#Broncho Bill

[tomoleary]

"Tarzan by Rex Maxon, Li'l Abner by Al Capp, Broncho Bill by O'Neill and The Captain and The Kids by Rudolph Dirks. Bottom margins have text noting that they are part of "Tip Top Comics Gift Picture" series. These complete a series of four premium pictures that were obtained w/two "Tip Top Comics" coupons and 10¢. ©1937 By United Features Syndicate Inc.”

Source

[natromanxoff]

Evening Post - November 25, 1991

(x)

Pop world mourns loss of Queen singer

FREDDIE MERCURY DIES OF AIDS

[Photo caption: Mercury pictured in September]

[Photo caption: SHOWMAN: Mercury’s unique stage style that made him a rock legend]

FANS and friends of pop star Freddie Mercury were today mourning his deah from Aids.

The 45-year-old singer of rock group Queen died peacefully during the night at his luxury London mansion, just hours after telling the world he had the disease.

Mercury's publicist Roxy Meade said: "His death was the result of broncho-pneumonia brought on by Aids."

The flamboyant star had lived like a recluse for the past two years, the illness leaving him frail and gaunt.

Tributes soon poured in for the singer who had helped make Queen one of the most successful acts in the world.

Ultimate

DJ and comedian Kenny Everett, a close friend of the singer, said: "He burnt the candle at both ends — and in the middle."

Rock critic Paul Gambaccini told TV-am: “What a star. They don’t make them like him anymore. He really gave life and showmanship to (…).

“He could command an audience, hold an audience in the palm of his hand. The climate was when he and the group absolutely stole Live Aid.”

Queen rose to force in the early 70s with a series of epic albums and singles culminating in the Number One smash hit Bohemian Rhapsody.

That was the song which began the video revolution in pop music. and the band stayed ahead of the pack with a run of spectacular and sometimes outrageous promotional films for their hits.

Mercury will be cremated in a private ceremony later this week.

He confirmed only on Saturday that he suffering from Aids. He issued a statement saying he wanted to end speculation about his health.

His statement to The […]

Mercury dies

[…] Press Association said: “Following the enormous conjecture in the press over the last two weeks, I wish to confirm that I have been tested HIV positive and have Aids.

“I felt it correct to keep this information private to date in order to protect the privacy of those around me.

“However, the time has now come for my friends and fans around the world to know the truth and I hope that everyone will join with me, my doctors and all those worldwide in the fight against this terrible disease.”

Musician turned politician Screaming Lord Sutch, who played on the same bills as Queen in the early 1970s, said: “We have lost a most original and entertaining singer who inspired many, many people.”

He said Mercury deserved to ranked alongside Mick Jagger and Elvis Presley.

DEATH OF A SHOWMAN

Front door exit for a legend

THE BIG FINISH

By JAMES BELSEY

FREDDIE MERCURY died as he lived last night… in a worldwide blaze of publicity.

It was only on Saturday that the over-the-top rock singer confirmed what we’d all suspected for months — that he was suffering from Aids.

Rare sightings of Mercury this year had shown a shockingly different picture of the man.

The chin-forward, grinning arrogance and that amused, boyish look had vanished.

Fortune

In its place was a spectral shadow of the Mercury who had catapulted Queen to worldwide fame and kept them there for almost two decades.

His kamikaze lifestyle of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll had finally taken its toll.

Rock music’s long list of stars who thought they were immortal and could live by a different set of rules to the rest of us had found its latest casualty.

Freddie had enormous talent and a stage presence that magnetised an audience at the swivel of a hip or the raising of an arm in his characteristic pose of defiance.

He amassed a huge fortune, lived in a £5 million mansion home in Kensington, showered gifts on friends and lovers but remained, at heart, a lonely, increasingly bitter man.

He once said: and "You can have everything and still be the loneliest man and that is the bitter tupe of loneliness.

Success has brought me world idolisation and milions of pounds, but it has prevented me from having the one thing we all need… a loving, on-going relationship.

I can't win Love is a Russian roulette for me. I try to hold back when I’m attracted to someone, but I just can’t control love. It runs riot. All my one night stands are just me playing my part.”

Freddie made no secret of his bisexuality. “I’ve had a lot of lovers. I’ve tried relationships on either side — male and female. But all of them have gone wrong.”

His longest love affair was with blonde Mary Austin which ended after seven years. They remained close friends and she worked for him as part of his staff.

He even became godfather to her son Richard two years ago and spoke of a new sense of responsibility.

His lavish generosity and party-living was outrageous and legendary.

Banquet

After Wembley in 1987 he hired a body painter from Germany and guests were amazed to find the “uniformed" bell boys were, in fact, naked. And at a banquet in New Orleans he hid a nude model in a huge tray of raw liver, making it quiver.

For another he hired Concorde and flew friends over the Atlantic at vast expense.

In one of his final interviews a few weeks ago, the by now painfully thin Mercury said: “I don’t really think about when I’m dead or how they are going to remember me.

“When I'm dead, who cares? I don’t”.

How Mercury became the first video star

FREDDIE MERCURY was born Frederick Bulsara in Zanzibar on September 5, 1946, son of a government accountant. He was educated first at a boarding school in Bombay.

When the family returned to England he became a student at Ealing College of Art. For a decade Britain’s art schools had been the breeding ground for a string of the world’s top groups.

Freddie longed to be a star and in 1971 teamed up with like-minded students Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor.

Their aim: to shock and amuse their way to the top. A new, young generation of glam rockers were pressing hard on the heels of the now mature Sixties superstars.

What was the most outrageous title for a band? They chose Queen, with its clear double meaning and, just in case anyone had missed the point, dolled themselves up with make-up.

Within a year they were the talk of the college circuit. Within two years they’d been signed up by EMI and their debut album Queen was released in July 1973, followed up with two gigantically successful national tours in 1974 and 1975.

Queen came to the Colston Hall in Bristol on November 12, 1974 and November 17, 1975. After the second gig Freddie changed out of his stage gear, a slashed to-the-waist catsuit and threw a party for pals and the road crew.

They returned to Bristol Hippodrome on December 9, 1979, as one of the world’s top attractions.

Mercury knew how to sell himself and the band better than anyone. It’s no coincidence that Queen single-handedly changed the rock industry overnight.

They knew they had s huge hit with their dynamic single Bohemian Rhapsody. But how to sell it?

In came the innovative answer. At the cost of a few thousand pounds they recorded a video film to promote single. Within months the rock video had ceased to be a novelty — and became an essential part of the business.

Typically, it was Freddie who’d been the first rock video star.

Avon Aids campaign launched

FREDDIE Mercury's death comes as health experts in Avon launch a new campaign to highlight Aids.

A series of events began today as part of a week-long Avons Aids Week designed to bring the disease into the public eye.

Experts are keen to dispel any complacency — particulary among heterosexuals — about the HIV virus.

anyope had missed the point,

And Health Secretary and Bristol West MP William Waldegrave has backed the campaign.

