Saturday, April 29, 2017

The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour (13)

Another page from the ACME Catalog -


Before our feature presentation, ACME would like to start the evening with the 1959 Road Runner Looney Tunes cartoon, Wild About Hurry:



In the opening title sequence, Wile E. Coyote is seated on a rocket with "directed by CHUCK JONES" superimposed on the side. When the rocket blasts off with Wile E., the letters fall off the rocket.


The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour is proud to celebrate the anniversary of the second of two 1978 concerts that Cheap Trick performed at the Nippon Budokan Hall in Toyko, Japan on this date.



The album was never supposed to be released in the US. For Epic/Sony, this was their first release. It was supposed to be for the Japanese fans only. But then the live version of I Want You To Want Me started to get airplay and it began to be a hit. It eventually became the largest-selling live album import ever, and finally the record label released it domestically.



Demand Euphoria!

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Terror and Horror to Astound Mankind!

April 26, 1956 -

Godzilla: King of All Monsters debuted in America on this date (Gojira premiered in Japan on November 3, 1954) :



With the ashes of World War II only recently cooled, Japan is plagued by a sudden wave of maritime disasters: Without warning, ships are exploding into flame and sinking beneath the waves. The few survivors are able to shed little light on the situation, as they quickly die from radiation and strange burns. (Hmmm, sound familiar) A group of investigators, including prominent paleontologist Dr. Yamane and American reporter Steve Martin (who was detoured from his trip to cover the Suez Crisis,) are sent to Odo Island to investigate. The natives warn that the ships are being destroyed by Gojira (Godzilla), a legendary monster. These claims are verified when a gigantic, dinosaur-like creature comes ashore and demolishes the native village. Dr. Yamane concludes that Godzilla is a prehistoric creature that has been awakened and mutated by atomic bomb tests. It's just the same conclusion you'd come to having just seen the ruins of a Japanese fishing village.

The military decides to use depth charges on the monster. However, the attack is unsuccessful, and Godzilla follows the ships back to Tokyo Bay. (Again, probably just what you would do - annoy a giant radioactive monster.) Coming ashore at night, Godzilla razes Tokyo. The destruction left in his wake is comparable to an atomic bomb. Military firepower proves useless against the monster. It is feared that Godzilla will continue to lay waste to the cities of Japan, and perhaps the entire world.



It is up to Emiko Yamane (Dr. Yamane’s daughter) to convince her former fiancé, Dr. Serizawa, to use his Oxygen Destroyer against Godzilla. Serizawa is skeptical; he fears that this terrible device might be more dangerous than the monster. However, he finally decides to make the ultimate sacrifice to rid the world of Godzilla.



So here in a nutshell, you have the greatest fever dream movie ever re-edited - a very good Sci-Fi film intercut with, the undisputed king of deadpan delivery and nipple rouge entrepreneur.

(We take Godzilla very seriously in our home.)





Monday, April 24, 2017

Troy lost her grace and glory


Dionysiac ( die-uh-NIS-ee-ak ), (Latin Dionysiacus, from Greek Dionusiakos, from Dionusios.), adjective 1. Of or relating to Dionysus, the god of wine and of an orgiastic religion celebrating the power and fertility of nature. Of or relating to Dionysia, ancient Greek festivals held seasonally, chiefly at Athens, in honor of Dionysus. 2. Often dionysiac. Ecstatic or wild; Dionysian.

Keep it in mind (we'll come back to it.)

April 24, 1184 BC (this is an approximated date.)
Most of the people who could have verified this date were too busy smearing olive oil on each other and inventing Greco-Roman wrestling in the nude, so the creation of an accurate calendar wasn't a high priority.

Think Dionysiac

... Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? ....



OK kids, here's your quick Lit Hum course.

Once upon a time, a pretty naked Greek girl was lolling around a limpid pool (lots of pretty naked Greek girls were doing that back then, trust your ole doc, I've known a lot of lolling Greek girls, some of them naked) and she saw a beautiful swan.



Before you could said By Zeus, Leda lays an egg (psst, don't tell Ted Cruz but bestiality was involved) and out pops Helen - another pretty naked Greek girl. But Helen wasn't just any pretty naked Greek girl, she was the MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE WORLD.



