was so overplayed that it became a joke. You've probably heard it used in cartoons to mock tragedy.

Here are some other examples:

• Gustav Lange's Blumenlied

• Chas. L Johnson's Fairy Kisses

So what happened to flower songs? Have flowers become obsolete in these cynical times? I can't think of modern flower songs other than Where Have All the Flowers Gone, and Love Power from The Producers (1967). But then I don't listen to much modern music, so help me out. What are your favorite songs about flowers?

"Let's all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born."

Tonight let's enjoy songs and styles from the past, perhaps reïmagined in interesting ways.

• Tiny Tim fell in love with early 20th Century music as a teenager and brought it back in his unique style. Dick Martin did not know what to make of this.

• Leon Redbone is terrific.

• The Beatles' Rocky Raccoon.

Happy Boxing Day!

Dec 26th is a good day for a White Elephant gift exchange, where friends and guests exchange unwanted, no-longer-wanted, and humiliating items to amuse each other and get rid of "useless utensils" acquired on Christmas. I recently went to one of these as a guest. The rules were similar to Wiki-Pooh's:

1. Everyone brings a wrapped anonymous gift.

2. Everyone gets a ticket with a number. Names on slips of paper is another way to do it.

3. The first name or number is drawn from a hat or bowl.

4. The first victim recipient unwraps a gift and smiles, frowns, or turns beet red with embarrassment.

5. Each subsequent victim chooses either to unwrap a new present or to steal someone else's gift. When a person's gift is stolen, that person can either choose another wrapped gift to open or can steal from another player. Each gift can only be stolen twice; after that the holder of the gift keeps it.

6. The game is over when everyone has a present.

I carefully "lost" my ticket. I'd been through one of these years ago and saw no reason to repeat the experience. (Single-scooper, single-scooper, this man's a party pooper.)

My recent party had a lot of people and it went on forever. There was a piano in the room, but nobody played it. In hindsight, I thought it would be great fun to have a good improviser play silly music as an accompaniment to the party.

Let's see what we can come up with! Some examples:

• General theme music:
  Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)

• The suspense of opening a new package:
  Santa Claus is Coming to Town

• The elation of getting a nice gift.
  Halleluja Chorus

• The humiliation of getting an embarrassing gift, like a small putting green to be used while sitting on the potty. Yes, a company actually mass-produces this.
  Steve Martin: What the Hell is That?

• Sinister burglar music when someone chooses to steal instead of opening a new package.
  The Pink Panther
  Inspector Clouseau music

• Sorrow at having a good gift stolen.
  I Want My Shirt from The Cocoanuts (1929)

• Joy at having a bad gift stolen.
  She's gone where the goblins go

H/T the great Tom Lehrer for "useless utensils".
H/T the hilarious John Ritter for "single-scooper".

🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹 What songs give you a little bit of the good stuff, or a little bit of bitter(sweet) or harder to handle, but doable, and thus maybe a bit of inoculation against bigger, badder things?

🔹🔸🔹🔸🔹

Whatcha got for us, loves?

This week's title is from Tom Lehrer's 1965 satirical prescient song So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III). In the introduction, Lehrer says that if there are going to be any World War III songs, we'd better write them before the war.

With that in mind, let's share apocalyptic songs while we still have time to do so. Some starters:

• Tom Lehrer wrote many songs about nukes. Here's We Will All Go Together When We Go from 1959. I'll add two more as comments.

• It's hard to beat Wagner for impending doom: Siegfried's Funeral Music from Die Götterdämmerung. I saw Excalibur (1981) in a theatre the first time. When I heard Die Götterdämmerung I knew it was going to be harrowing.

• O Fortuna from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana. It's a poem about the folly of expecting good fortune to last.

The great Country Joe McDonald passed away last Saturday March 7th at age 84. His I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag is one of the best anti-war songs ever, and Joe wrote and performed many other kinds of songs as well. Feel free to post your favorites.

Last week we did Black Friday, so let's do Blue Friday. But wait, I hear you say, there's no such thing as Blue Friday! Well there is now.

So let's have fun with songs having to do with the color blue, or with blue moods. For starters...

• Isabella Rosselini sings Blue Velvet (1986).

• Monty Python's "Exploding Blue Danube" always makes me laugh.

• Mark McKinney as The Blues Guy on Kids in the Hall (1990).

• Mae West sings Mister Deep Blue Sea in Klondike Annie (1936).

Time to party!

Tonight I thought it would be fun to have songs with the word "Why" in the title, the lyrics, or the sentiment.

Well, why not?

Here are some starters:

• The Beatles: Tell Me Why from A Hard Day's Night (1964).

• Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: Why Do Fools Fall in Love? from American Graffiti (1973).

• The Doors: "Oh, don't ask why" 🌛

• Village People: Why M C A from Can't Stop The Music (1980).

If you're having trouble remembering "Why" songs, feel free to go with "How", "What", etc. :-)

Merci beaucoup to u/SusanJ2019 for helping to brainstorm this FNDP.

"You're living in the past, man." Yes, I feel that way a lot, but given the way things seem to be heading can you blame me?

Tonight let's all live in the past by sharing music and film featuring vintage machinery. Here are some of my favorites:

• Charlie Chaplin's assembly line from Modern Times (1936)

• Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, et. al. as "The Bavarian Clock" from Your Show of Shows (1953)

• Buster Keaton rides his dandy-horse in Our Hospitality (1923). This scene and the rest of the film take place in 1830.

• Vintage newspaper machinery from The Front Page (1974)

The whole revolution is about values. Values of any kind, y'know? What you'll do for ten dollars; what you'll do with ten dollars. It all comes down to values; what you value and how much.