Increase

*We have done slightly better than was initally predicted but there is a slow-ticking time bomb of the disease moving across to the heterosexual community,” he said.

“Unless we act now we can predict that in five or ten years’ time we will see a big increase again of the disease in the straight community.

“We have got to get everybody as sensitive to this issue as they gay community is now.”

FAY GOULD

[Photo caption: THE CHAMPION: Top, Mercury had it all. Above, on stage during Queen’s Colston Hall concert back in 1975]

[digitalcomicmuseum]

Comic Uploaded: 29-07-2018 Broncho Bill 10 Uploader: freddyfly Download Link: https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=31735 Read Online

[rocket-pops]

music of the losers™ - grownups

the inevitable follow-up to this post, here's what i imagine the magnificent seven listened to throughout their adult years 🤟

bev 🌠

still loves her soft, old man music

branched out to some more alternative artists as she got older

became a breakup song aficionado

in her playlist: the cure, carole king, haim, florence + the machine

ben 🐢

grew up sentimental, went from cheesy pop songs to cheesy love songs

encountered a lot of pump-you-up jams in his quest for washboard abs

sometimes dips into sad boi music

in his playlist: beck, marky mark & the funky bunch, coldplay, christine and the queens

richie 🗯️

never outgrows his grunge phase

spent quite a bit of his 20s inside clubs and it shows

hides a lot inside feelsy music

in his playlist: red hot chili peppers, the national, lorde, radiohead

eddie 💓

unfortunately only grows angrier over time, stops trying to calm down

majorly into angsty girl rock

if a song rattles his bones and gives him the sensation of being centuries old, it's a banger

in his playlist: kate bush, alanis morissette, banks, mitski

stan 👊🏼

has mellowed out significantly since leaving derry, but hasn't lost his edge

developed a taste for classical after watching the shawshank redemption (oh, so meta!)

is actually a really cool guy, has the music library to show it

in his playlist: mozart, dave brubeck, broncho, phoenix

mike 🌱

has learned a thing or two about groove

doesn't realize a lot of his music has the central theme of "i gotta get out of here"

high-key lonely, puts on the moodiest songs and he yearns

in his playlist: ambrosia, childish gambino, hozier, alabama shakes

bill 📜

listens to film scores for writing inspiration

went through an experimental phase and came away with some odd stuff

driving-through-a-tunnel jams, matthew mcconaughey car commerical jams

in his playlist: john williams, muse, london grammar, phantogram

here's the playlist, it's definitely more chaotic than the last one

[deviiatc]

21 Questions

01.    NICKNAME  :  Peeb

02.    REAL  NAME  : Aaron

03.    ZODIAC  :  Taurus

04.    HEIGHT  :  5′2″ shut up

05.    WHAT  TIME  IS  IT  ?  :  2:34 PM

06.    FAVOURITE  MUSICIANS  /  GROUPS  :  BRONCHO, LVL UP, Bowie, Death Cab

07.    FAVOURITE  SPORTS  TEAM  :  honey,

08.    OTHER  BLOGS  :  @syncopxtc @jiiaian @holdyour-haand

09.    DO  I  GET  ASKS  ?  :  oui

10.    HOW  MANY  BLOGS  DO  I  FOLLOW  ?  :  oh listen i don’t have the energy for that 

11.    ANY  TUMBLR  CRUSHES :  nay

12.    LUCKY  NUMBER  :  uhhhhhh

13.    WHAT  AM  I  WEARING  RIGHT  NOW  :  sweatshorts, a JOURNEY t-shirt, and a flannel

14.    DREAM  VACATION  :  pawis fwance but also japan

15.    DREAM  CAR  :  I’m p happy with my current kia soul

16.    FAVOURITE  FOOD  :  peanut butter, quesadillas

17.    DRINK  OF  CHOICE  :  wine

18.    LANGUAGES :  english and a little bit of french

19.    INSTRUMENTS  :  i played the french horn and guitar in high school

20.    CELEBRITY  CRUSHES  : Ryan Lindsey uhhh Bill Hader i guess and like...young Alan Alda

21.    RANDOM  FACT  :  love broccoli, absolutely cannot eat the stalks of that shit

Tagged by/Stolen From:  @hanabiira

Tagging: all y’all

[strangertwostranger]

Inktober No. 8 - Adrian "Addie" Joss, nicknamed "The Human Hairpin," was an American pitcher in Major League Baseball. He pitched for the Cleveland Bronchos, later known as the Naps, between 1902 and 1910. In 1908, he pitched the fourth perfect game in baseball history. He accomplished the feat with just 74 pitches, the lowest known pitch count ever achieved in a perfect game. Off the field, Joss worked as a newspaper sportswriter from 1906 until his death in 1911 at the age of 31 due to tuberculous. The first "all-star" game was played as a benefit for Joss's family on July 24, 1911. The game was attended by approximately 15,270 fans and raised nearly $13,000 ($341,000 today) to help Joss' family members pay remaining medical bills.

[filamentzine]

Bill - Berdnturtle

Α piece of music that needs to be played loud 

The Knife - Heartbeats

A piece of music that moves you forward

Broncho - Boys Got to Go

A piece of music that gets stuck in your head 

The Rolling Stones - Miss You

A piece of music that makes you want to dance

Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)

A piece of music that makes you feel badass

Oasis - Live Forever

A piece of music that you remember from your childhood 

Black Sabbath - Paranoid

A piece of music that reminds you your hometown

Slayer - South of Heaven

The piece of music you’ve listened to the most

Talking Heads - Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)

As a band we are based in Athens, Greece and we formed in Chania on 2016. Our music taste and influences are a mix of indie and dream pop/shoegaze sound of UK & US music scene, and of 2010s bands such as Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Tame Impala, DIIV, Mac DeMarco and the list goes on. Ambush, is our debut album and it was pubished on October, 2019, as a DIY release. We shared the stage with friends and musicians from the Greek Underground Scene, such as Acid Barrets, The Bonnie Nettles, HEX, Nerrves, Psychedelic Trips to Death.  We also had our first interview/podcast on Radionotes by John Murch and Cold Gate included on Indie / Bedroom Pop • BIRP! June 2020.

https://berdnturtle.bandcamp.com/album/ambush

[newmusicmonthly]

2018

Hello all.

Hope you had a wonderful Christmas break.

I know it’s now 2019 so apologies for the late delivery but here are my lists of last year.

