Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Even if you had drunk and eaten prudently last night, you would still be doomed, because “Some Little Bug Is Going to Find You Someday,” as Roy Atwell sang in 1926, on a 78 RPM record I found last night in the Internet Archive’s audio collection. Atwell is cheerful about microbial doom:

Eating huckleberry pie
Is a pleasing way to die
While sauerkraut brings on softening of the brain
When you eat banana fritters
Every undertaker titters
And the casket makers nearly go insane.

Quicker ends are available in the same archive. “I mur-dered her,” George Grossmith warbles with Addams-family-esque delight, in a 1915 ballad about disposing of his laundress, a neighborhood organ grinder, his mother-in-law, and, finally, his caddy (“I approached him with my mashie, and I finished with the cleek”).

While life lasts, of course, there is love. “Why you’re as exciting as knitting / You’ve worn out the sofa with sitting,” Ada Jones complains of her cheap boyfriend in a 1916 song with the echt New York title, “Out of a City of Six Million People, Why Did You Pick on Me?”:

You must spend almost a quarter
When you go out on a tear.
The best thing, you say, is icewater.
I bet you cut your own hair.

Also very New Yorky is Jones’s 1907 tune “He Lost Her in the Subway.” UC Santa Barbara’s Cylinder Preservation and Digitzation Project has even more Jones, including “Call Me Up Some Rainy Afternoon,” which features a naughty invitation to come over and “talk about the weather”—a trill very hard to get out of your head once you’ve heard it.

If you prefer your songs of romantic disillusionment with historical detail, there’s Maurice Burkhardt’s 1920 song “Who Ate Napoleons with Josephine (When Bonaparte Was Away)?”:

Who said, “Do this for me,
And I’ll do that for you,”
While Nap was fighting Prussians,
Austrians, and Russians

“When Walter Raleigh left Queen Lizzie like a gallant kid / Did she walk on someone else’s coat? You bet your life she did,” Burkhardt sings in a thick German accent (more phonetically: “Ven Val-tair Rah-lay layft Kveen Lizzie . . . ,” etc.). The cases of Romeo, Catherine of Russia, Mark Antony, and Rip Van Winkle are also adduced. Enjoy, in moderation.

Or, even worse, innocent flowers may be photographed with an aura of sexual menace:

While on the topic of geeky Internet details, one of the secret fascinations of having a blog is that you get to see what people were searching for when they chose to visit you. Highlights of the last few months, for this blog:

“vulcan reaction to human birthday parties”

“how to make a gay”

“is there a troll factory in Denmark”

“teletubbies opinion gender black”

“slang towing the cod”

“weird diseases choochoo”

“poultry”

“is it acceptable to eat human flesh”

“prostitution altars”

“what kind of animal part leaves the most distinctive fossil”

“homosexual according to Kierkegaard”

“steamboats are crap”

“how to play the prostitutes in Krakow”

I’m sorry I had to delete so many of you. But you were zombies. I held out as long as I could, but you know how it is. There’s always a moment in the movie when you can no longer postpone your response to the zombies with familiar faces.

I should explain. I don’t really understand the technicalities of how this blog works. It has a Comments function, which I can turn on or off, but that’s about the limit of my expertise. Over the past year, while the Comments function has been on, I’ve been the victim of something called “comment spam.” In the dead of night, humans (or robots) were posting dozens of comments under false names. At first their comments had to do with the usual pharmaceutical products and well-known Internet vices. I deleted them and shrugged the task off as the cost of the blog. But recently the comments took a disconcerting turn: all of them read, “Good work! Nice webpage!” This was too insidious to be borne. Also, it took about four clicks to delete each one, and it was tedious.

I decided to investigate. It turned out that although the comments were in different names, the names corresponded to just one underlying member profile. And this member profile was that of a real person, whom I knew in real life. I concluded that his membership on this blog had been hacked. Cautiously, I deleted all the phony names but left his profile intact.

It didn’t work. Overnight my friend’s profile spawned half a dozen zombie progeny, and I realized I had no choice. I deleted him. (Sorry!) As in the zombie movies, of course, this didn’t work, either. A day or two later, the zombies were back, having co-opted a different friend. So I deleted him, too. You see where this is going. Pretty soon I had deleted about half of you. And my rampage was as futile as it was drastic. In the end, I had no choice but to turn the Comments function off. Nothing else would staunch the flow of innocuous compliments. It’s unsatisfactory, and I apologize, but I can’t figure out what else to do.

Usually digital cameras consider my black dog to be a patch of underexposure, and she gets processed into something the color of burnt umber, shiny as a wet seal. But I actually read the manual to one of my Xmas presents today . . .