Could Farmer Dan’s advice on how to get a wife have helped to fuel the property bubble, in Northern Ireland and Ireland?

Some unfortunate editing here at 1.46:

Farmer Dan

Konrad “Conny” Plank (May 3, 1940 – December 18, 1987) was a German record producer and musician. He was born in Hütschenhausen. His creativity as a sound engineer and producer helped to shape some of the most important and innovative recordings of postwar European popular music, covering a wide range of genres including progressive, avant-garde and electronic music. Plank was as much responsible as anyone else for defining the broad genre now known as krautrock and is arguably the unifying link between most of its disparate productions.

During the 1970s Conny Plank produced and/or engineered many of the most important recordings by significant German progressive/experimental music acts (given the derogatory label krautrock by the UK music press at the time), including Kraftwerk (Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2, Ralf und Florian, Autobahn, and the precursor album Tone Float), Neu! (all their recordings), Cluster, Harmonia, Night Sun, Ash Ra Tempel, Holger Czukay (Can), and Guru Guru.

According to Rene Tinner and Stefan Plank in a radio documentary about the life of Conny Plank, it was Brian Eno’s idea that Plank should produce the U2-album “The Joshua Tree” instead of him. After being introduced to the band by Eno and after a short meeting, Plank turned down the job (“I cannot work with this singer”).

Wikipedia

The cover of this particular issue features a picture of the ‘awesome fireball’ created by the November 1952 detonation of the ‘Mike Device’ on Elugelab Island in the Enewetak Atoll, as part of Operation Ivy, a series of American nuclear tests. The Mike detonation was the first successful test of a hydrogen bomb, and yielded 750 times the explosive energy created by the Hiroshima bomb, completely destroying the island and leaving an underwater crater.

Pictured in the Cleveland Hill fire piece below are Jackson’s parents, and Jackson himself, next to the teacher, in the second row from the top.

When Jackson Frank was 11, a furnace exploded at his school, sending a ball of flames down corridors until it ended up in Frank’s music classroom in the Cleveland Hill Elementary School in Cheektowaga, New York. The fire killed fifteen of his fellow students and burned Frank over more than half his body. It was during his time in the hospital that he was first introduced to playing music, when a teacher, Charlie Castelli, brought in an acoustic guitar to keep Frank occupied during his recovery. When he was 21, he was awarded an insurance check of $110,500 for his injuries, giving him enough to “catch a boat to England.”
Wikipedia

Jackson Frank was one of those to receive skin grafts. He was in hospital for seven months after the fire. Frank suffered for the rest of his life from a pronounced limp from skin grafts taken from his leg to repair his face and chest. He also put on a lot of weight later as the result of parathyroid malfunction, a side effect of the fire. He would later become a well-known folk-singer in the 1960s and 70s, releasing an album in 1965, sometimes referred to as “the most famous folk singer of the 1960s no one knew of.”  Those who knew him said he led a most tragic life, having been misdiagnosed with mental illness, when he was actually suffering from depression from his childhood. He was occasionally homeless, and lost one eye when shot with a pellet gun by some kids. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He died in 1999 of pneumonia and cardiac arrest at 56.
Cleveland Hill Fire Aftermath

I’m not sure whether Mike is saying that he has already been saved from the man he is, or if he needs to repeatedly be saved in order to stay away from the drink and smokes. I feel he’s not really clear on this point. Furthermore, if Mike is saved from the man he is, what does he then become? The man he isn’t? Well, at the end of the day, Mike is just a man, and in a way, aren’t we all men?

Billy Bob Thornton’s 2001 song for Angelina Jolie, Angelina, is more than a little hilarious. And the accompanying video is flipping creepy.

Video:

From the moment we met, you taught my heart to dance.