Today, we are continuing to quip famous people from Ireland with a quote from the great writer and essayist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) who penned the famous novel "Gulliver's Travel" (1735) that was recently made into a Jack Black film that we haven't seen (I wonder if esteemed New York film critic Nathan Lee has seen it, but he probably doesn't want to be pestered about it).
According to Wikipedia and my tenth grade English teacher Mrs. Schultz* at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md.**, "Gulliver's Travel" is meant to be a satirical view of European government, illustrate the petty differences among faiths, question man's inherent nature and show that specific individuals may be good even if their tribe is bad.
Now that we have that important stuff out of the way, here is the quote:
"A tavern is a place where madness is sold by the bottle."
SIDEBAR: For those of you residing in the Blacksburg, Va., area, one of our favorite college radio stations (well, the one in which I actually 'worked' at) WUVT/90.7-FM is on the verge of hosting their fund-raiser for the spring.
WUVT is one of the few radio stations where one can hear the '80s cult indie rock band The Replacements and the Turkish folk group Kardes Turkuler (means Songs of Fraternity in English) within a two-hour time span!
WUVT did indeed air songs from both of these musical entities on Saturday. Their amazing lineup for that day includes "Hickory Dickory Dock," "The Greek Show," "The Turkish Show" and "Nathan and Jared."
"The Turkish Show" played several selections on Saturday from Kardes Turkuleri, a group conceived some 20 years ago which plays Anatolian folk songs in the languags of Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic and Armenian. Songs from Kardes Turkuleri were featured on the soundtrack to the 2001 comedy film "Vizontele," which was a huge domestic box office hit in Turkey.
Later in the afternoon, "Nathan and Jared" played the song "Bastards of the Young" from The Replacements of the band's acclaimed 1985 release "Tim," which makes for great listening if you are writing that long-winded book report on "Gulliver's Travels."
*-pseudonymn, well I have no idea who my tenth grade English teacher was actually
**- Yes, there is actually a Walt Whitman HS in Bethesda, Md. No, I did not actually go to school there.
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