pining for the Fnord's? or should that be Albert Pine whoever he is?

yeah well.....

"this" time of year, memories...you know the thing.

If you had any kind of childhood, you may have special memories of this time, be it presents parties or snowy pavements.

Your first bike! That chemistry set you always wanted! David Cassidy's greatest hits! Another chance to see the Two Ronnies Christmas Special!

Today a memory popped into my head.....randomly generated after reading a friends FB status and having an image of a snowy pine tree in my head. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, no less...

"Trail of the Lonesome Pine" was a song performed by Laurel & Hardy in the 1937 film 'Way Out West".

A sample of the chorus

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
On the trail of the lonesome pine—
In the pale moonshine our hearts entwine,
Where she carved her name and I carved mine;
Oh, June, like the mountains I'm blue—
Like the pine I am lonesome for you,
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
On the trail of the lonesome pine.

If you have never seen any Laurel & Hardy before, at least check this out. As a grown up (?) adult person now, it makes me smile but way back when it would have me rolling in stitches (likewise the piano mover sketch in 'The Magic Box'...but I digress....)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8Fc681ZiNc will take you to the clip on youtube....which helped it to get to number 2 in the charts back in 1975.

The song is older than even Laurel & Hardy's film, however. Written in 1913, you can hear the original via the link below at the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project website....



http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/mp3s/0000/0717/cusb-cyl0717d.mp3

...also covered by the musical originator Link Wray as you can see in this youtube clip 'Link Wray On "The Jack Spector Show", Channel 12 WPRO-TV, Providence, RI, March 1960 '.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsEOz3gfOTU

amazing what you can find on the interweb, eh? :D

(oh, and Albert Pine? Who is he? No information I can find except he is the source of the quotation :

"What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal."

which has a simple positive message that tickles me.

and what provoked the urge to document this in a blog today? Just that the last year for Denise and I has been one of so many mixed memories, good, bad, sad, painful, and uplifting too. Life, Death and all the flavours inbetween. If I were a poet, I'd probably be on my fifth volume of "eulogies of a bad day", by now.

so today I decided to take a memory that made me smile, and thought I'll do a web search and dig out some links and whatnot.

Listen to the song, play the clip and I hope it makes you smile too!

(...oh and the Fnords? I'll leave you to check that out for yourself....)