The Annual Thanksgiving Tradition: Alice’s Restaurant

November 26, 2009 by Leave a comment

I wrote about Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant last year. So doing it a second year in a row qualifies it as a tradition of this blog now.

Why is Alice’s Restaurant associated with Thanksgiving? From Wikipedia:

“Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” [sic] (commonly referred to simply as “Alice’s Restaurant“) is one of singer-songwriter Arlo Guthrie’s most prominent works, a musical monologue based on a true story that began on Thanksgiving Day 1965, and which inspired a 1969 movie of the same name. In an interview for All Things Considered, Guthrie said the song points out that any American citizen who was convicted of a crime, no matter how minor (in his case, it was littering), could avoid being conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War.

Radio stations around the United states seem to play it around 12:00 noon every Thanksgiving. The song is a rollicking 18:33 journey through Arlo Guthrie’s classic guitar and great storytelling.

Below is a screenshot of the video. Embedding of the video has been disabled by request. Click the picture, and you’ll be taken to the video on YouTube.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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My Ten Favorite Tweets – Week Ending 112808

November 28, 2008 by 1 Comment

From the home office in Lake Tahoe, California…

#1: Better than spam? Chris Baskind reports a spammer on Twitter has a 21.5% return follow rate: http://bit.ly/EzHm

#2: If you don’t ask, you don’t get. And…you never get everything you ask for.

#3: Just added BackType to my FriendFeed. An interesting competitor to Disqus and Intense Debate.

#4: I love this saying about parenting: “The days are long, the years are short.” >> So very, very true.

#5: Why is Papa Bear such the dufus in the Berenstein Bears books? Giving us Dads a bad name…

#6: Doing a keyword search in my GReader, seeing some great posts for blogs to which I don’t subscribe. Power of subscribing to others’ shares.

#7: Editing/adding content on my blog’s About Me page. That page receives a good number of hits, and I thought…”What Would @chrisbrogan Do?”

#8: Reading: “Resumes are Dead. Social Media is Your New Resume.” http://bit.ly/yqUQ

#9: Twitter for $500 million..gut says that’s too low. Twitter is the defining platform for lightweight interactions. $1 billion +…

#10: Thanksgiving morning. We’ve got Christmas music playing on the radio (96.5). Kids are jumping on the bed. Heading to Gramma’s house later.

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Happy Thanksgiving with Alice’s Restaurant

November 26, 2008 by 1 Comment

I love this song, and hearing it this time of year conjures up great memories. Here’s Arlo Guthrie singing Alice’s Restaurant. The YouTube video is not embeddable, but click the picture and you’ll be taken to the video.

Happy Thanksgiving.

alices-restaurant-arlo-guthrie

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