From washingtonpost.com: 'It must be admitted
that few girls, of whatever age, have ever fathomed
the delirious appeal of Mad humor. Obviously, one's dopey sisters could
hardly be expected to grasp the sheer genius of a name like Elwood
Pleebis, Fornis J. Plebney, or Horace Veeblefetzer. But even those
girls one kind of, sort of, liked might actually fail to roll on the
ground with uncontrollable laughter at a political poster that
proclaimed: "Help the mentally incompetent. Re-elect your congressman!"
Of course, no girl, and certainly no mother, could be expected to
appreciate the risqu¿ insightfulness of "Snap Ploobadoof" -- the sound
of "Wonder Woman releasing her Amazon brassiere."' More
/ Doug
Gilford's Mad Cover Site
Clarence White, who died at age 29 in a tragic accident in 1973, is best known as a pivotal guitar texturalist on some of the Byrds' most stimulating albums and the co-inventor (with band mate Gene Parsons) of the B-Bender, a device that simulates a pedal steel bend. This Fender page pays comprehensive tribute to a musician who had magic in his fingers. Link / String Bender's B-Bender / American Nashville B-Bender Telecaster / The Byrds - Chestnut Mare live video
From The Atlantic: 'Although that point can be
debated, the 1950s—more precisely, the period from 1953 to the
mid-1960s—was clearly the era of Sinatra’s supreme artistic achievement
and deepest cultural sway. It amounted to the most spectacular second
act in American cultural history. In the early 1940s, following his
break with the Tommy Dorsey band, Sinatra had emerged, thanks largely
to swooning bobby-soxers, as pop music’s biggest star and a hugely
popular Hollywood actor. By the end of the decade, he was all but
washed up, having lost his audience owing to shifting musical tastes
and to disenchantment over his reported ties to the Mob, and over his
divorce, which followed a widely publicized affair with Ava Gardner,
whom he married in 1951. He soon lost his voice (he would never fully
recover his consistently accurate intonation and precise pitch), his
movie contract with MGM, his record contract with Columbia, and Gardner
— their passionate, mutually corrosive entanglement plainly and
permanently warped him. But in 1953, his harrowing, Oscar-winning
performance as the feisty, doomed Maggio in From Here to Eternity made
him a star again.' More