So when it was time for Helen to marry (at about 12), literally everyone who was anyone wanted to marry her, including Odysseus (who doesn't marry her but Penelope but that's another story), Menestheus, Ajax the Great, Patroclus and Idomeneus, Agamemnon (who doesn't marry her but her sister, Clytemnestra and lives (or dies) to regret it, but that again is another story). It doesn't hurt to mention at this point that her 'father' was the King of Sparta or the fact that he never noticed that she was hatched from a egg.



Yadda, yadda yadda, Helen marries Menelaus. Yadda, yadda, yadda, three more naked Greek goddesses, handsome naked Greek youth named Paris (how the French got into this story even I can't explain) and a golden apple.



Also, I bet you never realized how much nudity plays into this story.

Yadda, yadda yadda, an abduction and a promise extracted - bang zoom, you have the Trojan war. I have just saved you from reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology and most of the Iliad.

The Greek siege of Troy had lasted for ten years with no end in sight. The Greeks devised a new ruse: a giant hollow wooden horse. It was built by Epeius and filled with Greek warriors led by Odysseus. Meanwhile, a Greek spy, Sinon, convinced the Trojans that the horse was a gift despite the warnings of Laocoön (who gets to utter the line, "Beware Greeks bearing gifts" moments before being strangled by sea-serpents with his two sons - but that's another story)



and Cassandra (who has the gift of prophecy because of the God Apollo as a token of his love has snakes lick her ears clean but that again is another story) ;



Helen and Deiphobus (who won Helen in a game with his brother after the death of Paris but let's stay on course here) even investigated the horse; in the end, the Trojans accepted the gift on this date. In ancient times it was customary for a defeated general to surrender his horse to the victorious general in a sign of respect.



It should be noted here that the horse was the sacred animal of Poseidon; during the contest with Athena over the patronage of Athens, Poseidon gave men the horse, and Athena gave the olive tree. It should also be noted that after living ten years under a siege, one's reasoning seems to go out the window.

The Trojans have a huge orgy, I mean, party (think sodomy but on a grand scale - think Dionysiac) to celebrate the end of the siege, so that, when the Greeks emerged from the horse, on this date, the city was in a drunken stupor. The Greek warriors opened the city gates to allow the rest of the army to enter, and the city was pillaged ruthlessly, all the men were killed, and all the women and children were taken into slavery.



And so ends the Iliad. Oh yeah, Brad Pitt ends up dead but Orlando Bloom is alive.

Discuss amongst yourselves.




Sunday, April 23, 2017

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Today is believed to be the birthday of William Shakespeare, born in Stratford-on-Avon, England (1564). He was a playwright and poet, and is considered to be the most influential and perhaps the greatest writer in the English language.



His tragedies have been celebrated for centuries. For example, there’s the Tragedy of Julius Caesar, in which a Roman general thinks he’d like to be emperor, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is the Tragedy of Macbeth, in which a Scottish Thane thinks he’d like to be king, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is the Tragedy of Richard III, in which a hunch-backed noble thinks he'd like to be king, other people disagree, and everyone dies in the end. There is even the Tragedy of Hamlet, in which a young prince thinks and everyone ends in mincemeat.



(That last is naturally set in Denmark, where the relationship between thinking and dying has been most famously chronicled by Soren Kierkegaard, who called life itself the sickness unto death. He was a very happy fella.)

He gave us many beloved plays, including Romeo and Juliet (1594), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595), Gay Boys in Bondage (1601), Othello (1604), and King Lear (1605). Only a few scattered facts are known about his life. He was born and raised in the picturesque market town of Stratford-on-Avon, surrounded by woodlands. His father was a glover and a leather merchant; he and his wife had eight children including William, but three of them died in childbirth. William probably left grammar school when he was thirteen years old, but continued to study on his own.



He went to London around 1588 to pursue his career in drama (or to sleep with actresses or men who dresses like women) and by 1592 he was a well-known actor. He joined an acting troupe in 1594 and wrote many plays for the group while continuing to act. Scholars believe that he usually played the part of the first character that came on stage, but that in Hamlet he played the ghost.



Some scholars have suggested that Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to him because he had no formal education. A group of scientists recently plugged all his plays into a computer and tried to compare his work to other writers of his day, such as Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, and the Earl of Oxford. The only writer they found who frequently used words and phrases similar to Shakespeare's was Queen Elizabeth I, and although Shakespeare had been seen in women's clothing several times, the Queen was eventually ruled out as well.



