C. Brian Smith

“We called ourselves the Peewee Quartet.”

At age 7, Naftaly Birnbaum, aka George Burns, landed a job making syrup in the basement of a local candy store. When the mailman — a sucker for tight harmony — heard Burns and his pals crooning away on a barbershop ditty, he brought them out to the street and a crowd gathered. They played street corners, saloons and ferryboats.

 Sometimes the customers threw something in the hats. Sometimes they took something out of the hats. Sometimes they took the hats.

Burns quit school in the fourth grade to pursue show business full time, which meant singing with a trained seal, trick roller-skating, and adagio dancing in small-time vaudeville acts.

In 1977, Carl Reiner directed Burns in “Oh, God!” opposite John Denver, an assistant supermarket manager chosen to deliver a message to the world.

“George was really a workhorse,” Reiner explained to Investors Business Daily last week. 

He was always so calm you never knew how much preparation he had done before he got there. We once had some weather problems and had to shoot a different scene, so I told him he could have some time to look over his lines. He told me, ‘Before I ever go into a project, I learn every scene and everyone’s part.’ He was ready.

NEW YORK CITY – JULY 20: Comedian George Burns and date Lisa Miller attending the premiere party for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on July 20, 1978 at Studio 54 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage)

George Burns and Sharon Stone (Photo by Jim Smeal/WireImage)

NEW YORK CITY – JULY 20: Comedian George Burns and date Lisa Miller attending the premiere party for “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” on July 20, 1978 at Studio 54 in New York City, New York. (Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage)

George Burns and Sharon Stone (Photo by Jim Smeal/WireImage)

Let’s call it Centenarian style: one hand wrapped around a beautiful lady, the other clutching a lit El Producto cigar.

I smoke a domestic cigar. It’s a good cigar. It’s called an El Producto. Now the reason I smoke a domestic cigar is because the more expensive Havana cigars are tightly packed. They go out on the stage while I’m doing my act. The El Producto stays lit. Now if you’re onstage and your cigar keeps going out, you have to keep lighting it. If you have to stop your act to keep lighting your cigar, the audience goes out. That’s why I smoke El Productos. They stay lit.

We lost George Burns ten years ago this month.

Sleep softy, sir. (Just remember to tap out the El Produco. They stay lit.)

—C.B.S.

They don’t drink water directly but get it through plants and insects they eat.

When he was 13 years old, John Fairfax ran away from home to live in the jungle, emerging periodically in town to exchange ocelot skins for knives—which he used to skin more ocelots, and so on.

After having been dumped by a college girlfriend in Argentina at the age of 20, he attempted suicide—by letting a 400-pound jaguar attack him.

A decade later, he drew upon navigational skills picked up as captain of a Panamanian pirate ship, braved numerous typhoons and shark attacks, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat stocked only with Spam, oatmeal and brandy. Then, after a brief stint as a mink farmer, he traversed the Pacific Ocean in identical fashion, only this time he brought along a female companion.

Mr. Fairfax’s eulogy in the New York Times reads a whole lot like a Dos Equis commercial. That is, if the Most Interesting Man in the World had anywhere near the sand of John Fairfax…

It seems this sand has been eroding for years: bull-ravaged matadors replaced with professional wrestlers, perilous summits neutered by high-speed chairlifts, fighter pilots grounded in place of unmanned drones.

Yes, the post-Apollo generations have spawned their share of unmitigated badasses. SEAL Team 6, we’re looking in your (classified) direction. But even they would admit: assassinating a pirate is one thing. Being a pirate is another.

Citing Mr. Fairfax as a hero, 15-year-old Jordan Romero became the youngest person to scale the highest mountains on each of the world’s seven continents. It’s time we, too, recommit ourselves to adventure for adventure’s sake, to exploration for exploration’s sake, to crossing all forms of nature simply because, as Fairfax said of the Pacific Ocean, “it is there.”

Cigarettes are bad. But boy were cigarette ads good.

By good, of course, I don’t mean accurate. (“The finer the filter, the milder the taste.”)

Or moral. (“Blow in her face and she’ll follow you anywhere.”)

Or okay. (Barney Rubble: “I sure hate to see our wives work so hard.” Fred Flintstone: “Me too. Let’s have a smoke around back where we can’t see ’em.”)

The product was (exactly) fatally flawed—which made the marketing of that product all the more difficult. Anyone can sell an iPad. But an addictive, poisonous, cancer-causing vice? That required employing the most accomplished artists and the most savvy copywriters and the most popular public figures in America.

The result was nearly 50 years of exceptional—albeit morally reprehensible—television, radio and print advertising, which, regardless of the product, made for some actively enjoyable media consumption.

And some wildly aspirational scenes.

