In the shark cage

We spent a night at Grootbos which is on the coast and at the southern tip of South Africa. This is where the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans meet.

 

Here is the lot of us at dinner... Gary the Elvis fan, Kurt the Elvis Wannabe, Christof the Dashingly Handsome Guy, Mike the Stoic Marathoner, and Me, the guy who can't seem to wear anything that's not tie dyed. Throw back to the 70's? Aging hippie?

 

The accommodations for the night were fabulous.

As soon as I saw the two sinks, it made me miss my wife. And there were two bathrobes.... did they miss the memo that said my wife was gonna be 8,541 miles away?!?!? The bathtub has a view of the ocean. Wow.

 

And speaking of ocean ...

This is what tourists look like before getting fed to the sharks. Note the packer jersey. Kurt figgers the whole Brett Farve thing would have left a bad taste in the shark's mouth ... so the shark will leave him alone?

The captain and first mate. The Jack Daniels hat certainly gave me a feeling of security.

Luckily, they didn't need to do any emergency steering. This sign made me want to cross my arms across my chest.

Christof and Gary discuss how to divvy up the Elvis memorabilia when the shark realizes that Kurt never was with the Packers.

Mates... happy until the very end.

I just can't miss an opportunity for a pic of a sea gull.

  

This is what cage diving is all about.

 

This tuna head was put on a rope and thrown in the water to lure the sharks past the cage.

  

Here is a great white shark.

Another shot of a shark from the boat.

  

The view from inside the cage.

Christof likes it.

Pearl Valley golf resort, Cape Town

After our presentation in Cape Town, we were treated to a golf outing put on by Paarl Media for their customers. We spent two nights in a lavish condo...

 

I got the bedroom with the dance floor. Kurt took the one with the hot tub. 

He and I watched The Big Lebowski on the big screen TV. Dude. It was perhaps a bit unfortunate. I mean that I had watched Crazy Heart first. I probably should have watched Lebowski first, you know. Maybe I could get into the whole zen acting thing before taking on Crazy Heart? Never mind.

 

Regardless of whether it is better to watch Crazy Heart or The Big Lebowski first, the view from this condo was gorgeous. The first two pictures are taken from the back porch. This is a patio with a grill that we didn't get a chance to use. Sigh. The pond is full of frogs that go "plip" in the middle of the night, by the way.

As for the mountains, no one seemed to know the name of the specific mountains. I guess it's kinda like trying to name bars in northern Wisconsin. There's just too many. And who really cares?

"Hello, honey?  I'm getting drunk at a bar in northern Wisconsin."

"Oh yeah?  I'm snorkeling with Kurt in his hot tub. Did you ever notice that he kinda looks like Elvis?"

See what I mean?  It doesn't matter what the name of the bar is.

 

So we all got these cyan golf shirts and orange caps to play golf. I dunno if I mentioned it, but by this time, I had been away from my lovely wife Madelaine for a whole bunch of time, so I was missing her horribly. 

This young lady, by the way, is not my lovely wife Madelaine. This is a lovely lady. And she is named "Madelaine". But she is not my wife. She just spells her name the same way. 

Hence my confusion. I'm sure you will all understand.When my wife cools down, I'll be in a bar in northern Wisconsin.

Anyway, about the golfing. I don't have any pics of the golfing. Sorry. I came to South Africa not knowing two things: I didn't know whether I could speak Africans, and I didn't know whether I could play golf. 

I learned one word in Africans: lekker. It kinda sounds like lacquer and kinda sounds like licquor. It means "good".

I am now better at Africans than I am at golf.

I understand that Jack Nicklaus designed the Pearl Valley golf course. I have sent him a few emails. I am not sure he realizes that it's kinda dry in South Africa. And hot. And I dunno. Maybe if he would have left some directions about putting in a little fertilizer and water? Maybe they could grow some grass in some of those bare spots? He's got to be embarrassed by all those patches of sand where they can't grow grass. It's a pity, really.

 

Here we see the Elvis golf pros. Note the Elvis sunglasses. I still don't have a pair of Elvis sun glasses.No. Honest. I'm not bitter. Kurt scored some points for his golf foursome. Poop head.

Jewish Christmas songs

Jewish Christmas songs? What? You gotta be kidding!

My wife told me years ago that Irving Berlin was Jewish. This sort of comment is rather common from her. We will be watching a movie or listening to music or talking about music, and she will say "did you know that perfomrer is Jewish?" She is understandably proud of her heritage and there are a surprisingly large number of Jewish folks in the entertainment industry. Inordinately large, given the realtively small percentage of people in the US who are Jewish.

So, when she mentioned Irving Berlin, I was not particularly surprised.