Shakespeare used one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer, almost 30,000 words, and he was the first writer to invent or record many of our most common turns of phrase, including foul play, as luck would have it, your own flesh and blood, too much of a good thing, good riddance, in one fell swoop, so is your mother, play fast and loose, up your nose with a rubber hose, d'oh, that's what she said and in the twinkling of an eye.



Shakespeare wrote a lot of other plays and died in the end—on April 23, 1616. His accomplishments are all the more remarkable when you consider that he died on the same day he’d been born.




Saturday, April 22, 2017

The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour (12)


Another page from the ACME Catalog -


Before our feature presentation, ACME would love to show you the 1953 Road Runner Looney Tunes cartoon, Zipping Along:



In this outing, the Road Runner - who is shown outracing a fast train - is labeled "velocitus tremenjus." Wile E. Coyote, watching from above, is now labeled "Road Runnerus Digestus."


The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour is proud to celebrate the anniversary of the 1979 release of the movie Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, which featured The Ramones.



The Ramones were paid a total of $25,000 for appearing in the film, and had to play shows in southern California to help pay their hotel bills. During the 21-day shoot, Dee Dee Ramone got arrested for fighting with a roadie, overdosed in jail, and wound up in Cedars Sinai Hospital with a $3,000 medical bill.



Demand Euphoria!

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Rocket Man


April 20, 1961 -
Harold Graham made the first untethered flight in a rocket belt near Niagara Falls, New York.



Harold Graham reached an height of approximately 4 feet (1.2 meters), and then flew smoothly forward at a speed of approximately 10 km/h for a distance of 108 feet (less than 35 meters) and then landed. The flight lasted 13 seconds.


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Wednesday, April 19, 2017

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Monday, April 17, 2017

Something happened on this date


April 17, 1975: Cambodia falls when communist insurgents known as the Khmer Rouge enter the capital city of Phnom Penh.



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Saturday, April 15, 2017

The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour (11)

Another page from the ACME Catalog -


Before our feature presentation, ACME would love to show you the 1954 Looney Tunes cartoon, Bugs And Thugs:




Third appearance of Rocky, first appearance of his accomplice Mugsy.


The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour is proud to present an episode from the VH-1 Series, VH-1 Storytellers: Tom Waits (1999) (the audio portion). This is the whole show unedited with more stories and more songs than the broadcast version



While the broadcast version was a scant 45 minutes, this unedited version has been floating around the internet much like Shangri La, waiting for you to glimpse the eternal. Crack open the bottle and pour yourself a tall one (or two,) you're not going anyway for a while.



Demand Euphoria!

Friday, April 14, 2017

Along the Via Dolorosa


The old ladies you usually pester with questions of a religious nature are busy today: they are doing the Stations of the Cross. Since you probably have not been to church since at least Christmas and more like than not, have completely forgotten your entire religious training

(ACME will extend a Papal Dispensation to all non-Christians on this test) -

Here are the Stations of the Cross:

First Station: Jesus is condemned to death

Second Station: Jesus carries His cross

Third Station: Jesus falls the first time

Fourth Station: Jesus meets his mother

Fifth Station: Simon of Cyrene helps Jesus to carry his cross




Sixth Station: Veronica wipes the face of Jesus

Seventh Station: Jesus falls the second time

Eighth Station: Jesus meets the women of Jerusalem

Ninth Station: Jesus falls a third time




10th Station: Jesus clothes are taken away

11th Station: Jesus is nailed to the cross



12th Station: Jesus
dies on the cross




13th Station: The body of Jesus is taken down from the cross




14th Station: Jesus is laid in the tomb



Demand Euphoria!

Thursday, April 13, 2017

Occasiones diligenter ne in peccatum


Before embarking on the road that led me to my life of crime, I was an altar boy.

I became an Altar boy because you could get out of school early twice a week. You did have to do an early mass (7:00 AM) once a week but what the hell. The priest that ran the program was a frustrated football coach. We would have our weekly meeting and he would roll a blackboard out onto the altar and diagram what we were supposed to do.

He also told us that when at rest, we should keep our hands loosely clasped at our waist not at crotch level. "You boys do not have balls big enough to walk around holding them," he would warn us.


The duties of an altar boy are vast and complex. You had to set up before mass – you making sure there was water and wine and enough hosts ready for mass. If you ever wanted to have your little mind blown, open up the jumbo bag o' Body of Christ and fill up the receptacle like so much cocktail peanuts.

