Sunday, April 15, 2007
Back to his little grass shack
As if I wasn't already depressed enough by having to work and the fact that there is an unseasonable Nor'easter unleashing hell upon the city today, a very important early influence on my life kicked the bucket. It is with deep sadness that I acknowledge the passing of this giant of Hawaiian music...the utterly incomparable Don Ho:
There aren't very many dudes in the world who can make raspberry-tinted glasses and a Ukelele their trademarks and actually pull it off, but Don Ho managed to do so. I've adored Don Ho as much as the hot younger chick in the above picture, because he's been an influential force in my life almost since I was born.
When I was around two or three, I had this tape full of songs that I would sing along to. I don't really remember this much, but every once in a while I'll be making fun of some trashy song from the late 70s or early 80s, and my mom will say, "That was on your 'Favorite Songs' tape. You used to sing it all the time." From what I have discerned so far, this tape contained some AWESOME musical selections such as "Wildfire" by Michael Martin Murphy (song about a chick and her horse, I think), "If You Like Pina Coladas" by Rupert Holmes (song about 70s swinging and striking out on the newspaper personal ad scene), "Freeze Frame" by J. Geils Band (song about ?????), "Angie" by the Rolling Stones (duh), "Leader of the Band" by Dan Fogelberg (song about his elderly father), "Maneater" by Darryl Hall and John Oates (song about an unrepentant slut), "Bette Davis Eyes" by Kim Carnes (song about a super hot bitch in New York), "Urgent" by Foreigner (song about needing to get laid IMMEDIATELY), and "Tiny Bubbles" by Don Ho (song about drinking champers in Hawaii).
Apart from my instinctive attraction to "Tiny Bubbles" because of its alcohol-related theme, I used to really enjoy singing this song soulfully for my parents and their friends (then, as now, I was a zealous attention-seeker). When I was only about three, my ability to enunciate wasn't quite as well developed, and I would sing "Tiny Buboes...in the WINE." Perhaps it was due to my underdeveloped toddler's soft palate, and perhaps it was just an ode to things I would eventually like. "Bubo" could refer to two things:
1. The mechanical owl who assisted Perseus in his valiant struggles against Kalybos, his vengeful mother the goddess Thetis, and the evil Gorgon Medusa to save his beloved Andromeda from the fury of the Kraken in one of the greatest movies ever next to Varsity Blues and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Clash of the Titans:
I was crooning "Tiny Buboes" right around the time Clash of the Titans came out, and I was immediately entranced by it, so it's entirely possible that my rendition of Don Ho's masterpiece was indeed a tribute to Perseus's charming robotic owl.
2. An extremely enlarged, inflamed, painful, swollen, darkened lymph node characteristic of infection with Yersinia pestis. This is why the plague is called "black death," because the lymph nodes get full of hemorrhagic material and scar tissue (as you can see in the transverse H&E-stained section below) and become necrotic and black, which is called a "bubo", hence the "bubonic plague":
Although I've never had plague and don't study it, I think that singing about microbial diseases at a young age certainly prepped me for doing it as a career. I'm sure if there were a song that had lyrics which sounded like "allergic airway hypersensitization" or "paralytic poliomyelitis" I'd have sung that accidentally too.
In any event, whether I took Don Ho's classic to primarily mean "buy Clash of the Titans on DVD" or "pursue a career in microbiology", I ended up doing both. "Tiny Bubbles" was as much of an influence on the person I am today as The Sun Also Rises or Too $hort's Cocktails album.
Rest in peace, Don Ho(tness)...I hope wherever you are, the humuhumunukunukuappu'aa'aa are swimming by.
When I was around two or three, I had this tape full of songs that I would sing along to. I don't really remember this much, but every once in a while I'll be making fun of some trashy song from the late 70s or early 80s, and my mom will say, "That was on your 'Favorite Songs' tape. You used to sing it all the time." From what I have discerned so far, this tape contained some AWESOME musical selections such as "Wildfire" by Michael Martin Murphy (song about a chick and her horse, I think), "If You Like Pina Coladas" by Rupert Holmes (song about 70s swinging and striking out on the newspaper personal ad scene), "Freeze Frame" by J. Geils Band (song about ?????), "Angie" by the Rolling Stones (duh), "Leader of the Band" by Dan Fogelberg (song about his elderly father), "Maneater" by Darryl Hall and John Oates (song about an unrepentant slut), "Bette Davis Eyes" by Kim Carnes (song about a super hot bitch in New York), "Urgent" by Foreigner (song about needing to get laid IMMEDIATELY), and "Tiny Bubbles" by Don Ho (song about drinking champers in Hawaii).
Apart from my instinctive attraction to "Tiny Bubbles" because of its alcohol-related theme, I used to really enjoy singing this song soulfully for my parents and their friends (then, as now, I was a zealous attention-seeker). When I was only about three, my ability to enunciate wasn't quite as well developed, and I would sing "Tiny Buboes...in the WINE." Perhaps it was due to my underdeveloped toddler's soft palate, and perhaps it was just an ode to things I would eventually like. "Bubo" could refer to two things:
1. The mechanical owl who assisted Perseus in his valiant struggles against Kalybos, his vengeful mother the goddess Thetis, and the evil Gorgon Medusa to save his beloved Andromeda from the fury of the Kraken in one of the greatest movies ever next to Varsity Blues and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Clash of the Titans:
I was crooning "Tiny Buboes" right around the time Clash of the Titans came out, and I was immediately entranced by it, so it's entirely possible that my rendition of Don Ho's masterpiece was indeed a tribute to Perseus's charming robotic owl.
2. An extremely enlarged, inflamed, painful, swollen, darkened lymph node characteristic of infection with Yersinia pestis. This is why the plague is called "black death," because the lymph nodes get full of hemorrhagic material and scar tissue (as you can see in the transverse H&E-stained section below) and become necrotic and black, which is called a "bubo", hence the "bubonic plague":
Although I've never had plague and don't study it, I think that singing about microbial diseases at a young age certainly prepped me for doing it as a career. I'm sure if there were a song that had lyrics which sounded like "allergic airway hypersensitization" or "paralytic poliomyelitis" I'd have sung that accidentally too.
In any event, whether I took Don Ho's classic to primarily mean "buy Clash of the Titans on DVD" or "pursue a career in microbiology", I ended up doing both. "Tiny Bubbles" was as much of an influence on the person I am today as The Sun Also Rises or Too $hort's Cocktails album.
Rest in peace, Don Ho(tness)...I hope wherever you are, the humuhumunukunukuappu'aa'aa are swimming by.
Labels: alcoholism, epidemic geekery, I LOVE IT, people who died, Razzification, tragedy
Comments:
Links to this post:
<< Home
Razzy I was truly sad to hear about this... This was a cool tribute to him. People used to make fun of me as a little asian kid by calling me "Don Ho"... and perhaps for that reason i felt an affinity for him. After the death of Izzy Kamakawiwo'ole a few years ago, Don was one of the last great Ukelele-toting crooners. I will miss him, and I also do hope that he is around his humuhumunukunukuapuaa's.
Post a Comment
# posted by 
: 4/15/2007 7:57 PM
: 4/15/2007 7:57 PM Links to this post:
<< Home
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
