All off-site links will open in a new window.
Cell phone compatibility of off-site links cannot be guaranteed.
The links on this page vary across an eclectic spectrum and don't particularly fit into any of the other categories, though some are related. I'm hoping many or most of these are not pages many or most of the people who see this page will have seen.
Cherchez La Femme
Whispering/Cherchez la Femme/Se Si Bon by Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band
This Youtube video was made during a television broadcast with Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band singing their 1977 hit song, "Cherchez la Femme." It is my favorite disco music piece ever. I think the video is perfect for the music. I can't imagine anything better.
WHBF-TV, Rock Island, Illinois
A 1966 weather broadcast from WHBF TV in Rock Island, Illinois (Youtube), with weatherman Doug Dahlgren. I may not remember this particular broadcast, but I remember the genre and the weatherman! The television weather graphics from the era now seem so primitive!
Captain Ernie's Showboat
This is very regionally and time period specific, for Southeast Iowa, the 1960s. Captain Ernie (Ernie Mims) hosted the cartoon show I watched often as a kid, though I remember two of his predecessors, Captain Verne and Captain Ken, a bit better because I was younger during his run. I think one of them drew my name out of a treasure chest and I won a free pair of pants or something.
Video Beat!
Video Beat: "Welcome Hipsters!"
Video Beat has some very oddball (and often very much out-of-mainstream) movies. They focus on 1950s and 19660s youth and rock and roll culture in America. Nostalgia I relate to.
The Internet Archive
Internet Archive main search page
I love the Internet Archive, and though I think it remains a very underrated and under utilized internet tool for most folks. I have used it to distribute video, to download audio files (they have a 78 rpm record archiving project that is without equal), to watch or download movies in whole that are out of copyright, and occasionally to browse around just to find things I never would have otherwise. People use it for local television media, struggling musical groups use it to distribute their music, etc. Try it!
Reverend Billy &
The Church of Earthalujah
The good ersatz "Reverend" has been to San Francisco a number of times in recent years (he migrated out of here to New York City). He and his troupe decry globalization, consumerism, and much of the corporate mass culture we are daily exposed to, and its effects on longstanding neighborhoods, cities, and even countries. They are a fun bunch to see if they come to town, and a movie they starred in from a few years ago, "What Would Jesus Buy?", is also worthy of consideration. I am not a reformist anymore when it comes to society, but I can still enjoy their shenanigans.
Prisencolinensinainciusol
Music Video
Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano, 1972
This music video is very interesting. It is almost "proto-rap" in nature, and rather surreal. Made in 1972 for Italian television by Adriano Celentano, I think it was awfully advanced for the day. In the video, he is apparently pretending to teach a class English, but it is actually nonsense words—what English sounds like to Italians (who don't speak English). Knowing its background makes it even all the more interesting for me, but just musically I thought it was worth noting before I read its synopsis.
The Authentic History Center
I've used the Authentic History Site to get some old recordings, but there is a lot more there: "The Authentic History Center endeavors to tell the story of the United States primary through popular culture. It was created to teach that the everyday objects in society have authentic historical value and reflect the social consciousness of the era that produced them. New interpretive sections are added when substantial resources have been collected. Until then, incomplete collections are presented as digital archives without comment for individual study.".
Free Documentaries
Free Documentaries - download and watch
I checked out this site a couple of years ago, and again as I constructed this link. I think some of the earlier films may be gone, but I didn't do an intensive look around, so maybe they are there. I still saw a few I think are worthy of a look. For about three years I essentially watched nothing except "Depressing Documentaries," but unfortunately this web site was either not yet up (I think) or else unknown to me then.
Smash the Church,
Smash the State
The book review at City Lights bookstore
Smash The Church, Smash the State is an anthology of remembrances of the early years of the Gay Liberation movement (late 1960s and early 1970s), which was edited by my friend Tommi Avicolli-Mecca (and which contains an article I wrote in it). The title comes from a chant heard in early demonstrations of that day. It was published in 2009 on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall bar riots in New York City.
BlogActive
I like this site by Michael Rogers because he has outed so many politicians, who hide under an umbrella of secrecy and hypocrisy regarding their sexuality (not that I harbor any illusions this is likely to stop). Well, why not bring up the fact they're liars? The site's rationale: "I started this site in response to the use of marriage equality as a wedge issue during the 2004 elections. At the same time politicians and political operators were working against equality they were also living their lives in the closet. People are entitled to privacy and the exposure of someone's sexual orientation without their permission is unacceptable to me. Reporting on the hypocrisy of those who represent us in government? That's an entirely different matter."
The Crazy Nastyass
Honey Badger
This video by Randall went viral and now has millions of hits. I was led to it back in its youth, when it had only about a million hits. "There is no other animal in the kingdom of all animals, as fearless as the crazyass Honey Badger. Nasty as hell, it eats practically whatever it wants. Randall is disgusted."
