Ornoth

Submitted for your approval:

The year is 1968; a 42 year old Florentine composer named Piero Umiliani pens several tracks for a sexually titillating Italian language pseudo-documentary about Sweden entitled “Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso”: Sweden, Heaven and Hell.

One of those tracks, which accompanies an all-girl sauna scene, charts internationally, reaching number 55 on the American Billboard Hot 100, despite having no more lyrics than a series of nonsense syllables, in similar vein to scat singing.

A little more than a year later, the song is performed by Jim Henson’s Muppets on the 14th episode of Sesame Street, as well as the Ed Sullivan Show. The rest, as they say, is history.

But if you’re not familiar with this story, you might be amused to view the song in its original context in this scene from “Svezia, Inferno e Paradiso”.

Answers to the “interview me” meme, with questions posed by lothie. Actually, I didn’t ask to be interviewed, but since she took the time to come up with questions, I figure I orta answer.

I passed on this meme the first time it came around, so I’m not looking to ask anyone else any questions, but if you insist, I’ll do.

What's your opinion on the Tao?

Not much, actually. It’s kinda orthogonal to Buddhism, or at least the southeast Asian Theravadan Buddhism from Thailand and Sri Lanka that I’m most familiar with. The Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese forms of Buddhism might have been more influenced by it. But aside from that, I’m nt sure I fully agree in the whole balance idea, although there are aspects of it that do appear in the concept of the “Middle Way”.
 

If you could have dinner with a famous dead person, what would you eat?

Well, they’d probably turn my stomach, being dead and all, so maybe something very light. And they’d probably smell really bad, so something aromatic. Dead people aren’t the greatest companions, or at least so I believe, never having supped with one.
 

What is your least favorite thing about Boston?

Hmmm. Corruption. How hard it is to get some obvious things done. The barriers that people put up and how difficult it is to meet people. The whole car culture; there are several areas of town that should simply be closed to motor traffic, period. The lack of light in the winter and its duration. Those are probably the big things.
 

Spam: evil or food of the gods? Discuss. Give examples.

Spam is pretty useless. It’s 82% fat, and one slab is 750mg of sodium, so it’s basically a death bomb. Fried, it’s really not very appealling. I seem to recall my mother maybe putting it in ham salad back in the 70s, when I actually ate such things. On the other hand, it’s mostly pork, and pork is the food of the gods; it’s just that there are much healthier and tasty ways to get your piggy on than Spam.
 

Any do-overs you'd like to have?

Not many, but a few. I would like to have treated most of my SOs better. I would like to have been more sexually active when I was younger. Those are really my only significant regrets.

snudge, noun ('sn&j)
1: a muddy or slushy mass, deposit, or sediment produced as a by-product of snuggles and/or hugs.