And the long list of tracks further below includes numerous gems.

xx

TOP 10 ALBUMS

Michael Nau - Michael Nau & The Mighty Thread

U.S. Girls - In a Poem Unlimited

Fenne Lily - On Hold

Gaz Coombes - World's Strongest Man

Kurt Vile - Bottle It In

Bonny Doon - Longwave

Malena Zavala - Aliso

Kali Uchis - Isolation

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Wrong Creatures

Ryley Walker - Deafman Glance

TOP 10 TRACKS

Michael Nau - On Ice

Kurt Vile - Check Baby

Gaz Coombes - The Oaks

Bonny Doon - I Am Here (I Am Alive)

Fenne Lily - Three Oh Nine

The Men - When I Held You In My Arms

Grimes, HANA - We Appreciate Power

Conan Mockasin - Charlotte's Thong

Kali Uchis - Just A Stranger (feat. Steve Lacy)

Cyn - Believer

TOP 10 GIGS

24/06/2018 - Nine Inch Nails - Royal Albert Hall

26/09/2018 - Michael Nau - Hoxton Bar & Grill

04/10/2018 - Another Sky - Tufnell Park Dome

07/11/2018 - Kurt Vile - KOKO

26/10/2018 - Van Morrison - O2

25/05/2018 - Glass Animals, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem - All Points East Festival

27/03/2018 - Steven Wilson - Royal Albert Hall

22/05/2018 - TT & Nick Mulvey - Royal Albert Hall

23/03/2018 - Carpenter Brut - KOKO

02/11/2018 - King Crimson - Palladium

JANUARY

Shame – One Rizla

Serpent Power – Howling

Dream Wife – Hey Heartbreaker

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – Carried From The Start

Stephan Kreussel – Mermaid

FEBRUARY

Hookworms – Negative Space

U.S. Girls – L-Over

Rhye – Phoenix

Jonathan Wilson – Over the Midnight

Dead Meadow – Unsettled Dusk

MARCH

Editors – Hallelujah (So Low)

The Decemberists – Severed

Seun Kuti – Black Times

The Men – When I Held You In My Arms

Amen Dunes – Believe

APRIL

Bonny Doon – I Am Here (I Am Alive)

The Horrors – Fire Escape

MIEN – (I’m Tired of) Western Shouting

Blackwater Holylight – Sunrise

Kali Uchis – Just A Stranger (feat. Steve Lacy)

MAY

Gaz Coombes – The Oaks

Fenne Lily – Three Oh Nine

Queen Kwong – Raptures

Blood Red Shoes – God Complex

Lord Huron – Ancient Names (Part I & II)

JUNE

King Tuff – Raindrop Blue

Albin Lee Meldau – I Need Your Love

Cyn – Believer

Ben Howard – A Boat To An Island On The Wall

Nine Inch Nails – Over and Out

JULY

Boy Azooga – Face Behind Her Cigarette

Denzel Curry – BLACK BALLOONS

Laura Carbone – Lullaby

Phantastic Ferniture – Dark Corner Dance Floor

Israel Nash – Hillsides

AUGUST

Damien Jurado - The Last Great Washington State

The Coral - Strangers In The Hollow

Michael Nau - On Ice

Träden, Träd Gräs Och Stenar - När lingonen mognar (Lingonberries Forever)

Black Futures - Trance

SEPTEMBER

Lonnie Holley - I Woke Up in a Fucked-Up America

All Them Witches - Rob's Dream

Emma Ruth Rundle - Darkhorse

Richard Swift - Broken Finger Blues

Erthlings - Bridges

OCTOBER

BRONCHO - Sandman

Jaakko Eino Kalevi - Fortune Cookie

Conan Mockasin - Charlotte's Thong

Farao - Marry Me

Baxter Drury, Étienne de Crécy, Delilah Holliday - White Coats

NOVEMBER

Kurt Vile - Check Baby

Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats - Wasteland

Grimes, HANA - We Appreciate Power

TVAM - Psychic Data

Bill Ryder Jones - Don't Be Scared, I Love You

DECEMBER

Loma - Black Willow

Holy Motors - Honeymooning

Malena Zavala - If It Goes

Kadhja Bonet - Mother Maybe

Idris Ackamoor, The Pyramids - Warrior Dance

[oldhead-blerdette]

Western Comics-Where Did They Come From and Where Did They Go

Many of us, as children, played “Cowboys and Indians” We saw men riding horse in “10 gallon hats” shooting down outlaws, settling on the old and new frontier, and having one too many drinks in the saloon. The Western genre has been apart of novels, movies, and pulp magazines as early as the 1930s. So, how did it find its way into comics?

It began with Harry O'Neill's newspaper strip Young Buffalo Bill (later changed to Buckaroo Bill and then, finally, Broncho Bill) distributed by United Feature Syndicate beginning in 1928. Soon, other titles started popping up in the papers. It wasn’t until the mid 1930s that the first comic had a Western story. That story was “Jack Woods”, published in  National Allied's (now DC Comics) New Fun Comics #1 in February 1935.

Make no mistake, this was not the first stand alone Western comic. That didn’t happen until Centaur Publication debuted Star Ranger and Western Picture Stories in ‘36. Other stories were printed and found decent success. Note that these titles were competing with the superhero genre. However, Westerns managed to find good footing. Marvel Comics stepped into the fold with Kid Colt Outlaw and started what is known as the Golden Age of Western Comics. Other publishers like Dell, Harvey, Charlton, and Fawcett got into the mix as well. 

The 1940s and 50s even saw a rise in Cowboy actor comics, following stars like John Wayne and Tim Holt.

All good things must come to an end, and so the 1960s saw a decline in the Romantic Western stories due to social and political climate of the times.Western comics didn’t all go away. Fans of today can still recall stories like Jonah Hex and Preacher. They weren’t the only two titles around of course. Some Western titles saw a rise in European countries.

Today, there are few Western titles that aren’t a combination of two or more genres. You just have to get out there and look. Have a favorite Western you would like to share?Drop it in the replies. Need more info or would like to read some free Western comics? Check out the links below.

Reading Material:

http://comicbookplus.com/?cbplus=western

More information

http://toonopedia.com/bronchob.htm

http://www.europecomics.com/the-european-western/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=qZrLIgcMowU

http://www.b-westerns.com/comics.htm

http://mikegrost.com/westernc.htm

http://www.tcj.com/the-last-of-the-authentic-cowboy-cartoonists-stan-lynde-has-cashed-in/

https://goldenagecomics.org/wordpress/2009/01/09/the-first-western-comic-book/

[natromanxoff]

Evening Echo - November 25, 1991

TRIBUTES POUR IN AFTER AIDS KILLS QUEEN STAR

There’ll never be another King Freddie

Fans and friends of pop star Freddie Mercury were today mourning his death from AIDS.

The 45-year-old singer of rock group Queen died during the night, just hours after telling the world he had the disease.

He died peacefully at his luxury home in Kensington, west London, said his publicist Roxy Meade, adding “His death was the result of broncho-pneumonia brought on by AIDS.”

Mercury, who is to be cremated in a private ceremony later this week, confirmed only on Saturday that he was suffering from the disease. He issued a statement saying he wanted to end specualtion about his health.

Figures from the music world today paid tribute to the flamboyant star.

Disc jockey and comedian Kenny Everett, a close friend of the singer, told Independent Radio News: “He burnt the candle at both ends - and in the middle.”

Unique

Musician-turned-politician Screaming Lord Sutch, who played on the same bills as Queen at colleges in the early 1970s, said: “We have lost a most original and entertaining singer who inspired many, many people. He was a unique talent.”

