Musical Interlude
If you’re like me—and I’m sure you are—you probably wake up of a morning wondering if pianos are funny, or if they serve any useful purpose at all? Well, I’m here to tell you they are indeed funny.
To demonstrate, I give you Victor Borge, here as a young man playing at the White House during the Eisenhower administration:
Borge was an exceptionally good classical pianist, which left him enough space to develop his comedy routine and musical slapstick. It takes a lot of talent and practice before you can do something like the bit above, or a piano duet with a friend like Leonid Hambro:
One instrument whose comedic potential I have never spent much time wondering about, on the other hand, is the concert harp. Not even a comedian and self-taught virtuoso like Harpo Marx thought it was anything other than serious. Here he is playing his own take on the Hungarian Rhapsody #2 in A Night in Casablanca (1946). Quite good for a person who didn’t read music.
As children, the Marx Brothers’ parents only had enough money to pay for one child to take music lessons, and Chico was the lucky one. Harpo learned by emulating his brother and practicing. Both could do a mean two-man piano routine. Here, from the 1941 film The Big Store.
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Those Marx Bros. links bring back childhood memories of watching their movies back in the old pre-cable days when this was it on tv on a weekend afternoon (besides Bowling for Dollars and some really boring news show or sportsball).
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nutria-rat-pet-neuty-giant-invasive-rodent-orange-teeth-387eac7f?mod=hp_featst_pos5
Since only one person in North America likes the Nutria, it may not qualify to be a TSAF animal, but I thought I'd pass along this Wall Street Journal article about the Nutria. The article says they taste like wild rabbit.