HAPPY EASTER!

Coloring Easter eggs is a holiday tradition, and if you haven't already colored your eggs this video will guide you through the process. It's a lot of fun. When we were kids, we'd bring Easter candy and colored eggs to school the entire week following the holiday--but now health authorities discourage eating colored eggs. These are the same people who took away our cigarettes and broken glass. Back then, we thought we'd live forever. We'd bravely munch a couple of these brightly colored bombs and race out to climb the monkey bars or bail out on the swings. The monkey bars were cast iron anchored in concrete, and it was a tough fall if you lost your footing (nowadays monkey bars are probably made of Nerf material and set on mattresses, but I can't verify that). Anyway, we lost a couple kids every recess. We got used to the whack-whack sound of medevac choppers, and watching friends strapped to the skids being flown away, never to be seen again.

After recess, it was worse. By then the sugar had warn off, and since the classrooms were always overheated we had to fight dozing off during the long division drills. This was before pocket calculators, when we actually had to learn math. Inevitably, some kid threw up. The janitor was summoned from his broom closet, and the sour old bastard came ambling down the hall like a mean version of Mr Greenjeans, jingling his massive key ring, pushing a mop the size of Rhode Island, and carrying a can of puke powder. He covered the stain with the puke powder but the stink never went away. It lingered in the warm classroom, drifting on the afternoon thermals. You'd gag every time you passed the spot. You'd get up to sharpen your pencil--a yellow, chewed-up Ticonderoga #2 --and practically get the dry heaves. Sometimes if I catch a faint whiff of sick from an alley it carries me back to Mrs. Vest's fourth grade class. I wonder who survived. I hope everyone made it, with the exception of Mr. Greenjeans.

Anyway, the moral of the story is simple. Don't eat colored eggs unless you're foolhardy and have nothing to live for. Otherwise, play it safe and do as you're told. Happy Easter.

This video will give you another angle on coloring eggs.

"I Want Candy" by

The Master Egg Painter colors an egg. More vintage Easter cards below! Check here!

WATERMELON IN EASTER HAY

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Frank Vincent Zappa (1940-1993) combined the sacred and the profane as a musician, songwriter, composer, bandleader, guitar-player, weirdo, and outspoken critic of mindless censorship in a free society.


Frank Zappa was born in Baltimore on December 21, 1940 to Francis Zappa (born in Partinico, Sicily) who was of Greek-Arab descent, and Rose Marie Colimore who was three-quarters Italian and one-quarter French. His father was a chemist and mathematician in the defense industry, and the Zappas moved around the country as the old man worked in various arsenals and chemical warfare facilities, finally skipping around California--Monterey, Claremont, El Cajon, and San Diego--where Frank joined his first band, The Ramblers, at Mission Bay High School.

The Zappa Family

By 1956, the family had moved to Lancaster, in the Mojave Desert near Edwards Air Force Base. Zappa continued devouring music. He soaked up avant-garde composers Stravinsky and Varese, old fashioned R and B, early rock and roll, and pachuco Do Wop bands. He met Don Vliet at Antelope Valley High School and they became friends--Vliet of course later recorded under the name Captain Beefheart, though he wasn't actually a captain and his heart was almost certainly human. Around then, Zappa played drums for The Blackouts, a racially mixed band that played blues and R and B. Zappa graduated from AVHS, and would later thank two of his high school music teachers on "Freak Out!" (1966) the first album recorded with the group that made him famous, The Mothers of Invention.

thanks for letting me sign your yearbook, Frank


Zappa at 22 on the Steve Allen Show: experimental music on a bicycle

To quote the Wicky, "His own heterogeneous ethnic background, and the diverse social and cultural mix in and around greater Los Angeles, were crucial in the formation of Zappa as a practitioner of underground music and of his later distrustful and openly critical attitude towards "mainstream" social, political and musical movements."

Today, we celebrate Frank Zappa--and Easter--with this 1988 performance of his beautiful composition, "Watermelon in Easter Hay."

EASTER IS COMING!

Sunday, Christians will celebrate Easter and commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without realizing it, they will also celebrate the pagan fertility springtime festival the Christian holiday supplanted. Crucifixions will mingle with fertility symbols--chicks, eggs, rabbits, flowers. It's been this way since the first Easter, at the tail end of the Iron Age. Look it up. In fact, the pagan goddess of spring and renewal was called "Oestar" from the Scandinavian "Ostra" and the Teutonic "Ostern" or "Eastre." This goddess of spring and fertility was honored on the vernal (spring) equinox. All that, and chocolate!

Of course, many people (most of the people on the planet, in fact) don't believe in Jesus as our Savior/Messiah, but they are still welcome to a chocolate bunny. Some people don't even believe in the Easter Bunny, who they claim is merely a magical mythical figure depicted as an anthropomorphic rabbit that delivers eggs in a basket. The following chart will help you place yourself according to your belief in Jesus (and of course many will simply be off the chart). This diagram may also help clarify your belief (or lack thereof) in the Easter Bunny.


The great Tom Waits helps us celebrate Easter with a stirring rendition of "Chocolate Jesus," combining both strains of the holiday in one tasty treat.

Speaking of anthropomorphic rabbits, here's one of our favorites, Bugs Bunny, helping the Easter Bunny in this cartoon classic from 1947, "Easter Yeggs." Just so you'll know, "yegg" is oldtime slang for a burglar or safecracker.


"Easter Yeggs" (1947) Looney Tunes


Springtime in Italy is the watchword around here, and this is how they celebrate the holiday. Wouldn't you know eating would be involved? You betcha. And you know it's good! Buona Pasqua! (Check out this post, Springtime in Italy).


Italy Travel: Easter Traditions in Italy


Isn't this little hatchling adorable? Long after the Iron Age but before the Age of Email, people actually sent these wonderful vintage Easter cards to family and friends. Of course, they weren't called "vintage" cards back then, no more than coins minted before the time of Christ carried the initials "B.C,," but now they've become collectibles. This was from the Golden Age of Illustration, before stock photos and Photoshop killed off the illustrators. Times were different then.

Here's another Easter cutie. Actually, this pin-up purports to be an actual photograph of the Easter Bunny. Then again, maybe it's Ostra, goddess of spring!

FUNNY LITTLE BUNNIES! AN EASTER CARTOON

This Silly Symphony cartoon from the Disney Studios was made in 1934. These funny bunnies are busy decorating eggs. You get the idea.

HAPPY EASTER!

If you're like me, you have fond memories of Easter morning. Rabbits, who had been pretty quiet all year long, would sneak into our house and leave baskets full of candy. I know, it sounds fantastic. We'd wake up and tear through colored cellophane and grab the candy and eggs and chocolate rabbits and Peeps all nestled in the green plastic grass. Winter was over, Spring was here, and the day was chock full of symbolic harbingers of new life and birth -- eggs, chicks, bunnies. I mean no offense to your belief system, but as you may have guessed, if you are free to ponder such things, Easter predates the arrival of a certain carpenter by a long shot. Still, the story of the resurrection fits squarely at the center of the birth-rebirth theme of this springtime holiday going back to pagan times. Believe what you will -- in Jesus or Buddha or Moses or Mohammad or Krishna -- or no God whatsoever -- as long as you tread lightly and respect others. There are too many narrow-minded, venal, greedy folks using religion as an excuse for hatred and selfishness and warmongering. But you know that.