Silver Sleigh Bells
1906- Silver Sleigh Bells (on the player piano) by E. T. Paull
As a kid who willingly took piano lessons, my family had inherited a load of old sheet music, mostly from my paternal grandmother, who also was a pianist. One old and frayed song in our house was "Silver Sleigh Bells" (I probably still have it here in the back closet). E. T. Paull wrote a lot of heroic music, and made notations in the different sections to describe the actions for which he was scoring. I remember playing several others, I think an entire book of his music appeared somewhere along the line. The music was not very hard, but it made the folks (my folks) happy to listen to, more so than, say the Beatles.
Fathead
Fathead: You've Been Fed a Load of Bologna!
As this Fathead article asks, regarding the American Heart Association: "Do These People Read Their Own Data?" An article by Tom Naughton in Bad Science
A Reversal on Carbs
LA Times article on saturated fat vs. carbs
"Fat was once the devil. Now more nutritionists are pointing accusingly at sugar and refined grains." Personally I point the finger at all grains, but I have reasons beyond just nutrition.
Wheat Belly
Lose the Wheat, Lose the Belly...
"Who had the audacity to write such an against-the-grain book exposing 'healthy whole grains' for the incredibly destructive genetic monsters they've become? That's me, Dr. William Davis, cardiologist and seeker-of-truth in health."
Housing Rights Committee
Housing Rights Committee San Francisco
My friend, Tommi Avicolli-Mecca, works at the Housing Rights Committee office in San Francisco. "[The] Housing Rights Committee is a tenants' rights organization that offers free counseling for San Francisco tenants in all types of housing, including rent-control, public housing and Section 8." Keep it in mind if you have landlord problems.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster
Graphical highlights of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
"The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, while having existed in secrecy for hundreds of years, only recently came into the mainstream when this letter was published in May 2005. With millions, if not thousands, of devout worshippers, the Church of the FSM is widely considered a legitimate religion, even by its opponents - mostly fundamentalist Christians, who have accepted that our God has larger balls than theirs. Pastafarianism is a real religion."
Don't Touch My Dot Com
"life, art, and all the other funny stuff"
I met Andy Maluche, a native of Munich who resides in Manila, the proprietor of "Don't Touch My Dot Com," back in about 2006 or when he was visiting San Francisco and showing some of his photography at a local one-night art show. He was engaging to talk to and an excellent photographer/digital artist, with a bend toward whimsy that I really enjoyed. At the time he had produced a one-issue magazine I still have a copy of, The Stick Insect Hunter. He also has a Flickr Photostream online.
- Information on these links
- Help
Help
(links' pages)
Please report any problems you might encounter to me using this email link, or the link on the email icon at the bottom of any page's (lower) navigation bar.
The organization of the links pages is, I feel, fairly straightforward. The main navigation index appears on the main links page, as well as the other links' subcategories' pages. (It does not appear on the Item Index page). Links to the subcategories' pages are available on the upper right navigational toolbar:
The "item index" would be useful if you were searching for a specific link by person or category.
- brumm.com Site Information
The History of www.brumm.com
(Site Information)
The latest incarnation/redesign of the www.brumm.com web site was begun in September 2010.
It was a surprise to me that I even have attempted this. After some rather dire health concerns and major surgery in 2008, I haven't felt like attempting anything particularly time consuming and difficult, certainly not as stressful as web page design tends to become.
As the last couple of years have progressed, I do feel better, and there are so many things that are relatively new and fun to attempt with web pages. So I again got the idea to attempt this insanity. Many of these new things do things I would have liked to have done years ago, but the constraints and reality of the internet were much harsher then.
www.brumm.com was begun in 1996, and first hosted on a server in Fremont, California, at zoom.com. Later I transferred the domain to he.net (short for Hurricane Electric). Still later it was on a late friend's server space that she and her husband leased at he.net. When they decided to dump that expense, I tried a cheap and dubious hosting service for a few months. It proved to be a big mistake! My pages got hacked, and they wanted more to fix the "damage" so I could get back up and running than they were going to charge me for rental over 3 years. I moved again in 2008 to sonic.net, in Santa Rosa, California. It may cost a bit more, but it is not a fly-by-night operation like so many cheap web hosting services really are.
I am very much "pleased as punch" with sonic.net. They are one of the rare companies that have managed to stay around (at least) since the mid 1990s, remaining un-swallowed-up by the rush of big corporations into the internet fray. Sonic.net gets high customer satisfaction ratings. Indeed, I've only needed to call them once, and the tech support I got then was also excellent. This sounds like a commercial, but it isn't meant to be. So much of what passes for corporate culture these days is such a disaster, it's just a pleasant surprise to find oneself happy about any of them.
In The Blue Phase version of my web site, certainly as "useful" as they all have been, I hope to include a few things I put away in the back closet in the more recent versions. I want to dust some of them off, update, and re-upload. Probably that will happen over the course of time. I am also including, of course, a few things I have regularly kept going, and new versions of things as well. I hope you enjoy it. As I tend to have a fairly unique perspective on things at times, perhaps it will inspire people to consider some alternatives they never thought of before.