He said Mercury deserved to ranked alongside the likes of Mick Jagger and Elvis Presley.

“We have no one else left like him except Mick Jagger. Like Presley he had the looks, physique, movement and that outrageous voice. It was almost like he had too much talent to pack into one body.”

Mercury rose to fame with Queen in the 1970s.

The Sheer Heart Attack album gave the band a big hit with Killer Queen but it was A Night At The Opera which produced massive number one Bohemian Rhapsody.

Mercury will also be remembered for his outrageous pop videos and stupendous performance when Queen took part in the Live Aid concert at Wembley in 1985.

Rock critic Paul Gambaccini praised Mercury’s abundance of talents and his professionalism.

“What a star. They don’t make them like him any more. He really gave life and showmanship to the form,” Mr. Gambaccini said in an interview on TV-am.

“He could command an audience, hold an audience in the palm of his hand. The ultimate was when he and the group absolutely stole Live Aid.”

The group’s release of the Bohemian Rhapsody video in the mid-seventies also had a lasting effect.

“Let’s give them credit for the video revolution,” Mr. Gambaccini said. “Without Bohemian Rhapsody the whole video revolution which we now have with MTV and all that, would never have happened.”

Mercury had talent, fame, amassed a huge fortune and had everything money could buy except the one thing he really craved - true love.

He once said: “You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man, and that is the most bitter type of loneliness.”

He never made any secret of his bisexuality saying: “I’ve had a lot of lovers. I’ve tried relationships on either side - male and female. But all of them have gone wrong.”

[digitalcomicmuseum]

Comic Uploaded: 03-11-2016 Broncho Bill 14 Uploader: movielover Download Link: https://digitalcomicmuseum.com/index.php?dlid=28970 Read Online

[acesspeedway]

Belle Vue “Aces” 1933 Team

Eric Langton, Max Grosskreutz, Broncho Dixon, Bob Harrison, Frank Varey (capt. on bike), Eric Gregory, Bill Kitchen, Joe Abbott.

[shemakesmusic-uk]

𝔾𝕖𝕥𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕋𝕠 𝕂𝕟𝕠𝕨...

Fever Queen.

Fever Queen is the music and moods of Chicago-based songwriter Eleanor Rose Lee. On her debut album, The World of Fever Queen, Lee conjures up stark, psychy sounds and knockout melodies that cohere into a singular, one-woman vision of love, dreams, and hesitations.

Lee prizes emotion above all else. And through her work as a songwriter and adept multi-instrumentalist, she elevates life’s emotions into a vibrant, and palpable, psychedelic world. The World of Fever Queen is Lee’s intimate journal made into sound.

Fever Queen's new single ‘Night Vision’ is about 2.5 minutes of driving guitar/drums accompanied by Eleanor's melodic musings. We had a quick chat with her about the song, the album, her influences and more. Read the Q&A below.

Hi Eleanor! Please tell us a little bit about Fever Queen. Who/what influences your sound?

"Hi! Fever Queen is me, my guitar, keyboard, and drum machine getting weird in my room!

"Singer-songwriters are a big one for me because I think it’s powerful when just one person has the courage to amplify their thoughts on their own. I feel like that’s where shit gets the most raw. I’ve always been inspired by artists that have a lot of heart and honest, down to earth lyrics and I enjoy hearing a good mental breakdown on sound. One of my favorite musical artists is Lady Lamb. She’s got so much heart and her voice is so unique and guttural. Every time she opens her mouth there’s no doubt she’s giving it her all. I love Bill Callahan as well. He is such a mood and character and draws so much mystery. I’ve always listened to a lot of punk, so I love punk guitar and always crave good simple power chords. As a mid-westerner, I love the Replacements and their early stuff. Broncho is another band that makes me feel like I’ve died and gone to guitar heaven. Overall guitar is always the instrument that can get me the most amped up and feel like a 10 year old who’s had too much sugar, and I love that feeling. Vocal wise, I grew up loving musicals and singing in choirs, so harmonies and classic melodies have always felt really chilling and powerful to me."

You've just dropped your latest single 'Night Vision'. What's the story behind the song? What does it mean to you?

"So I’m really into the fact that your pupils dilate in response to darkness. It feels like a super power. I saw an astronomer speak once and the way she talked about space felt really poetic to me. She described looking at the night sky as “opening up” since the longer you stare, the more open your eyes are. She also brought up how when you look up at the night sky, you are actually looking back in time, because a big red star could already be burnt out and dead, and since its light takes a millions years or so to reach us, you are actually looking into the past. Taking that a layer deeper, I feel like night time has always made people open up. That’s why the best secrets come at slumber parties and people go on dates in dimly lit bars at night. Night time has this openness and vulnerability to it and I started thinking of night vision as being in this state of openness where you can see deeper into yourself than you normally can."

'Night Vision' is taken from your upcoming debut album The World Of Fever Queen. What can you tell us about the record? What was your songwriting process?

"This record sort of served as my home base in a time of my life that was full of movement and change. Most of it I wrote in 2019, but there’s a few old songs that had been in my pocket for a while that I came back to, ‘Night Vision’ being one of them. I lived in 3 different apartments in 2019, so like, a lot of physical movement as well, and I really enjoyed just coming into my little music nest and having that catch up time with myself.  A lot of these songs started off as voice recordings in my phone. I was walking down the stairs of my apartment when the ‘You, You’ melody came to me. I was pissed off about something and the melody of the teasy chorus I guess was my retort to dealing with that situation. ‘Gravities’ I started singing in the shower. ‘Demolition’ I was doing the dishes. When I sit down in my music room, I either have a phone memo melody I’m stoked on, I start fiddling with the guitar til I find a vibe (‘Charmer’, ‘Good Mistake’). Or I have lyrics I’ve written in my phone at some point that I love and I start with those until I can make something work (’Cerulean’, ‘Steam’)."

What do you hope listeners will take away from The World of Fever Queen?

"I hope they sit down and enjoy it all as one record and flow. I feel like every song is really different. I’ve had a hard time describing it genre wise. So I hope it keeps people on their toes and makes them excited to hear more."

Finally, what do you have planned for the remainder of 2020? I expect you're excited to tour the album when it is safe to do so?

"Touring safely still feels far away, so I plan to keep recording and writing, which is ideal. I definitely look forward to performing live at some point to see how the songs evolve in a group. I’ve always done everything myself, so I feel like bringing others into the mix and doing the harmonies with some back up babes would be really fun."

‘Night Vision’ is out now. The World of Fever Queen is out September 10 via First to Knock.

Photo credit: Eva Jenkins

[tripstations]

Travel writer BILL BRYSON reveals the marvels of your mouth

When you swallow, food doesn’t just drop into your stomach by means of gravity, but is pushed down by muscular contractions. That’s why you can eat and drink while upside down if you choose to. Bill Bryson is pictured above

In the spring of 1843, the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel took a rare break from his labours to amuse his children with a magic trick. 