Since these are not yet been consecrated, you are permitted to handle them. But you had to guess how many parishioners would attend mass because the priest hated waste and if he didn't have mass later that day, he had to consume the remaining hosts (nothing worse that stale Eucharists). But God forbid you didn't have enough and you had to run back in to get some more – that got you a smack to the head.

Yes, priests were allowed to smack the altar boys around. The priest was holy and you were a snot nosed kid, so if the priest hit you – you must have deserved it.

Then there was the issue of the 'Blood of Christ'. Each priest had his own special mixture of wine and water to create the sacrament. One priest liked sherry. Another liked white wine. The third like the traditional red wine. But monsignor liked his scotch, with just a splash of water for his `Blood o' Christ'.

"Boyo, don't be stingy with the scotch this morning, tis cold and you didn't pay for it," monsignor would hiss under his breath. "And not too much water. Christ wasn't anemic, boyo."

Besides having to dole out the sacraments, Altar boys had to hold the bible for priest during mass. You had to mark the appropriate space for the daily mass and be prepared to open to that page when called upon to do so. Woe was you if you forgot to mark your place or didn't hold the book steady enough or close enough when the priest had a hangover and his sight was blurry. That got you a smack to the back of the head.

You also had to ring a special set of bells at a specific point in the mass. God forbid you rang them too enthusiastically (to get your friends attention) or worse, missed the cue and rang them too late. That got you another smack to the head.
You also had to lay out the correct vestments for the day's mass. The little old ladies, who were the handmaidens to priest, would tag them for you and you had to take them out of the garment bag. Sometimes the old ladies were running late or they forgot and you had to guess which garment. That could be you a boot in the ass for the wrong guess.

One of your main tasks was to play catcher for fallen hosts. For those of you who remember (or know), the priest had to place the body of Christ directly on the tongue of the receiver. The altar boy walks next to the priest, holding a small salver (serving tray) on a stick (paten) under the chin of the receiver, just in case, the priest dropped the Eucharist or it slipped from the receivers mouth. In that horrific case, the priest had to consume the host himself. Also if someone throws up right after receiving communion, the priest had to re-ingest the pre-digested communion wafer. (Yes, you know where we're going with this.)

Altar boys would practice the secret art of flicking the paten, so they could force their friends to spit up the host and watch the priest have to eat the pre-moistened host. But you had to do this, without the priest catching you – it meant instant dismissal from the ranks of altar boydom. Yes, I got one or two of my friends in the throat and never go caught.

Now we come up to the another important function of the altar boy – towel boy. At the end of communion, the priest cleans his hands and finishes the wine (Blood O' Christ) in the chalice.

The altar boy's job is to pour water for the priest as he rinses his fingers of the Crumbs O' Christ into the chalice and then offer him a hand towel (purificator) before he finishes off his holy drink. Unlike the attendants in washrooms, no tips were offered for  your services. It was just, `hurry it up, we're not washing my dick here' or `Not too much, that was the good sherry you poured today. I'm going to kill you when we get back into the sacristy'.

At this point, mass was nearly over and if you were lucky so was your torture. Either you had the beatings hanging over your head or you know you could make a quick get away. Once mass was over, you have to stow away the various items that were used during mass and hang up the priest's vestments. If you weren't in trouble or one of the little old ladies were there – you could make a mad dash by to school or to home. If you did something wrong or the priest was already deep into his cups – there could be hell to pay.


You'd hope for the quick smack to the back of the head. You could get the slow torture of thumbs against the wall. Place you hands straight in front of you then step back about a foot. Then lean against the wall with just your thumbs while the priest busied himself around the altar and sacristy after mass.


Have a good Holy Thursday



Demand Euphoria!

Saturday, April 8, 2017

The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour (10)


Another page from the ACME Catalog -

Before our feature presentation, ACME would love to show you the 1954 Looney Tunes cartoon, Design For Leaving:



Acme's innovations are at once prescient and outlandish, predating The Jetsons (with its robot maid and household gadgetry) by a decade.


The ACME Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour is proud to present the 2011 greatest hits album of the phenomenal artist Sade Adu. While ACME is not encouraging the use of the album, as such, it is understood that this artist's music might be played as an enhancement to lovemaking - please pace yourself accordingly.



Sade was awarded an O.B.E. (Order of the British Empire) in the 2002 New Year's Honours for her services to the music industry. She often performs barefoot; that cannot be said for most O.B.E's.



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