Then I got to thinking about it. Didn't he write "White Christmas"? Yup, she said. Well, that's odd. But, I looked it up on Wikipedia. It's all true.

But I found out this week that "White Christmas" is not the only Jewish Christmas song. I was reading a column by Garrison Keillor (http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/garrison_keillor/2009/12/15/cambridge).

First, let me apologize. This article is a real piece of curmudgeonry. I don't recommend it. But Keillor made a comment that caught my interest: "And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck."

So I went to Wikipedia. "Chestnuts roasting..." Ummm... that's" The Christmas Song", which I know was written by Mel Torme. Was he Jewish? Wiki says "yes". Interesting. Two Jewish Christmas songs!

How about "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer"? Robert May wrote the original story for Montgomery Wards. He was not Jewish. But, the guy who wrote the song about Rudolph was Johnny Marks, and he was Jewish. It turns out he wrote quite a few Christmas songs, including

"I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day",
"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree",
"A Holly Jolly Christmas", and
"Run Rudolph Run".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Marks

Wow. That makes seven!

Johnny Marks, by the way, was born on my birthday in 1909. Cool, huh?

A little more digging and I found two more Jewish Christmas songs. Sammy Kahn and Jule Styne wrote "Let it snow, let is snow", and Livingston and Evans wrote "Silver Bells".

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/culture/2/Music/American_Jewish_Music/Songs_By_American_Jews.shtml

Wow. That makes nine popular Christmas songs written by Jewish people.

This last week, I happened to remember an article that I had seen in the Utne Reader maybe ten years ago. The article was a tongue in cheek look at the eerie similarities between Elvis and Jesus. I rooted around and found a link. Very silly. Read it.

http://locallygrownnorthfield.org/post/7374/

As I re-read this, I noticed that it said that Elvis was Jewish. Wow. I wonder... did he write "Blue Christmas"? Could that be the tenth Jewish Christmas song?

Well, first we have to ask, was Elvis really Jewish, or is this just urban legend? I rooted around and found a number of sites that at least sounded credible:

http://www.elvispresleynews.com/JewishElvis.html
http://www.jewwatch.com/jew-entertainment-elvis-presley.html
http://israelinsider.ning.com/forum/topics/all-shook-up-in-the-holy-land

I checked Snopes, and there is no listing for "Elvis Jewish". I checked Wikipedia and it said "Presley's ancestry was primarily a Western European mix—Scots-Irish, with some French Norman; one of Gladys's great-great-grandmothers was Cherokee and, according to family accounts, one of her great-grandmothers was Jewish."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvis

Note that Jewish decent comes through your mother. If your mother was Jewish, then so are you. Elvis' mother's mother's mother was Jewish, so there you have it. He was Jewish.

Well, I'll be darned. I guess my wife wasn't kidding when she said a lot of performers are Jewish!

Ok... so was "Blue Christmas" another Jewish Christmas song? Did Elvis write it? Well, unfortunately Wikipedia says that it was written by Billy Hayes and Jay W. Johnson. I couldn't find much information on these two guys, but there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that they were Jewish.

But this brings up an interesting question. Did Elvis write any of his songs? I came across a number of webpages that stated that Elvis never wrote any songs, but that he was given credit for writing several songs. It seems that a deal was cut with the original authors. Elivs would agree to sing their songs if they agreed to give Elvis credit. Elvis got a bigger cut and the authors stood to make more money than if Elvis did not sing their song.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071215213656AAG8q1V
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Did_Elvis_Presley_Write_His_Own_songs
http://en.allexperts.com/q/Presley-Elvis-562/Elvis-songwriting.htm

None of these webpages give anything in the way of references or even really say who was answering the question, so it's hard to say just how credible they are. But still. I've written a bunch of songs, so I am better than Elvis. And I'm not even Jewish. I even wrote a Passover song.

Wikipedia has an entry (with references) that says that Elvis actually wrote two songs, neither of which were big hits. There goes my bubble.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That%27s_Someone_You_Never_Forget

I came upon another interesting fact in my digging:

"In 1958, the 'Hound Dog/Don't Be Cruel' single became just the third record to sell more than 3 million copies, following Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas' and Gene Autry's 'Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer'."

http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=473

I have not been able to corroborate this, so maybe I shouldn't call it a fact. But it is interesting for two reasons. First, of course, it is interesting because I was born in 1958. Notice how I keep popping up in this narrative? Me ... Elvis ... Jewish stuff. All intertwined. The fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

The second point of interest was that "Hound Dog" was written by two Jews, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller.

http://www.myjewishlearning.com/culture/2/Music/American_Jewish_Music/Songs
_By_American_Jews.shtml

Wow.