Things didn’t go quite to plan, however. 

Midway through the entertainment, he accidentally swallowed a gold half-sovereign coin he had secreted under his tongue.

Over the next few days, Brunel, his friends, colleagues, family and doctors attempted every obvious remedy, from slapping him hard on the back to holding him aloft by the ankles and shaking him vigorously, but nothing worked. 

Seeking an engineered solution, Brunel designed a contraption from which he could hang upside down and be swung in wide arcs in the hope motion and gravity together would make the coin fall out. That didn’t work either.

At length, the eminent physician Sir Benjamin Brodie decided to attempt a tracheotomy, a risky and disagreeable procedure. 

Without the benefit of anaesthetic – its first use in Britain was still three years off – Brodie made an incision in Brunel’s throat and tried to extract the coin by reaching into his airway with long forceps, but the patient coughed so violently that the attempt had to be abandoned.

Take the tonsils – the two fleshy hummocks that stand sentinel on either side of the throat at the back. We are all familiar with them, but how many of us know quite what they do? In fact, nobody knows quite what they do

Finally, on May 16, more than six weeks after his ordeal began, Brunel had himself strapped into his swinging contraption once again and set in motion. Almost immediately, the coin fell out and rolled across the floor.

Very shortly afterwards, the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay burst into the Athenaeum Club in Pall Mall and shouted ‘It’s out!’ and everyone knew at once what he meant. 

Brunel lived the rest of his life without complications from the incident and, as far as is known, never put a coin in his mouth again.

I mention all this to make the point, if it needed making, that the mouth is a place of peril. We choke to death more easily than any other mammal. 

In the spring of 1843, the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel took a rare break from his labours to amuse his children with a magic trick. Things didn’t go quite to plan, however

Indeed, it can reasonably be said that we are built to choke, which is clearly an odd attribute to go through life with – with or without a coin in your trachea.

Look inside your mouth and a good deal of what you find is familiar – tongue, teeth, gums, dark hole at the back presided over by that curious little flap known as the uvula. 

But behind the scenes, as it were, is lots and lots of very important apparatus that most of us have never heard of: palatoglossus, geniohyoid, vallecula, levator palatini. 

As with every other part of your head, the mouth is a realm of complexity and mystery.

Take the tonsils – the two fleshy hummocks that stand sentinel on either side of the throat at the back. We are all familiar with them, but how many of us know quite what they do? 

In fact, nobody knows quite what they do. Adenoids are similar but lurk out of sight within the nasal cavity. Both are part of the immune system, but not a particularly impressive part, it must be said. 

Adenoids often shrink away to virtually nothing in adolescence, and both they and tonsils can be removed without making any discernible difference to your overall wellbeing. 

50 muscles must work together to swallow

The anatomist’s word for swallowing is deglutition, and it is something we do quite a lot – about 2,000 times a day, or once every 30 seconds, on average. Swallowing is a trickier business than you might think. 

When you swallow, food doesn’t just drop into your stomach by means of gravity, but is pushed down by muscular contractions. That’s why you can eat and drink while upside down if you choose to.

Altogether, 50 muscles can be called into play just to get a piece of food from your lips to your stomach, and they must snap to attention in exactly the right order to ensure that whatever you dispatch doesn’t go down the wrong way and end up lodged in an airway, like Brunel’s coin.

According to official sources, about 5,000 people in the US and some 200 in Britain choke to death on food each year – which is odd because those figures, adjusted for population, indicate that Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons

The complexity of swallowing is largely because our larynx – commonly called the voice box – is low in the throat compared with other primates. 

To accommodate our upright posture when we became bipedal, our necks became longer and straighter and moved to a more central position beneath the skull rather than towards the rear, as in other apes. 

Uniquely among mammals, we send our air and food down the same tunnel. Only a small structure called the epiglottis, a kind of trapdoor for the throat, stands between us and catastrophe. 

The epiglottis opens when we breathe and closes when we swallow, sending food in one direction and air in another, but occasionally it errs and the results are sometimes dire.

It is pretty amazing when you reflect upon it that you can sit at a dinner party enjoying yourself extravagantly – eating, talking, slurping wine – and that your nasopharyngeal guardians will send everything to the right place, in two directions, without you having to give it a moment’s consideration. That’s quite an accomplishment.

But there is even more to it than that. While you are chattering away about work or school catchment zones or the price of kale, your brain is closely monitoring not just the taste and freshness of what you are eating, but also its bulk and texture. 

So it will allow you to swallow a large ‘wet’ bolus (like an oyster or lump of ice cream) but insists on more meticulous chewing for small, dry, sharp items like nuts and seeds that might not pass so smoothly.

The anatomist’s word for swallowing is deglutition, and it is something we do quite a lot – about 2,000 times a day, or once every 30 seconds, on average. Swallowing is a trickier business than you might think. Bill Bryson is pictured above

Meanwhile, you – far from assisting this critical process – just keep pouring more red wine down your throat, destabilising all your internal systems and seriously compromising your brain’s functional capabilities. 

To say that your body is your long-suffering servant is to put it mildly. When you consider the precision required, and the number of times in a lifetime the systems are challenged, it is extraordinary that we don’t choke more often. 

According to official sources, about 5,000 people in the US and some 200 in Britain choke to death on food each year – which is odd because those figures, adjusted for population, indicate that Americans are five times more likely to asphyxiate while eating than Britons.

Even allowing for the gusto with which my fellow Americans chow down, that seems unlikely. It is more probable that a lot of choking deaths are misattributed as heart attacks in the UK. 

Suspecting as much, a Florida coroner Robert Haugen many years ago looked into the deaths of people who had supposedly died of heart attacks in restaurants and, without much difficulty, found nine who had in fact choked.

But even using the most cautious estimates, choking is the fourth most common cause of accidental death in America today.

Heimlich manoeuvred the truth as well as stuck food

Henry Heimlich was something of a showman. He promoted the procedure, and himself, relentlessly

The well-known solution to a choking crisis is the Heimlich manoeuvre, named after Dr Henry Judah Heimlich (1920-2016), a surgeon from New York who invented it in the 1970s.

The Heimlich manoeuvre consists of embracing a choking victim from behind and giving him or her a series of sharp hugs just above the navel, to force out the blockage, like a cork from a bottle. (For the record, the burst of air is known as a bechic blast.)

Henry Heimlich was something of a showman. He promoted the procedure, and himself, relentlessly. 

He appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, sold posters and T-shirts, and talked to groups large and small across the US.

He boasted that his method had saved the lives of Ronald Reagan, Cher, New York mayor Ed Koch and several hundred thousand others. He was not always terribly popular with those close to him, however. 

A former colleague called Heimlich ‘a liar and a thief’, and one of his own sons accused him of practising a ‘wide-ranging, 50-year history of fraud’. 

Heimlich seriously undermined his reputation by championing a treatment called malariatherapy, in which people were purposely infected with low doses of malaria in the belief that it would cure them of cancer, Lyme disease and AIDS, among much else.