Report any errors or difficulties to me at brumm@brumm.com. Use that link or else the email icon on the (bottom) navigation bar on any page.
- brumm.com Site Information
About these Pages
Links Pages
http://www.brumm.com/links/index.html
http://www.brumm.com/links/friends-links.html
http://www.brumm.com/links/genealogy-links.html
http://www.brumm.com/links/html-links.html
http://www.brumm.com/links/index-links.html
http://www.brumm.com/links/like-links.html
http://www.brumm.com/links/music-links.html
http://www.brumm.com/links/predicament-links.html
(The various pages that lead to off-site links)
Many standard links to sites that everybody knows about will not be found on this list. If you haven't discovered Youtube yet, you must be an awfully new Internet user. My own surfing habits don't frequently involve returning to a lot of sites once I have seen them. I don't regularly read any blogs, but do hit upon some fairly more often than most I guess that indicates a trend....
If any of the links on this page do not work, I would be happy for you to report them to me at the email link on the bottom navigational tool bar.
- Copyright
- Outside Links
- My Short Biography
Dennis W. Brumm
Age: 59
(September 2011, while redesigning this site)
Height: I once was 6' 4½", but in the past years I've shrunk about an inch. When I was very young and silly, I wanted to be over 7 feet tall.
Shoe size: 13, though, since the Chinese have begun to make all our shoes, it seems to have increased to 14, at least sometimes. Some maternal cousins have upwards of 15 and 16.
Weight: Recently shrinking. If I write a rant on the American diet (and its sub-cults) sometime, I will explain what I've been up to.
Colors: Blue eyes, but sometimes bloodshot while designing web pages. Hair, grayer than ever, originally blondish, then brownish.
Family: My parents are both dead (my mother since 1967, my father in 1986). No siblings, so I'm an "orphan" these last 25 years.
Friends: I have many, and many good ones.
First memory: Apparently before age one. My mother had a bout will Bell's palsy shortly after I was born, and I remember seeing her face a bit "contorted." When I mentioned this once to my father, he informed me I couldn't possibly remember that, as I was too young. But, despite his naysaying attitude, I do. I remember bits and pieces of a 3rd birthday party, when my Uncle Paul brought me a used toy tractor to ride (like a tricycle) on the sidewalk. He'd taken off the rust and painted it, and fixed it up nicely. Many other very youthful memories.
Last memory: Typing the word "memories" in the above paragraph.
Where I've lived: New London, Iowa, until age 18, then Ames, Iowa, until age 25. and finally San Francisco, California, since then (1978). I've lived in the same apartment in San Francisco since 1980.
Travel: I had a touch of the travel bug when I was in my 20s. I went to Europe twice. I haven't been on an airplane since 1990, so I guess the bug was exterminated. Nowadays I am not the biggest fan of the airline industry. Global warming and all...
Health: I was a sick kid, getting a lot of colds, ear infections, as well as the usual childhood diseases. I missed a lot of school some years. By the time I was a teenager, this improved greatly, and I rarely get sick now. However, as I have survived 2 aortic dissections (see the "Bad News" Section), and since I have a titanium aortic valve and some plastic arteries, I wouldn't say I'm the healthiest human on the planet.
Hobbies: I spend a lot of time on my computer. It shows. I began an interest in genealogy in about 2000. It meshed nicely with the computer interest. I studied piano as a kid and some in college and have a great interest in music. Composed some for awhile, and was obsessed with making video once upon a time. I have one cat left (there were three just a few years ago); he is not a hobby but my good friend.
Other interests: I have an interest in where culture is going, and why. Additionally I have dabbled lately in evolutionary psychology, but I am not "adept" in knowledge of it.
Education: New London (Iowa) High School, graduated in 1970. Attended Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. No degree, all sorts of things happened during that period (see the gay liberation section of "Schools.")
Work: I have been on disability since May 1998 from the aforementioned aortic condition. Not working has kept me alive. I previously held a number of interesting jobs, ranging from janitor to chemical technician to the middle manager boss of ten folks in the accounting department of a produce company. I didn't expect or really want an early retirement, but thus crumbled the cookie. We can't always get or have what we want, even if your spiritual advisor tries to convince you otherwise.
Irritations: These change periodically. Presently they are cell phones in public (disruption of the commons), cell phones regardless of location (to some extent all digital addictive media, though I am an addict as well). I get pretty angry sometimes at the entitlement felt/exhibited by those who push baby carriages on local sidewalks and stores (baby carriages are the SUVs of the sidewalk). Often I get irritated by those who accept unfounded myth in the face of all evidence, and the rationalizations they make in the supposed reasoning of their beliefs. However, I have come to believe this latter trait is probably a natural human phenomena, evolved as such, and try to just let my irritation go about it whenever possible. I can still feel some astonishment without the irritation and get along better with the world.
- Information on these links