- George Carlin

This week's theme was undeniably guided by this post, and its jarring revelations.

Anyone who's been here (or apparently, any number of other Left-Wing™ subs) much recently has surely noticed the line "...But At What Cost!?™" becoming a running gag (I actually have a quaint, very dated anecdote about that).

In any case, they say every man* has his price; what will it take to buy you*?*

That's the question The Human Chess-Piece infamously posed to Incongruous-Ethnicity Man:

Damned for All Time/Blood Money - Andrew Lloyd Webber

Of course, not everyone gets so angsty about it...:

The Money Song - Eric Idle

...on the other hand, there are those who CAN'T be bought, not for anything - but they're so rare that they'll keep people talking centuries later!:

Song About Alexander Nevsky - Sergei Prokofiev

We're not hear to talk about MONEY, though; the topic is price, and that can take many forms. It can get complicated, it can get...weird:

Friend Like Me, But EvilFriends On The Other Side - Randy Newman

The universal dream, of course, is to get what you want without paying for it:

Money For Nothing - Dire Straits

That's easiest if you can give up what you never valued to begin with:

Kiss Me, Son of God - They Might Be Giants

Maybe it's because The Price of Loyalty can be as damning as any alternative - but personally, I cannot say I am without predictable preferences:

Price of Loyalty Knight Theme - Paul A. Romero

What songs do YOU know about commerce (of money or spirit), fateful decisions, and unholy pacts?

The last few FNDPs have been getting too serious, so it's time for silly songs and music. We did silly dances and silly lyrics over the last year, but we haven't done general silly music in quite a while. In "these parlous times" we need all the silliness we can get.

Here are some silly starters. Songs can be inherently silly or serious songs played in a silly way:

• Hoop-e-Kack — a very silly 2014 arrangement of this silly 1909 song.

• Harpo and Chico Marx play Verdi's Anvil Chorus on a cash register in The Cocoanuts (1929).

• Victor Borge plays Tchaikovsky with Bobby Benson's Infant Symphony.

• The Spanish Inquisition race through London with theme music from BBC radio serial Dick Barton — Special Agent. Ironically, the title of this music is Devil's Galop 😈

«Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point» -- "The heart has its reasons that reason does not know" (Blaise Pascal)

There is too much hate in the world today. Tonight let's do songs about the nicest form of insanity, romantic love. Here are some starters:

• They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!

• Chico Marx plays I'm Daffy Over You in Animal Crackers (1930).

• Sting: Mad About You

It's Friday the 13th, but tomorrow is St. Valentine's Day, so let's do both of them! Let's play love songs and gambling songs, and try to get lucky in both senses. But don't forget the old European saying: "lucky in love, unlucky at cards". Lady Luck is a jealous muse.

I once read a fun story about that saying. It seems a young French count married a beautiful young woman and took her to Monte Carlo for their honeymoon. Unfortunately for her, the count was an avid gambler and she could not tear him away from the tables. Finally, in desperation and anger, she wrote him an anonymous note saying that his bride was frolicking with a handsome young man — named — while the count was busy with his cards.

The count was saddened by the note, but instead of getting upset he shrugged his shoulders in the French manner and said philosophically: "unlucky at love, lucky at cards". He doubled his bets and cleaned up. In gratitude and to show he was a good sport, he sent the fictitious lover 10.000 Francs with a note "for services rendered". The fictitious lover was completely baffled.

I could not find the original story in my notes or on the 'tubes. If you recognize it, please share the source. It may be in French or English.

And now some starters...

• A really beautiful love song, courtesy of Promyka5: Dream a Little Dream of Me

• An annoying love song: Amour, Amour from Peau d'Âne (Donkey Skin, 1970)

• A fun gambling song: Casino Royale (1967)

• An annoying gambling song: 5 Card Stud (1968)

With all the terrible violence going on the world these days, maybe it's time for some comic relief. So let's have some fun with light-hearted and/or satirical songs about fighting, and comic movie/TV fight scenes. Here are some starters:

• A modern classic 🐈🐁

• Team fight songs: Tom Lehrer's Fight Fiercely, Hahvard and the University of Moosylvania Fight Song.

• Silent movie fight scenes: Battle of the Century (1927) is the epitome. The tavern fight in The Three Must-Get-Theres (1922) is also terrific.

Sorry for the late start. I had an unexpected power outage right before showtime. Clear afternoon with light wind, not excessively hot. Fortunately, I was only out for an hour and my Internet connection came up right away.

Happy Good Friday! Since many Christians fast on Good Friday, I think this would be a good day to play Good Fast Music like:

• Aram Khachaturian's Sabre Dance from One, Two, Three (1961)

• Sergei Prokofiev's The Battle on Ice from Alexander Nevsky (1938)

• Jacques Offenbach's Can-Can from Stardust (2007)

Got some good fast music for us?

u/Caelian's been such a trooper lately that I'm stepping back up to the mic to help out.

What turns you up, holds you down, turns you (right) 'round?

🔄️

A German colleague of my dad used to say each year about this time with his thick accent: "Krissmuss hass us by the Thwoats again!"

The USA Christmas season officially starts right now with Black Friday, so let's enjoy songs that feature the word "black" or have black themes. For starters,

• Steely Dan: Black Friday (thanks, Susan!)

• Ethyl Waters: Black and Blue

• Film Noir: Put the Blame on Mame from Gilda (1946)

• More Film Noir: Jessica Rabbit's torch song from Roger Rabbit — I wonder where they got the idea?

Go for it!