His claims for the treatment were not supported by any actual science. Partly because he had become an embarrassment, in 2006 the American Red Cross stopped using the term ‘Heimlich manoeuvre’ and started calling it ‘abdominal thrusts’.

Heimlich died in 2016 aged 96. Shortly before his death, he saved the life of a woman at his nursing home with his own manoeuvre – the only time in his life that he had an opportunity to use it. Or possibly not. 

It emerged afterwards that he had claimed to have saved someone else’s life on another occasion. Heimlich, it seems, manoeuvred the truth as well as trapped lumps of food.

The greatest choking authority of all time was almost certainly a dour American doctor with the luxuriant name of Chevalier Quixote Jackson, who lived from 1865 to 1958. Jackson has been called ‘the father of American broncho-esophagoscopy’.

His obsession was with foreign objects that had been swallowed or inhaled. Over a career that lasted almost 75 years, Jackson specialised in designing instruments and refining methods for retrieving such objects – and built up an extraordinary collection of 2,374 imprudently ingested items.

Today, the Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection is housed in a cabinet in the basement of the Mutter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 

Among the objects Jackson retrieved from the gullets of the living or dead were a wristwatch, a crucifix with rosary beads, miniature binoculars, a small padlock, a toy trumpet, a full-sized meat skewer, a radiator key, several spoons, a poker chip, and a medallion that said (perhaps just a touch ironically) ‘Carry Me For Good Luck’. 

Our painkiller more potent than morphine 

It will not have escaped your attention that the mouth is a moist and glistening vault. 

That’s because 12 salivary glands are distributed around it. A typical adult secretes about two-and-a-half pints (or a little less than 1.5 litres) of saliva a day. 

According to one calculation, we secrete some 30,000 litres in a lifetime (as much as in 200 deep baths). Saliva is almost entirely water. 

Only 0.5 per cent of it is anything else, but that tiny portion is full of useful enzymes – proteins that speed up chemical reactions. 

Among these are amylase and ptyalin, which begin to break down sugars in carbohydrates while they are still in our mouths. 

To say that your body is your long-suffering servant is to put it mildly. When you consider the precision required, and the number of times in a lifetime the systems are challenged, it is extraordinary that we don’t choke more often [File photo]

Chew a starchy food like bread or potato for a bit longer than normal and you will soon notice a sweetness. 

Unfortunately for us, bacteria in our mouths like that sweetness too; they devour the liberated sugars and excrete acids, which drill through our teeth and give us cavities.

Other enzymes, notably lysozyme – discovered by Alexander Fleming before he stumbled on penicillin – attack invading pathogens, but not the ones that cause tooth decay, alas. 

We are in the rather strange position that we not only fail to kill the bacteria that give us a lot of trouble, but actively nurture them.

Recently it was discovered that saliva also contains a powerful painkiller called opiorphin. 

It is six times more potent than morphine, though we have it only in very small doses, which is why you are not perennially high or indeed notably pain-free when you bite your cheek or burn your tongue. 

Because it is so dilute, no one is sure why it is there at all. It is so unassertive that its existence wasn’t even noticed until 2006.

We produce little saliva while we sleep, which is why microbes can proliferate then and give you a foul mouth to wake to. It is also why brushing your teeth at bedtime is a good idea – it reduces the number of bacteria you go to sleep with.

If you’ve ever wondered why no one wants to kiss you first thing in the morning, it is possibly because your exhalations may contain up to 150 different chemical compounds, not all of them as fresh and minty as we might hope.

About 1,000 species of bacteria have been found in human mouths, although – and this is the good news – at any one time you are unlikely to have more than 200. The mouth is not only a welcoming home for germs but an excellent way station for those that want to move elsewhere [File photo]

Among the common chemicals that help to create morning mouth are methyl mercaptan (which smells very like old cabbage), hydrogen sulphide (like rotten eggs), dimethyl sulphide (slimy seaweed), dimethylamine and trimethylamine (rank fish), and cadaverine (yes, decaying bodies).

In the 1920s, Professor Joseph Appleton, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine, was the first to study bacterial colonies within the mouth and discovered that, microbially speaking, your tongue, teeth and gums are like separate continents, each with its own colonies of micro-organisms.

There are even differences in the bacterial colonies that inhabit the exposed parts of a tooth and those beneath the gum line. About 1,000 species of bacteria have been found in human mouths, although – and this is the good news – at any one time you are unlikely to have more than 200.

The mouth is not only a welcoming home for germs but an excellent way station for those that want to move elsewhere.

Paul Dawson, a professor of food science at Clemson University in South Carolina, has made something of a career of studying the ways people spread bacteria from themselves to other surfaces, such as when they share a water bottle or engage in ‘double dipping’ with crisps and salsa.

In a study called Bacterial Transfer Associated With Blowing Out Candles On A Birthday Cake, Dawson’s team found that candle-blowing across a cake increased the coverage of bacteria on it by up to 1,400 per cent, which sounds pretty horrifying but is in fact probably not much worse than the kinds of exposures we encounter in daily life anyway. 

The marvel of our ‘ready made fossils’ 

The most familiar components of the mouth are of course the teeth and the tongue. Our teeth are formidable creations and nicely versatile, too. 

They come in three varieties: blades (which are pointy), cusps (which are spade-like) and basins, or fossae (which fall somewhere between the other two).

The outside of your tooth is the enamel. It is the hardest substance in the human body but forms just a thin layer and can’t be replaced if it is damaged. That’s why you have to go to the dentist for cavities.

Under the enamel is a much thicker layer of another mineralised tissue, called dentine, which can renew itself. At the centre of it all is the fleshy pulp containing nerves and blood supply.

As well as those in the mouth, the body has taste receptors in the gut and throat, but they don’t connect to the brain in the same way as the taste receptors on your tongue, and for good reason. You don’t want to taste what your stomach is tasting [File photo]

Because they are so hard, teeth have been called ‘ready-made fossils’. When all the rest of you has turned to dust or dissolved away, the last physical trace of your existence on Earth may be a fossilised molar. 

We can bite pretty hard. Bite force is measured in units called newtons (in honour of Isaac), and if you are a typical adult male you can muster about 400 newtons of force, which is quite a lot, though nothing like as much as an orangutan, which can bite with five times as much vigour. 

Still, when you consider how well you can demolish, say, an ice cube (try doing that with your fist) and how little space the five muscles of the jaw occupy, you can appreciate that human chomping is pretty capable.

The tongue is a muscle, but quite unlike any other. For one thing it is exquisitely sensitive – think how adroitly you pick out something in your food that shouldn’t be there, like a tiny piece of eggshell or grain of sand – and intimately involved in vital activities like speech articulation and tasting food. 

When you eat, the tongue darts about like a nervous host at a cocktail party, checking the taste and shape of every morsel in preparation for dispatching it onwards to the gullet.

As everyone knows, the tongue is coated with taste buds. These are clumps of taste receptor cells found in the bumps on your tongue which are called papillae. 