Men wanted a record studio in the Hollywood Hills and a voluptuous woman on an Eames-era couch. Voluptuous women on Eames-era couches wanted jewels. And kids wanted to light up with Santa while he decorated the Christmas tree with packs of cigarettes (what?).

But isn’t aspiration the point of entertainment? Or at least the point of entertaining advertising. To escape into a fairy tale that, with the right amount of blissful ignorance, can feasibly be attained by purchasing a pack of Chesterfields. (Or, you know, receiving a Christmas carton of Chesterfields from Ronald Reagan.)

A boy can dream…

Clockwise: Thomas Bede, suborning a witness, 1928; Hampton Hirscham, Cornellius Joseph Keevil, William Thomas O’Brien and James O’Brien, burglary, 1921; Valerie Lowe, stealing a saddle and bridle, 1922; Sydney Skukerman, fraud, 1924

Here’s a collection of mug shots from the New South Wales Police Department in Australia taken between 1910 and 1930.

As curator Peter Doyle explains, an anonymous photographer working in Sydney’s Central Police Station took the photos of “men and women recently plucked from the street, often still animated by the dramas surrounding their apprehension.”

More photos are available here and the complete collection is on display at the Sydney Justice & Police Museum.

Sidney Kelly stares remorselessly in his mugshot from June 25, 1924. He had regular run-ins with police, who described him as an ‘Illicit drug trader’ who ‘drives his own motor car, and dresses well’

Well-heeled: Hampton Hirscham, Cornellius Joseph Keevil, William Thomas O’Brien and James O’Brien were arrested after a bookmakers was robbery.

Burglar Valerie Lowe had her mugshot taken on February 15, 1922

Low-life crook: Thiefs such as Frederick Edward Davies, pictured on July 14, 1921, were held in such low regard by police that they were photographed in front of the toilets

—C.B.S.

The stage was still smoldering when Leonard Cohen stepped upon it shortly after 4am.

Hours earlier, on the final night of the Isle of Wight concert in 1970, the festival had deteriorated into anarchy when the rain-soaked crowd of 600,000—few of whom had slept in five days—responded to Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary performance by setting ablaze anything remotely combustible.

Multiple riots erupted.

Joni Mitchell and Kris Kristofferson were booed offstage.

The piano and organ were burned to the ground.

Bed-headed from a two-hour nap and belted in a frayed safari jacket, the 35-year-old Cohen greeted the snarly crowd of half a million undefiantly with an anecdote from his childhood:

When I was seven years old, my father used to take me to the circus. He had a black mustache, a gray vest and a pansy in his lapel, and he liked the circus better than I did.

But there was one thing that happened at the circus that I used to wait for.

I don’t want to impose upon you—this isn’t like a “sing-a-long with Mitch”—but there was one moment when a man would stand up and say,

“Would someone light a match so we can locate one another?”

So could I ask you, each person, to light a match so I can see you all? So we can locate one another. I know that you know why you’re lighting them.

And then he played “Bird on a Wire.”

British rock journalist Sylvie Simmons watched it all from the wings alongside Baez, Kristofferson and Judy Collins, who stood in awe. “Leonard greeted the crowd with a hypnotist’s charm and an intimacy that seemed unfeasible in such a vast, inhospitable space. It was magical, from the first moment to the last. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

There’s some debate as to whether this began the practice of audiences holding up lighters at concerts. Some attribute it to Dylan and the Band’s world tour the same year. Others credit the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” The beginning of Live Peace in Toronto 1969 by John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band begins with emcee Kim Fowley instructing the audience to “Get your matches ready. Ladies and gentlemen, the Plastic Ono Band.”

Music critic George Varga, though, offers the strongest empirical evidence: “During the Mudfest of 1969, otherwise known as Woodstock, the performance of a songbird known as Melanie during a massive rainstorm was rewarded by appreciative fans who held various lit items up to demonstrate their gratitude. Melanie documented this illuminating incident in her song ‘Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).’”

As I see it, though, laying claim to a candlelight vigil is as futile as Richard Lewis’s attempt at copywriting “____ from hell.”

Of much greater concern is the fact that the practice has grown extinct, replaced by cell phones and PDAs hoisted maniacally into the air like radioactive semaphores. Sure, the fact that fewer and fewer people carry lighters speaks to a healthier (and safer) world, but I’d still like to dust the practice off — we could use some help finding each other

Particularly when the need to locate one another arises.

—C.B.S. (via Kempt) (via C.B.S.)

‘Technically, this creature is a pig, but it has a fuzzy, sheeplike appearance and can allegedly be as tame as a house pet. This naturally led to the animal being called a “sheep pig” and, according to one breeder, “if you treat them nicely, they’ll become as tame as dogs—they’ll follow you, play with you.’ via MyModernMet

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