Journal: News & Comment

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

Thanga. Thanga very mush.

Elvis died 25 years ago today. No really, he did.

Mark Steyn, in yesterday's National Post, explained the King's enduring appeal as that of a man who never lost his white-trash roots and culture:

...his tastes never changed. Being rich meant doing all the same things he'd done when poor, only more so: he had banana pudding every night; instead of eating one cheeseburger, he'd eat six; instead of cruising Main Street for a late-night diner, he'd hop on the private jet, burn $16,000 worth of fuel and fly to Denver for a peanut-butter sandwich; instead of a 22-inch TV, he had the planet's biggest set; instead of grumbling that there was nothing on, he'd blow the set apart with his M-16 automatic rifle; instead of shooting beer cans off the tailgate of his pick-up, he'd buy up every available flashbulb in Memphis, toss them in the pool and shoot them out of the water. At Graceland, he took an antebellum colonnaded fieldstone mansion and turned it into the world's largest trailer.

We know Elvis would not disapprove of the tens of thousands of impersonators, the velvet paintings, the collector plates, the bobble-heads. He allowed much worse in his lifetime -- the Having Fun with Elvis On Stage album, for instance, voted the third worst of all time a few years ago.

 |