They come in three different shapes – circumvallate (or rounded), fungiform (mushroom-shaped) and foliate (leaf-shaped). They are among the most regenerative of all cells and are replaced every ten days.

For years, even textbooks spoke of a tongue map, with the elemental tastes occupying a well-defined zone: sweet on the tip of the tongue, sour at the sides, bitter at the back.

In fact, that is a myth, traced to a textbook of 1942 by one Edwin G. Boring, a Harvard psychologist who misinterpreted a paper written by a German researcher 40 years before that.

Altogether, we have about 10,000 taste buds, mostly distributed around the tongue, except in the very middle where there are none. 

Additional taste buds are found in the roof of the mouth and lower down the throat, which is said to be why some medicines taste bitter as they go down. 

As well as those in the mouth, the body has taste receptors in the gut and throat, but they don’t connect to the brain in the same way as the taste receptors on your tongue, and for good reason. You don’t want to taste what your stomach is tasting.

Taste receptors have also been found in the heart, lungs and even the testicles. No one knows quite what they are doing there. 

It is generally supposed that they evolved for two deeply practical purposes: to help us find energy-rich foods (like sweet, ripe fruits) and to avoid dangerous ones. But they don’t always fulfil either role terribly well.

Because they are so hard, teeth have been called ‘ready-made fossils’. When all the rest of you has turned to dust or dissolved away, the last physical trace of your existence on Earth may be a fossilised molar [File photo]

Captain James Cook, the great British explorer, had a salutary demonstration of that in 1774, on his second epic voyage through the Pacific. One of his crew caught a meaty fish, which no one aboard recognised. 

It was cooked and presented to the captain and two of his officers, but as they had already dined they merely sampled it and had the remainder put aside for the following day.

This was a very lucky thing, for in the middle of the night all three found themselves ‘seized with an extraordinary weakness and numbness all over our limbs’.

Cook was for some hours paralysed and unable to lift anything – even a pencil. The men were lucky to survive, for what they had sampled was puffer fish. These contain a poison called tetrodotoxin, which is 1,000 times more powerful than cyanide.

We have about 10,000 taste receptors, but our mouths have a greater number of receptors for pain and other sensations. Because these receptors exist side by side on the tongue, we sometimes mix them up. 

When you describe a chilli as hot, you are being more literal than you might suppose. Your brain interprets it as actually being burned. 

As Joshua Tewksbury, of the University of Colorado, has put it: ‘Chillis innervate the same neurons that you activate when you touch a 335F ring on your cooker. Essentially, our brain is telling us that we have got our tongue on the stove.’ 

In the same way, menthol is perceived as being cool even in the heated smoke of a cigarette.

As far as taste goes, our tongue can only identify the familiar basics of sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (a Japanese word meaning ‘savoury’ or ‘meaty’). 

Sing your way out of stuttering misery

Stuttering is one of the cruellest and least understood of everyday maladies. It affects one per cent of adults and four per cent of children.

For reasons unknown, 80 per cent of sufferers are male. It is more common among left-handers than right-handers, especially those who have been made to write right-handed.

Victims of stuttering have included a great many distinguished figures, among them Aristotle, Virgil, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Winston Churchill (when young), Henry James, John Updike, Marilyn Monroe and King George VI, who was sympathetically portrayed by Colin Firth in the 2010 movie The King’s Speech.

No one knows what provokes stuttering or why different sufferers stumble over different letters or words in different positions in a sentence.

For many, the stammering miraculously ceases when they sing their words, speak in a foreign language or talk to themselves.

The majority of speakers recover from the condition by their teenage years (which is why the proportion of child sufferers is so much higher than adult ones). Females seem to recover more easily than men.

Some authorities believe we also have taste receptors specifically allocated for metal, water, fat and another Japanese concept called kokumi, meaning ‘full-bodied’, but the only ones that are universally accepted are the five basics.

The tongue and its taste buds give us just the basic textures and attributes of foods – whether they are soft or smooth, sweet or bitter, and so on – but the full sensuousness of it all is dependent on our other senses. 

It is nearly always wrong to talk about how food tastes, though of course we all do. What we appreciate when we eat is flavour, which is taste plus smell.

Smell is said to account for at least 70 per cent of flavour and maybe even as much as 90 per cent. 

We appreciate this intuitively: if someone hands you a pot of yogurt and says ‘Is this strawberry?’ your response will be to sniff it, not taste it. That is because strawberry is actually a smell, perceived nasally, not a taste in the mouth.

When you eat, most of the aroma reaches you not through your nostrils but by the back staircase of your nasal passage, what is known as the retronasal route – as opposed to the orthonasal route up your nose. 

An easy way to experience the limitations of your taste buds is to close your eyes, pinch shut your nostrils and eat a flavoured jelly bean collected blindly from a bowl. 

You will instantly apprehend its sweetness, but you almost certainly won’t be able to identify its flavour. But open your eyes and nostrils and its fruity specificity becomes immediately and redolently apparent.

Even sound materially influences how delicious we find food. People who are played a range of crunching sounds through headphones while sampling crisps from various bowls will always rate the noisier crisps as fresher and tastier even though all the crisps are the same.

Many tests demonstrate how easily we are fooled with respect to flavour. In a blind taste test at the University of Bordeaux, students in the Faculty of Oenology were given two glasses of wine, one red and one white. 

The wines were actually identical except that one had been made a rich red colour with an odourless and flavourless additive. The students without exception listed entirely different qualities for the two wines.

That wasn’t because they were inexperienced or naive. It was because their sight led them to have completely different expectations, and this powerfully influenced what they sensed when they took a sip from either glass. Odours and flavours are created entirely inside our heads. 

Think of something delicious – a moist, gooey, warm chocolate brownie fresh from the oven, say. Take a bite and savour the velvety smoothness, the rich, heady waft of chocolate that fills your head. 

Now consider the fact that none of those flavours or aromas actually exists. All that is going in your mouth is texture and chemicals. It is your brain that reads these scentless, flavourless molecules and enlivens them for your pleasure.

Your brownie is sheet music. It is your brain that makes it a symphony. As with so much else, you experience the world that your brain allows you to experience.

Speaking…the great wonder of the world  

There is one other remarkable thing we do with our mouths and throats, and that is make meaningful noises. 

The ability to create and share complex sounds is one of the great wonders of human existence, and the characteristic more than any other that sets us apart from all other creatures that ever lived.

Speech and its development ‘are perhaps more extensively debated than any other topic in human evolution’, in the words of Harvard paleoanthropologist Daniel Lieberman. 

No one knows even approximately when speech began on Earth and whether it is an accomplishment confined to homo sapiens or whether it was mastered by archaic humans like Neanderthals and homo erectus.

What is certain is that the capacity for speech requires a delicate and co-ordinated balance of tiny muscles, ligaments, bones, and cartilage of exactly the right length, tautness and positioning in order to expel microbursts of modulated air in just the right measures. 

