Is it just me, or is there something distinctly homo-erotic - or just plain weird - about these vintage American adverts?

Well, they certainly look like they're having fun! So do these fine young roister-doisters...

American magazine stands of the '20s and '30s must have been a riot of wit, vulgarity, elegance, taste, energy and colour

1939: the greatest year in the history of Hollywood - from Son of Frankenstein to Gone With the Wind

...and that wasn't the half of it! I've been hearing about the importance of 1939 in cinema history all my life, but it wasn't untilI I read Majestic Hollywood: The Greatest Films of 1939 by Mark A. Vieira that I realised just how bizarrely brilliant a year it was. Take just one month, December, when cinemagoers were offered...

An American school receptionist signals the start of summer by belting out Etta James's "At Last" over the PA

I'm not sure my old school would have condoned...

More rocking gems from David Stephens's "RocknRoll" e-book - including the Everlys, Jerry Lee, Joey Dee and Dale Hawkins

Having devoted my  last two posts to pre-British Invasion singles by black American acts released on the London American label here in the UK,  as an equal opportunities blogger I'm taking affirmative action to give the white folk a fair crack of the whip. Not all of the following records were released on London, but I either heard them for the first time or became reacquainted with them through one or other of David Stephens' two wildly entertaining e-books - RocknRoll and London Rocks. I'll start with Frank DeRosa and the D-Men's tough-as-old-boots, Duane Eddyesque 1958 instrumental, "Big Guitar":

I'd better come clean and admit...

12 great records by black R&B and Doowop vocal groups and duos - take a bow, The Rays, The Dynamics, Don & Dewey and The Chips

"Daddy Cool" was the B-side of The Rays' 1957 hit, "Silhouettes":

The Cadillacs had a hit with one of the great rock'n'roll breakthrough records, "Speedo", in 1955 - here's their very Coasters-like "Peek-A-Boo"...

12 great records by black singers culled from David Stephens' wonderful e-book, "London Rocks"

I'd heard Ray Charles's "Tell the Truth" - from his In Person album (1960), but I'd forgotten how cool, sassy and just altogether groovy it was. I have to thank...

Golden Age Hollywood movies that are more fun than a barrel of monkeys - Destry Rides Again, Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Mark of Zorro, Heaven Can Wait & Barbary Coast

I watched Destry Rides Again (1939) for the first time last week - and, Lord, what a treat it turned out to be. No wonder Hollywood conquered the world. First, there's Marlene Dietrich as a cynical saloon singer/croupier in full Lili von Shtupp mode...

$tateside, London American and Pye International - the record labels that brought us great American music in the early '60s

I experience a warm glow at the very thought of those labels - far more than I do when I'm reminded of, say, Parlophone, EMI, Top Rank, Pye or Decca. That's because $tateside, London American and Pye International's main function was to release singles and EPs of American material which UK labels had licensed from  labels in the States. Not every record released via these subsidiaries was brilliant - but a fair proportion of the great singles released before the British Invasion - i.e between 1956 and 1963 - appeared on one of the three. Even after the British Invasion, the number of brilliant American tracks released here remained high: British beat combos were recording cover versions of formerly obscure American hits (primarily R&B) - and British companies realised they'd already licensed many of the originals. I'm going to switch to full train-spotter mode and take a look at what each label was offering the 'Oi'll geeve eet foive" generation, starting with $tateside...

RIP Rick Hall: "Land of 1000 Dances", the Muscle Shoals FAME studio and the great '60s music racial melting pot"

Despite its title, "Land of 1,000 Dances" started out as a fairly gentle-paced gospel call-and-response-style chugger written and recorded in New Orleans in 1962 by the talented black New Orleans singer-songwriter, Chris Kenner, whose career was destroyed by chronic alcoholism and a three-year prison spell for statutory rape in 1968. The song was a middle-rank hit:

Three years later...

The Deplorables' Hit List: ten recordings that go down well with American patriots (and I like some of them too)

Canadian commentator Gordon Sinclair's 1973 single started out as a radio broadcast - they just added...

"Let me not digress" - Damon Runyon lives on in a Noo Yawk lady's splendid denunciation of Mayor DeBlasio

It all fell into place when the lady from Queens...

My latest addiction: CBS Reality's "Cold Blood" and "Medical Mysteries" series

My latest addiction is to the American true crime series, Medical Detectives and Cold Blood, which are currently running on the CBS Reality channel. I usually polish off one of each before going to bed. Until recently, I might have spent that time watching Sky News or Fox, but, for anyone of a conservative disposition, the news has been unbearable of late: before resuming my former nightly habit I may have to wait for Peak Corbyn to pass, and for America to finally admit that the whole Trump/Russia narrative has been invented by Democrats suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Meanwhile, accounts of murder investigations are filling the gap effectively. After last night's fix, I found myself wondering why I enjoy these programmes so much - and what they tell us about violent crime in America:

Time to rethink that Florida vacation? The Florida Man Twitter feed might help you decide...

I have a new favourite Twitter feed - Florida Man, "Real-life stories of the world's worst superhero." I spent a few days there 40 years ago, so I'm not exactly an expert on the state...

"Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush." Special sleazy "Confidential" blog issue!

Film fans will recognise the marketing slogan in the headline of this post as belonging to Sid Hudgens, the publisher of the salacious scandal rag Hush Hush,...

Comics - is there anything they DON'T know?

Yes, indeed, Eric Idle - the lovable old madcap Python funster himself. So it's a joke, obviously. Only...

Two shooters, no conspiracy. It seems the JFK assassination anomalies may have been explained by a ballistics expert in 1992!

The last book I read about the Kennedy assassination was David S. Lifton's massively-detailed 920-page monster, Best Evidence: Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, first published in 1981. I think I probably read a new edition of it in the early '90s, quite possibly bought for the plane-ride back from being a member of the BBC news team in Little Rock, Arkansas covering Clinton's 1992 election victory. As far as I remember, Lifton's main focus was on alterations supposedly made to Kennedy's skull (skullduggery?) between the hospital he was first taken to in Dallas after the shooting and the site of the autopsy in Bethesda - alterations which, Lifton alleged, had been made to cover up the number of shooters involved. All I clearly remember now is that I finished the book convinced that (a) there was indeed something odd about the various accounts of how the bullets from Oswald's rifle had behaved, (b) there probably had been another shooter, and (3) there was no conspiracy - Oswald acted alone.

The antinomianism of America's "entertainment" industry elite - they behave like pigs because they're "justified by faith"

And what's with this peculiar obsession with their private parts?

To mark the end of the Obama Terror, here's a selection of really mean memes...

Good luck back on whichever weird planet you came from, Mr. President...

Theresa May's Hard Brexit speech + Trump's inauguration - with this much butthurt, Anusol stocks must be running dangerously low

Er... I'm not sure "democracy" means what you think it means, Timmy...