This is an abridged extract from The Body: A Guide For Occupants, by Bill Bryson, published by Doubleday on October 3 at £25. Offer price £18.75 (20 per cent discount) until September 30

The tongue, teeth and lips must also be nimble enough to take these throaty breezes and turn them into nuanced phonemes. And all of this must be achieved without compromising our ability to swallow or breathe.

It isn’t just a big brain that allows us to speak, but an exquisite arrangement of anatomy. One reason chimpanzees can’t talk is that they appear to lack the ability to make subtle shapes with tongue and lips to form complex sounds.

It may be that all this happened fortuitously in the course of an evolutionary redesign of our upper bodies to accommodate our new posture when we became bipedal. 

Or it may be that some of these features appeared through the slow, incremental wisdom of evolution. But the bottom line is that we ended up with brains big enough to handle complex thoughts and vocal tracts uniquely able to articulate them.

The larynx is essentially a box about an inch to an inch-and-a- half on each side. Within and around it are nine cartilages, six muscles and a suite of ligaments, including two known as the vocal cords but more properly known as the vocal folds. 

When air is forced through them, the vocal folds snap and flutter (like flags in a stiff breeze, it has been said), producing a variety of sounds, which are refined by tongue, teeth and lips working together into the wondrous, resonant, informative exhalations known as speech. 

The three phases of the process are respiration, phonation and articulation. Respiration is simply the pushing of air past the vocal ligaments; phonation is the process of turning that air into sound; and articulation is the refinement of sound into speech.

If you wish to appreciate what a marvel speech is, try singing a song – Frere Jacques serves very well – and notice how effortlessly melodic the human voice is. Your throat is a musical instrument as well as a sluice and wind tunnel. 

We should also take a moment to consider the strange little fleshy appendage that stands guard where all becomes darkness. I refer to the mysterious uvula. (The name comes from the Latin for ‘little grape’, even though it is not especially like a grape at all.)

For a long time, nobody knew what it was for. We are still not completely sure, but it seems to be a mudflap for the mouth. It directs food down the throat and away from the nasal passage. It also helps with the production of saliva and may also play a part in speech. People who have had their uvula removed lose some control over guttural sounds.

The rattling of the uvula in sleep appears to be a significant component of snoring, and is often the reason uvulas are taken out. 

The uvula, in short, is a curious thing. Considering its position at the very centre of our largest orifice, at the point of no return, it seems oddly inconsequential. There is perhaps a kind of strange double comfort in knowing that you will almost certainly never lose your uvula, but that it wouldn’t matter too much anyway if you did.

©Bill Bryson, 2019

Abridged extract from The Body: A Guide For Occupants, by Bill Bryson, published by Doubleday on October 3 at £25. Offer price £18.75 (20 per cent discount) until September 30. To pre-order, call 01603 648155 or go to mailshop.co.uk. 

See Bill Bryson live on stage in a new theatre show. For information and tickets, go to lateralevents.com.

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85.  The 1990 off-season --- Coaching and front office changes

Coaching Changes

New Orleans would look to move away from the Veer with new talent Tommy Hodson entrenched at QB.   Their leadership wanted a coach who could develop Hodson in a pro set.

They talked to former Carolina head coach Roman Gabriel, but he lacked the local credibility they were seeking.  Eventually an offhand comment lead them to a surprising, but inspired choice —  former Saints’ QB Archie Manning. 

Manning would take the job on one condition — he alone would have final say on the team’s first round picks.  

(Manning would hire two key figures from his past to be his coordinators.  Former Saint OC Ed Hughes, the OC during Manning’s best years, would be the Offensive Coordinator and Manning’s former Saints Head Coach during the same era, Dick Nolan, would be the Defensive Coordinator.  Both would come due to their respect for Archie Manning.)

Manning would want to totally rework the Breakers’ passing game.  He would see it as the team’s veteran receivers had gotten so comfortable in a run-first offense that they no longer ran tight routes.  They could still make plays, but there was no consistency to their routes.   Privately he would tell his staffers in New Orleans “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”.  He would say that the lack of discipline to their routes would end up generating a lot of future hits on Hodson.  

He wasn’t going to have that.  Manning had lived through being a QB with no player support from management and wasn’t going to let that happen to Hodson.  Manning told his staff that he was hugely impressed with the emerging talents at Grambling and some of the other area colleges and wanted to rebuild the receiving corps with rookies.

Carolina’s ownership would hate that they had to fire Head Coach Roman Gabriel after the team responded well down the stretch and the offense had really come together, so they would offer the job to Offensive Coordinator Jonnie Walton for continuity’s sake.  Walton would initially balk at the offer until Gabriel himself encouraged Walton to take the job.

Denver’s new majority owners, Alan Harmon and Bill Daniels, would reach the conclusion that the run and shoot may keep you in games, but unless you had an elite QB, it wouldn’t win you games.  With that in mind, they would seek a return to what worked well with the fans early on — smashmouth football played by a lot of local fan favorites, mostly former Bronchos.

As they admired the work of original Gold owner Ron Blanding in building a team the fans loved, they would try to re-create it. They would re-hire popular former Bronchos and Gold coach Red Miller.

They would instruct their GM to look for a team to acquire a few of the Gold WRs in order to clear space to sign promising players who failed to make the Bronchos’ roster the last few years.  (The goal was to change out the bottom half of the roster and make it more fan friendly.)

They also saw the Colorado Buffaloes National Championship team and recognized an emerging opportunity to bring in a lot of talented locally popular players if they could gather enough picks in the upcoming draft.

Denver and New Mexico would have advanced talks about several players.

The Gold found a willing partners in their wide receiver transaction in both to the New York DMA franchises. 

New Jersey’s Mouse Davis would happily turn over second round picks in this years draft and the next for Denver’s star WR Leonard Harris. 

New York’s Stephen Ross had reached the conclusion that without Hershel Walker, he would need to really feature QB Steve Young to stay in the public’s eye.  What better platform for the accurate, decisive, and mobile Young than the run and shoot?  He was certainly smart enough to handle it.  Additionally with the league’s first pick, the draft would dictate they look to sign Heisman Winner Rocket Ismail who would be perfect in that offense.

New York would trade their second round pick this year and next year to Denver for veteran run and shoot WRs Marc Lewis and Vincent White.

With no FB in the offense, all star FB Maurice Carthon would be granted his release to sign with the New York Giants.

Ross would make a somewhat unpopular choice in hiring former Denver Head Coach June Jones to replace Walt Michaels, but given his plan, it was quite defensible.

To keep Chuck Long happy, Tampa Bay would promote former Green Bay TE and longtime Offensive Coordinator Rich McGeorge to be their new head coach.

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Bucking Broncho (1894)

Bucking Broncho (1894)

Lee Martin, one of the cowboy stars in 'Buffalo Bill's Wild West', rides a bronco as a crowd looks on. While the horse is trying to throw Martin off its back, another cowboy stands on top of a fence rail and occasionally fires his six-shooter, to spur on both horse and rider.

Try one more:

A Moment of Romance II (1993)